Towelhead (26 page)

“It ran out in front of the car,” he said. “It was dark out. I couldn't see.”

“Where is it?” I asked.

“What do you mean where is it? It's on the side of the road. It's dead.”

“You didn't pick it up?”

“And do what with it?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“I'm calling Animal Control,” he said. “They'll come and get it.”

“What did it look like?” I asked.

He took out the phone book and started flipping through the blue pages. “It was little and white.”

I took a deep breath. “That's the Vuosos' cat.”

“What?” Daddy said, looking up from the phone book.

“You hit the Vuosos' cat.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” I said. “I went over there to see Zack this afternoon, and she escaped while we were talking.”

“You must be kidding me,” Daddy said. He put the phone book down on the kitchen counter.

I shook my head.

“What the hell were you doing over there? You don't even like that idiot kid.”

“I don't know,” I said.

“No!” Daddy yelled. “That's not true! We don't go knocking on people's doors because we don't know. You tell me right now why you went over there.”

“I had to ask Mr. Vuoso something.”

“Vuoso?” Daddy said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I had to tell him I was sorry about my article.”

“What article?”

“About reservists. For the school paper.”

“You didn't write that,” he said. “I have the tape.”

“I wrote it by trying to remember what was on the tape.”

“You wrote a fake article about Vuoso?”

“No,” I said. “I remembered a lot of the things right. It was just some of them that were wrong, and that made Mr. Vuoso mad.”

Daddy paused for a second, then said, “Do you have this newspaper?”

I nodded.

“Go get it.”

I went and got the paper out of my backpack and brought it to him. “Look at that idiot,” Daddy said, poking his finger at the picture of Mr. Vuoso. Then he started reading. Almost immediately, he laughed. “This is what you remembered?” he said. “You have a terrible memory!” He read his favorite answers aloud, such as, “
No, I am not afraid to go to war. It's not that scary since I will just have to pass out food
,” and, “
We all need oil for our cars.
” When he was finished, he said that it was the best article he had ever read, and that he had clearly done the right thing to take the cassette away from me. Then he said, “Now go and get your coat.”

When I came back from the closet, he was rummaging under the sink, pulling out the old white T-shirts with yellow sweat stains under the arms that he used to polish his shoes. “Here,” he said, handing one to me. Then he grabbed the yellow dishwashing gloves hanging over the spigot and gave me those, too. “Let's go,” he said, pulling his own coat from the chair where he'd left it.

We got in his car and drove to the end of our street, then took a left. I saw the cat as soon as she appeared in Daddy's headlights. She looked the same way some bugs did when they were dead, all curled up in a tight circle, as if being alive was the only thing that kept their backs straight.

“Go get it,” Daddy said, pulling over, and I opened the car door. I was nervous to see her up close since I had never seen anything dead before. I wanted to hold her as soon as possible. I knew she would get stiff soon and I was terrified of feeling her that way.

The cat's eyes were open, which made me think she was alive for a second, but then when I saw how still she was, how the eyes weren't moving to look at me, I understood that she really was dead. I knew that on TV, when people died with their eyes open, other people brushed a hand over their lids to make them close. It was bad to have your eyes open if you weren't alive. I didn't think that would work now, though, since cats don't really have eyelids. Instead I just said, “Sorry, Snowball.”

Daddy had made me think she would be covered in blood by giving me the rubber gloves, but she only had a small trail of it coming out of her left ear. Still, I put them on before lifting her onto the center of Daddy's T-shirt, which I had already laid out on the road. She wasn't stiff yet, but she didn't feel regular, either. Mostly she was just tight, like a flexed muscle. As I moved her, I realized I was closing my eyes a little, like when you watch a scary movie through your hand.

After she was on the T-shirt, I lifted all the edges around her, then carried her like a sack to the car. Daddy opened my door from the inside and said, “Just hold it on your lap.”

We were quiet as we drove the couple of minutes back to our house. In our driveway, Daddy turned the car off and said, “Bring it inside.”

“Don't you want me to take her back to the Vuosos'?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” Daddy said. “So that asshole can call me a murderer? Forget it.”

Inside, he stood over me at the kitchen counter, instructing me on how to wrap the cat first in Saran Wrap, then in several layers of plastic bags. He told me to put her in the freezer, and that we would put her out with the trash in a couple of days.

“Then they'll never know what happened to her,” I said.

“Well,” Daddy said, “you should've thought of that before you got her killed.”

That night in bed, I couldn't stop thinking about what Daddy had said. That I had gotten Snowball killed. I thought he was probably right, but at the same time, I wondered how come it was me. I got her killed by trying to apologize to Mr. Vuoso, but I would never have had to apologize if Daddy hadn't taken my tape and I hadn't had to write a fake article. How did Daddy know where the problems all began? How could he be so sure? I guessed he was sure because he never thought he did anything wrong. But he did do things wrong. He was a racist, and he was mean, and it seemed to me that one day, somebody besides me was going to find out.

 

The next day at lunch, when I told Thomas about Snowball, he said, “I want to see her.”

“You can't,” I said. “She's all wrapped up.”

“So we'll unwrap her.”

“I don't know,” I said.

“I'll do it. You won't have to touch her.”

I didn't say anything. Mostly I was worried about the Vuosos telling on me if they saw Thomas visiting, since they might be outside looking for Snowball.

“C'mon,” he said. Then he lowered his voice and said, “I'll have sex with you.”

“You will?” I said.

He nodded. “I know you miss it.”

When Thomas started talking like that, acting like I liked having sex with him so much, I got a good feeling. Daddy got mad when people made assumptions about him, but I liked it. It made me feel like someone wanted to know me. Even if they were wrong, it didn't matter. It mattered only that they were trying. “I don't have a rubber,” I said.

“So?” he said. “I'll pull out.”

“Will that work?”

“Duh.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, and he bumped my leg with his under the table.

 

When Thomas and I got off the bus that afternoon, Zack was outside, calling for Snowball. “Hey, Zack!” Thomas said, like they were old friends.

Zack ignored him.

“I heard you lost your cat,” Thomas said.

“Screw off,” Zack muttered.

“What's that?” Thomas asked.

Zack wouldn't repeat himself. Instead he yelled, “Snowball!” a little louder than usual.

“Snowball!” Thomas yelled, too.

“Don't!” Zack wailed. “She's scared of you. She'll never come if she thinks you're here.”

“What if she never comes at all?” Thomas said.

“C'mon,” I said to him. “Let's go.”

“What if she's dead?” Thomas asked.

“Screw you,” Zack said. “What do you know?” and he turned and walked in a different direction.

Inside my house, Thomas went straight for the freezer. “Is that her?” he asked, pointing to the oddly shaped package wrapped in a white plastic grocery bag, and I nodded.

He pulled her out and set her on the counter. She made the same scraping sound as a block of ice would. I guessed she actually was a block of ice. “I can't believe he made you wrap her,” Thomas said, untying one of the many knots I had made with the bag handles.

“It was my punishment,” I said. “I killed her.”

“Bullshit,” Thomas said. “You can't even drive.”

I moved closer to him then, leaning my head against his shoulder.

“You sure put her in enough bags,” he said, since every time he took one off, there seemed to be another.

“Daddy wanted to be sanitary.”

“Three is sanitary. Five is crazy.”

Finally he got down to the Saran Wrap. You could see her pretty clearly through it. “Oh, man,” Thomas said. “That's just sad.”

“She was a good cat,” I said.

He nodded. “Are her eyes open?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why didn't you close them?”

I shrugged.

“We should close them now.”

“We can't,” I said. “She's frozen.”

“Well,” Thomas said, “I bet if we thawed her out a little, it would work.”

“There's not enough time,” I said.

“Sure, there is.” He put his arms around me and kissed me lightly a few times on the cheek. He said, “We can go in your room and by the time we come out, she'll be soft.”

“What if she smells?”

“She won't.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, and he whispered in my ear that he was.

We went in my room then and Thomas told me to take off all my clothes. When he just stood there watching me, I said, “Aren't you going to take off yours, too?”

He shook his head. “I want to do it where you're naked and I'm not. I'll just unzip my jeans.”

“Why?”

“Because it's sexy. It shows how much you want it.”

I thought this made sense, so I said, “Okay.” When all my clothes were off, he told me to get on all fours on the bed. “Why?” I asked again.

“Because that's how I want to do it.”

“But I can't see you,” I said.

“You'll feel me.”

I did what he told me, even though it made me feel kind of embarrassed. I worried that by being that way, he could see inside my butt. I tried to turn around a little to look at him, but he told me not to. He said to just keep looking forward and not worry about it. I heard his zipper, then I felt him poking me with his penis. He tried to push it into a place where there wasn't a hole. “It's not there,” I said.

“Hang on,” he said.

After another try, he found the right spot. I was already excited from his kissing me in the kitchen, so it went in pretty easily. “Oh, man,” I heard him say. Then he asked, “Does that feel good?”

“Yes,” I said, even though I wasn't sure if it did. It didn't feel bad. It just felt like exactly what it was: Thomas holding my hips and sliding in and out of me.

“Are you going to come?” he asked a minute later.

“I don't think so.”

“The girl has to come first,” he said.

“I don't think I'm going to.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't know how to if I'm not by myself.”

Just then, Thomas reached around the front of me and put his hand between my legs. I made a noise then that I didn't mean to make, like a long
ooh
.

“Can you come like this?” Thomas asked me.

“Yes,” I said, and then very quickly after he started rubbing me, I did. I made another noise, like my voice was shuddering. It seemed so much better like this, to have an orgasm with someone else. It was incredible to think that I wasn't the only person who knew how to make myself feel good.

“Okay, now I'm going to come,” Thomas said.

“Okay.”

I felt him pull out of me. “Roll over,” he said.

I rolled over. Instead of putting himself back inside me, though, he knelt in front of me, staring between my legs and touching himself. When it was time for him to come, he pointed his penis at my stomach and that was where the stuff came out. Some of it went in my belly button.

When he was finished, he lay down next to me on the bed. “Can I have a tissue?” I said.