Red Girl Rat Boy (13 page)

The Hunter

If the cat stretched till she hurt,
her front paws reached the bars on one side and the tip of her long black-ringed tail, thick and plushy, touched the other side.

He’d constructed the steel cage for her sight unseen, a cube, five-sided, and lapped wire mesh all round. It resembled a parcel. His present. Pretty arrived tranquillized, in a plastic travelling container; he decanted her beauty into the cage as if pouring cake mix into a pan. The fit pleased him. Her body was three feet long, her tail another three. All over, the oily exudate of his Pretty’s fur coated the mesh.

She didn’t see sharply but had little to observe. A windowless basement room, pale featureless gyproc. One door to a bathroom, another to stairs. In the cage, a metal stool. Early on, she used it as a change from lying or pacing, now only when he ran the hose. For water, a metal cake pan. At the beginning of their shared life his Pretty often knocked it about,
clash bang ring!
He worked hard, needed sleep. Couldn’t she tell night from day by the rhythms of the house’s lighting systems? Would she adapt? Now the pan stayed still.

The wire mesh made for easy clambering. The green video had shown Pretty’s superb climbing skills, and for toys he’d provided knobs and rings of tough plastic. They lay still. He shook his head. Here she was, acquired at such cost and risk, safe and warm and fed and cleaned-up after and talked to, yet her eyes always angled off. To what? When he put her food through the slot he might shout, or slap the cage. If she startled, he got a moment’s satisfaction.

As to flooring, he’d thought wire mesh would be uncomfortable, so bolted the cage into the concrete below smooth industrial linoleum. Her pads wore an X-trail and one round the edge. She scratched the lino, stained it too, the acids of her excretions corroding the surface while he worked or slept or watched teenaged Asian girls masturbate. His Pretty came already spayed, of course. Shreds of meat got mushed about the floor, too. Drinking, she slopped. Every day he hosed down her living quarters, then ran heat lamps and fans. She developed a cough. Inaudibly, pain shot up her legs from beneath the concrete, from the deep cold midden studded with millennia of clam and oyster shells. The room smelled of her.

Sometimes his Pretty lay dead-still, a limp tumble of tawny, ochre, silver-grey, black. His heart thumped until under the supple skin he detected a throb. He’d jiggle the steel pins securing her food-slot. Could she resist? Never quite. A small victory, but often she didn’t bother to get up, or ate little, even if he’d on purpose delayed a feeding.

Above her, in the rest of the rented house, flourished hundreds of plants, their lushness suggesting the green video of her homeland. During the years of saving and planning and fear that at last brought his Pretty, he’d watched the images repeatedly, learned her special name,
neofelis nebulosa
. With her sibs, Pretty frolicked enticingly to expose the stunning black ovals on her belly. That vision gave him strength.

As Mumma taught, he made a list: (1) get passport; (2) buy plastic containers for cake; (3) leave Vancouver for the first time ever, to hunt his clouded leopard and bring her home. He didn’t learn that she’d entered the world on a Texas game ranch. Soon after he’d placed his online order, nearly fainting as he logged out (
What have you done, son?
), his cellphone rang. Obedient, he drove the van to Bellingham. No one asked to see his passport, and he’d only needed one plastic cake-container. Ten cakes had fitted in the pack he’d bought for the much longer hunt expected, in that green Nepalese forest.

As for the cannabis, his skill ensured that the plants’ exposure to light was shortened every twenty-four hours by the right number of minutes, that measured fertilizer was applied at the most fruitful moment, that water arrived constantly, that useless foliage got plucked off just when buds would thirstily absorb the resulting surge of nutrients. Capacitors, switches, transformers, drip-lines, timers—for all, he was accountable. Orderly and dutiful, he did a good job. Mumma would have to agree.

Grow lights intensified the plants’ rank scent. Other odours formed as drywall, carpet, hardwood responded with mould to the hydroponics. The humid air bore also vanilla, chocolate, orange, butterscotch, for daily he baked up a cake mix. No other groceries were stored in the house, but his takeout Greek, Mexican, and Chinese enriched the diverse gases moving through his Pretty’s lungs. Her own food, picked up in the van from a wholesale butcher, lay in a large freezer.

During harvest, he’d seen her waver, even stagger. Was she stoned? Sick? The latter option he never dwelled on; nothing could be done. But if only she were more lively! One twitch showed off her coat’s extravagant patterns. He longed to glimpse that splendour while taking a break from his lonely work, but she lay still, still, her rather short stocky legs splayed out. She never climbed to her roof any more. So. Again. The old agenda: (1) strip the plants; (2) bag them; (3) at night, carry the heavy plastic sacks out to the van; (4) drive them to their destination (obeying all the rules of the road, he was never pulled over); (5) replant.

Nine harvests thus. The limit, for security’s sake, of his and Pretty’s tenure, but he wanted to break the rule and stay. To move her cage, make her home cleaner, nicer.

So neighbours wouldn’t wonder about the blind house, he mowed the lawn, set out garbage, cleared gutters. One week children’s toys and bikes lay on the front steps, the next week at the back. He parked the well-washed van properly. Inside, while grow lights gulped power off the grid in staggering amounts, he maintained strict surveillance on all mechanical systems. He scraped incipient black mould off the carpet, using Mumma’s old-fashioned vinegar mix, never bleach, in case of contamination.

Each individual plant, luxuriant, purplish, viridian, was known to him, and he adjusted the gifts of fertilizer by sixteenths of a teaspoon. First-class and abundant product resulted. Mumma couldn’t criticize.

His masters, busy with their profits, acquiesced. “Okay, one more year.” Unlike some of their grow-ops, the retard’s caused no trouble.

Pretty now ate so erratically that drugging her food wouldn’t be a reliable precaution. To move the cage, therefore, he made a list. (1) drill new holes in the concrete, check the new plants, bake; (2) loosen and remove the present bolts; (3) lift and tug the cage’s lowest bar, now held down so tightly it indented the lino; (4) push the cage, Pretty inside, to the new site; (6) insert and tighten the bolts in their new location, check the plants; (5) eat brownies and watch the special TV girl, the winking girl with the sliding hands.

During (3), could a paw slide under the cage? Doubtful. Maybe so. He rehearsed frequently the necessary motions of arms, legs, hands. How smoothly Pretty would travel!

Drilling the new bolt-holes made a dreadful noise, though, and concrete dust fogged the basement room. In distress, Pretty folded back her soft round ears—he’d never seen that. She paced, coughing hard.

“I’m sorry, Pretty.” He opened the bathroom window and went upstairs. For each new crop he set up the lighting system from scratch, again, and for the hydroponics he checked each pump and switch and gauge. If he found he’d missed one, he started over. Good job. While nestling the seedlings in their containers, his fingers practiced in miniature the grips, hoists, and shoves to come with (2) and (3). His Pretty would blink gold. Gobble her food, lick her paws. Maybe to sleep she’d curl up sweetly in the way he loved, her long tail wrapped all round.

All was well.

Now the brownie mix. He never used drugs, despised the smokers who threw away their lives on fantasies. The pan in the oven, he set the timer and adjusted the fan. The homey fragrance would vent outside, reassuringly meet a neighbour’s nose. Ahead now lay an hour’s work, max. Pretty’s clouds would shimmer. Might he touch them? Once or twice, indifferent, she’d paced so near the mesh that softness met his fingertips.

When he dropped the first freed bolt, Pretty raised her elegant head, sat up as he moved from one face of the cage to the next. Her glorious tail rippled. Alert, she watched the wrench, watched him shuffling on his knees from bolt to bolt, as if praying. Mumma always prayed. He didn’t any more. Did she know? Pretty stretched her neck out, stared. Her whiskers, barely sketched wings, moved as she sought his purpose.

He’d got all the bolts loose. Out.

Now the quick sharp lift-and-tug.

Done! All that needless anxiety over. Good job.

Now lean and push. Push. He grimaced, his cheeks heated, he smelled chocolate, and slowly the container shunted across the ravaged lino. His Pretty, as the cage distanced itself from her on one side and neared her on the other, sat peering on her metal stool. Then she got down to pad about her voyaging prison, not in her usual tranced trudge, but curiously.

The metal cake pan tipped over. He and Pretty startled. She lapped at the spilled water, batted at the pan so it flew up to the cage’s ceiling and fell, flew and fell.
Clatter ring bang!
Her play made his heart glad. A few more pushes, to line the cage up with the new bolt-holes.
Neofelis nebulosa
now licked a paw, extended and retracted her claws, blinked. Her lashes: tiny gold feathers.

Movement stopped. What? One leg of the stool had lodged in an abandoned bolt-hole. The stool, jammed against a corner, braked the cage.

Shake, bang. No good. Leverage, yes, but the tire iron was too big to go through the mesh, the plastic tubing from the grow-rooms too light. Pretty patted at it, gave a small jump. From her throat rose a resonance. Her kind of cat didn’t purr, he knew, but the noise sounded happy.

The kitchen timer rang.

Eating hot brownies hadn’t been on the list, but he needed energy. No fork, Mumma would fuss. Her knitting needles, they’d be perfect. Wiggle one to distract, the other to shake that stool loose. Perfect knitting, never a dropped stitch. He put the half-empty pan back in the oven to stay warm and got calves’ liver from the freezer. To his Pretty, cooked food was even worse than dead, so as soon as the blood-smell rose he took the meat from the microwave.

The revised list: (1) use the toilet; (2) barely open the cage door and fling the liver across it; (3) reach in with the tire iron to dislodge the stool.

Attending to (1), his bowels were loose and foul. Nerves. (2) went well, with Pretty sniffing the meat all over. For (3) he rehearsed the sequence of movements. Her glance at him was golden.

Five seconds, a scream and a crack of bone, an empty cage. Mumma’s knitting needle, somehow, stuck out of his leg. Agony. His cellphone, as far off as Texas or Nepal, on the kitchen counter. Even if, whom to call? Communication with the masters was one-way. And he’d forgotten to turn off the oven. Carbonized chocolate, venting to the world.

He let go into pain. Psychedelic visions of the grow-rooms, green and lush, heralded glimpses of his kitten padding through her jungle, dapples melting in leaves and light. Rapidly, the filth from Pretty’s claws inflamed the wounds on his face and arms.

In seconds, the cat had entered the bathroom’s stench.

Two more, to identify the source of fresh air.

Eleven to leap from the tub’s rim to the sill and squeeze her head and front paws through and scrabble her strong hindquarters up and balance her weight and launch into darkness, tail flying out behind.

Three jumps took her across the grow-op’s weedless back lawn. A slide to cover, under a rhododendron in the next-door garden. Thin leathery leaves festooned its branches, fallen ones lay on the cold ground.

A long scrambling rush took her, running low under fences and through hedges, to the end of the block. Under a Japanese maple she crouched, smelling, but the need for height was urgent. She leapt to a Douglas fir and went thirty feet up.

Since her escape, ninety seconds. She coughed.

Two dogs barked. A door opened.

In midnight terror, wings scissored away from the fir.

The cat sniffed water. Underground water, rain coming, salt. Animal fur, droppings, spray. Humans. Plants grasses bushes. Dead leaves loose, crackling, mashed, skeletal. Fish, shellfish, algae. Stiff bull-kelp on the stony beaches. Insects, their acid odours. Powdery bird-feathers. Bird-shit. A rabbit, decomposing. Insecticides, herbicides, pesticides. Also diesel, sulphur, fuel oil, hot metal, sawdust, transmission fluid, chlorine, gasoline, tar, rendering plant, concrete batch plant, wheat, logs, milled lumber, rubber, paint thinner, creosote—in billions, the molecules floated by.

Over there, that way, she smelled a density of trees. Something mechanical honked on the ocean. A dog got hauled indoors. Bright lights shone amid a thousand shadows. Fast-moving clouds spattered the heavens while a new moon appeared, vanished, again made the water glitter. Closer by, window lights, door lights, street lights. Someone rummaged through a garbage can and a yard light flashed on.

Restless, the cat moved up the fir. More birds flew. A bark. Stretched out, she let the Pacific northwest fill her damaged lungs and coat her palate. Down to the roots of her exceptionally long canines the flavours penetrated, entered her digestive tract to unite with her. The November night parted the hairs of her coat, drawing off the stench of cannabis, dead cow, human feces. She shivered. When clouds next covered the moon, she ran down the tree head-first.