Creamy Bullets (16 page)

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What’s this about? Are you like, gay or something?”

He scoffed and took another bite of tuna. “There’s no such thing as gay cats,” he said. “Maybe bisexual, but not all the way gay.” He walked over to me and started clawing at my shoes. “Oh yeah, that feels good.”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked him.

He flipped over and closed his eyes as if he was going to fall asleep there on the kitchen floor. He waited a long pause before turning his head to look at me. “Look. This hurts me. I tried to tell you the other night. It’s just, I know you can do better. That bitch of yours—all bitches really—are no good. Women are crazy. It’s a proven fact. They don’t have the right balance of chemicals. My first owner was a woman
and
a doctor and that’s what she told all her patients.”

“Why aren’t you with her anymore?”

“I ran away. My sister too. We both ran away. But don’t think we have it any better now. That old lady we live with never changes our litter box and then she gets mad at us when it starts to stink.”

I started to realize how ridiculous it was to be having this conversation. “Annie’s not crazy,” I said. “She’s my wife and if you don’t like it then you shouldn’t hang out over here, and you shouldn’t be digging a tunnel.”

The next two nights, before Annie returned from her assignment, I could hear the faint, cautious sounds of Baxter digging and scratching somewhere in the kitchen wall, close to my cupboards. Once, late at night, I heard the old lady owner call for him and he had to stop digging. He must have been close because I heard him swear and scuttle back into his own cupboard. “There you are,” I heard her voice say as he slinked out of her cupboard. “What were you doing in there?” she asked. But of course, he didn’t answer.

Annie came home that weekend, lightly tanned, upbeat, and horny. We had sex twice on the first day upon her return. The second time was right after dinner and I could hear Baxter scratching closer and closer to his destination as Annie moved above me. Our bed squeaked and tapped the wall with our rhythm. I wondered if he could hear us and was getting angry. I started to fear an ambush by him. Maybe he snapped and was going to tell Annie about our talks. From the kitchen, I heard a sound. A soft hiccup like a baby crying. Annie jumped off of me, startled. “What’s that sound? Is someone in our apartment?”

We put on our shirts and shorts and went into the kitchen. I heard Baxter mewing in our cupboard. “Is that Mr. Hoo-Ha?” asked Annie. I opened the door of the cupboard slowly and saw Baxter’s head sticking out of the hole in the corner.

“I’m stuck,” he whispered to me. He was able to make it sound like a hiss.

“How long has he been in there?” asked Annie. She was trying to see over my shoulders, past the pots and pans.

“I think there’s a tunnel or passageway that he’s found. But it looks like he can’t quite fit.”

“Aw,” cooed Annie. “He must really love us.”

I stuck my head further in and pushed him back from the opening. “I could probably cut this hole a little bigger so he could fit,” I said to Annie. Baxter stuck his head back through the square and mewed a little more loudly, playing up his predicament. I heard the neighbor lady rustling around in her kitchen. She was opening her cupboards. I heard her make a sound like she was calling her cats. Dinner time. Baxter didn’t make a sound but I could tell his head was full of swear words.

“Maybe we should go next door and tell her,” Annie said quietly.

“No!” I said a little too sharply.

“Okay. Alright,” said Annie. “Let me look for something to use.”

“Finally, bitch,” said Baxter.

Annie turned and froze. “What did you say to me?”

“I was talking to myself,” I started. “I mean, I was talking to Mr. Hoo—um, Baxter. He tried to scratch me.”

“It sounded like you were talking to me,” she said.

“I was,” said Baxter. But this time, I was looking at Annie when he spoke and she saw that my mouth didn’t move.

Her eyes looked like they imploded in her head and she crouched down quickly and pushed me out of the way. “Who’s in there?” she said into the cupboard. Baxter stared right at her and didn’t say anything. I heard her voice soften a little as she started whispering to Baxter. The old lady next door dropped something in her kitchen and we all heard a great clang and crash. I tried to hear what Annie was saying. It sounded like baby talk. Annie’s knees scooted back on the tiled floor and it looked like she was pulling on something. I was thinking about how dirty the floor was when she carefully withdrew from the cupboard, Baxter in her outstretched hands. He sneezed.

The next morning, after the neighbors left, I took my pocketknife and made the hole in our cupboard bigger so that Baxter could come and go more easily.

Whenever we made anything in the kitchen, he’d make his way over to see what we were cooking. He rolled around on the kitchen floor, getting the dust off his fur. Around midnight, he’d come by to sleep with us. He didn’t speak when Annie was around and only tolerated her when she was, sometimes biting and scratching her extra hard when she tried to play with him. I was always nervous when he was around and I found myself not cuddling or kissing with Annie as much as I did before. I expected him to speak at any moment, especially those decreasing times when I showed affection to Annie.

Three weeks after I cut the hole in the cupboard bigger, the apartment manager stopped by. She’d received a call from the neighbor about the hole in their cupboard. After inspecting it, she found the tunnel that Baxter dug leading to our kitchen. She wanted to see if the tunnel ended in our kitchen somewhere. Baxter was actually sleeping on our bed at that very moment. Annie was at the grocery store.

The apartment manager opened all of our cabinets and pulled out her flashlight. She paused when she spotted the hole. I felt a rush of heat go through my body, like a liar who’s been found out. “Do you see anything?” I asked.

She took out her cell phone. I thought she was going to call the police but she pushed a button and took a photograph. She stood up with the phone still unfolded in her hand. “Is their cat in here right now?” she asked me.

“I don’t think so,” I said. I wanted her to leave but I wasn’t sure if I had the right to kick her out since she was the manager. I heard Baxter’s bell ring in the bedroom, as if he was getting up.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“That’s our phone,” I said unconvincingly.

She exhaled out of her nostrils like she was trying not to laugh. “That’s all I need,” she said.

Two days later, we got an eviction notice in the mail.

As we loaded up the u-haul, the old neighbors took turns watching us through their kitchen window. Baxter was nowhere to be seen but Bubbles paced around casually, sometimes stopping to look into a tree for birds or squirrels. Annie and I both felt numb, confused, and ashamed. I told her that I had gone down to the office and talked about the hole. But I didn’t. My mouth was hard and heavy like concrete.

We had found a place that was a little smaller and cheaper on the other side of town. No cats were allowed. All the apartments that allowed cats smelled badly. We still didn’t have time for a pet anyway.

I closed the back of the u-haul and got in the driver’s side. Annie sat in the passenger seat, taking a last look around. Her eyes looked glassy and out of focus, as if she were having a panic attack. Her neck was tense and straight. I could tell that she was looking for Baxter. As I started the engine, I looked over to the neighbors’ window and saw them both standing there, framed by their drawn curtains and raised blinds. The old man held Baxter in his arms with a look on his face that said,
See who he loves?
One of Baxter’s white legs dangled awkwardly and I could see him starting to squirm. The man, his “dad” as we had called him, struggled to hold the cat in his arms. I could tell he was determined to hold Baxter like that until we drove off. Annie saw this too, and we both bluntly stared, our heads turned ninety degrees. I reached over and grabbed Annie’s hand. The old lady reached for the blinds and started lowering them. They came down smoothly, silently, like a guillotine.

Jealousy is Policy

T
here’s the girl who loves chocolate and eats nothing but cake. She eats her lunch in the shack, outside by the recycling bins. We can never find her when a customer comes for her. Sometimes the customers get mad and kick over tables.

Whenever I eat in the back room, I keep an eye on the shack. I can see it through the windows. I eat grilled chicken and potatoes in the back room. The other girls come back and get jealous of my chicken. The smell is so good and strong and it sticks to the walls in the back room for the whole day.

No one else is happy here.

Once we caught Stacey, a frumpish woman in her late 30’s, trying to microwave a fork in the back room. We scolded her and wrote a memo about things not to put in the microwave, and the next day she was dead.

June is the one who eats her lunch in the shack. Her mouth is always covered in chocolate residue when she’s working. The customers seem to like it but we always make fun of her. Some say that she lives in a fort by the water, that she is the daughter of a boatman. They say the boatman is always calling her on his boat phone. What is a boat phone?

There’s an attractive janitor that cleans the floors at night. I can’t believe he’s not a model. If you took pictures of him and hung them up in a store window, people would start walking in, I’m sure. He always makes sure that all of us girls get in our cars at night before he starts cleaning the floors. He has a tattoo on his hand. I wonder what he eats for lunch.

“That chicken—,” they say to me, but they never finish. I’m convinced that they are just jealous.

Sometimes June, the chocolate girl, makes something for everyone. Once she made a pan of brownies with peanut butter in the middle. She says she can’t live without chocolate. Once, Kimberly said something about how June was going to “overdose on chocolate,” but we thought it was so stupid, what Kimberly said. Kimberly was someone who made more money than all of us put together.

Of course it didn’t take long for my boss to say something about the chicken. “If that’s all you’re going to eat,” she said, “you can eat it in the shack, where we don’t have to watch you.” Plus she said I wasn’t working hard enough, that I needed to ask for help when I was having problems with a customer. Customers were complaining about me and also my clothes, she said. My boss was the type of person who liked to pop pimples on us whenever the opportunity arose.

Later that same day a photographer came to take pictures of us for a newspaper story. It was an old lady in her 70’s and we all made fun of her behind her back. She told me I had pretty hands.

There was a rumor going around that Janet and Lori planned to burn down the shack while June and I were in there eating lunch. The shack started smelling more and more sickly—like moldy eggs—and I was scared of its history. “It just showed up one day,” said Jack, the quiet old man who actually owned our building. “I expected someone to come back and get it, tow it away on a trailer, but it has stayed there for a long time. And there are tools in it,” he said. “And pictures on the wall.”

June and I discussed the pictures in there as we ate lunch. She liked them and wanted to bring them home to hang in her living room. They made me feel uneasy, all these close-up photos of people’s eyes and noses.

“I like caramel best with chocolate, see this?” June held up a thin bar of chocolate and dumped a spoonful of caramel from a jar on top. It oozed over the sides and June giggled as she opened her mouth largely.

“Can I try it?” I asked. She chewed and shifted the glob in her mouth, her cheeks bulging. “Jesus,” I said, laughing. There was a line of caramel hanging from her chin.

She finally swallowed and said, “I can stick my whole fist in my mouth.” She opened her mouth and showed me. I scooted near her and looked at her arm going into her mouth. I shook my head and she took out her hand and wiped it off on her shirt. She grabbed the spoon and prepared a piece for me.

“What do you think these pictures mean?” I asked June.

“I think they mean: a good place to eat chicken and chocolate.”

Soon after that there was a memo that told everyone June was no longer going to work with us, but instead, she’d only work in the shack, preparing signs and making equipment for the rest of us. Whenever the boatman called for her we had to crinkle paper in the receiver and tell him that we couldn’t hear him, that the line was bad, that he had to use a regular phone. One night a man came in and started crying like a baby. We didn’t know who he was, but some say it was the boatman. He cried with great drama and said nothing in any discernible language. Private Nurse Nancy had to take him outside and give him aspirin and a map. She walked with him to the corner and he was never seen again. The next day the boatman called and was angry and loud and said with much anger: “Don’t you know this water is getting godamned cold. Godamn you all to Hell and I hope you never board a ship on my river. For the waves will rise and crash upon you like an angry hammer from the Mother Nature. When I think of all of you there in that place, I laugh until I can’t breathe, I get sick to my throat and I spit on the dangerous jagged rocks of my shore. All of you, animals without a soul.”

I was then told not to eat out there in the shack again or to deliver any memos to her. She did not want to be disturbed, the boss told me. “She is making something in there that will be a surprise to you,” the boss said.

When the newspaper article and the photographs appeared it caused quite a stir. A famous movie producer visited us and was satisfied with the service he received. He wanted to make our little group into a movie, he said. I don’t think he knew anything about June or the way we all hated each other or the way I ate chicken in the back room. “I want to show the world your strength,” he told us later at a teleconference. But we were suspicious. Even the man who cleans our floors at night said, “How could he make a movie about you twits? All you do is complain and throw stuff on the floor.” Kimberly said he was just resentful. When she first started working here, Kimberly had an intimate moment with the janitor, reportedly on a desk somewhere, and so we all assumed she knew what his every thought and emotion was.

Of course, months later, the famous producer stopped writing letters and no one but our regular customers cared about our outstanding services. There was much work to be performed and we completed each task like our lives depended on it.

At just about the time our morale was getting dangerously low, a wonderful thing happened. I was in the back room eating grilled chicken and potatoes when I noticed the shack was gone. A rainbow-colored van drove up to the back door where the shack used to be and I almost started crying. The tears that were climbing to my eyes stopped at my throat. I swallowed and stood up. The old lady who took photographs of us months beforehand got out of the driver’s side of the van and walked to the back doors of the vehicle. I watched her as she strong-armed a trio of dark brown figures, each of which was about the size of a statue you’d find on someone’s front lawn. The figures were of hunched-over old women and each had a silly grin on their chiseled faces. My heart squeezed itself when I realized the statues were made from chocolate. The old lady looked at me and nodded before climbing back into the driver’s seat and making the odd vehicle cough its way away.

I went outside and looked at each statue, wondering if June had made them, and also wondering if they were hollow. If they were hollow they might crumble in my hands. I could just see everyone laughing at me if I tried to move the things and they broke all over me. It was cool outside but the sun was bright and mean. A bead of chocolate sweat ran down one of the wrinkled-looking faces.

I decided not to tell anyone about the chocolate. Someone else would come into the back room and see the statues through the windows. They would call for help. Someone else would know exactly what to do. I went back inside and turned my chair around so I couldn’t see them. I finished my potatoes and sniffed the air for the stench of my half-eaten chicken. I sweated and prayed for someone else to come into the back room. Sometimes customers would ask for me but when I went out to the main room they would wave me back to the back room. I averted my eyes, not wanting to display responsibility for the things outside. I heard a man raising his voice to the other girls working. Then Janet and Lori could be heard laughing. I tried to eat but couldn’t.

I felt lonely and jealous.