Thai’s chocolate and silver body has a bandage cinched around his middle, like a wraparound saddle.
You’re the one who buries Thai because Mama can’t bring herself to. You put him in a Siamese-sized cardboard box, dig a hole under the holly in the backyard, and lay him to rest with a spank of the shovel blade and a prayer consisting of grief-stricken repetitions of the word please.
Two or three months later, you come home from school to find a pack of dogs in the backyard. They’ve dug Thai Thai up. You chase the dogs away, screeching from an irate crouch. Thai’s corpse is nothing but matted fur and protruding bones. Its most conspicuous feature is the bandage holding the maggoty skeleton together at its cinched-in waist.
This isn’t Thai, you tell yourself. I buried Thai a long, long time ago, and this isn’t him.
You carry the remains, jacketed in the editorial section of the Atlanta Constitution, to a trash can and dump them with an abrupt, indifferent thunk. Pick-up is tomorrow.
One Sunday afternoon in March, you’re standing with two hundred other homeless people at the entrance to Trinity United Methodist’s soup kitchen, near the state capitol. It’s drizzling. A thin but gritty-looking young woman in jeans and sweatshirt, her hair lying in dark strands against her forehead, is passing out hand-numbered tickets to every person who wants to get into the basement. At the head of the outside basement steps is a man in pleated slacks and a plaid shirt. He won’t let anyone down the steps until they have a number in the group of ten currently being admitted. He has to get an okay from the soup-kitchen staff downstairs before he’ll allow a new group of ten to pass.
Your number, on a green slip of paper already drizzle-dampened, is 126. The last group down held numbers 96 to 105. You think. Hard to tell with all the shoving, cursing, and bantering on the line. One angry black man up front doesn’t belong there. He waves his ticket every time a new group of ten is called, hoping, even though his number is 182, to squeeze past the man set there to keep order.
“How many carahs yo ring?” he asks. “I sick. Lemme in fo I fall ouw. Damn disere rain.”
When the dude holding number 109 doesn’t show, the stair guard lets number 182 pass, a good-riddance sort of charity.
You shuffle up with the next two groups. How many of these people are robots, human machines drawn to the soup kitchen, as you may have been, on invisible tractor beams? The stair guard isn’t wearing a watch or shaking a key ring. It’s probably his wedding band that’s the remote-control device….
“My God,” he cries when he sees you. “Is that really you? It is, isn’t it?”
The stair guy’s name is Dirk Healy. He says he went to school with you in Hapeville. Remember Pamela van Rhyn? Remember Cynthia What’s-her-name? When you go down into the basement, and get your two white-bread sandwiches and a Styrofoam cup of vegetable soup, Dirk convinces another volunteer to take over his job and sits down next to you at one of the rickety folding tables where your fellow street folk are single-mindedly eating. Dirk—who, as far as you’re concerned, could be the Man in the Moon—doesn’t ask you how you got in this fix, doesn’t accuse, doesn’t exhort.
“You’re off your medication, aren’t you?” Your hackles lift.
“Hey,” he soothes, “I visited you at Quiet Harbor. The thing to do is, to get you back on it.”
You eat, taking violent snatches of the sandwiches, quick sips of the soup. You one-eye Dirk over the steam the way that, years ago, Sky one-eyed you from her grain-crib nest.
“I may have a job for you,” Dirk says confidentially. “Ever hear of Rockdale Biological?”
One summer, for reasons you don’t understand, Mama sends you to visit your father and his ex-hairdresser floozie—whose name is Carol Grace—in the Florida town where they live off the proceeds of her mail-order business and sometimes bet the dogs at the local greyhound track.
Carol Grace may bet the greyhounds at the track, but, at home, she’s a cat person. She owns seven: a marmalade-colored tom, a piebald tom, three tricolor females, an orange Angora of ambiguous gender, and a Manx mix with a tail four or five inches long, as if someone shortened it with a cleaver.
“If Stub was pure Manx,” Carol Grace says, “he wouldn’t have no tail. Musta been an alley tom in his mama’s Kitty Litter.”
Stroking Stub, she chortles happily. She and your mother look a little alike. They have a similar feistiness, too, although it seems coarser in Carol Grace, whom your balding father—she calls him Webby, for Pete’s sake—unabashedly dotes on.
A few days into your visit, Carol Grace and you find one of her females, Hedy Lamarr, lying crumpled under a pecan tree shading the two-story house’s south side. The cat is dead. You kneel to touch her. Carol Grace kneels beside you.
“Musta fell,” she says. “Lotsa people think cats are too jack-be-nimble to fall, but they can slip up, too. Guess my Hedy didn’t remember that, pretty thing. Now look.”
You are grateful that, today, Carol Grace does the burying and the prayer-saying. Her prayer includes the melancholy observation that anyone can fall. Anyone.
Enough of this crap, Penfield says. Tell me what you did, and for whom, and why, at Rockdale Biological.
Givin whah I can, you mumble, working to turn your head into the uncompromising rigidity of the clamps.
Adolf, Penfield says, what you’re giving me is cat juggling.
Alone in the crafts room with Kim Yaughan while the other kids in Blue Group (QHPC’s Wild Child Wing has two sections, Blue and Gold) go on a field trip, you daub acrylics at a crude portrayal of a cat walking upside down on a ceiling. Under the cat, a woman and a teen-age boy point and make hateful faces.
“Are they angry at the cat or at each other?” Kim asks.
You give her a look: What a stupid question.
Kim comes over, stands at your shoulder. If she were honest, she’d tell you that you’re no artist at all. The painting may be psychologically revealing, but it refutes the notion that you have any talent as a draftsman or a colorist.
“Ever hear of British artist Louis Wain?” Kim says. “He lived with three unmarried sisters and a pack of cats. His schizophrenia didn’t show up until he was almost sixty. That’s late.”
“Lucky,” you say. “He didn’t have so long to be crazy.”
“Listen, now. Wain painted only cats. He must’ve really liked them. At first, he did smarmy, realistic kitties for calandars and postcards. Popular crap. Later, thinking jealous competitors were zapping him with X-rays or something, the cats in his paintings got weird, really hostile and menacing.”
“Weirder than mine?” You jab your brush at it.
“Ah, that’s a mere puddy-tat.” Then: “In the fifteen years he was institutionalized, Wain painted scads of big-eyed, spiky-haired cats. He put bright neon auras and electrical fields around them. His backgrounds got geometrically rad. Today, you might think they were computer-generated. Anyhow, Wain’s crazy stuff was better—fiercer, stronger—than the crap he’d done sane.”
“Meaning I’m a total loss unless I get crazier?” you say.
“No. What I’m trying to tell you is that the triangles, stars, rainbows, and repeating arabesques that Wain put into his paintings grew from a desperate effort to… well, to impose order on the chaos inside him. It’s touching, really touching. Wain was trying to confront and reverse, the only way he could, the disintegration of his adult personality. See?”
But you don’t. Not exactly.
Kim taps your acrylic cat with a burgundy fingernail. “You’re not going to be the new Picasso, but you aren’t doomed to suffer as terrifying a schizophrenia as Wain suffered, either. The bizarre thing in your painting is the cat on the ceiling. The colors, and the composition itself, are reassuringly conventional. A good sign for your mental health. Another thing is, Wain’s doctors couldn’t give him antipsychotic drugs. You, though, have access.”