Hellcats: Anthology

by Kate Pickford

“How far?”

  “As far as I can!”

  The cleft is a ditch is a gully is a ravine is an arroyo and before I can say zim-zala-bim we’re in a redrock canyon with stone dwellings stuck onto rock shelves embedded in the cliffs above us.

  “These are Anasazi ruins.” Of course Che knows that, and off she goes about amaranth and khivas and ancestral Pueblan pottery while Ferret studies the cliffs, listening and nodding.

  Looking at the cliffs makes me think of the car and the train case and my shrieking mother who should be dead but isn’t. I’m not in a frame of mind for any of this, so I sew myself into a prenatal cosmic pouch and float over to the edge of the dry river. Just me and my soul-shackles and a red poofy cloud of giggling June bugs.

  I sit there in peace until the sound of thunder rolls up—clomp! clomp! clomp! clomp! clomp! clomp! It’s Che. I look around her and through her legs. She’s alone.

  “Where’s Ferret?”

  “Exploring the ruins,” she says.

  I give Che a headcocked look. Do I tell her someone swapped out her neck with a banged-up tailpipe swiped off a 1940 Indian?

  Truthfully, though…her neck is giving me a frisky.

  And Ferret’s not around….

  Succulent words float by, dripping with fat: lost weekend, body shots, cocaine-fueled monkey sex. I throw out my best pickup line: “I bet you’re a damn good lay, aren’t you?”

  Che’s eyes narrow to red slits that glow like fresh lava.

  Oh, I am so in.

  “It’s OK to give in, Che. You quiet ones are always the superfreaks. You can’t help it. It’s the naughty librarian in you.” My hips roll. My hips sway. I reach out to stroke Che’s tailpipe.

  Che slaps my paws down. “Are you high?”

  “Babycakes, I’m high as the Haight.”

  Che melts into a laughing puddle of Diet Pepsi. “Get away from me!” she shouts.

  A macrocephalic black skull rises out of the puddle, plastered all over with rainbows of candy buttons. Red roses spin in the eye sockets. Smoke puffs from a turquoise flipped-over-heart nose hole.

  You’re beautiful, candy-button skull. I love you.

  A red, red, red, redredred triangle of ruby-red candy buttons sits right between the eye roses. I want to eat them.

  “Come to daddy, Che. Let’s make the agave goddess weep.”

  Che clocks me. It feels just like home.

  “I suppose this means hot tubbing is 100% off the table?” I say.

  Che rolls her eyes and storms across the path to a splat of shade growing under an overhung rock. “I ought to roast you on a spit,” she says, and something tender puckers. Che’s eight times my size. She could definitely do it.

  “Look, I’m sorry, all right?” I’m a bit shocked at myself. Apologies were neither given nor taught in the Miss Marbles household, and this is the first apology I have ever offered. I roll it around in my mouth. It doesn’t taste so bad. The aftertaste is bitter though. In the end, I spit it out.

  “Che, I want to thank you for punching me ass-first into a mouse-eared succulent, for its spiny pricklybits have given me an idea. I do believe I have the solution to Ferret’s oracle pipe, the unblocking of which is why Ferret’s on this road trip in the first place. If Ferret can unblock her oracle pipe, you see, then she’ll finally be able to oracle. And oracling means sixteen vestal virgins writhing naked in purple incense. With another sixteen behind them, and behind them another sixteen, but plump ones.” I throw my paws skyward. “I am the walrus!” I shout and I dance the Cossack squat dance.

  “You’re a pig,” says Che. “Hi, Ferret.”

  I leap out of my squat.

  “Ferret! I’ve solved your problem! I know how to unblock your oracle pipe!”

  Ferret’s ears perk. She claps her paws and rises up on her hind feet in that sexilicious invertebrate way ferrets do. “Tell me! Tell me!”

  Che is glaring at me. Wings folded. Talon tapping.

  “What?” I say.

  “Tell her about the naked virgins.”

  “Shut up, Che. I didn’t say that out loud.”

  Che’s feathers exhale scarlet bubbles—tiny crystalline orbs that burst with wet, fizzy mhops!

  Mhop!

  Mhop!

  Mhop! Mhop! Mhop!

  I wrap my paws across my face. If I can’t see the bubbles I won’t jump around trying to eat them.

  I’ve lost my train of thought.

  “Che, what was I going to tell Ferret?”

  “You were going to tell her you just hit on me.”

  Now Ferret is the one glaring at me. She pushes me in the chest. “You hit on Che?”

  Alarms ring in my skull. This is not going good places. You know what to do. Attack the attacker.

  “You, Che, are the unholy union of a dinosaur and a feather duster. This Siamese does not do the frisky with velociraptors.

  “Quote,” says Che, “I bet you’re a damn good lay, aren’t you? Come to daddy, Che. Let’s make the agave goddess weep.”

  Ferret bares her fangs.

  Uh oh.

  “You said that to her?” Ferret’s screaming now. Completely losing it. My apocrines kick into overdrive. I drag a paw across my eyes. It comes away wet. I lick it. Salty. “Che’s a liar. I never said that.”

  “Quote,” says Che again. “You can’t help it. It’s the naughty librarian in you.”

  Ferret’s ears flatten. “Oh, my god, you are such a jerk!”

  “Absolutely useless,” says Che.

  I waggle a paw at Che. “I am also a god of wrath and fire. Do not incite me, mortal.”

  Che swivels her half-shaved, velociraptor neck and shakes her head. Ferret picks up a rock. Cocks her foreleg.

  I hold my paws up. “Wait, babycakes. Listen, a lot has been going on in my head.”

  “He called me babycakes, too,” says Che.

  Ferret shrieks.

  Rocks in flight are closer than they appear.

  A spectacular light explodes across the insides of my eyelids.

  There’s a fire when I come to. A glowing heart in a dark room. A ladder extends down to the floor through an indigo-colored hole. Gray smoke unspools up through it. Che, Ferret, and the human sit around the fire, chatting. It’s all very peaceful.

  I stretch and arch my back. The conversation stops when I crawl toward the fire.

  Everyone stares at me. Even the kid.

  Che folds her wings across her chest and looks at Ferret. The kid looks from one to the other, then to me, then back at them.

  “What?” I say.

  “You’re an asshole,” says Ferret.

  “Well good morning to you, too.” I stretch and arch my back. I have the mother of all headaches.

  “It’s Thursday night,” says Ferret.

  I flick my claws one by one. Monday flick Tuesday flick Wednesday... “I’ve been out for three days?”

  “Yeah,” says the kid. “Just like Jesus.”

  “At last, Jesus and I finally have something in common.” I rub my face. “I hope he felt better post-resurrection than I do. Are those chalupas?”

  The kid nods.

  “Where’d they come from?”

  The kid points at the train case in the corner.

  “There’s chalupas in the train case?”

  “There’s a lot of things in the train case.”

  “Can I have one?” The kid tosses me a chalupa and I dig in.

  “We’re in a khiva,” says Ferret. She looks serene. Like her oracle pipe finally unblocked.

  “Up in the ruins?” Ferret nods. I ask how they got up the cliff.

  “The train case,” says Che.

  “I have so missed you and your dulcet squawks, Che.” I take a monstrous bite of chalupa, jamming a wad into my cheek and chewing the rest.

  “I’m leaving you, Cat,” says Ferret.

  My jaw freezes mid-chew. “Esthuse me?”

  “We’re done. Gladys and I are moving to Taos. We’re go
ing to be feng-shui consultants.”

  “Who the hell is Gladys?”

  Ferret points at Che.

  “I’m Gladys, you insufferable twatwaffle.” She and Ferret bump fists. Paws. Wings. Whatever.

  I feel a hairball coming. There’s too much chalupa to swallow and too much to chew. I look around for a bag or a hole. All I find is the train case. I open the lid and spew the wet wad of chalupa inside. The hairball follows.

  “Annnd confirmation I have made the right decision,” says Ferret.

  “Of course you have,” says Che.

  Ferret gets up, dusts her flanks, slithers up onto Che’s shoulder. “Out of a misplaced sense of decency,” says Ferret, “we waited for you to wake up. We’re leaving now.”

  I hold up my paws. “Wait, stop. I get it. You want out. Fine. But help me understand what’s happening here. One minute we’re road tripping, having a grand time...”

  Che snorts.

  “...and the next I’m waking up from a rock-induced catnap to find my girlfriend leaving me for an emu?”

  Ferret shrugs. “More or less.”

  “To feng-shui houses for Scottsdale divorcées?”

  Che flips me the bird. How appropriate.

  “And which archangel delivered this revelation?”

  “The train case,” says Che.

  “We all took a turn in it,” says Ferret. “It was life changing.” She nods at the kid. The kid nods back. There’s entirely too much nodding going on.

  Che starts for the ladder.

  “Wait, Ferret, you never got to oracle. Don’t you want to unblock your oracle pipe and oracle?”

  “Here’s the thing, Cat,” says Ferret, “and this is the last thing I’m ever saying to you. I never wanted to be an oracle. You wanted me to be an oracle. What I wanted never concerned you. What you wanted concerned you. I want to feng-shui with Gladys. What I don’t want is you.”

  And that’s that. Without a goodbye or a wave or even a wistful look like Leia gave Han at the carbon freezer, my little babycakes disappears out the hole in the roof.

  My back slides down the stone wall. I sniff my pits. I smell like chives.

  The kid waves. I forgot he was here.

  “So, tell me, kid. What happens inside the train case?”

  “It’s different for everyone. When I go inside, Old Me comes.”

  “Who’s Old Me?”

  “Old Me is me, but the grown-up version. Old Me makes a campfire and we roast marshmallows and talk. Sometimes for a really long time. Old Me tells me I shouldn’t be afraid.”

  “Of?”

  “Of bullies. Of mom and dad. Of starting things. Or finishing things. He says no one is out of my league. Not even the Broadway dancer.”

  “What does Old Me look like when he talks about the Broadway dancer?”

  “He shakes his head when he talks about her. Real slow like this, and makes a sound like my dad when he sits down in his chair after work. Then he looks kind of sideways at the ground and nods his head, and then he smiles. Kind of a happy-sad smile.”

  I know all about the happy-sad smile.

  “I know exactly what happened,” I say. “He chickened out. He had her in the palm of his hand and he chickened out. She was too beautiful and too smart and too in demand…she was too all the things…and then he looked at himself and saw nobody and he chickened out.”

  We watch the fire down to embers. “This chalupa tastes like sawdust.” I chuck it into the fire. It doesn’t even bother to burn. I haul the train case over. It stinks of hairball and chewed-up chalupa, but what the hell.

  “You think I should do this?”

  The kid nods.

  I put one foot in the case.

  “This doesn’t take long, right?”

  The kid shrugs.

  My other foot goes in.

  “You’ll be here when I get back?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I won’t be able to explain to the cops if I come back and find you murdered by some lunatic Aztec trickster god. ”

  The kid just smiles. Like he knows something. He walks over, runs his fingers over my notched ears, and gently presses me down into the train case.

  The lid closes.

  The latches click shut.

  Mom is howling.

  ~†~†~†~†~†~

  A few taps is all it takes. The latches spring and the lid rises. Some guy I don’t know looks down at me. Two young girls, twins, it looks like, scream “KITTEN!” and skritch my ears. The guy laughs. Gentle-like. Leaning into the skritches, I ask the guy, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Old Me.”

  Old Me Old Me Old Me. The words bang around in my skull, and then…

  “Get outta here. You’re the kid I locked in the trunk of that Volkswagen.”

  Old Me smiles and nods. “You’ve been gone a long time.”

  “Have I?” I look around at Old Me’s house. Upright baby grand along the wall. Two guitars beside it. Some kind of African mask hanging above kiddie crayon art. “This doesn’t look like a khiva. May I?”

  Old Me nods. I step out and stretch my legs. The twins wrap their hands around my paws. Warm. Soft. Like kids’ hands should be. Like a kitten’s paws should be. Like mine are now.

  I look sideways at the girls. Old Me grins. “They think I’m meowing at you.”

  “That’s a good trick. They yours?”

  “50% each. My wife is to blame for the other half.”

  “Names?”

  “You’re going to laugh.”

  “I’m actually cool with that these days.”

  “Red dress with glasses is Kay. Blue hair is Cassandra.” Old Me leans back in his chair with a smug smile on his face. “I’ll let that settle in for a min...”

  “Ahhh, you clever bastard. Kay, Che. But…Cassandra?”

  “No one told me Ferret’s real name….”

  “Penelope.”

  “…and I couldn’t name her Pythia.”

  We both laugh. “You married?”

  Old Me nods.

  “You like it?”

  He smiles. “We’re quite happy.”

  “Where’d you meet?”

  “At a book reading. But listen, my story can wait. I want your story. I recall you were going to the desert to eat fistfuls of peyote and erase your mom from existence.”

  An electric motor kicks in outside and a garage door starts up. The girls jump up and run to the back door. Mom must be home.

  “Your domestic bliss makes we want to hurl a hairball. Did you ever finish that book you were writing?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve made a nice living writing books people buy but don’t read. I hear I’m #1 on nightstand to-read stacks. Still can’t draw a B-24, though.”

  “Sorry I was such a jerk about that.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got a tribe now that’s convinced me it’s OK to have crooked wings and imperfect sentences.”

  “Does your tribe know you have a Pulitzer? I see the medal hanging oh-so-conspicuously behind you.”

  “Well, yeah. That happened too, I guess.”

  “And who is this?” I point at a framed photo of Old Me in a tux on a red carpet beside a dynamite brunette with legs up to her halo.

  “Juliana Silva.” Old Me winks. “Brazilian model.”

  “I remember your story about freezing up on the Broadway dancer. How’d you mess this one up?”

  “I didn’t. You just met her daughters.”

  “Wait, what? Nooo…”

  “Aside from telling the Universe exactly what I want, accepting my fathomless capacity for imperfection and getting on with my life was the best thing I ever did.” Old Me leans back in his chair, tucks his hands behind his head. “So what happened in the train case?”

  “Feel my ears.”

  “No notches.”

  “Look at my paws.”

  “No scars.”

  Old Me kicks his feet
up. “Tell me everything.”

  “Fair warning: this is going to get weird.”

  We both get comfortable. “After you closed the case I went for a walk. No particular destination. Just walked. Ended up in LA. Found my mom. She hadn’t died yet. We looked at each other for a long time, like boxers do before a fight. Then had a long talk. Pretty awful at first. I showed her my ears and my paws. She showed me the burns on her neck and told me why her tail was a stump. Turns out her old tom had been rough with her the way she’d been rough with me.

  Mom and I decided to go for a walk. We walked to Yorba Linda, her kittenhood home. Found her old tom. Compared war wounds with him. His mom had been brutal, too. He was clumsy and that embarrassed her. Her solution to teach him agility was to throw him off a four-story roof. So we grabbed him and walked to his kittenhood home, and we kept doing that, generation after generation, until we got to Ground Zero.”

  “How far back did you have to go?”

  “When was Woodrow Wilson president?”

  “Oh, my god. Wilson?”

  “It was a long chain of abuse. Anyway, so we find Ground Zero in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Seventy-eight of us make a circle around him, every one of us messed up in some way. Cut up ears. Burns. Patchy fur. Missing toes. Blind eyes. You name it. There were a lot of fidgety cats in that circle, but every one of us hung in. I honestly don’t know what we were going to do, but we wanted Ground Zero to see the ripples of his abuse. How many lives he’d ruined. How many relationships. I told him if he flinched even a whisker that we’d claw his eyes out (17th descendant), bite his ears off (9th and 34th), slam his tail in a steel door (mom), and burn the pads of his paws (me). Well, Ground Zero heard all that and lost it. He slid onto the floor and started to cry, just sitting there holding an old purple ribbon, sobbing. I wanted to bail, but mom held my paw, and then the cat next to her held hers, and on around the circle until we were all joined up, all of us watching Ground Zero cry. Some of us were crying too. Then Ground Zero started talking. Real low at first, then louder.

  “‘I was an Easter gift to a little girl when I was a kitten,’ he said. ‘Her name was Chloe. When I slept on her head, she’d lay still so I wouldn’t slide off. When I flopped in front of the book she was reading, she’d skritch me. When I raised my tail and showed her my butthole, she’d rub my back. She was just perfect. I loved Chloe and Chloe loved me.