James Hynes - Kings of Infinite Space

“Depends,” Paul said, without meaning to. “How do you feel about cats?”

“Cats?” She let go of his chin, but she didn’t pull away. Paul slid out from under her and doubled over, reaching for his trousers.

“We ought to head back,” he said. “We both have to work tomorrow.”

She laid a hand on his shoulder, but more tentatively than before. “I’m just funnin’ with you, Paul. I don’t mean nothin’ by it.”

“Anything.” Paul stood in the rocking truck bed with his back to her and yanked his trousers up. “You don’t mean anything by it.”

“Yes, sir.” Callie jerked her jeans into the air, slapping them against the side of the truck. “Will that be on the exam, Professor?”

They bounced back down the two track to the gate without speaking, the truck glugging angrily. At the road, before the truck even stopped, Paul heaved open his door and jumped out to get the gate, half afraid as the truck rumbled over the cattle grate that Callie might just keep going and leave him there. But she waited as he shut the gate, her elbow hanging out the window, her eyes dark hollows in the dashboard light. Paul climbed into the cab and slammed the door, and she jammed the truck into gear. They roller-coastered back up the two-lane road towards the main highway. With each free-fall dive down a hill, Paul was lifted slightly off the seat, and he felt a regretful little tingle in his balls. The truck banged around a rocky curve and then rattled over a low water crossing. FLASH FLOOD AREA, read a sign over the culvert, DO NOT DRIVE INTO RUNNING WATER. A-fucking-men, thought Paul, sneaking a glance at Callie’s angry cheekbone in the dashboard light. It seemed to Paul that she was taking the road faster than she had coming the other way. She’s in a hurry to get back to Lamar, he thought. She’s in a hurry to be rid of me.

At the junction with the highway, she skidded to a gravel-slinging stop. Dust churned through the headlights. Then she gunned the truck out onto the road and started to coax it gear by gear up to the speed limit.

“I killed a cat.” Paul lifted his voice over the rising whine of the truck. “I drowned it in a bathtub.” He looked at her and found her gazing back at him along the seat. “I guess that’s the worst thing I ever did.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time, working the stick shift up through second and third. Paul’s stomach tightened the longer the silence went on, and he began to regret having said anything. He was certain this was his last evening with Callie, and the sad thing was, he actually sort of liked her. As the hill ahead was silhouetted in the orangey glow of Lamar, she said, “Why’d you do that?”

“Kill the cat?”

“Yeah.”

Paul swallowed. Did he really want to tell her this? “It’s a long story,” he said.

“It’s a long way back to town,” she said. “Radio don’t work neither.”

So all the way back, rolling through the dark over and under the hills, past the spreading subdivisions and the late-night supermarkets with their empty parking lots in the harsh fluorescent glare, and finally along a gaudy strip past the drooping pennants of car dealerships and the red glare of fast-food joints and the forlorn glow of check-cashing emporia, Paul told Callie the story of Charlotte. To his own astonishment, he told her the truth: about his failing academic career, about his bloodless marriage with Elizabeth, about his giddy affair with Kymberly, about his war with the cat to keep the affair secret. Callie said nothing all the way into Lamar, but now and then she looked at him, as the light from a streetlamp or the glare of a neon sign glided over her through the windshield. Paul, meanwhile, gazed out the windshield without really seeing anything. He felt numb by the end, and when he reached the part about drowning Charlotte, he didn’t relate all the awful details: how he’d torn his apartment apart in a rage looking for her; how he’d grasped her, yowling and flailing, by the scruff of her neck; how he’d put her in her cat carrier in the bathtub and turned on both taps. His right forearm began to sting where, in the right light, he could still see the faint traces of the scratches Charlotte had given him that night.

All he could do now was rub his arm and say, “So I drowned her in the bathtub.” Bless me, Callie, for I have sinned.

“You mean, like kittens in a sack?”

Paul stomach twisted. “Yeah, like that.”

“Whew,” was all Callie said.

Paul fell silent and gazed into his lap. He decided there was no point in telling Callie about the aftermath — she already knew that he’d lost his academic career, and she wouldn’t believe that he was still haunted by the ghost of a cat. He scarcely believed it himself.

When he looked up again, the truck had stopped; through the windshield he saw his own apartment door in the glare of the headlights. Callie’s truck was chugging in place, and Callie was watching him down the length of the seat.

“Why’d you want to know that?” Paul met her gaze. “What the worst thing I ever did was?”

Callie shifted her gaze out the windshield, as if she were looking at a distant horizon instead of the brick wall of the apartment five feet beyond the hood of the truck. She drew a breath to speak, caught herself, then drew another breath.

“ ’Cause with every guy I ever been with, sooner or later I find out what the worst thing they ever done is. And usually it’s what they done to me.” She turned to him. “I figured this time I’d get it out of the way first thing. Then maybe we could work our way up from there.”

“Well, now you know.” Paul yanked on the door latch, but Callie leaned down the seat and caught his arm.

“I’m glad you told me,” she said. “Now we know the worst about each other.”

Not quite, Paul thought. He still hadn’t told her about Charlotte’s ghost.

“Now I know two things about you,” Callie said. “One is, I got to watch you like a hawk around other women, but what else is new?”

“What’s the other thing?”

“That there’s at least one way I don’t have to worry about you hurtin’ me.”

“What’s that?” His arm was still burning.

“I don’t have a cat,” Callie said, and she kissed him.

Paul’s head was spinning as he fumbled for his keys at the door of his apartment. Behind him Callie’s truck banged over the loose grate at the center of the parking lot, then grumbled out onto the road. As he fitted his key into the lock and opened the door, he heard her roaring away, heard the stuttering whine of each gearshift — first, second, third — and he imagined the marvelous flexion of her gear-shifting arm. Then he sort of floated into his apartment, amazed to think that at the end of this long, impossible, humiliating day, he had had ecstatic, sweaty sex under the stars in the bed of a pickup truck with a passionate girl; that he’d told her the worst thing he’d ever done (more or less); and that, miraculously, the girl was still speaking to him afterwards. He felt more relief than joy, it was true, but as he felt for the light switch inside the door, he was certain that nothing could make this day any stranger.

Certain, that was, until he turned on the light. Someone had been in his apartment and tidied it up. Paul was not the most fastidious person in the world, and it was instantly obvious that the small-scale chaos of his little flat had been put in some sort of order. The chair from his dining table, which he had set in the middle of the floor for Callie, had been returned to the table. The table itself was clean and uncluttered, the thrift shop salt-and-pepper shakers set to the side, the little stack of paper napkins wedged between them. His secondhand dishes — the battered pot he’d boiled the hot dogs in, and his purple plastic plate — had been washed and set to dry in his dish drainer. Paul saw all this instantly, and as he closed the door behind him and edged warily into the apartment, he saw that the floor of his kitchenette had been swept, that his little counter was clean of crumbs and stains, and that the enameled top of his dinky little three-burner stove had been scrubbed spotless.