by Edward M. Sledge |
|
In the spring of 1993, Charlie Martin and his family moved to Springfield and bought the house across the street from mine. Charlie was twelve, two years older that me and nearly six inches taller. His hair was black, like mine, but his eyes were blue, where mine were brown, and I wore glasses, where he didn’t. Charlie was the only kid close to my age for several blocks, so our parents thought it would be a good idea if we became friends. Sounds like a good idea, right? Well... Our neighborhood had been having a problem with feral cats for several years. People moved and left their cats behind, or they didn’t get them fixed, and suddenly we had nearly a hundred cats living within a few blocks of us. My mother always warned me to stay away from them. She said I could catch ringworm or get fleas, but, of course, I didn’t listen to her. When Charlie and I would play, most often, we would go into the alley behind his house and play with the kittens that lived around there. Play with them is probably not the most accurate word to describe it, since they were too skittish to let either of us near enough to touch them, but we would watch them and give them names, like Fangblood, Deathclaw, Thunder and Sir Scratch-a-lot, sometimes imagining great adventures and battles that the kittens would fight. What can I say, we were a little weird. One day, Charlie brought a surprise with him when he came out to play. He had made a sock puppet that looked like a cat. It had button eyes and pipe cleaners for whiskers. Its name was Mayo. I wanted one too, of course, so he helped me make one and I named mine Godzilla. No we had our own kittens to play with. I can’t even imagine how we must have looked; two little boys with cat puppets slaying imaginary dragons and trolls and whatnot in a muddy alley full of feral cats. It wasn’t long before Charlie started to bring food out for the kittens and soon he had befriended a few of them. I was actually jealous when my favorite tabby, Deathblood, let him pet her. Deathblood disappeared about a week later. Charlie figured she got hit by a car and I sadly had to agree with him. I had seen dead cats in the road more than once that spring. About a month after Deathblood’s disappearance, Charlie invited me to come over and play. My mother said yes, so I grabbed Godzilla and headed over to his house. It was a rather cold and stormy day, so I suggested we play inside. Charlie agreed, but said he had to get something from the alley first. I was just getting over a cold, so, contrary to most ten-year-olds, I decided to stay in Charlie’s room so I wouldn’t get sick again. He wasn’t gone long, and when he returned he had a feral kitten hidden in his jacket so his mother wouldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of the kittens we had named in our games, it was too small. Most of those were nearly grown cats now. This one was scrawny, but cute as anything I’d ever seen. After making sure the door to his room was shut tight, Charlie sat down on the floor and gave me the kitten to hold while he fished something out from under his bed. It was an empty mayonnaise jar. I started to get a weird feeling in my stomach as he unscrewed the lid and then took the kitten back from me. I watched silently as he slowly slipped the kitten into the jar, back legs first, and then began to screw the lid back on. “What are you doing?” I asked him. “Just watch,” he said, grinning. “This is so cool.” With the lid screwed on tight, the kitten began to panic, struggling to get out, its tiny, thin body flipping around as it clawed at the smooth glass walls, its frightened meow muted by the jar. Then it would stop and lay still for a moment, gasping for breath, before it began to struggle again. “That’s great,” I said, although I really felt like throwing up. “Let it out now.” The kitten had ripped one of its claws out on the lid and was smearing blood on the inside of the jar. “Not yet,” Charlie said. The kitten seemed to be having trouble breathing. It lay still for a long time, only its heaving chest moving, then it tried again to get out, more furiously than before, its head banging loudly on the glass. It released its bladder and bowels, covering itself with its own excrement. “Charlie, stop it!” I shouted. Angry, he grabbed my arm and pulled me down beside him. “Shut up, you little baby,” he hissed at me. We could hear his mother’s footsteps in the hall. Quickly, Charlie shoved the jar under his mattress. “Say anything about that, and I’ll kill you,” he said as his mother knocked on the door. “You boys getting along all right in there?” she asked, opening the door. Charlie had Mayo the puppet on his hand and grinned up at his mom like nothing was wrong. “Sure mom. We’re just playing, right?” he asked, looking pointedly at me. “Uh, right.” I said. She looked at me, a concerned frown on her face. “Are you feeling all right? You look a little pale.” I quickly got to my feet, my knees a little shaky, and left the room, mumbling something about my cold coming back and having to go home. I was halfway across the street when Charlie called to me. “Hey, you forgot Godzilla!” “Keep it!” I shouted back and ran all the way to my room. I didn’t feel like eating that night, nor for many nights after, and my mother kept saying she should never have let me got out to play that day. She didn’t know how right she was. I never went over to Charlie’s house again and I never told anyone about what I saw that day. I probably should have, I now realize. Someone might have been able to get Charlie some help before it was too late. I hear again and again how children who hurt animals grow up to be serial killers, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s what would have happened to Charlie, if he had lived to grow up. It had been almost a year since that horrible day at Charlie’s house and I was still haunted by nightmares. Every night I would wake up, sometimes screaming, with the feeling that I couldn’t breathe, or that something was scratching me. My parents were starting to think that I needed counseling or something. One night, I was awakened by the sound of cats meowing. It was so loud, it sounded like it was in my room. I cowered under my blankets, crying silently. It felt like they were walking on me. I didn’t move for ages and, finally, they went away. Exhausted from fear and crying, I fell asleep and did not dream. In the morning, I was awakened by the sound of police and ambulance sirens. I ran downstairs in my pajamas and out into the street, to where my mother was hugging Charlie’s mother. They didn’t notice me and I watched as the paramedics hurried into the house. They didn’t hurry out though. It was a long time before they brought him out, covered in a white sheet. Suddenly, the wind grabbed the sheet and pulled it back, and I nearly screamed when I saw him. His face and hands were covered in shallow red scratches and his black hair was white as snow. The paramedics quickly covered him up and put him in the ambulance. My mother finally noticed me and made me go inside, but I watched everything from the livingroom window until all the police cars and the ambulance were gone. I asked my mother what happened to Charlie, but all she would say was that it was an accident and that I shouldn’t worry about it. It was years before I got the whole story. The scratches that I saw on his face and hands covered every inch of his body, but there were no tears in his pajamas. It wasn’t the scratches, though, that killed him. Charlie died of a heart attack. His hair went white from fear. After years went by and his mother finally cleaned out Charlie’s room, she found the remains of thirty-seven dead kittens in mayonnaise, mustard and pickle jars under his bed. You might think that this tragic and mysterious death of my childhood friend would set me up for a lifetime of nightmares, but I haven’t had a nightmare since the night I woke up to the sound of cats in my room. I visit Charlie’s grave every now and then, and every time I do, there’s always dusty little kitten footprints on top of his tombstone. |