Nothing happened, of course. Nothing ever really happens, you know. Life is infinitesimal and incremental and inconsequential. Those young black men paid for their energy drinks and left the store. I paid for my candy bar, walked out to my car, and drove toward the movie theater.
One block later, I had to hit my brakes when those same black guys jaywalked across the street in front of me. All of them stared me down and walked as slowly as possible through the crosswalk. I’d lived in this neighborhood for years and I’d often had this same encounter with young black men. It was some remnant of the warrior culture, I suppose.
When it had happened before, I had always made it a point to smile goofily and wave to the black men who were challenging me. Since they thought I was a dorky white guy, I’d behave like one. I’d be what they wanted me to be.
But this time, when those black men walked in slow motion in front of me, I did not smile or laugh. I just stared back at them. I knew I could hit the gas and slam into them and hurt them, maybe even kill them. I knew I had that power. And I knew that I would not use that power. But what about these black guys? What power did they have? They could only make me wait at an intersection. And so I waited. I waited until they walked around the corner and out of my vision. I waited until another driver pulled up behind me and honked his horn. I was supposed to move, and so I went.
DO YOU KNOW WHERE I AM?
Sharon and I were college sweethearts at St. Jerome the Second University in Seattle, or, as it is affectionately known, St. Junior’s. We met at the first mixer dance of our freshman year and soon discovered we were the only confirmed Native American Roman Catholics within a three-mile radius of campus, so we slept together that inaugural night, in open defiance of Pope Whomever, and kept sleeping together for the next three years. It was primary love: red girl and red boy on white sheets.
Sharon was Apache, and I was Spokane, but we practiced our tribal religions like we practiced Catholicism: We loved all of the ceremonies but thought they were pitiful cries to a disinterested god.
My white mother, Mary, bless her soul, raised me all by herself in Seattle because my Indian daddy, Marvin, died of stomach cancer when I was a baby. I never knew him, but I spent half of every summer on the Spokane Reservation with his mother and father, my grandparents. My mother wanted me to keep in touch with my tribal heritage, but mostly, I read spy novels to my grandfather and shopped garage sales and secondhand stores with my grandmother. I suppose, for many Indians, garage sales and trashy novels are highly traditional and sacred. We all make up our ceremonies as we go along, right? I thought the reservation was ordinary and magical, like a sedate version of Disneyland. All told, I loved to visit but loved my home much more. In Seattle, my mother was a corporate lawyer for old-money companies and sent me to Lakeside Upper School, where I was a schoolmate of Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who have become the new-money kings of the world.
Sharon went to St. Therese’s School for Girls. Her parents, Wilson and Pauline, were both architects; they helped build three of the tallest skyscrapers in downtown Seattle. If Zeus ate a few million pounds of glass, steel, and concrete, his offal would look something like those buildings. However fecal, those monstrosities won awards and made Wilson and Pauline very popular and wealthy. They lived in a self-designed home on Lake Washington that was lovely and tasteful in all ways except for its ridiculously turquoise exterior. I don’t know whether they painted the house turquoise to honor the sacred stone of the Southwest or if they were being ironic:
Ha! We’re Apache Indians from the desert, and this is our big blue house on the water! Deal with it!
Sharon and I were Native American royalty, the aboriginal prince and princess of western Washington. Sure, we’d been thoroughly defeated by white culture, but dang it, we were conquered and assimilated National Merit Scholars in St. Junior’s English honors department.
Sharon and I were in love and happy and young and skinny and beautiful and hyperliterate. We recited Shakespeare monologues as foreplay:
To be or not to be, take off your panties, oh, Horatio, I knew him well, a fellow of infinite jest, I’m going to wear your panties now.
All over campus, we were known as Sharon-and-David-the-Bohemian-Indians. We were inseparable. We ate our meals together and fed each other. Risking expulsion for moral violations, we sneaked into each other’s dorm rooms at night and made love while our respective roommates covered their heads with pillows. Sharon and I always tried to take the same classes and mourned the other’s absence whenever we couldn’t. We read the same books and discussed them while we were naked and intertwined. Oh Lord, we were twins conjoined at the brain, heart, and crotch.
I proposed to Sharon on the first day of our senior year, and she accepted, and we planned to secretly elope on the day after our graduation.
In June, the day before graduation, Sharon and I were taking one last walk along the path beside the anonymous creek that ran through the middle of campus. We were saying good-bye to a good place. Overgrown with fern and blackberry thickets, the creek had been left wild and wet.
“‘Whose woods these are I think I know,’” I said.
“Robert Frost wrote the poem,” said Sharon. We were playing Name the Poet, a game of our own invention.
“‘Know’ and ‘poem,’” I said. “A clumsy rhyme, don’t you think?”
“You stink,” she said and laughed too loudly. Her joy was always rowdy, rude, and pervasive. I laughed with her and pulled her close to me and pressed my face into her hair and breathed in her scent. After the first time we’d made love, she’d said,
Now I know what you smell like, and no matter what else happens to us, I’m always going to know what you smell like.
“Hey,” I said as we walked the creek. “How about we climb into the bushes and I get you a little wild and wet?”
We kissed and kissed until she pulled away.
“Do you hear that?” she said.
“What?”
“I think it’s a cat. Can you hear it meowing?”
I listened and heard nothing.
“You’re imagining things,” I said.
“No, it’s a cat. I can hear it. It sounds pitiful.”
“There must be a hundred cats around here. City cats. They’re tough.”
“No, it sounds hurt. Listen.”
I listened and finally heard the faint feline cry.
“It’s down there in the creek somewhere,” she said.
We peered over the edge and could barely see the water through the thick and thorny overgrowth.
“I’m sure it’s hunting rats or something,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“No, listen to it. It’s crying. I think it’s stuck.”
“What do you want me to do? It’s just a dumb-ass cat.”
“Can you go find it?”
I looked again at the jungle between that cat and me.
“I’d need a machete to get through there,” I said.
“Please,” said Sharon.
“I’m going to get all cut up.”
“‘All in green went my love riding,’” she whispered in that special way, “‘on a great horse of gold into the silver dawn.’”
“Cummings wrote the poem, and I’m in love and gone,” I said and made my slow way down the creek side. I didn’t want to save the cat; I wanted to preserve Sharon’s high opinion of me. If she hadn’t been there to push me down the slope, I never would have gone after that cat. As it was, I cursed the world as I tripped over ferns and pushed blackberry branches out of the way. I was cut and scraped and threatened by spiders and wasps, all for a dumb cat.
“It’s like
Wild Kingdom
down here,” I said.
“Do you see him?” she said, more worried about the cat. I could hear the love in her voice. I was jealous of that damn cat!
I stopped and listened. I heard the cry from somewhere close.
“He’s right around here,” I said.
“Find him,” she said, her voice choking with fierce tears.
I leaned over, pushed aside one last fern, and saw him, a black cat trapped in blackberry branches. He was starved, too skinny to be alive, I thought, but his eyes were bright with fear and pain.
“Man,” I said. “I think he’s been caught in here for a long time.”
“Save him, save him.”
I reached in, expecting the cat to bite or claw me, but he remained gratefully passive as I tore away the branches and freed him. I lifted and carried him back up the bank. He was dirty and smelly, and I wanted all of this to be over.
“Oh my God,” said Sharon as she took him from me. “Oh, he’s so sad, so sad.” She hugged him, and he accepted it without protest.
“What are we going to do with him?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“We can’t keep him,” I said. “Let’s let him go here. He’s free now. He’ll be okay.”
“What if he gets stuck again?”
“Then it’ll be natural selection. Come on, he doesn’t have a tag or anything. He’s just a stray cat.”
“No, he’s tame, he’s got a home somewhere.” She stared the cat in the eyes as if he could tell us his phone number and address.
“Oh, wait, wait,” she said. “I remember, in the newspaper, last week or something, there was a lost cat ad. It said he was black with white heart-shaped fur on his belly.”
Sharon had a supernatural memory; she could meet a few dozen new people at a party and rattle off their names two days later. During an English department party our sophomore year, she recited by memory seventy-three Shakespeare sonnets in a row. It was the most voluminous display of erudition any of us had ever witnessed. Tenured English professors wept. But I was the one who enjoyed the honor and privilege of taking her home that night and making her grunt in repetitive monosyllables.
Beside the creek, Sharon gently turned the cat over, and we both saw the white heart. Without another word, Sharon ran back to her dorm room, and I followed her. She searched for the newspaper in her desk but couldn’t find it, and none of her floormates had a copy of the old paper, either, so she ran into the basement and climbed into the Dumpster. I held the cat while she burrowed into the fetid pile of garbage.
“Come on,” I said. “You’re never going to find it. Maybe you imagined the whole thing. Let’s take him to the shelter. They can take care of him.”
She ignored me and kept searching. I felt like throwing the cat into the wall.
“This is it,” she said and pulled a greasy newspaper out of the mess. She flipped to the classifieds, found the lost cat ad, and shouted out the phone number. She jumped out of the Dumpster, grabbed the cat, ran back to her room, and quickly dialed.
“Hello,” said Sharon over the telephone. “We have your cat. Yes, yes, yes. We found him by the creek. At St. Junior’s. We’ll bring him right over. What’s your address? Oh God, that’s really close.”
Sharon ran out of the dorm; I ran after her.
“Slow down,” I called after her, but she ignored me. Maybe Sharon wasn’t a good Apache or Catholic, but she was religious when she found the proper mission.
We sprinted through a residential neighborhood, which may or may not have been a good idea for two brown kids, no matter how high our grade-point averages. But it felt good to run fast, and I dreamed about being a superhero. Fifteen minutes later and out of breath, Sharon knocked on the front door of a small house. An old couple opened the door.
“Lester,” shouted the old man and took the cat from Sharon. The old woman hugged the man and the cat. All three cried to one another.
“How’d you find him?” asked the old man, weeping hard now, barely able to talk, but unashamed of his tears. “He’s been gone for a month.”
“I heard him crying,” I said (I lied) and stepped into the doorway. Sharon stood behind me and peered over my shoulder.
“Oh, thank you, bless you,” said the old woman.
“I pulled him out of some blackberry thorns,” I said. “And then I remembered your ad in the newspaper, and I found the paper in the garbage, and I called you, and here I am.”
The old man and woman hugged me, holding the cat between us, all of us celebrating the reunion, while Sharon stood silently by. I think I lied because I wanted to be briefly adored by strangers, to be remembered as a handsome and kind man, a better man, more complete, even saintly. But it was Orwell who wrote that “saints should be always judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”
All during this time, Sharon never spoke. I can only guess at her emotions, but I imagine she was shocked and hurt by my disloyalty. Standing in the presence of such obvious commitment between two people and their damn cat, she must have lost faith in me and, more importantly, in herself.
“How can we ever repay you?” asked the old woman.
“Nothing,” I said. “We need nothing.”
“Here, here,” said the old man as he opened his wallet and offered me a twenty.
“No, no,” I said. “I don’t need that. I just wanted to be good, you know?”
He forced the money into my hand; I accepted it.
“You’re a good man,” said the old woman.
I shook my head, took Sharon’s hand, and walked away, leaving those grateful strangers to their beloved pet.