Hush Hush

by Steven Barthelme

  That was one thing we used to do together sometimes, my wife and I, if there was a storm, we’d have a drink and leave the door open, cut the lights, watch the lightning and listen to the rain. And smoke, before we quit smoking.

  The next morning, Tuesday, it was still raining and the cat still wasn’t back when I left for work. I drove to the office under the gloomy, gray skies listening to the rain beating on the windshield and the ripping sound the car tires made on the wet streets, thinking. I have crooked little feelings, I guess, nothing you could write a magazine article about. Not like these people with these giant, rectangular emotions that sound like volumes of an encyclopedia. Guilt, Hysteria, Independence, Joy, Loss, Zed. Rot.

  Sometime that morning I told Becky that my cat was out in the rain overnight. “Slick?” she said—I didn’t even know she knew his name. “You didn’t go out and find him?” It was strange to me that she would get so excited. I said, “Becky, it was pouring. I wouldn’t know where to find him, anyway. I don’t know where he goes.” The look on her exquisitely made up face, framed in blonde-edged brown curls, was dismissive, damning.

  “I whistled for him,” I said, raising my voice. All along the hall there, the clerical people were looking at me, so I tried to speak normally. “I was out calling him and calling him, for an hour.” But she knew I was lying, she’d turned back to the computer by then.

  The weather was making everybody edgy. I did like the cat, a great deal. It was just the way I understood things—cats went out and later they came back. They’re animals. You don’t ask them where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing. Next thing you know the cat’ll be telling me I’ve got to learn to “let go” and “share my feelings” and “cuddle.” Jesus.

  At home that evening I went out and called for the cat from both the kitchen door, that opens into the garage, and from the back bedroom windows, at the opposite end of the house. Then I remembered that once when we had first had the cat, when he was just a few months old, a kitten, pint-size, he was gone overnight and my wife and I had found him the next day, up on the roof of the house, whining. I found him, actually, and my wife gushed on and on about it, and I felt like a hero.

  So I pulled on my raincoat, and got out the big red umbrella, and I got outside in the rain and walked back and forth around the house looking up on the roof. Of course Slick wasn’t up there. Dumb, I thought. The cat’s not on top of something, he’s under something somewhere. I went out and called him again around midnight, but he didn’t show, so I had an extra Scotch and went to sleep.

  By Wednesday morning it had been raining solid for two days and the TV morning show and my soggy newspaper were talking about how many inches of rain it was and how the ground was saturated and the two rivers were cresting north of town. Water was driving snakes and deer into people’s yards and so on. My house smelled damp, muggy; you couldn’t get away from it. In the neighborhood, water was standing everywhere, and the little creek had turned into an ugly torrent. The underpass on the street that I usually took to work was full of water. You could just see the tip of the black and white stick, the flood gauge, and the stick was six feet. I had to drive about ten blocks up, past the park, to get across under the Loop.

  All the way into work I dreaded Becky asking me if I had found the cat, and that was the first thing she said. When I told her I hadn’t, she frowned and went back to her keyboard. Outside the windows, gray sheets of water coming down. We didn’t talk again all day, until close to five when she was packing up to leave.

  “You know, sometimes they get up under the house,” she said. “Is there a space under your house?”

  I said there was, but it was probably a bog by now. I told her I would look there, with a flashlight.

  Even when it’s dry, you have to get down on your belly to look under the house, but I had promised Becky. When I got home and the cat was still not back, I changed into some jeans and a sweatshirt and put my raincoat on over that and went out in the rain with a flashlight to the place in the back garden where there’s an opening in the outside wall down to the space under the house. The garden was full of water.

  I slid through the mud and into the opening, my face about ten inches into the two foot high space under the house. You could see fifteen or twenty feet to either side. Rusty pipes hung under the floor and pools of oily water filled in the low spots and cobwebs glistened with drops of condensation in the flashlight beam. There was a thirty-year-old Coke bottle and a big pipe elbow with a crack in it. A rotting magazine. Spiders. A rat, fur flat and soaking wet. Dead. I pulled back out from under there.

  My clothes were drenched by this time, and the whole front of me was so filthy I felt like a kid. I rolled over in the water in the garden to get mud all over the back of me too. I was laughing, taking a mud bath. I sat up against the back wall of the house and shielded my eyes with my hand to look at my neighbor’s house. He has a better life than I have, I thought, and he’s a Republican. It’s not supposed to be that way. He even loves that fetishistic little dog. Think I’ll just sit here until my cat comes home. I tried to pick up some mud, but it drained through my fingers, so I dug down and got drier dirt, and brought it up and compressed it into a clod, and threw it at his house. Clods for clods, I thought. Cat’s dead. Life is stupid, most of it.

  On Thursday it was still raining, and I didn’t go to work. I started in, drove down the service road along the Loop until, near the cross street I’d found to get under the freeway, I saw a dead cat, an orange tabby, lying out from the curb, splitting the water running in the gutter. The service road was wide and ran beside a flat, empty park. Not far away, the same creek from near my house ran parallel along the other border of the park.

  I jerked the car over, stopped, and got out. The cat’s thick orange and white fur lay almost flat, like carpet. A big cat, stiff, not as big as Slick. It was pretty far from home. As I stood there in the rain, the weirdest thing happened—I almost started to cry. Now, my wife was right, actually, about my not having feelings, because I just don’t. I remember one time she read me a magazine article about how the average man is five foot ten and cries once a month. I thought, Once a month? You’ve got to be kidding.

  I couldn’t go to work, so I picked the orange cat up and set it on the grass, so no one would hit it, then got back into my car and drove home, wishing I had a cigarette the way you wish for a cigarette after a few years of not smoking, wistful, wanting to be some way you used to be.

  At home, I got my umbrella and then walked up and down the streets, methodically, block by block, looking, staring up driveways and into backyards, shouting Slick’s name. I’d ask kids I saw if they’d seen a big black cat. I was wearing the raincoat and holding the red umbrella and walking through water that was often over my cuffs and sometimes up to my knees. The rain slanted in under the umbrella, but once you get good and soaked it doesn’t much matter. Odd, really, the way we try to avoid the rain, stay dry, as if it hurt.

  I walked up and down, opened people’s gates, jumped fences, crossed patios. Sometimes people’s cats would watch me from a windowsill and I’d knock at the house and ask about mine. I would finish one street and then start the next, block after block. Slogging through the water I got hunches and premonitions—he’s in this block, or, Buicks, he likes Buicks. I saw black spots which turned out to be buckets, holes, hunks of mud, tree stumps, a black T-shirt wadded into a ball.

  After four days of rain there was garbage everywhere—cups, a golf club, three or four shoes, a dog’s collar, panties, a can of green beans. I was out all morning and into the afternoon, getting crazier, starting to get hot flashes and sweating in the rain, and starting to love the cat, desperately, wanting him back.

  I finally got to the creek which was now angry, fifteen feet across, loud, shushing ahead like a picture in fast forward. I stopped, watching tree branches race past, then started to walk along beside it. If he got caught in this, I thought, he’s gone. He was so clumsy he could barely
make it across the living room rug without stumbling. So careless he’d fall asleep under a rocking chair. So insecure he wouldn’t eat unless you stood there and watched. You could barely tell the fool was a cat.

  As I walked along the creek bank, staying back from the edge, slipping and sliding, I kept thinking he couldn’t have wandered this far, but then I thought: It explains why he hasn’t come home—he crossed it before the rain and then couldn’t get back. Or, he tried to get back.

  Eventually when I looked up, I was in the park. It was about three in the afternoon. I was on the opposite side of the park from the service road, but a concrete footbridge led over the fat angry creek, so I crossed and went to look for the orange tabby.

  It was still lying where I’d left it that morning, but its mouth seemed to have opened slightly, baring the small front teeth. It was ugly. I knelt down to pick it up, and looked around. No one was ever going to find it here.

  Carrying the cat under my raincoat I walked across the park, back across the bridge, and then along the creek, all the way to my neighborhood, and back up to my house. I set the cat on the front lawn, and stood looking down in the rain, thinking of it as a sort of signal, a crooked totem. A message to my cat, about what could happen. It lay out there the rest of the afternoon, all night, and most of the next morning.

  I found Slick lying sprawled on the garage concrete, shivering, clumsy, careless. Obstinate. I carried him in and set him on the kitchen floor. On the white linoleum, limp, he looked like an embryo, his breaths heaving in the thin blue skin over his flanks, too tired to protest as I wrapped him in a towel and went over him with a hair dryer, blubbering like a baby. Later, I took a shovel from the garage and went to bury the other one. Standing out in the rain thinking, This doesn’t mean anything. It just kept on raining.

  Acquaintance

  On the plane the gin happy flight attendants had had a hard time persuading anyone to sing Auld Lang Syne, but then finally, when they offered a free flight as well as the bottle of champagne, a little bald guy in a red coat got up, took the microphone, stood in the aisle posing like a 50’s crooner, steadying himself with one hand on the back of a seat. The little guy had a very beautiful voice, and by the time he was finishing up the whole plane was singing, just as the seatbelt lights went on for the descent into Logan.

  A nice thing, Quinn thought. He was sitting on the bed in his hotel room, on the phone with his father.

  “You remember, Dad,” Quinn said. “McCarthey was one of my teachers. I’m picking up some stuff I left in a rent house here. His book, other stuff. It’s a fool’s errand. Listen, I’ve got to go.”

  “Four hundred dollar flight, isn’t it?” his father said. “Must be some book. You could still stop through here.”

  “I can’t, Dad. I’d like to, but I’m back at work Tuesday. I just wanted to say Happy New Year. I’ll call when I get back to Chicago, okay? I love you.” He said goodbye and hung up. Tomorrow, Quinn thought. Get it and then get out of here. He settled back on the pale yellow brocade bedspread in the too bright hotel room, and closed his eyes. Four hundred dollar book, no less. Daddy’s voice, he thought.

  Quinn had not known, when he had been a student, that T. Tyrone McCarthey was famous enough to get even the tiny news item about his death that the newspaper had run in the book section, six lines that called him a “modernist” and his career “disappointing” and even mentioned White Cats, the book he had signed, the same book Quinn had left in a cardboard box of books and other junk in an attic in a rent house in Brookline eight years ago when he finally finished school and left Boston for good.

  McCarthey had been a fat, balding, red-faced man—around school they always said he was on speed, which may have been why he died at fifty-four. Quinn had been a sort of protege, for about a year, and then, about the time Quinn switched over to marketing, there was an argument. One night, drunk in a bar on Comm Ave., McCarthey thought Quinn had insulted Anna, his wife, and blew up, leaning into the younger man’s face, screaming, his own huge red forehead swelling, shining, reflecting the red and blue neon of beer signs. Quinn just stood in the narrow corridor between the barstools and the tables, looking into McCarthey’s face, dumb, trying not to cry, every muscle in his body tight, thinking how loud the voice was and how suddenly quiet the bar was, watching. Even now his jaw clenched. The wait, until the tirade was finally over, until McCarthey turned away, threw a bill at the bar, and walked out with Anna, had seemed eternal. Quinn had picked the twenty dollar bill up at the base of one of the stools, and handed it across to the bartender.

  It was McCarthey who had given Quinn his name, called him “Mr. Quinn” and later just “Quinn” instead of “Terry,” the name he had come to college with. McCarthey had given him liquor as if that were an ordinary thing, listened to his opinions, read his writing, and laughed at things that Quinn’s father—the real Mr. Quinn—had said. “Worcester-wisdom,” he had called it; and then he would always say, “But no worse than what we produce here in Boston,” and laugh again.

  Even though McCarthey had apologized a week or so later, Quinn stayed well out of his way from then on. McCarthey’s wife left him, and he left the university after that year, went out to some school in Kansas, but Quinn didn’t even hear about it until the following semester. Two years after that Quinn graduated and got a job with a pharmaceutical company in Chicago.

  • • •

  In the morning Quinn woke up late and when he went down for breakfast they had already stopped serving. So he drank coffee and read at the newspaper. The national pages were too grim, filled with killings and imbecilic cruelties, so he put the paper aside after a quick look at the sports pages. Must be Boston does this to me, he thought. Place is so contented. But I was never happy here. He used to say, Do something foolish; you’ll feel better. Quinn laughed. Never was very good at that. Although I guess this stupid trip qualifies.

  The waitress, a kid who looked about fourteen, with long red hair escaping its pins, came to the table with a steaming silver pitcher and filled his coffee cup. She smiled. “I can probably still get you some toast, if you like.”

  “No, thanks,” Quinn said. “I’ll get lunch later.” He smiled back. “It’s a nice place. Boston.”

  “We like it,” the girl said. “Here on business?”

  “Nope,” Quinn said. “I guess I’m here to see someone. Find something I threw away.”

  She looked at him. “Well, maybe she still loves you,” she said. “Happy New Year, anyway.”

  Quinn watched her walk away, left the newspaper and a tip, and walked outside for a cab. On the ride through town he didn’t recognize anything, but farther out the dirty apartment buildings and little shops and broken streets started to at least look familiar. As the old taxi strained and bounced along Beacon Street, Quinn remembered leaving.

  He had gotten the job late, in September, just about the time he had decided to give up and go back to Worcester, to his father’s house. He had packed everything in three or four days and driven to Chicago in a sort of controlled panic, stopping overnight to see his family and then pushing on. He had not exactly forgotten the stuff up in the attic. It was a gallery of previous residents’ detritus up there—dead black and white TV sets, and a lot of useless lamps, as he recalled. Things you couldn’t just put in the trash, because they had come so dear—a television costs as much as a Bentley when you’re a student—or because you couldn’t understand how their powers had just evaporated, or because the attachment to them had been of such a personal character, like a love affair or friendship, that the objects deserved a ceremony, and there was no place to bury them. So you left them in the attic.

  None or all of these reasons explained why Quinn had left the cardboard box up there. He’d been tired, and in a hurry, and even getting up into the attic was a gigantic hassle. And he had accepted his father’s idea—to make a living, do something practical—even before the break with McCarthey.

  By graduation, the yea
r spent with the writer and his scruffy friends and his books and his praise had faded in memory. Even so Quinn still had to pretend to himself forgetting the box in the attic. The truth was by then he hated the damn book.

  “Those people have very sad lives, Terry,” his father had said. “They talk smart and never get paid very well.”

  To get up into the attic you had to shove a table or a chest of drawers underneath a small two-foot square opening in the ceiling, push the plywood panel out of the way, and hoist yourself up. Which is why Quinn assumed that now, eight years later, it was all still up there. If the house was still there, the stuff was still there.

  Quinn had done, again, what his father suggested, and it had all worked out well. Better than that, actually—he could always lend a beloved ex-wife whatever she needed, or waste hundreds of dollars on a trip without blinking. The book, safely cottoned in memory, had faded like the other things, until the morning he had seen the notice in the paper that McCarthey had died.

  He had been at his office, reading the Sunday paper on a Monday, and he saw the item about McCarthey and looked out at the white fog over the lake and thought, There but for the grace of God. It was like ten years he had not lived suddenly formed in his imagination, years of “disappointment” in some place like Kansas. He had looked out the big twenty-fourth floor window again, and McCarthey’s voice came, ‘No worse than hawking cold capsules in Chicago,’ and Quinn had laughed.

  • • •

  “Hey,” the cabdriver said. A black guy with no hair, who looked like Woody Strode. Quinn looked out.

  The street seemed the same, kind of prim. The house looked tiny, not the way Quinn had remembered it. The yard was mostly dirt and leaves, and the big oak tree between the porch and the street had now broken up the sidewalk completely with its roots. The fat limbs had been cut back cruelly, three or four feet from the trunk, so that the tree looked like a man with no hands, nine or ten half arms.