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Crazy Cat "We had a great big tom cat in my town when I was little. He didn't allow any others around ever. We had some kittens in the cellar, living under the house in the crawlspace. That big tom cat snuck in through an open window and just killed them all, all those cute little kittens. He was jealous of them. He wanted their mother to just pay attention to him. He hated the kittens. He killed them all. We just found fur all over." There was truth enough in that story to make a myth of. The myth, I hated, and I refused to keep it alive except in the back of my mind where that tomcat hovers still, In the background of my dreaming, being this old man or that, being me, my father, all us jealous men. I never knew a tomcat who hated kittens. And I had a big black tom myself, six years, and he sired two litters at home, God knows how many in his nightly prowls. I never heard that he had killed any of his children. Maybe he wasn't clever enough to exercise that male impluse, and maybe he prowled the alleys, black shadow in the moonless night, hearing weak mewls behind walls and shut windows, lurking outside feline nurseries to suckle his own murderous rage, waiting in dark hedges, his green eyes neon in reflected light, till some foolish mother leaves his prey helpless and unguarded . . . . Then: Then murder, with rape, perhaps, for dessert. Today I think that even that big tom lived only in her fancy, and in the dreams of other mothers finished with their husbands, making myths around the shutting out of men.
One son's life slipped slowly out of focus, his glasses growing thick as walls, the seen world dimmer and diffused. He lives with her, at twenty-five. He left once, joined the Army. They gave him a discharge after a week at Fort Bliss. He went home, blinking angrily through coke bottle bottoms, hunching his shoulders in hazy grey rage against the hazards of bus travel. He lives with her now. He can't very well live by himself: People will try to take advantage of him. People will try to trick him. People will cheat him if he goes outside. He lives with her now. Someone has to take care of him. His father doesn't talk to him much. His father just comes home to sleep, lives at the gas station, plays lots of cribbage, sneaks calls long distance to his children. He cannot see his father very clearly now. He sees her clearly, though, under other names, now, names he gives the women on the stages of his dreams, the pages where his stories grow, the paper he covers with ink– drawing under the radiance of a neon magnifying lamp. When he was twelve, he liked to rock. It was better than toys. The rocking chair was his. It was too big for the new children she loved. He rocked gently, as if lulling a child; gently, sometimes facing somewhat towards the corner, facing away from all of us engaged with trucks and Lincoln logs and television. She watched him rock, one day, spending half a minute watching, only her eyes moving, as if he were a tennis match seen far away.
when I was little, he rocked all the time. One day he killed his mother with an axe," she told us as we watched her watch.
–1981 |
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