THE CAT'S MAW

CHAPTER IV

IV:  OF CLOUDS AND CLAWS

In the week that followed, there was a change in Billy. He wasn't moping on the cot anymore, crutches unused at bedside. He didn't leave his trays of food half-eaten. His eyes were no longer glassy and empty, and only interested in TV.

Instead, the boy had some spark, a growing appetite, and a resurrected smile. And it was obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes and a whisker of common sense as to the reason why.

Billy had made a friend.

From the hour he woke until the hour he slept, (and often the hours through the night), the cat stayed close to the boy. It would sit on the bed and clean itself, or follow a few feet behind as Billy practiced navigating the house on the crutches. But mostly it slept, curled in a warm mound of white and black by his side.

A few times each day, the cat would disappear. Billy would ask his mother to look for it, but she would just sigh and assure him that it was probably off doing what cats tend to do. 

To her mounting dismay, she'd stumble across it nosing around the house, rubbing against furniture to mark its new territory, or sharpening its claws on cardboard boxes in the den. As the days wore on, the woman would prove to be less than delighted at the discovery bits of fur in increasingly strange places and hard to reach places. 

But Elizabeth Brahm was one to count her blessings. She smiled with relief when she saw the thing paw at the back door, demanding to be let outside to engage in its bathroom business. The litter-box that Mrs. Thomas had delivered, along with a bag of dried corn litter – 'It's practically odourless!' Enid had said, with Elizabeth crinkling her nose – sat unused in the basement, between the furnace and the laundry machine.

More importantly, the creature was quiet. During that first week it didn't meow, or screech, or hiss even once. The only sound it made was a gentle purring when it was stroked. And that would only happen when it was in direct contact with her son.

When Billy would call to it with a generic 'Here kitty – here kitty, kitty', the cat would eventually trot into the room, spring up on the cot, and sit at the boy's feet. It would stare with its tiny head cocked to the left, looking somewhat annoyed, as if to say: 'I hope this is important. I was busy.'

"You should give him a name," Stanley Brahm said, opening the newspaper. "How would you feel if we only said 'Hey kid – kid, kid!' all the time?"

Billy's father had been coming in late for dinner all week, smelling like wood chips and varnish and tangy sweat. He'd normally get home by 5:30, but was taking advantage of the longer daylight for some secret project by the back garden. If Billy listened hard when he ate lunch on the patio with his mother, he could hear the faint tip-tap and zip-zoop of hammers and handsaws beyond the meadow. 

"Don't encourage him, Stanley," Elizabeth said, taking her husband's dinner plate out of the oven. She popped the cap off a bottle of home-brewed beer and handed it to him. "We still haven't decided whether it will be staying."

Billy knew that the only way to keep the cat was to get his parents involved with it — to make the connection personal. Naming together was a good first step.

"What do you think would be a good name?" Billy said. He remembered asking Mrs. Thomas how she was able to come up with names for all of her cats. "It's not my job to name them," she had said. "It's my job to listen, and hear what they want to be called."

"Did I ever tell you I had a dog when I was your age?" his father said. "A big golden retriever. When it was a puppy, it would run around the yard, tear up the grass and flowerbeds, and try to dig holes clean through to China."

"Which is why we don't have a dog," his mother said from the kitchen, clinking the dishes in the sink.

"Be that as it may, dear,my Dad took one look at that pup going crazy in the yard and said, 'That right there is a dog that wants to go places. That's a travelin' dog.'

Stanley went over to the bookshelf, and pulled out a large black atlas. "My Dad made me flip through one of these with my eyes closed, and then point to a random spot on a page. The closest place to my finger? That wound up being the dog's name — Jasper." 

"What happened to him, dad?" Billy asked.

His father took the last swig of beer, and fiddled with the soggy label that was peeling off the bottle. "We moved a few years later and had to give him away. Found him a good home, though. Yep. I'm sure he had a good life."

Stanley Brahm tousled his son's hair, and gave the cat a quick scratch behind the ears. Billy and the cat both watched his father leave the room. When he was gone the cat licked a front paw, and then rubbed it across the top of his head where he'd been touched.

Billy flipped open the atlas, closed his eyes, and did what his father had described. He flipped the pages and jabbed his finger down at least fifty times – Vancouver, Saskatoon, Orillia – but none of them sounded right. They sounded like boring names of all the places he'd never see.

"Okay kiddo, time for bed," his father poked his head into the room. "Get a good sleep. Your mother says you've been moving around more. If you're feeling up to it, we'll go out to the garden tomorrow. Might have something waiting back there for you."

"What?" Billy said. "What is it?"

His mother came in the room and shoo'ed the cat from the bed. She fluffed up his pillow, straightened the blankets, and then tucked Billy snugly within them.

"Gimme-gimme never gets, don't you know your manners yet?" she said with a kiss goodnight on the cheek. The kiss smelled of dish-soap, and wine, and of the baking chocolate he knew was hidden on the top shelf of the spice cabinet. "Goodnight," she said, and clicked the light off as they left the room.

"'night," he said.

When they had gone upstairs, Billy pulled himself free from the coffin of blankets and patted the mattress. He felt a soft and silent impact as the cat leapt onto the cot and padded across the bed. It stepped onto his belly, proceeded up to his chest, and sat.

The boy could only see its outline and the glints of moonlight reflected in its eyes, big and round and black in the darkened room. The cat leaned forward and pressed its wet nose against the boy's lips, tickling his chin with its whiskers.

Billy had read the myths. In the middle ages, some thought felines were demons that preyed on small children. The creatures would crouch on their victims' chests as they slept, and then steal their breath. If they stole enough, they'd have the child's soul.  

The boy knew that was nonsense. He'd had better sleeps and no bad dreams since the cat arrived. So, the next day, before going to see any 'surprise' his parents had planned, Billy would reward his new friend.

He would take him to his favourite place in the world.