The Captive (15 page)

It is uncomfortable bringing Barry to mind now when the world is so simple and direct. I tingle with his discomfort, even though at this moment he is asleep, gone inside as if he had never been, exhausted with his human living and responsibilities. He wanted it all, fought and almost died for it too. Now I think, poor Barry, and roll over to my stomach,  pushing him out of my mind. I feel the light breeze pulsing over my back fur, making it erect with pleasure, and from the corner of my eye I catch the tiny flicker of the beacon at the Albuquerque airport, far down and away to my left. But the spell is broken. Barry has spoiled another evening with his worries that carry over into my own life. Perhaps he is too much trouble, should be put aside as a bad job, for my life begins to seem no more than an occasional relief building itself in the nightly blanks of Barry's tight little existence.

But I cannot leave him and the Family that way. There is more that I must learn from them, even from the anxious husband that Barry has turned out to be. There is much love here that I savor like a new wine. I have time. I rise and stretch luxuriously, being careful not to put my behind into a cholla cactus, and turn to trot in the direction of our home in the valley.

I approach our house from the river side of the conservancy  ditch, as usual, the safest route, almost covered by willows and brush. I leap the width of the ditch and scramble down the other side into the shadow of the big cottonwood beside Renee's garden. The rows of carrots and lettuce and beets are irregular masses of dark green on the mounds  between the irrigation channels. I wait a moment, feeling about for Barry so I can shift before going in through the latticed patio doors, but he is far down, so much asleep in himself that he is almost hibernating. I decide to enter the house and let the place itself bring him to the surface rather than my having to force him awake. I take one step away from the shadow of the tree and freeze as a child's high pitched whisper says, "I see you, Big Pussy Cat."

I extend my spatial sense and feel her vibrations from the shadowed edge of the front porch. She is curled in the long porch swing, one little arm over the back of the swing, her chin resting on her elbow, very calm. I think of shifting, but she has already seen me. She must have terrific eyes to see in this deep shadow under the tree and make out my shape so well. I stand very still, thinking what possibilities there are, and strangely it does not seem threatening. I feel  incongruously comfortable, as if she is no danger. She is part of my family, after all. But I do not think she has ever seen me before. She is getting out of the swing and coming around and down the porch steps.

"You don't have to be afraid," Mina says, walking across the sparse, dry grass of the side yard. "I know who you are, really, and I'm going to be your friend."

I relax enough to draw back my foot and sit down on my haunches.

"I bet you can talk too," the slender little seven year old says, coming quite close and looking at me with her head tilted, Her eyes appear to glow in the darkness, and for a moment I find myself looking into those eyes as if they  belonged to someone else in some different world, not to Barry's little step-daughter. They sparkle as in a dream I once had, almost lulling in their intensity, more than a child's eyes. I flinch as she speaks, as if I had almost been asleep.

"I'm going to be your friend, and you can be my friend, 'cause I don't have any really truly friends on this street, except at school and that's out now, and Benny Ochoa is just a Mexican."

It must be Barry who answered now before I can speak. "You shouldn't call Benny a Mexican. He's an American too."

"I don't want you to be a daddy now, I mean my  step-daddy. I want you to be my Big Smart Pussy Cat," she says, stepping closer and putting her little hand on my head as she might stroke a cat or dog.

What would your mother say if she knew you were out in the yard so late at night?
I feel rather stupid sitting there, my eye level just at the child's, her hand stroking my head, but what does one say?

"She won't wake up," Mina says confidently. "You're partly my step-daddy, aren't you?"

We are really quite separate
, I begin, wondering how she knows this, how to be clear with her, how to prevent her from telling her mother - or anyone else - and how to continue  to be myself in this increasingly difficult position. I still do not feel threatened, but somehow very comfortable with the child's hand on my head. If I were not so placid at this point I would be astounded that the little girl can be so brave, and I so strangely quiescent.

"Well I know he's not in Mommy's room in bed, and every time he's not there, I see you out here." She giggled and tapped my muzzle with one little index finger. "Have you swallowed my step-daddy, you big bad pussy cat?"

I cannot keep from laughing. The child is wonderful.
That's not the way it is, Mina
, I say.
Your daddy is just fine, and he was asleep until you came out.

"Don't be him yet," she says thoughtfully, running her hand down my long, sloping back. I see her shiver under the light cotton nightgown.

"I want a ride."

I beg your pardon?

"Ride me on your back, just around the yard and through the trees." And she tries to climb onto my back. "C'mon, be my horse or I'll tell Mommy about you."

It's funny, and I find myself giggling as I get to my feet and bend down like a camel so she can straddle my back. She is light and feels very much in place behind my shoulders  as I begin trotting about through the dark trees, onto the brilliant moon-splashed grass and back to the blackness under the cottonwoods and the oleanders, and she hangs on with one small fist full of fur on each side of my neck. I am strangely elated as she rides, and I sense her joy melting through me, the dream joy of riding in the moonlight on one's own private tiger, or bear, or whatever that large golden beast might be, but now she leans forward as the beast moves into a low gallop, her bare little toes curled under my ribs in almost a natural saddle so she can hang on as I race up the ditch bank on a slant and leap across the water in the ditch, our reflection appearing and disappearing underneath us like an apparition from fairyland, and she squeals with delight as she bounces in spite of her holding tight with all her hands and feet, and I hear her breath in my ear as it catches and then releases when we lope across the moonlit fields, leaving tracks that the farmers will  wonder over in the morning, leaping a low fence, and now her body seeming more like a part of my own, her joy an  extension, an addition to my own, a sharer in my life, this full existence that I had thought could never be shared. I feel no sense that this is little Mina, Barry's step-daughter,  Renee's child, but that here is another consciousness partaking of my life, and the old third rule, "Alone is safe," fades from my mind. I savor the rush of this leaping, ecstatic moment when simply to share with another consciousness the life that has been so private all of my existing time fills the wide limits of the night with a pulsing joy.

We stand panting lightly by the back door under the ivy that covers one side of the old adobe house. I feel  conspiratorial and like a child, Little Robert again, although now I feel a wider happiness than he could know. Mina gives me a last pat and a hug that squeezes my neck.

"Mmmmmm. You know, you ought to brush your teeth," she says into my right ear. "You've got a terrible breath."

Now you know you must never tell anyone about me
, I say to her as seriously as I can.
If you tell, even your mommy, we can never have rides in the moonlight or fun again, and I will have to leave forever.

"Oh, I know that, and you don't have to be so grown up. I know all about that. I wouldn't really tell Mommy," she says, and yawns.

Get in there and back to bed, Mina
, I say, feeling Barry very much awake and wanting to come out.

As she walks into the familiar-smelling darkness of the kitchen, I pull myself into a concentrated point and say the name. I shift.

Barry made sure Mina had gone back to bed and instead of going into the bedroom, he stopped in the kitchen, drew a quart bottle of milk from the refrigerator and sat in the dark drinking from the bottle and considering the days ahead. It was not enough to have taken the job at the
Journal
and to be sending out to the pulps. If
Esquire
would only answer on the Indian proposal he had sent them - but then he was an unknown. Whatever happened on that front, he would have to make another loan, as he called it, before the end of the month, since the checks from the reviewing he had done would not come in for another two weeks and the other money was not enough. He thought abstractedly of the almost comic figure of himself, not a year in the world, pretending to be a name in the writing field, even making some gains already, mostly on the strength of his desperation and violently hard work.

He sat still, listening to the few late frogs finishing their night's stint on the irrigation ditch bank, the night wind  moving the cottonwood twigs against the adobe just over the deep embrasure of the kitchen window. The house was silent,  deep and old and always cool, not like a basement or underground room, but the natural clean coolness that a good adobe house always felt like even in the hottest summer.  I fit in so well here, he thought, it is almost as if I had lived here before. Lies, so many lies, and always the money. I should just go out and rob a bank and get it over with. He took another swig from the bottle, hearing, as he tilted it up a scrape of slipper in the hallway, knowing Renee was standing  there in the dark kitchen door.

"Drinking out of the bottle again," she said softly, shuffling  in to sit beside him. "Do you know what time it is?"

"Huh uh."

"Barry, now don't drink out of the bottle."

"I'm" - gulp - "going to finish it anyway."

"Doesn't matter. What if Mina saw you. How would you like your daughter drinking out of a bottle in public?"

He set the bottle down on the counter with a thump, wheezing out a long breath and feeling his stomach distended with half a quart of milk downed in a single drink. "Wow, there's breakfast," he said.

"Yes. That was the last milk."

"Oh hell, there's more in there."

"We don't need it anyway." She put her arms around his neck and leaned against him. "Why are you up so much at night?"

"The usual. Can't sleep wondering about how to keep the wolf from the door, what to try next, the standard husbandly worries."

"But I've waked up sometimes when you aren't even in the house," she said, trying to be nonchalant but sounding the least bit tense, wondering what indeed her husband could be doing at night if he was not sitting in the kitchen drinking milk.

"Sometimes I walk up the ditch a ways," he said, being calm and not even very concerned about it. There were always excuses, and his conscience was clear, perhaps too clear. He was not worried enough that he could even  understand his wife's feelings at the moment. It did not seem important, for he knew his nights on the mesa or prowling the river bottom in that other form were essentially harmless,  except to the few prey that were captured. It was a constant problem, so old, as old as he was, so often  encountered and so easily dealt with because who would  believe the truth, his saying seriously, "I'm half animal, a sort of werewolf, my dear, have to go out when the moon is up, you know." That wasn't funny at all, he thought. But he had been asleep during most of those excursions, retaining only vague, dreamlike memories of them, and a clear  conscience.

"You aren't even listening to me, Barry," the woman said, her face only a light oval in the darkness.

"Of course I am. I just have this habit now of getting up to walk around to think about things."

"We should talk about it together." Her fingers were tense on his neck, feeling as if she might suddenly grab him or scratch. He felt them suddenly as an irritation, feeling her mood arousing his own nervousness as it always did.

"Now sweetheart, it's nothing to worry about. We're just getting started here. I used to travel all around, not have things like a mortgage and insurance and taxes. I'm just getting used to being a family man, that's all." He knew that sounded bad, as if he were accusing her of tying him down, but he wanted to draw away from the subject of the night walks.

"Barry, it isn't easy for me either, coming all these  thousands of miles to a desert to begin living all over again. No friends or family and no one for neighbors but the, the spics."

"C'mon, that's no way to talk."

"Well, the little Ochoa boy comes over to play with Mina and he steals things, takes her toys and hides them in his shirt and looks up at me with his Indian face and says he hasn't done it, and I can see the thing in his shirt. Now what kind of people are these, these Mexicans?"

"Well, they're not very well off, most of them."

"We're not either."

Money was the sore point with him. He was not insecure about the usual masculinity things, but money made him wince and twist his neck around as if his collar were choking him. He didn't want to get into an argument about money, but he heard himself defending himself again as he always did, as if she had attacked him.

"You know it took everything I had to go to the Midwest last year, and there were enormous hospital bills after that accident." He felt guilty about that because that was another lie. And then he felt the beginnings of rage as he thought of Bill and that night he had wakened in the old Chevy sitting on the blind crossing, feeling around in the whiskey-smelling darkness while his head throbbed with pain, unable to find door handles or window rollers, crawling about in a glass coffin as the train whistle raised in pitch and the light swung through the trees around the bend, stunned and unsure if he were Barry or if the Beast had put Bill in the car to kill him, his own personality wiped almost clean by terror and how it was going to feel to be smashed by the speeding train. The blood suffused his face, and he was glad of the darkness of the kitchen.