Children of Bast (5 page)

“Yup, definitely. I think about all of what she taught me that first day, everyday.”

Chubby got up and stretched. After a deep yawn he walked over to me and licked my face.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“Not particularly, but I could eat.”

“Let go get us a mouse or two.”

As I trotted along the street with my old friend, I remembered when Adele introduced me to him, and I blessed her for it.

Chapter 3

Before a cat will condescend

To treat you as a trusted friend,

Some little token of esteem

Is needed, like a dish of cream
. T.S. Eliot

A
re you a gib, Gaylord?”

“No, I’m a tom. A full tom. Why would I spray around you if I was a gib? You can be rude, you know. I don’t go around asking strange mollies like you if they’ve been fixed.”

“Well, good. At least we don’t have to deal with that wretched business.” She went back to eating the fish we’d scored from Smokey’s. She was rude, to say the least.

I munched away and thought again about where I was and whether I belonged there. Here I was, this pampered amait hanging out with a mollie that was tough, street-smart, and maybe a little dangerous. I hadn’t met any other amai, except Thain, but I’d seen a slew of them milling around, and most looked shifty and mean. They glared at me like I was some disease they had to cure to protect their clowder. Adele dubbed me a kith in the woods after that first dig in the dumpster where I didn’t know fish from eggshells. And I was a kith in the woods. So, what was I thinking? What did I expect to accomplish?

Except, I noticed almost immediately after running away that I knew what to do, sort of. Something guided me; I knew even though I didn’t know I knew. Does that make sense? Like, I knew what the dumpsters were for. With all the amai milling around them, jumping in and out with their mouths full of stuff I didn’t recognize, I just knew it had something to do with staying alive.

I also ran for a dark, secluded place, the alley, because I knew I’d be safe and unseen by Harriett who searched everywhere calling for me.

And, when I saw Adele, although I was shy at first, I saw her as a teacher who knew everything that I needed to know.”

“Come on,” Chubby said. “Teacher? My crooked tail. You got the hots instantly.”

“Yeah, well, I did spray a lot and a warmth gripped my bax, something I’d never experienced.”

“Warmth gripped your bax! Lady Bast. You’re lying, Gaylord. If I know you at all, I know you drowned in your own spray and wanted to mount her right then.” Chubby chuckled and licked a paw. “Good thing you didn’t try because she’d a killed you.” He paused and smiled. “But I love ya anyway.”

Chubby and I got to Smokey’s and found a juicy, sloppy piece of meat wrapped in round bread that we didn’t eat. We shared the meat except the green thing that was sour. The meat was so good that even washing off was tasty.

“You want me to go on?” I asked.

“Yeah, but can you get to the good stuff? Like the first time you scored.”

“Dirty old amait.”

“I’m dirty, but I ain’t old, just older.”

“Yeah, well…”

Adele lapped the last of the juices from Smokey’s fish. “So, where’s this apartment you keep talking about?”

“Across the street, that row of apartments by the seminary.

“Tell me more about this cemetery.”

“No. Sem-in-ary. Seminary.”

“Okay. Please explain to me like I was a kith.”

“Well, like I said before, they honor something. I’m not quite sure exactly, but we think it’s a place where Ned learns about spirits and ghosts and stuff.”

“How do you he learns about that stuff?”

“Okay, he and Harriet sped a lot of time on their knees talking to . . . well, nothing. Just this wall with a thing on it.”

“Thing?”

“I don’t know. A thing.”

“Interesting.” She began washing her face. “Who’s we?”

I’d finished eating, too, and washed up. I can never talk while I wash, so I finished before I answered.

“We are my maama and my sister, like I told you before. You need to pay attention, hey.” She cuffed meon my shoulder. “Maama died a few months ago, and Lamis, my sister, didn’t want to leave.”

“Maybe she’s not the street type. What about the spirits and ghosts?” She finished washing and laid next to me, wrapping her lovely tail around herself.

“I don’t know. They talk about holy this and holy that. God comes up quite a bit. What is god, anyway, and holy? Something to do with holes?”

“I don’t know much about god, but I do know we were gods once.”

“Yeah, you told me and when Maama was sober she talked about it.”

She ignored me and went on. “Long, long time ago, in someplace a long ways away from here, we were gods. My maama didn’t know where we came from, but she told me our god was called Bast. She used the word raeed.”

“A leader. That’s what raeed means.”

“So, you know a word I don’t know. She got up and faced me. “My maama said the bašar at that place created a eikonigow for Bast who had a body like a mollie bašar and a head like an amait.” She flopped on the floor and stared at me. “Gaylord, I have a lot to teach you.” She yawned. Incredible teeth and the prettiest tongue I’d ever seen. Her ears flattened when she yawned, and she squinted her eyes shut. She went on. “My maama said the bašar loved us so much that when we died, they’d shave their eyebrows because they were sad. How’s that for weird? And, if someone killed us for any reason, the killer bought it. I think she said they cut his head off. And, get this: after we died, they wrapped us in some kind of cloth and buried us. What about that?”

“What’s a goddess?”

“A mollie god.”

“Wonder if she was fixed.

“Please shut up and listen. You might learn something and silence the rattling in your head.” She signed, licked her chest, and went on. “Bast protected a'maar after the Time of Owls when it’s dark outside.”

“Whoa. That’s sounds freaky. How do you protect a'maar?”

“I said shut up. I’ll knock you into next Time of Owls if you don’t.”

“Okay, grouch.”

She slammed a paw on my tail and stared at me like you do sometimes, Chubby, then said, “They made lots of different eikonigow of her, maybe like those eikonigow you saw on the table or that thing on the wall at the cemetery.”

“Seminary.”

“Whatever. They bowed down to them, my maama told me. They gave them gifts, like perfume and stuff. They even killed animals for Bast, thinking she got off when she smelled the meat burning. Creepy, huh? So, that’s the story. Now you know.”

“I knew about Bast, but you told me a lot more. Very interesting. Was that place your maama talked about the only place where amai were found?”

“Dunno. Maama didn’t get that far. Listen, I need to sleep before we go out again. Wanna curl up together? Get’s kind of drafty in here.”

Oh, wow, Chubby. It’s impossible to tell you how I felt with that invitation. My teeth itched. I’m not lying; my teeth itched.

“And, look,” she said, standing over me now, “if you have feelings you don’t understand, Gaylord, I understand them, and if you get some kith-brained idea that I’m easy, forget it. I’ll slice you up like so much liver. I’m not ready and won’t be for at least another three weeks. Understand?”

“Not really.” But, my attention came together like clumping litter as she stood there.

“Oh, brother. Now I gotta tell you about that, too?”

“What?”

“Never mind. Let’s just get comfy and stop talking.” She dropped down and rolled to her side.

“Belly to belly, Bombay boy? Oh, kissing’s all right. I like kissing. But that’s all. Dig?”

I crawled over and put my belly next to hers. We wound our tails together before kissing and washing each other’s faces. Sleep swallowed me whole.

Chapter 4

The cat could very well be man's best friend but would never stoop to admitting it
. Doug Larson

O
ver the next few days Adele taught me how to take care of myself on the street. Never trust a kilaab, she told me, which was new to me because I’d never met one.

“That screaming, whining, barking lump of filthy red hair over by the door of the pizza parlor is a mongrel of some kind. Kalb are retarded, stink like rotten meat and bark constantly. They’ll bark at nothing, or themselves, or their leg, which they think is attacking them because it’s scratching their ears. And there is nothing between those ears except an eternal whistling breeze where a brain should be. And, they’ll eat anything including their own vomit, their own khara and ours. They’re constantly ramming their noses in each others butt holes trying to figure out whose is whose. Oh, and did I say that kalb are worthless, nature’s biggest mistake? Sorry. I meant to.”

Mongrel meant nothing to me, but when she said that they eat amai, I got it. She jumped to a dumpster.

“You know about dumpsters, but never eat anything out of here that smells like your khara.”

“My what?”

“Khara. That stuff you bury whenever you go.”

“Oh, that’s what my maama called aha.”

“Call it what you want, but if anything smells like that, don’t eat it. It could be khara because some amai don’t care where they drop it. Here, I’ll show you.”

She dug to the bottom of the dumpster and came up with something that looked like a huge hairball.

“Take a whiff.” She pushed it under my nose and I gagged.

“What is that?” I rubbed my nose and washed my face.

“Who knows, but don’t eat it. If it doesn’t kill you, you’ll get the throbbing hunches.”

“Throbbing what?”

“It’s pain in your gut that throbs like crazy and makes your back hunch up all the time.”

“Oh. A belly ache.”

“Not just a belly ache. A pain that’ll make you wanna die. Trust me; I’ve been here a long time.”

“Okay.”

After we found a sack with my first half-eaten piece crunchy meat, Adele proceeded to tell me about herself.

“I was like you, once,” she said between bites. “Lived in a house, what you call an apartment, and was bored so bad I slept most of the time under a bed. Oh, I got food. Good food, I was petted, bathed—something I hated like poison–and cuddled. I sometimes got taken to some awful mollie bašar in a white coat that I hated. I wore a collar with a bell and had a lovely litter box that cleaned itself. How, I don’t know.”

“So, you were kidding about going to where I used to live?”

“Yeah,” she grinned. “Just wanted to make sure you knew what you were doing.”

“Those mollie bašar in white coats?” I said while she munched. “Harriet called them vets, whatever that means. I hate vets. They stick you with sharp things, open your mouth, and make you gag, probe your belly until it fills with gas and stick things up your butt. I give them a time, hey. I mean, when I’m finished, so are they.”

“Mess yourself?”

“To the max. Makes ‘em puke.” I went back to eating. I really didn’t like the yellow crud on the meat, but the other stuff was tangy and sweet.

“Anyway, I had a good life,” Adele continued. “I could even roam the back yard, which was pretty nice. I could eat grass, flowers and leaves. I could even drop my khara in the garden without going to my box. But, I was numb from boredom. The attention my pet parents, as they called themselves, was thorough but brief. Know what I mean?’”

“Yeah. Pick you up, cuddle and scratch your ears, sloppy kiss, put you down and forget about you for hours. I know what you’re talking about.” I’d finished eating and started to wash, which always ends my ability to talk.

“You got it. So, one day I’m outside, sniffing around, and I don’t know why because I had scent-marked the entire territory and nothing had changed, except for a few rain damaged spots that I took care of. Suddenly, as I rubbed my jaw against a post, I got the strong scent of another amait. When I looked up, there he was peeking though the slats at me. Now, I knew about other amai because of going to the . . . what you call it?”

“Vet.”

“Vet. But this was the first amait I’d seen loose. I was shocked.”

“You saw other amai at the vet, didn’t you?”

“Nope. Heard ‘em, smelled ‘em, but never saw them. You saw other amai at the vet’s?”

“No. They came by the apartment. Never went out to them.” I finished washing and sprawled out to catch some sun. Adele came over and flopped beside me.

“Although, come to think about it, I was jolted outta my wits once when I saw an amait out the window,” I said. “At the vet I was a snarling mass of teeth and spit, so she never let me get away. If I went completely nuts, she’d plop me in this tiny basket with holes in the top and cover it with an old shirt. And there I’d be for hours until she decided I was sane again. Hated that thing. I sat as far back as I could and pouted and glared at everyone who looked in. I hissed my guts out.”