Class (25 page)

He put the box under the kitchen table, filled up a bowl full of sheep’s milk from the fridge, and placed the bowl next to the box. His parents had never allowed him a pet. It felt nice, providing for these little creatures.

“There,” he told the wary mother cat. “See? I’m not so bad.”

The gray cat continued to stare at him while he finished off the grapes. A minute or two went by. Then the cat stood up and stretched and hopped out of the box to lap up the milk. Patrick lunged for the box and scooped up a soft black kitten, carefully stashing it in his parka pocket. He headed outside to the car, ignoring the mother cat’s accusing glare.

T
ragedy buried her chin beneath the collar of the thick raccoon coat. The fur was warm as hell. Falling almost down to her ankles, it completely insulated every part of her body except her head, which was frozen raw. Pretty soon she’d be able to peel her head off her shoulders, like a wart that had been frozen off.

She liked to walk. No matter the weather, she’d always liked to walk. The woods around Dexter were connected by a trail that looped around itself like a giant pretzel, with the town of Home in the middle of one loop, and the college, up on its hill, in the middle of the other. She thought she knew the trail blindfolded—rain, shine, in sunlight, or in total darkness. One of her usual routes led from the top of the hill behind her house all the way to the field house at Dexter, on the other side of the Pond. This was the path she was on now. At least, she thought she was. Walking in a blizzard in the dark was like solving a Rubik’s cube with only white squares.

The melody of the Bee Gees song she’d been named after moseyed through her mind like Muzak in a grocery store.
It’s hard to see. With all this snow and no pants on, you’re going nowhere…

Her parents hoped that naming their beautiful baby girl Tragedy might provide some relief from all the ugly tragedies in the world. The personal is political. Make love not war. Think globally act locally. Those were their mottos. And she liked the way people repeated it when she said her name, rolling it around in their mouths and testing it out. “Pretty,” they’d say, looking her up and down.

Where was the fucking field house? She’d been walking for hours, and there was not a building or a light in sight. The path she was on ended in a clump of uprooted trees. It looked like a car wreck. She must have gotten turned around somewhere. Maybe she’d walked over the state line into Canada, which might actually be all right. Her mom and dad would miss her, but she could write to them tomorrow and let them know she was okay.

“Fuck!” she exclaimed, remembering the sheep. She was supposed to put them in the back stalls and throw them some hay.

“Double fuck!” she shouted, remembering the kittens. It was
cold now and Storm, the mother cat, would be hungry. They should have been put in the house.

“Mom is going to kill me,” she muttered, retracing her steps.

Adam would probably get home first anyway. He’d bring the sheep in. And if Storm was hungry enough she’d yowl her head off till he heard her. Tragedy could pay him back tomorrow by making his favorite peanut butter and jam yule log. But first she had to find a path out of the woods.

I
t was nearly 2
A.M.
and still snowing hard. The haunting notes of Taps drifted underneath the door, the efforts of an ROTC student who had recently taken up bugling. Shipley lay under the sheet with her head on Adam’s bare chest, drifting in and out of sleep. Adam was wide awake. How could he sleep? He felt like he’d just been born. He was finally alive!

“When you were a kid, what did you want to be?” he asked. “I mean, what did you want to be when you grew up?”

Shipley was just drifting into a dream. She was so tired, but she wanted to talk to Adam too.

“A train conductor,” she responded drowsily.

Adam laughed, his rib cage jostling her head. “Seriously?”

“I loved the sound when they punched your ticket,” Shipley told him with her eyes closed. “Greenwich is only a forty-minute train ride from Manhattan. I used to take the train into the city with my mother to go shopping. Saks, Bendel’s, Bergdorf. Afterward we’d walk up Fifth Avenue next to Central Park. Mom liked to look at the buildings.”

Adam waited for her to continue.

“I didn’t really want to be a train conductor,” she admitted with a yawn. “I always thought I’d get married and have two little girls and live in one of those buildings on Fifth Avenue.
They’d go to Sacred Heart so they could wear those adorable uniforms with the red-and-white-checked pinafores.”

“Uh-huh,” Adam murmured encouragingly. He had no idea what she was talking about. “Go on.”

She inched closer to him so the top of her head was in the crook of his neck. Her hair smelled like seawater. “I have no idea what I’m going to do when I grow up. I guess I could be a poet,” she mused. “Professor Rosen likes my poems.”

“What else?” he prompted.

“What else?” She opened her eyes briefly and then closed them again. “I have this brother…,” she said, her voice trailing off as she fell back to sleep and into her dreams.

Her ice cream was dripping onto her skirt. The steps of the Met were crowded with tourists and schoolgirls. Only a few feet away from her a group of them sat smoking and gossiping.

“Here, use this,” her mother said, handing her a Kleenex. “Don’t forget we’re meeting your father for dinner at seven.”

A uniformed doorman pushed open the door to the green-awninged building across the avenue. He raised his white-gloved hand, his lips curled around a silver whistle as he hailed a taxi. A cab stopped, the doorman opened the door to the building, and out strolled Tom, wearing black Ray-Ban sunglasses and the same plain white T-shirt, black pants, and old tennis shoes he’d worn in the play, minus the blood. He looked like a movie star. No, he
was
a movie star.

Now she was kissing Tom and he didn’t smell like chemicals, he smelled like Ivory soap, and his skin was so soft and—

Beep! Beep! Beep!

Orange lights flashed through the window as the staff of Buildings and Grounds plowed Dexter’s section of Homeward Avenue. The sky was the pinkish gray of near-dawn and it was still snowing, although not quite as heavily. It was almost six
o’clock in the morning. Adam was still awake. The bugler, who’d been practicing all night, burst into a rousing reveille.

“I don’t know,” Shipley said sleepily, picking up half from her dream and half from their conversation a few hours before. “I probably shouldn’t have gone to college in Maine.”

They were both quiet for a moment. Adam brushed his chin against her hair. “If you hadn’t gone to school in Maine, you wouldn’t have met me,” he remarked pointedly.

The plows moved on down the road and the bugler paused for breath. For a moment the room was silent. Then a gunshot rang out, ricocheting off the windows and sending chills up their spines. The bugler recommenced his playing, this time a march.

L
ess than half a mile away, Tragedy lay bleeding in the snow. Whoever had shot her had broken the law; bear hunting season had ended just after Thanksgiving. Not that she was a bear. She was a person, wearing a coat, which wasn’t even made out of bear fur. Raccoon hunting season might well have run all year, the little pests.

“At least I’m not fucking dead,” she swore, attempting to stand. “Hey!” she shouted. “Hey! I’m fucking bleeding over here!”

Nothing. Snowflakes drifted prettily down through the whitewashed trees. The storm was tapering off.

“Hey!” Tragedy shouted again, but her shout came out too hoarse to go anywhere. The bullet had gone right through her, somewhere near her belly button. She felt like she’d eaten a whole fucking pound of hot chili peppers. “Hey!” she shouted, even more hoarsely this time. Her voice was just a whisper, quieter than a snowflake.

She couldn’t walk, so she dragged herself through the snow, scraping at it with her bare hands. A break in the trees and there
was Dexter College, sitting prettily on its hill, the brick buildings all frosted with snow, the blue light shining from the chapel spire like a Christmas tree topper. It looked just like it did in the snow globes they sold at the campus bookstore. It looked like a fucking Christmas present. And just on the fringes of campus was that huge tent. She’d have to drag herself a hundred fucking miles to get there, but she’d get there. And then she’d yell her fucking head off until someone came.

“Shit,” she whimpered. Her hands hurt. “Mom’s going to kill me.”

20

T
hey say a pet can do wonders for your mental health. A pet is a source of comfort. Making a home for a pet gives you a sense of security and well-being. Providing for a pet is very satisfying and teaches responsibility for others. Pets appreciate leftover surf and turf from the Lobster Shack. Most of them do anyway.

Patrick hadn’t thought of the right name for the kitten yet. Frodo was a good one, but once you named your cat after a character from
The Lord of the Rings,
you were pretty much done for—just you and your cat, living in your own little fairyland of magic and wizardry. Blackie was retarded. Jet was too gay. Raymond—so gay. Hugo was sort of theatrical. Or maybe Victor? No, gay again. Pink Patrick with a black cat named Victor. It was like something out of
Psycho
.

His Outward Bound instructors had written about the Pink Patrick incident in the report that went out to his parents.

“Patrick, are you gay?” his father had asked him after reading the report.

“What?” Patrick said. “Huh?” It was all he could think of to say. He’d never had a girlfriend, but he’d never had a boyfriend either. He was Pink Patrick. People avoided him.

“Here, kitty,” he called, setting down a plastic bowl of surf and turf that he’d shredded into tiny scraps. The kitten scampered over to the bowl and sniffed it. Then it sat down on its haunches and began licking its asshole.

“Are you gay?” Patrick demanded of the kitten. He cracked a smile when it paused to look up at him with its big yellow eyes.

One of the thick wool blankets that girl had brought for him lay in a heap on the floor, right where he’d left it a few days ago. He lay down and rolled himself up in it, rubbing his palms against his thighs. The yurt’s flaps were shut tight, but it was still freezing. He thought about lighting the little stove for the kitten’s sake but he wanted to sleep, and it said in the directions not to leave the camp stove unattended.

“Here, kitty,” he said again, but the kitten didn’t move.

“Suit yourself,” Patrick told it and rolled over.

He’d been driving for hours, hypnotized by the snow and the
flap, flap, flap
of the Mercedes’s windshield wipers. He almost hit the same white car several times. Idiot, driving a white car in the snow. Eventually the kitten started mewing like crazy in the backseat and he decided it must have to poop. He couldn’t very well let a cat poop all over a room at the Holiday Inn, so he’d brought it back to the yurt. He’d even dug away a place in the corner for it to use as a litter box, but the damn thing still hadn’t pooped.

He dozed off. A while later he was awakened by a scratching sound. He sat up.

“You finally pooping?” he asked the kitten, but found that it was curled up asleep inside the red wool hat that girl had brought
him on Thanksgiving. Its tiny chest rose and fell with every breath.

“
Hey,
” someone called from outside the tent. It was just a whisper, or maybe it was the wind. “
Hey
.”

Patrick stood up and untied the door flap. The girl who’d brought him things was lying at his feet, wearing what looked like a bear skin. A trail of pink snow led down the hill behind her and into the woods.

“Hey,” Tragedy whispered to the toes of Patrick’s boots. Then she passed out. The black kitten stalked over and lay down on her hair.

It wasn’t snowing anymore. The sun was trying to come out. A few stray flakes drifted down from the trees. Patrick picked up the girl’s cold, red hands and dragged her inside. She didn’t stir. Was she dead? He knelt down and put his ear next to her mouth. A little puff of air tickled his earlobe. But man, her hands were cold, and her face was all shiny and red, like it had been power-washed. She was frozen stiff.

He flailed around in the half dark of the tent, setting up the little camping stove and lighting it with the wooden kitchen matches he kept sealed in a Ziploc bag. He turned the flame up as high as it would go and moved the stove as close to the girl as he dared. She lay stiff and cold in her mangy fur coat.

“Shit.” The stove was pathetic. It barely gave off enough heat to defrost a mouse. He needed a bigger flame.

The tent was full of random crap—a metal cooking pot, a pair of mittens, a can of corn. He was suddenly reminded of
Quest for Fire,
the only movie he’d ever seen at a drive-in, and one of his earliest memories. His parents had taken him just after Shipley was born, and they had both fallen asleep in the front seat with the baby while he watched the movie from the backseat. It was all about cavemen looking for burning embers in old fires be
cause they’d lost their original embers and didn’t know how to start fires on their own. Man could not exist without fire. Man’s evolution could be traced back to the quest. In the half-dark of the yurt he stumbled over
Dianetics
by L. Ron Hubbard. It killed him to burn it, but it was a nice thick book. Once it got going, the flames would be huge.

He opened the book and ripped out a few pages, crumpling them into tight balls and dropping them into the bottom of the cooking pot before tossing the whole book in. Then he turned off the stove and disconnected the little kerosene tank so he could douse the book with kerosene. Perching the pot on top of the stove, he lit a match, dropped it in, and poof, the book burst into flames. He rocked back on his heels, pleased with his work. It even smelled good.