C: Lucky's Kittens

Chapter: Kid, Lucky's Kittens

Lucky is pregnant, something we've known for a while since her belly
started swinging heavy and low. Lucky moves from place to place around
the apartment. We find her under the couch or behind the curtains.
Sometimes she pants, like a dog, her small pink tongue sticking out and
her eyes closed. She hisses if we touch her.

Lucky is our cat's daughter. Our cat has had so many babies that we are
used to the way Lucky acts. Any time now we expect to find Lucky in the
bathtub, or in the closet, squeezing out some slimy new kittens. We'll
pack these kittens in a box and hold them on our lap while my mother
drives us to the pound, but we don't about that. The people at the
pound always raise their eyebrows when we tell them we found the
kittens. I wish there was more than one pound.

Lucky herself is one of the two kittens our cat had. She is small, like
her mother, with gray and white stripes and tiny black paws. Her eyes
are surrounded by black fur, and she is noisy, meowing in the middle of
the night or when she's hungry. She never goes outside, so we wonder
how she's pregnant. I am suspicious of Spunky, the boy kitten we kept
and who's all grown up now. He walks around the apartment and pees on
the furniture while his big balls stick straight out. My sister gets
mad when I say Spunky is the father.

"Who let her out?" my sister asked.

"Not me," I said.

I find the first of Lucky's kittens one day when I come home from
school. It's tiny, and white, and at first I think it's a mouse. I look
closer, and see the little claws and ears. Its ears don't stick up,
laying against its sticky white fur. It's not dead, but breathing, its
stomach moving up and down in jerks. I push it with my finger and I can
feel the carpet sticking to its fur as it moves. It doesn't meow or
cry.

I look for Lucky, who I'm sure has dropped this kitten by mistake. I go
through the closets one by one, and into the bathroom at the back of
the apartment that never gets used except to store boxes. I find Lucky
under my big sister's bed. She's on her side, and raises her head to
look at me when I crouch down to look at her. Her eyes glow green
before her head falls back onto the carpet. I'm not sure what to
do.

There's a knock on the front door. I jump over the kitten in the living
room and answer it. It's B.J., who wants to go swimming. B.J. isn't
particular in his friendship with my big sister and me. He's as many
years younger than my sister as he is older than me. He has blond hair
and no freckles, the way I would like to look. His mother sits all day
in a wheelchair, reading the Bible and smoking long cigarettes. I'm
glad he is here.

"Lucky's having her kittens," say, "And there's something wrong."

"Lucky's having kittens?" B.J. comes into the apartment, and sees the
first kitten. It's still breathing. He gets down on all fours to look,
his rear end sticking up in the air. "Yuck," he says, and blows on the
kitten. One of the kitten's paws raises up, and then falls back down on
the carpet.

"What should we do?" I ask. I'm hoping B.J. will take over, make a
plan. I wish my big sister would come home, so she could take care of
Lucky.

"I don't know," B.J. says, "Where's Lucky?"

"Under the bed," I say. I take his hand and lead him into my sister's
bedroom. B.J.'s hand is warm. He doesn't pull it away. When we get to
the bedroom door, Lucky runs past us, her head low and her tail
sticking straight up. I drop B.J.'s hand when I see another white
kitten sticking out of Lucky's behind, the rear legs dangling as she
runs behind the curtains in the living room. B.J. looks afraid, his
mouth open like he's seen a monster.

"See? There's something wrong," I say, looking up. B.J. is almost a
head taller than I am, and he's chewing his lip. He still has his pool
towel over one shoulder, covering part of his bare chest. One of his
hands tugs at the towel.

"Where's your mom?" he asks.

I shrug. "Who knows?"

"When's she supposed to get home?" I shrug again. B.J. keeps staring
after Lucky. I feel like crying, but stop myself. I don't want to make
B.J. leave.

"Maybe we should go outside, to the pool or something," I say, but
B.J.'s face has changed. I turn to look. Lucky has dropped another
kitten, and is moving fast along the wall. She runs behind us and heads
back into the hallway.

This new kitten is breathing, and squirming more than the first one. It
has a fine line of gray fur down its back. Its lip curls up, showing a
row of tiny sharp teeth, and its eyes bulge against the skin covering
them.

"We should move them," B.J. says, "Maybe put them together. I bet
they're cold."

"Do you think they'll live?" I ask. I'm stalling, because I don't want
to move the kittens. I don't want to touch them.

"I don't think so," B.J. answers, "They're too little, like they
weren't ready to come out." He kneels over the second kitten, running
his finger down its back. His knee is right over the kitten's head. I
step back so I don't bump him.

B.J. tells me to get something to wrap the kitten in. I find a kitchen
towel in the laundry basket, still wet but pretty clean, I think. I
hold it up to my nose and it smells like mildew. B.J. wraps the kitten
in it slowly, then stands up.

"Where?" he asks. He holds the kitten away from him, in one hand, its
nose sticking out from under the towel.

"There's a shelf in my closet," I say. It's the first place that comes
to mind. It's also the only place I can think of that's not full of old
toys or shoes or wadded up clothes. I've been using the shelf to draw
on. It's close to the ground, almost like a little desk when I sit on
my bedroom floor facing the closet.

B.J. heads towards my room, going around the first kitten. He calls for
Lucky but she's disappeared again, probably under my big sister's bed.
In my bedroom, he sets the kitten down on the shelf, pulling the towel
away too fast. The kitten rolls a bit, its head making a hollow thud on
the wood shelf. B.J. freezes, and I turn away, wanting to throw up.
B.J. tells me it's still breathing.

He heads back out into the living room to get the first kitten. When he
reaches down to pick it up, it makes a ripping sound as it comes off
the carpet. B.J. doesn't seem to notice the sound, but it sends me back
into the hallway, my hands over my ears. B.J. adds the kitten to the
shelf, being more careful this time so that it doesn't thump on the
wood.

In my big sister's room we look under the bed. Lucky is there, but this
time she doesn't lift up her head. I can see another small white mound
behind her, and the dark roll of her straining stomach. B.J. reaches
under the bed and pulls out the third kitten, and it occurs to me that
there may be more than three. Maybe there are more of these half-dead
kittens all over the apartment, behind curtains and under beds. Maybe
Lucky will spent the morning dropping kittens wherever they happened to
come out. I will have to look for them later, I think, because these
are not the kind of kittens I want surprising me. I follow B.J. back
into my bedroom, where he lines all three of the kitten up neatly, in a
row. He makes sure they touch one another.

"Should I cover them up?" I ask.

"Let's wait and see how many she has," B.J. says. He sits on the edge
of my bed, the bed that's always made because I never use it. He takes
his pool towel off his shoulder and puts it beside him. I consider
sitting down next to him, but decide against it. I don't want him to
leave. When he lays back on the bed, his hands behind his head, I sit
on the floor and stare at the kittens, making myself not look at the
skin under his arms, which is smooth and lighter than the rest of
him.

Later we find one more kitten. Lucky has stayed under the bed, and her
stomach doesn't roll as much. Instead it moves up and down while her
front claws dig into the carpet. She meows when B.J. takes the fourth
kitten away from her, which we add to the row on my shelf. I cover them
with a pair of shorts I find stuffed into the back of the closet,
keeping their heads free. The fabric moves as they breathe.

"There's nothing else we can do," B.J. says. He puts his hand on my
shoulder and pulls me back. He reaches down and clears off the back of
the shelf holding the kittens.

"This way," he says, "Lucky can come up and feed them if she feels like
it."

I try to picture Lucky climbing onto the shelf, lying down and letting
the kittens eat, but I'm not convinced. The rubbery, unformed legs of
these kittens are nothing like the legs on Missy's kittens, which are
strong enough to let them crawl and push their way to Missy's stomach
and the row of nipples there.

"Should we check on Lucky?" I ask.

"Let her rest," B.J. answers. We go back into the living room, where I
look around for more of the kittens, but so far I don't see any. More
than anything I want to leave the apartment. B.J. must feel the same
way, because he says we should go swimming, and come back later to
check on Lucky and the kittens. He says something about God's hands,
but I don't know what he means. B.J. says things from the Bible all the
time, because his mother makes him read it. Also I think he believes in
God.

When I come home, my big sister is there, in her room and on her bed.
I'm alone, because B.J.'s mother told him he had to be home by a
certain time, and he always listens to her, no matter what. My sister
doesn't know about Lucky, and when I tell her she jumps off her bed and
backs up next to me in the hallway. I tell her again, because I'm tired
and scared of what I'm going to find on my closet shelf. I want my
sister to take her turn watching after Lucky and the kittens. But she
stays put.

"Did she die?" my sister asks.

"I don't know. You should look."

I'm surprised when my sister gets down and looks under her bed. I know
she can't see anything at first, because it's dark, but then she starts
saying "Lucky" over and over again, in the same voice she uses when she
feeds the cats or wants them to come to her room. My sister reaches
under the bed, but pulls her hand back out so fast that I know she'll
have rug burn on her arm later. She stands up and runs past me, into my
bedroom, where the kittens are.

They are all dead. The shorts covering them doesn't move, and somehow
they have moved apart from each other, the neat row B.J. made all gone.
My sister pulls the shorts off the kittens and pokes each one with her
finger. They don't move, and for the first time I see the tiny cords
coming out of their stomachs, shriveled and twisted, and I wonder if
cats have belly buttons like people do.

My sister doesn't cry. She doesn't yell and scream, either. Instead she
gets one of the black plastic garbage bags out from under the sink,
brings it back to my room, and we put the kittens into one by one,
being careful that they don't lay on top of each other.

My sister pulls Lucky out from under her bed. I don't know how she does
it, because I refuse to go into her bedroom while she does. From the
hallway, where I'm standing with the garbage bag, I can hear Lucky's
claws tearing on the carpet. It almost sounds like Lucky is just in the
living room, sharpening her claws on the couch, putting more rips into
the fabric while we shout and try to get her to stop. But Lucky would
never stop, not until we went into the living room. Then she'd look at
us, her ears back and her eyes wild, taking off when we chased
her.

Lucky goes into the garbage bag along with her kittens. My sister has
wrapped Lucky in a towel. She's just a shape under the cloth, but still
I'm glad when my sister knots up the bag, tying the top over and over,
until the bag becomes a little plastic sack that could be holding
anything. We take it outside, where we take turns digging in the patch
of dirt outside our front door. We don't have a shovel, but get the
dirt loosened up with a spoon, and then move the dirt with our hands.
When the hole is big enough, we put the bag in and cover it up. There's
hardly a mound by the time we finish. It almosts looks like nothing was
buried there, nothing at all.