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Originally
appeared in Buffalo Spree Magazine
"Catapult"
Tom
Darrell gazed up at the massive birch limb and shook his
head. “No, I don’t think they do that in real life,” he
said. “Only in the movies. Only on TV.”
Sarah looked at him. “Sure they do, Honey. It’s a
fireman’s job to rescue cats out of trees. When there
aren’t any fires, of course. Why don’t I give them a
call?”
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “I don’t know.”
“Come on, Tucker. Come to Mama, kitty,” Sarah called.
“Look at the poor thing. He’s scared to death. Do
something, Tom. Look at him. He’s just a baby. Come to
Mama, kitty. Please come down. He doesn’t even know us
yet. That stupid dog. Whose dog was that, anyway? There
ought to be a law.”
“Sarah, do you still have that old clothesline in the
garage?” Tom asked, his dark-eyed gaze still fixed
upward on the tree limbs.
Uh-oh, Sarah thought. “I don’t know. I think so. What
do you want that for?” Quick rememberings flashed
through her mind: the time he set half the woods behind
the house on fire with his “new system” of burning
leaves, the time he decided to re-shingle the roof
himself and fell off and broke his leg, the time he
built an addition to their one-car garage, a carport
that sagged and tilted for weeks, a neighborhood
eyesore, before it crashed down on her brand new
silver-gray Honda.
“And I need something to tie it to. Something heavy. A
pipe wrench. Or a big claw hammer, maybe. Get me one,
please. And the clothesline. I’ll watch the cat.”
“Honey, what in the world are you planning to do?”
Sarah frowned. Strands of butterscotch blonde hair
framed her face attractively.
He looked at her then. “This is a birch tree, Sarah.
And birch trees bend.”
Oh, boy, Sarah thought as she jogged toward the garage.
I guess he told me. This is a birch tree, Sarah, like
you’d speak to a child or an idiot. And just like Tom to
give orders without explanations. I’ll give him a
son-of-a-bitching order of my own when I get the chance,
but for right now, in an emergency, I’ll let it pass.
An old ache touched her heart then, as she thought of
her earlier life, the years before Tom, before she gave
up freedom and career for the love of a man, like an
innocent young girl in an old “B” movie, and moved back
east from Phoenix here to Dunkirk, where everybody knows
everybody else – from their love lives to their shopping
habits – too well.
Management fast track at Motorola. Gone in a flash! It
had been so tough getting hired in the first place and
so tough getting promoted. This marriage I’ll make work,
though, she vowed, remembering that wonderful terrible
rebellious delicious frightening earlier marriage at age
nineteen that soared and crashed and left her shattered.
This one I’ll make work, she said to herself as she
entered the garage.
Moments later Tom tied the rusty claw hammer Sarah had
brought to one end of a fifty-foot length of ancient
clothesline. He stared up at the half-grown
black-and-white kitten clinging terrified to the tree
limb twenty feet overhead, slacked out the line, picked
up the hammer, and swung it back and forth, testing its
heft, getting his rhythm. Then he hurled the hammer
skyward in a sure, steep trajectory and watched it soar
over the tree limb, wrap around twice, and tangle in the
lesser branches. Tom pulled the clothesline taut and
tested its strength. The birch limb swayed up and down
at his command.
“That should do it,” he said.
“Honey, do you really think this will work?” Sarah
couldn’t help hoping a little, despite his track record.
Like all of his plans, this one looked good at first.
But something always went wrong. The man was jinxed.
Hand over hand and slowly, Tom gathered in the
clothesline. The limb bent lower and soon the cat was
only ten feet from reach. Then five.
“Come to Mama, Tucker. We’ll save you, kitty,” Sarah
called as she stretched her arms up toward cat and tree
branch.
Suddenly the old clothesline snapped, and the powerful
birch limb swung back violently and flung the little cat
upward and outward over the crown of the tree. Tom and
Sarah watched in horror as their pet kitten soared over
rooftops, shrank smaller in the distance, and
disappeared into suburban neighborhood.
They stood in shock for several seconds, gazing at the
empty tree and empty sky. Sarah felt amazed, awed,
furious, disbelieving, and helpless all at once. She
stifled an urge to grab her husband by the neck and
choke him and scream at him, and instead dashed off in
the direction the cat had been thrown, calling out
Tucker’s name again and again in desperation. Tom
followed in thin-lipped silence.
The rest of that Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday,
the Darrells spent cat-calling along neighborhood
sidewalks, tacking posters on telephone poles, placing
an ad in the local “Shopper,” and calling friends and
neighbors, but no Tucker appeared. Sunday evening they
pronounced the cat lost, probably dead.
Sarah cried and worried and raged for four days,
fighting grief over the death of the kitten and anger at
Tom. It was not so much his faults, his dangerous
sometime stupidity that made her hate him a little in
spite of her love. It was his guilt. His silence and
hangdog guilt.
This incident was just one of a hundred small grudges
that could add up to marital rift over the long haul, or
be forgiven, forgotten, assimilated into understanding
and love. She tried to put it behind her, to busy
herself with paying bills, cleaning house, doing
banking, planning investments, preparing meals, reading,
writing letters, forgiving a husband.
Tuesday afternoon Sarah was doing her regular grocery
shopping when she noticed old Mrs. Weisenflugh, her
eccentric neighbor from three doors down, in the pet
food section, comparing prices between Friskies Cat Chow
and Purina.
“Mrs. Weisenflugh,” Sarah ventured as she pushed her
shopping cart alongside the old woman’s. “I didn’t know
you had a cat.”
“Oh, hello, Deary,” Mrs. Weisenflugh said, and smiled
her strange, long-toothed smile. “Oh my, no. Henry does.
For the next three days, anyway. How are you, Deary? You
haven’t gained a pound or two, have you? Such a lovely
girl, and you must be thirty by now.”
“Twenty-eight,” Sarah corrected, biting her lip. “About
the cat, Mrs. Weisenflugh. You say it’s your husband’s?”
“Oh my, yes, Deary. I’m so thrilled! After all these
years. We’re going up to Polk State Hospital on Friday,
between you and me and no one else, of course. I’ve
talked and talked and talked to him about the evils of
alcohol. And now he’s finally taking the cure!”
“And the cat?”
“Oh yes! The cat! In a way it’s all because of that
silly cat. You know how Henry sits out in the sun for
hours, cocktail glass in hand, he says ‘communing with
nature,’ ‘waiting for a sign,’ a sign from who to do
what, I’ll never know.”
Sarah nodded. Okay, lady, she thought. Okay, okay. So
what?
“Well, last Saturday he’s out there sunning himself and
working on his third vodka tonic. I’m inside doing
laundry and such. All of a sudden I hear Henry yelling
for me at the top of his lungs. I run out there
absolutely scared to death. You know about Henry’s heart
condition, I’m sure. I’m thinking, oh, this is the big
one, my poor husband, and did I remember to pay that
last life insurance premium? So I race out back and
there he sits with a stupid little black-and-white cat
on his lap. Can you believe it? ‘Where on earth did that
come from?’ I ask. And you’ll never believe what he
answers.”
“Try me,” Sarah whispered, barely able to speak at all.
“Well, he sits there with his eyes all wide open and
wet and shining from, y’know, the drinking, and points
up in the air. ‘I swear to God, Julia,’ he says. ‘This
cat came right out of the sky!’ What’s the matter, Deary?
You look a little flushed. Are you all right?”
Sarah nodded, speechless.
“So he says it’s some kind of sign and I say it’s a
sign to stop drinking, if you ask me. And can you
believe it? He agrees with me. ‘Apollo,’ he says –
that’s what he named the cat – ‘Apollo, you’re a sign
from heaven. You’re a miracle. I’ll never drink again.’
But now I have no idea what to do with the silly thing.
I mean, y’know, after Henry goes up to Polk.”
“We’ll take it,” Sarah said. “Tom and I. We’re planning
children some day, but for now, we’d really like to have
a cat. Really.”
“You shouldn’t put off starting a family, Deary. Some
day you’ll wake up and it’ll be too late. A woman almost
thirty.”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Whatever. If you’re sure you’ll take the cat, I don’t
know if I should bother buying cat food, then, for just
the three days. We’ve been feeding him table scraps up
till now.”
“I’ll pay for it,” Sarah said.
“Would you, Deary? That’s a nice gesture. Of course
it’s only right, since it’ll be your cat, y’know.”
“No problem, Mrs. Weisenflugh,” Sarah said. “No problem
at all. Let’s see if I can pick out a brand he might
like.”
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