Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

“Mrs. Simms, do you think you could turn the TV down?” Tom says.

With one long step, Dawn reduces the contestant’s joy to a pathetic, distant screech. Lavinia wants to slap her hand. She can hear Plato crying, his squeaky meow like an unoiled bike chain.

“I’m sorry,” she says loudly, tapping her right ear, “you’ll have to forgive me. A bit hard of hearing. So what can I do for you?”

Dawn scratches her nose with her thumbnail and clears her throat. “Mrs. Simms, we need to take a look around. To inspect the premises. We’ve had reports you have a number of cats living in unsanitary conditions.”

Was cat hair considered unsanitary? How about a few spots on the rug? She tried to get the blueberry stain out, but the rug is old, none of that stain protector they advertise these days.

“Well, as you can see, I’m a widow, don’t have much money. My cats are healthy, though, and well fed. I take very good care of them.”

“The report suggested you had more than a few cats. More than these,” Tom says. “And to be honest, ma’am, the house doesn’t smell very good.”

“May I?” Dawn says, motioning toward the kitchen.

Lavinia steps aside. Tom and Jerry, a pair of littermates Lavinia picked up at a garage sale, stand on the counter peering through a smear of white bird poop on the dusty glass.

“Exactly how many cats did you say you have?” Dawn, looking at the plates and the scattered crunchers on the floor, shrivels her small, round nose.

Lavinia recognizes repulsion. It is the expression most often seen on a person before he hangs himself.

She checks out the window. Of course old man Pultwock is standing in the narrow strip of gravel between their houses. Lavinia sees the interest in his eager face, the bright, alert way he watches the van parked out front. He drags on his cigarette, then flicks the filter toward Lavinia and pulls out his pack to take another.

“Mrs. Simms? How many cats do you have?”

“What difference does it make?”

Tom calls in from the other room, “Dawn, come take a look.”

He’s standing in the doorway to the back bedroom. Lavinia hollers, “Who do you think you are? This is my home!”

Dawn continues toward the room as if deaf while Tom cocks his head to the side and sighs. “I better call my wife. She’ll freak if I’m late for dinner.”

They call the police, who must subdue Lavinia before the cats can be removed. It turns out the kittens are dead. Somebody broke their necks while Lavinia was talking to Tom and Dawn.

When they run out of cages, Dawn stays behind to write up reports while Tom drives the first load back to the Humane Society and returns with more cages and another woman, who helps him round up the remaining cats and load them in the car.

After everyone is gone, Lavinia sits at her Bakelite table, tilting to the left where the foot of one leg came off years ago. Her head aches from crying and her hip hurts where she fell, slipping on a pool of Friskies vomit by the basement door when she tried to bar Tom’s way down. The plastic plates lie around her, scattered into the middle of the room, several upended.

This can’t be right, she thinks. She must have some recourse.

She considers calling Christopher, but can’t bear the thought of his perfunctory pity.

A knife lying on the counter catches Lavinia’s eye and she imagines herself knocking on Pultwock’s door and, when he opens it — all bathrobe and day-old cigarettes — stabbing him. She imagines the look of surprise cross his greasy features.

Lavinia gets the knife. She stabs at the air first with an overhand grip, then underhand. This would be better, she thinks, for getting him before he can see what is coming, a blow beneath the ribs, right where his flimsy robe ties around his disgusting potbelly, like a sack of skinned rabbits shuddering beneath the terry cloth.

Lavinia goes to the back door. On this side of the lock the other half of the envelope outside reads, Rarely is suicide committed through reflection. If a friend addressed him indifferently that day, he is the guilty one.

Lavinia opens the door quietly and looks across to Pultwock’s porch, at his dark windows, giving nothing away. She goes out, holding the screen door until it latches, then crosses the gravel path, stepping on a pile of cigarette butts in the dark, fallen heroes under her slippered feet. Around back she tries to spot him through the kitchen window. The house sits on a high foundation, though, and even on her tiptoes, ingrown nails piercing painfully, Lavinia can’t see in. She moves to the living room, where the windows are set lower, cups her hands beside her eyes, the knife held precariously between her thumb and the edge of her palm.

In the contrast between dark and light, Lavinia can now see the picture clearly. Her mother is hugging the dog Lavinia sent to the pound with one arm and clutching the throat of her bathrobe closed with the other, as if someone has caught her unprepared. But she smiles. The surprise is not wholly unwelcome.

Lavinia adjusts her hands and sees Pultwock at the kitchen table, just as she was a moment ago. He has a plate of eggs and a piece of toast, but instead of eating, he’s smoking a cigarette.

He looks behind him, sees Lavinia staring and waves. He doesn’t even seem surprised. Did he see her come outside? Perhaps tracked her progress around the house? She wonders if he sees the knife.

The back door opens and Lavinia hears his voice. “Fifty-five with the new ones!” he shouts.

“What?” Lavinia grips her knife in the underhand position.

“Fifty-five fucking cats I counted,” Pultwock says.

Lavinia tromps to the back door and stands in the dark. “You were the one who called, weren’t you?”

Standing on the lowest step, Pultwock cinches his robe. “I didn’t call nobody. Fifty-four fucking cats is pretty hard to hide.”

“I kept them in the house.”

Pultwock shrugs. Lavinia steps toward him and jabs at the air with her knife. “I ought to gut you like a fish. Nobody would care, you know. Nobody would give a damn.”

“You’re right about that,” Pultwock says. “But I want to know first — where’s number fifty-six?”

“What?” Lavinia steps forward, having convinced herself she’s going to do it. She’s going to jam this knife into his belly because she doesn’t believe him. He’s a liar. He is the cause of her tremendous loss.

“You had fifty-four, but that Jason, he gone off today, and you got the kittens. I seen fifty-five leave. Should have been fifty-six, and I want to know, where you stash her?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” The numbers mean nothing to Lavinia. She’s never actually counted the cats.

Pultwock takes a piece of paper out of his robe pocket, the back of a long grocery receipt, and lets its wrinkled length drop to his knee. “Gray one with white spots, black nose. Black one. Long white hair with gray face. Black and white (big). Black and white (small). Orange with black swirls. Gray with black stripes. White with orange circles…”

He reads for several seconds, describing by color and unique markings each one of Lavinia’s fifty-four cats, kittens not included. “So what happened to the all-white one? The one you call Emily?”

She’s in the rafters of course. Lavinia stands on the concrete floor, kicking aside newspaper, calling up, “Here, kitty kitty kitty. Here, Emmy Emmy Emmy. They’re all gone. It’s just us.” She instructed Pultwock to stay upstairs so he won’t scare her. “We’re all alone here. Here, Emmy Emmy Emmy. Come to mama. Kitty kitty kitty.”

The cat’s eyes, glowing blue, appear out of the darkness. She meows and rubs against the fragile knob and tube wiring. Her face is dusty.