You Only Get Letters from Jail (22 page)

Without the ram air hood vibrating across the top of the engine, we were suddenly dumped into more quiet than I had expected and for a minute I wondered if I had seen the cat get hit, or if maybe it was just my imagination and we were still moving forward and blowing back miles.

“We hit that fucking cat,” Elbow said, and there were many things I did not trust about Elbow, but what he said around his cigarette was not one of them, and in the empty seconds as side one faded out on the tape deck and there was the quiet pause before side two, I knew that we had killed that thing in the road and I wasn't that high anymore and it would be impossible now to fake it and forget.

“What do we do?” I said. My mouth was as dry as the air that came in through the window, and I could smell burning wood, a distant fire leaking out someone's chimney. For a minute I was reminded of fall and away games when I had played basketball and the team had traveled by bus to a distant town and me and Lonnie Howard would leave the gym when we were supposed to be doing homework while the varsity team played, and we would walk foreign sidewalks of cities we did not live in and there was always
a smell that October carried with it—dank and dark and full of smoke and cold and fire and rotten vegetables waiting to be upturned by garden rakes on blustery Saturday afternoons when there was no sun and no heat. But now it was March and Lonnie Howard had transferred schools after freshman year and I was with Elbow Ritchie and I did not play basketball anymore and there was a dead cat behind us and a few months of senior year in front of us and beyond that nothing but the sputter and hiss of dead air like the end of our own tape.

“Well,” Elbow said, “we probably have two choices.” He shifted his weight in the seat and I could see his right foot rise up from the floor mat and strain toward the gas pedal, and I knew that choice, so I pulled the handle on my door and spilled myself into the street and made choice number two. I heard Elbow make a noise behind me and then I had my legs underneath me and I was headed back along the gutter to the shape and the mess. Elbow gunned the car's engine and I thought maybe he might punch it and run but then the motor cut and there was silence in the street and in thirty feet I was looking down at what we had done. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Other than the unnatural angle of the cat's head and the way that the glassy eyes stared in opposite directions, it looked like it could be picked up and petted. I had seen a squirrel hit by a station wagon one time when I was walking home from school and it had exploded. Crunch and poof. It had looked as if the squirrel had decided to turn itself inside out and go empty in the process.

But the cat was intact. I looked down at it and it looked sideways at me and it said to me five words that I would not forget even after the last of the cheap weed wore off. “It should have been you.”

Then a woman in the yard beside the gutter was screaming and Elbow was beside me and the cat continued its accusation and I wanted to reach down and lift it from the thin stream of water it was lying in, but it told me to just step away, leave it alone, let it be. I looked at Elbow to see if he had heard the cat's decision, but Elbow was lighting a cigarette and squaring up against the woman, who was yelling, “Toby, my God you killed Toby,” and I shoved my hands deep into my jeans pockets and decided to go as limp as the cat.

She wasn't a tall woman, but she crossed the yard in quick strides, and then the sidewalk, and she was on us before Elbow even had a chance to exhale. Elbow squinted at her and raised both hands in a gesture of accepted defeat. “It was an accident,” he said.

“You,” she said. “You ran right over him. You didn't even try to stop.”

“Ma'am, I didn't even see him. He ran right in front of my car.” He hooked his thumb up the street toward the Mustang, which was parked at a decidedly drunken angle in our lane. I could still smell the faint burn of new tire and by now other neighbors had left the warmth of their houses to stand on their porches with their hands on their hips or folded across their chests in a gesture of conviction and I knew that Jefferson Street had found us guilty of the crime and we would never get a jury of our peers.

“I want the names of your parents. Both of you.” She said this matter-of-fact, and I realized that she was not hysterical or crying, but her face was flushed and she kept wringing her hands in front of her as if they might escape and do something on their own if she didn't hold them back.

“Everything okay over there, Marianne?” a guy called from two houses down. He was wearing an unbuttoned mechanic's shirt over a white T-shirt and he had a can of beer in his hand.

“These boys ran over my cat.”

I heard a woman gasp and suck in her breath and a quiet murmur ran up the street like a wave. We were surrounded on all sides now. There were kids standing on the sidewalk, and crowds forming in driveways. “You want me to deal with them?” beer-can mechanic called. A siren started up in the distance and I wondered if someone had already called the police.

“It's okay, Randy. Everything is under control.” She looked at both of us, and Elbow just kept smoking and staring down the street at his car and I kept looking for a place to put my eyes, but in the end they just met hers and I couldn't break away and she wouldn't let me.

Eventually the woman made us write down our names and phone numbers on a piece of binder paper I pulled from my backpack, and then beer-can mechanic came down the sidewalk with a pillowcase and a pair of gloves and everyone watched his performance of pulling the cat from the gutter, dripping water and wrappers, its limbs
already stiff, and some of the kids cried and some of the women covered their own eyes from the sight and Elbow grew bored and started taking small steps back toward the car while the cat was bagged and carried away. “Your parents will be hearing from me,” Marianne said.

I went home and the evening stretched out in front of me in one long inhale and I choked on my heartbeat every time the telephone rang. The air was cold and my eyes itched from too much weed and the fact that I couldn't seem to close them and rest even though I wanted to.

I had only pushed my dinner around on my plate and when the obligation was over, I went to my room and shut the door and lay on my bed in all of my clothes, right down to shoes and socks, and watched the light leak from my windows and the shadows shift and change on my ceiling. She still hadn't called, and I figured maybe the woman had been all threat and no follow-through—it was an accident. Even Elbow had been saying that the entire way back to my house—“What is the bitch
really
going to do to us? It was an accident. I mean, we weren't driving around trying to kill fucking cats.”

When my clock ticked past nine, my eyes finally felt like they could close and I had put it all into justification and perspective and even decided that we hadn't really been that high and it couldn't even be proven that we had actually hit the cat when you got right down to it, and even if she called tomorrow or the next day, there was no way my parents would bust me for being a passenger in a car that had hit a cat—even if we had been cutting school
and were stoned and I wasn't supposed to be with Elbow Ritchie in his
too much car for a kid like him
without permission. Those were details—unimportant compared to the fact that it was an accident. Perfectly innocent. Perfectly faultless.

I heard the phone ring the second before it actually did and I heard the television mute in the other room and I kept my eyes shut and pretended that I was blind. I wondered if losing your vision really does increase the strength of your other senses and if my eyes were closed would food taste different or better, could I feel my way from my bedroom to the end of the block, could I hear somebody strike a match in the house next door? With my eyes closed right then on my bed in the darkness of my room I could taste my own fear and smell my own sweat and hear my father's voice on the phone and the sound of my name.

Elbow got his dad to pay her off. He wouldn't tell me how much or how the conversation went, but I figured it was more than a C-note, maybe more than two, and Elbow skated right out of punishment and my parents found another reason to think he was a bad influence on me, and come that Saturday morning I was standing in front of her house, 477 Jefferson, ready to serve three weekends of my time as penance for being high, for cutting school, for being with Elbow, for riding shotgun in a cat-killing machine. Three weekends of work, yard care, house painting, trash hauling, hammering broken stairs, gutter cleaning. Elbow's dad threw her some money and I got to serve the time. “Take this weed with you,” Elbow
said Friday after school as we headed out to the parking lot and I got relegated to the backseat because guys who didn't have the money to pay to stay out of trouble didn't get to ride shotgun in a cat-killing machine anymore, and now Brock Irwin was in my spot and I was in back like the hired help. Elbow handed me a Ziploc bag with a handful of joints at the bottom, all of them rolled like perfection. “It will make you forget that you're doing a work project.” Brock held up his hand and Elbow gave him a hard high five and I rested my head against the back of the seat until the music came tearing out of the speaker behind me and I realized how much I hated that song.

My father woke me up on Saturday morning, five minutes before my alarm was set to go off, and he followed me around while I got ready, monitored my time, supervised my routine, and when he dropped me off in front of her house, he waited at the curb to make sure that I didn't bolt, which is exactly what I wanted to do. She opened the door after the first weak knock and invited me to step past her and into the half-light of her living room. Her house smelled like flowers and cooking and things I could not name but recognized. “You can call me Marianne,” she said.

I stood there awkwardly looking down at my old pair of Converse I had worn to work in, and she did not break the silence that followed and relieve me of my shame. I could hear the heavy tick of a large clock coming from a room I could not see, and I wondered if that sound ever got on her nerves, woke her up in the night, made her have to turn the television louder in order to hear her shows. I
looked around to see what kind of television she had. I didn't see one at all.

“So?” she said. I shifted my weight and scratched a place on my cheek that did not itch. “You want some coffee?”

I thought about it for a second. The agreement was that I would work for her from eight to five every Saturday and Sunday until the time was served. “It's a good lesson for you, Marty,” my dad had said. “And it's a good gesture. She lives by herself. She needs the help.”

“I don't know how yard work is going to pay her back for her dead cat,” I had said. “I mean, the last time I checked, you can't mow some lawns and bring back grandma if she dies.”

“Keep at it, Marty,” my father had said. “You want to make it six weeks?”

So the deal was nine hours a day, Saturday and Sunday, all the way into April. It was about serving the time, not the amount of work I got done, and the way I figured it, if she wanted to offer me a cup of coffee, that big loud clock ticking off the minutes was reminding me that for every tick and sip, it was less time I had to haul and scrape and hammer and cut.

“Yeah,” I said. “I'd like a cup of coffee. That would be great.”

She led me into her kitchen and there was a small table under a window and the room was full of early morning sunshine that was already warm, and I could smell cinnamon and baked sugar, and the table was set with two cups painted with little blue designs, and there was a pot
of coffee on a beaded potholder and a white cream pitcher and a cup with sugar and little silver spoons. She pointed me toward a chair and she went to the oven and lowered the door and pulled out a braided loaf of bread, and she set it on the counter while she drizzled icing over the top and then cut it into thick slices, and I could see steam rise out of the bread each time the knife pulled away from it.

“I hope you don't mind raisins,” she said.

She took a slice of the bread and lifted it onto a blue painted plate that matched the cups and the saucers, and she drizzled more icing over it and set it in front of me and then took the other empty chair at the table and poured coffee into each cup. When she was finished, she lifted her coffee, sipped at it, added a spoonful of sugar, and then sat back and stared at me. I realized that I had never sat in a stranger's house by myself, never sat and eaten food in front of someone I did not know without the presence of my parents or a friend from school. I had never been alone with a stranger in a stranger's house, and I wasn't sure what to do with my coffee other than to just drink it even though it tasted hot and too bitter, but the thought of adding things to it and having her watch me seemed like too much to go through.

“You don't want cream?” she said.

“It's good,” I said. “I'm fine.”

“That bread was my mother's recipe,” she said. “It was my favorite when I was a girl.”

I picked up a small silver fork and held it in my hand, unsure whether I should cut off a piece and take a bite, or
drink the coffee, or just pick up the slice of bread and eat it that way. I realized I was sweating and for the first time in my life I couldn't wait to go outside and work.

“Don't be nervous,” she said.

I swallowed a too-hot mouthful of coffee and followed it up with another one. “What should I do today?” I asked.