Wrong Thing (15 page)

“People don't meow, so where do cats get the idea from?”

“I don't know. Well, people do meow. You just meowed at him.”

“Yeah, but I meowed back at him, dork. He did it first. And I already know cats meow.”

“Yeah, well—maybe the first creature ever to meow was a human, and a cat heard it, and then told all the other cats that's the noise people make, so you better make it if you want humans to understand you . . . ”

“You know something?” Vanjii kissed him. “If there was a National Weird Dude Directory, you'd get a five-star rating.”

Later, the Kid got up and cooked chicken breasts with rice and a honey-and-lemon sauce. As he cooked, he listened to Elliott Smith. “I'm in love with the world/through the eyes of a girl/who's still around the morning after.” He didn't know that Elliott Smith would stab himself to death with a knife.

Though he lived with them both, Catboy was always the Kid's cat. He didn't mind Vanjii, but he never seemed to like her much, except when she was the only one home when Catboy was hungry. He belonged to the Kid.

Catboy couldn't stand it when the Kid left for work in the morning, and you'd have thought he'd ingested catnip when the Kid came home in the evening. After cooking dinner, the Kid would lie on the couch in the living room, and Catboy would lie beside him, his cheek pressed against the Kid's.

To the Kid's regret, he had to ban Catboy from the bedroom. It was his only chance of getting a full night's sleep. Otherwise, he would be wakened by claws tearing his skin in affectionate kneading, or a rough tongue licking his head to show dominance. So, when the Kid and Vanjii went to bed, they'd close the door so Catboy couldn't get in. This was not taken lightly by Catboy. At first he tried aggression— he'd meow furiously outside the bedroom door, clawing at the carpet. When that got no response, he resorted to emotional blackmail. He had a collection of cat toys, his favorites being a spider the Kid had named Spidey and a mouse named Mickey. He'd try offering some of his toys to the Kid, leaving them by the bedroom door in a neat line. If Spidey and Mickey were among them, the Kid knew that Catboy had really been lonely for him.

It was the same routine every day when the Kid went to work. As soon as the Kid started to put his coat on, Catboy would stand by the front door of the apartment and wail. When the Kid got home that evening, Catboy would be all over him, purring, licking him and rubbing his head against him. The Kid had read that this wasn't the cuddling it seemed to be, it was marking with the cat's scent, but that was okay with him.

One night, Miguel was coming over for dinner. The Kid was roasting a chicken. Vanjii was taking a bath, soaking away the smell of the Woolworth's snack bar. The Kid went into the bathroom to take a piss. The bathroom light wasn't on. There was a little candle on the edge of the tub, and Vanjii was lying in the water, her eyes closed. She opened her eyes, looked at the Kid and smiled. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

“How long till dinner?”

“A while. It's roasting. I can make you a snack if you're hungry.”

“No, I'm okay. I just wondered how long I can lay here.”

“Take your time.” He bent over and kissed her.

After he'd pissed, he walked out of the bathroom and found Catboy snoozing on the hall carpet. Catboy raised his head, looked at the Kid and meowed. The apartment was full of the smell of roasting chicken.

The Kid wanted to stay there forever. He had a rush of feeling that if he and Vanjii and Catboy could just stay there in the small, dark apartment, with candles in the bathroom and a chicken cooking in the oven and the front door locked to keep the cold and all the bad things outside, then they would be all right and nothing would hurt them. For no reason he could understand, the Kid felt tears stinging his eyes.

The Kid loved supermarkets. It wasn't that he liked shopping for food, though he didn't mind it. What he loved was the feeling of being in a supermarket on a dark evening, the bright light of the store, and the people walking around the aisles, picking up the things they needed before going home. He imagined them later in the evening, cooking, eating, sitting on couches in living rooms, talking or watching TV. He never understood why this had such an effect on him, he just felt it and didn't question it. But he knew it had something to do with why his favorite TV show was the local news.

He loved sitting beside Vanjii, watching the news, hearing the anchor talk about what was happening in Santa Fe, seeing pictures of places he knew. Even if the news was bad, the Kid liked the feeling of watching it along with thousands of other people who lived there.

It was a Saturday night. Miguel had come over for dinner, and now the Kid, Vanjii, and Miguel were in Doctor Know. All three of them were quite drunk, though Miguel wasn't as bad as the others because he was driving. He had recently acquired a M
OTHERS AGAINST
D
RUNK
D
RIVING
bumper sticker, which he hoped would make it less likely that the cops would pull him over when he was driving drunk.

A group of young white women were sitting together at a table. One of them kept looking at the Kid. She was in her late twenties, thin, with lank blonde hair. At first the Kid thought she was checking him out, so he put an arm around Vanjii to give the woman the message, but she kept on staring. Then she began to cry. The Kid avoided looking at her when he saw that.

One of the woman's companions came over. “Hey,” she said to the Kid. “My friend wants to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“Her dad. Will you come and sit with us a minute?”

“Okay.” He looked at Vanjii and Miguel. “I'll be right back.”

“She hitting on you?” Vanjii said.

“No,” the woman's friend said.

“Don't worry,” said the Kid.

He went over to the other table. “Hey,” he said to the woman. “What's up?”

She was still crying, but she had it under control and she wasn't sobbing. Tears were leaking silently out of her eyes and running down her face to merge with the snot that was coming out of her nose. She pulled her chair away from the table, out of earshot of her friends. “Are you the Kid?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“You don't know who I am, do you?”

“No.”

She pulled another chair beside her. “Will you sit down? Just for a little while?”

He sat down.

“You killed my dad,” she said.

“I think you got the wrong guy. I never killed anybody.” “You did. You shot him in the street outside of Evangelo's. His name was Tony Crowley.”

The Kid didn't say anything.

“It's okay,” she said, choking down sobs. “Well, it's not okay, but . . . I don't know. I just wanted to talk to you. I don't hate you or nothing. I don't know why I . . . It's just I wanted to talk to you.”

“I didn't know your dad,” the Kid said.

“I didn't either, not really . . . What did you kill him for?”

“He beat me up.”

“I don't hate you. I just wanted to talk to you.” She reached over and took the Kid's hand, squeezed it. The Kid squeezed back. “I just . . . I'm drunk,” she said. “I'm sorry. I'm gonna leave.”

“No, that's okay. I'll leave. Stay.” He squeezed her hand again. “Sorry,” he said. Then, for no reason he could make sense of, he said, “I'm drunk too.”

When he looked at the woman, he tried to imagine that she could have come from Crowley, at least part of her, that she had been in him, in his balls, had sprayed out of his cock into her mother, that this was how she came into being. How Crowley came into being too. And Crowley was gone, destroyed, and she was there in the bar, and so was the Kid.

All he had to say to Miguel was, “Remember the biker? He was her dad.” Miguel just nodded and muttered, “Jesus.”

“What the fuck was that about?” Vanjii asked.

“I'll tell you when we get home,” the Kid said.

Later, in bed, he asked her, “Do you really want to know?”

She thought about it and said, “No.”

“But you know I've done stuff”‘

“Fuck, yeah. But it doesn't matter.”

“It would matter to a lot of people.”

“Yeah. Well, maybe they can afford it. But I can't. I don't know exactly what you've done. I know what people say, I know some of it must be for real. But I know you love me. And I'll take that where I can get it.”

T
he Kid started baking chocolate macaroon cookies. He didn't have much of a sweet tooth himself, but Vanjii liked them, and he liked the process of making them. He found the recipe in a book, tried making some, and ended up making a batch just about every night. Vanjii couldn't eat them all and neither could he, so he'd usually put some of them in a Tupperware box, take them to work with him and share them with the sales people and customers.

The manager's name was Woody. He was a part-owner of the dealership. Each day he would show up at around ten in the morning, two hours after the Kid had started work. As he passed the reception desk, he would sometimes say hello to the Kid and sometimes ignore him. The Kid didn't mind either way. He didn't like Woody, and he didn't dislike him. If anyone had asked him what he thought of Woody, the Kid would have said he thought he was okay.

One morning, the Kid was talking to one of the sales guys. The guy was perched on the Kid's desk, and, as the two of them talked, they ate some of the cookies from the open box. Woody came in, said hello to them both, and took a cookie from the box. He walked away without saying anything else. The sales guy made an elaborate bow to him when his back was turned, but the Kid didn't smile.

When it was time for the Kid's lunch break, he went to Woody's office. “Hey,” he said. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure, if it's just a minute. I'm a little bit rushed . . . ”

“You remember when you took one of my cookies this morning?”