Cedric stood alone before a display of hardcover books. Each bore a cropped image of a marble face, eyes averted and hair unkempt. It was all Greek to him.
He picked up a book and skimmed the inside of the jacket. The table from which it had come bore a folded piece of cardstock with large text: “Staff Picks”. The book had just been distributed into the library’s collection.
The voice of a middle-aged woman suddenly rose from behind him as he found himself absorbed by the summary. He leapt in his shoes, caught completely off-guard.
“Secret History? New release; big deal.”
Cedric turned around to face her and nearly dropped the book.
“Oh, I was just having a look,” he said, feeling sheepish.
She smiled disarmingly. “Looks like an interesting read. I saw the review in the Times. Are you going to pick it up?”
Cedric placed the book back on the table. “Maybe next, I dunno. I’m in the middle of one of Dickens’ right now.”
The librarian softened her face, smiling, condescending. “That might take you a while.”
Cedric pursed his lips.
“You know, I see you here a lot. Why don’t you have a library card? You could take the book home with you.”
Cedric felt a little exposed. “I’m just renting a room right now. I don’t have any paperwork.”
“You’ve been coming here for months,” she reasoned. “I see you here near every day.”
Cedric was not entirely comfortable knowing he had been observed.
“Why don’t I sign you up for a temporary card until you get settled? It’s a quick form and ten bucks. You get your money back in thirty days. Maybe you can get your landlord to write you a letter for a real card by then. That’s all we’d need.”
Cedric looked down at the figure on the cover, pale olive on black, and then back to the librarian.
“You can tell me what you think of the book. It’s a thriller. Should leave you on the edge of your seat.”
‘Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five—’
Cedric counted the bills from the register with careful precision. This was the second time he had gone through this pile. He had no intention of making an error in his tally.
Raindrops clattered angrily against the windows. It had not been like this earlier in the day, before the night had fallen. There had been hints of grey in the sky, but he hadn’t made preparations. With no raincoat waiting for him in the back room, he’d gambled, and lost.
His manager walked over with that characteristic swagger and threatened to slash his focus. “Hey Ced, you done yet?”
‘Forty, sixty, eighty—’
“It’s raining cats and dogs out there. You bring an umbrella?”
‘Fifty… One-hundred—’
Cedric finished the count and wrote the totals on a piece of paper. “No, I forgot my coat.”
“Sucks. Me too.” He leaned on the edge of the belt, glimpsing Cedric’s notes beneath the point of sale.
“You wanna shoot some pool at Eight Ball until the rain lets up? I can’t let you walk back in this. Nasty out there.” Zed looked with disdain at dark windows at the front of the store. “I’ll buy you a beer.”
Cedric did not particularly want to go out tonight. He would get rained on no matter which direction he walked, and he had only read a few chapters of his new book, now sitting on the bedside table in his room. He was anxious to continue his progress.
And he didn’t like beer.
But he worked with Zed, and he wasn’t sure there was any getting out of this.
“Yeah, sure.”
Cedric was pretty good at pool. He had only been to the billiard hall on a handful of occasions but the few times he’d played, he had discovered he had a bit of a knack for the game. He liked the simplicity of the strategy, and felt pleased when the geometry of the next shot flashed in his mind like electrons across wire. The only trouble came when his body wouldn’t listen to what he was trying to tell it to do. But he figured with a little practice, he would be able to propel the ball exactly as he intended.
As the alcohol began to flow through his body, Cedric felt the chill he’d gathered from walking through the cold rain begin to dissipate. His nerves deadened just enough to permit the cue to flow more as a veritable extension of his will than a stick shoddily attached to his hand. His opponent was laid plain on the table, and all he had to do was take the next shot.
“You’re a natural, Ced,” his boss admitted, somewhere between truth and abject flattery. “I don’t think I can win this one.”
“Seven ball. Corner pocket.”
Cedric leaned forward and sent the cue ball to ricochet off the rail, striking his called shot, and netting him one more point.
Zed made a gesture to wipe imaginary sweat from his brow. “Phew, kid. Glad we’re only going to thirty. You play a lot where you come from?”
Cedric brought the cue over the table and took aim. “Couple times.”
This time, he missed.
“Couple times my foot,” Zed remarked, and then called out. “Mark, get my buddy another beer!”
Cedric wasn’t sure he wanted another beer. He wanted to win.
“So, Cedric—” Zed moved over toward him. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”
Cedric was chalking his cue, impatient for play to return to his side.
“Listen, you know you deserve a raise. I know you deserve a raise. And you haven’t said anything ‘cause that’s the kind of guy you are but it hasn’t gone unnoticed.”
Cedric set the blue cube on the edge of the table.
“Problem is bossman doesn’t have the cash flow. Store isn’t doing great and they’re not giving anyone more money right now. You, me, no one. I mean, writing’s on the wall as far as our jobs, but you didn’t hear it from me. We just can’t compete with the big guys.”
The barkeep brought over a new pint, golden-yellow, with a head of white foam inside the rim of the glass. He set it on a table forming a barrier between the pair and the next group over.
Cedric, gaze floating over the offering, thought one of the men in the bar was eyeing Zed anxiously, and he kept him within his peripheral vision.
“You deserve more’n you’re getting, Ced. You work like mad, you pick up everyone’s slack. Someone calls out; you’re there. And you’re a good guy. I like you. I want you to know that.”
Cedric continued to watch the man twitch.
“I wanna help out in any way I can. I know you’re trying to get your own place and I get that. I want to help,” he continued. “I hope you don’t think of me as just some guy you work with. ‘Cause I wanna help. I wanna be your friend. Friends help friends. That’s what friends do.”
Cedric wasn’t completely sure what Zed was going on about, his focus turned toward the somewhat emaciated man approaching the two of them.
Zed, finally noticing that someone was trying to get his attention, rolled his eyes. Forced into action, he turned toward the interloper less in genuine interest than in an attempt to return command of the conversation to himself.
“I’m off-the-clock. Go talk to Bruce,” Zed said, voice lowered, looking toward nowhere in particular. A hint of aggression lay beneath his measured response.
But the man continued to press in. “Butch don’t like me. I just need a twenty. Got it right here. Right here.” He patted his chest.
Cedric had difficulty looking at the man while he stood positioned uncomfortably close to them, scratching his skin.
“Don’t know what the fuck you’re talkin’ about, man.”
“Aw, Zed, don’t be like that. I just need—” he removed a crumpled bill from his pocket.
Zed rose his voice. “You don’t need nothin’. You need to chill the fuck out. I don’t want your fuckin’ money.”
The man hesitated for a moment, hoping Zed would reconsider, and then crushed the bill messily within his fist and slumped back in shame. He turned over his shoulder for a last desperate glance as he shuffled to the other side of the room.
The other men in the room continued to play, the clatter of their shot echoing off the low walls.
As they were soon left alone, Zed turned to Cedric with a look of disgust. “Some people…” he said, trying to elicit sympathy.
“Some people just want to kick a dead horse. Won’t let you change who you are. Just want to keep you living in the past.”
Cedric watched the jittery man slink out the door, dejected in the falling rain, and thoughts surfaced that he would rather have left shelved.
“—Sleeping dogs lie,” he said, the butchered idiom forming the first words that came to mind.
“Exactly,” Zed affirmed. “Anyway.”
Cedric glanced sideways at the green felt and tried to decide upon his next approach, but his brain felt hazy and the colors seemed to swirl, so he blinked and tried to regain a crisp perspective.
“I was wondering if you’d be able to do me a solid. I gotta work next couple days but I know you got Wednesday Thursday off. You wanna run a little package down to the city for me? You can meet my friend. It’s always good to know people, ‘specially when you’re trying to get established. I’ll make it worth your while. You scratch my back, I scratch yours sorta deal.”
Cedric realized Zed had no interest in billiards. He had suspected that all along, but he’d let himself get lost in the game. He’d been enjoying himself. He’d forgotten.
“Two hundred,” Zed bargained, sensing Cedric’s reluctance. “Seventy-five for the road, rest when you get back.”
Adrenaline surged as the numbers hit his consciousness. That was nearly two weeks’ pay — for a day’s work.
Maybe he could finally get his car looked at.
But he hesitated, the interaction between Zed and the hanger-on giving him pause. He had come so far and he knew it could all disintegrate in an instant.
He was standing in a soap bubble, pearlescent and ephemeral. And he didn’t even notice that he was gasping for air.
By the time Cedric left the Eight Ball Billiards & Tap, it had stopped raining, and for that, he was grateful. But he was drunk, very drunk, and though he’d managed for a short time to fly, he was now grounded and unsteady on his feet. He’d stopped having fun at least an hour ago.
The air was cool and pleasant, but it was only background noise as he walked next to the quiet road back to Betty’s house. To make his way under these circumstances was tiring, exhausting. But he knew, despite his muddled thoughts, only time could grant him release from this labor. There was only one way to go.
Cedric had never drank so much alcohol in a single sitting. He’d had a few drinks before he’d left for Newburgh, several times if he’d stopped to recollect. The old guard had been happy to take his money, not giving a damn about what the feds had to say about his age.
‘You can kill a man—’
‘—but you can’t buy a beer.’
Cedric took a left and began walking north in the dim light. He slipped his hand in his pocket and wrapped his fingers around his worn folding knife. The street lamps were dim. He didn’t think anything would happen, but it was what he had. You never knew what people were going to do.
He felt acid well up in his stomach, and he stopped walking for a moment. Bringing his hand off the knife and forming a fist against his breastbone, he struck himself until he felt his innards relent. He did not want to vomit. He brought oxygen into his lungs, and then let out a belch, relieving some of the immediate discomfort in his gut.
He took a breath and continued on.
Sometime after Zed had offered the cash deal to Cedric, the gangly businessman had bought a round of shots for everyone in the bar.
The amber liquid in the tiny glass didn’t fight with daggers of bitter carbonation, and, most importantly, it disappeared just as soon as it had been delivered. Cedric sank a few more balls with ease and for a minute, he was riding high.
He felt good.
This was so unlike how he usually lived. So he didn’t want to stop. He wanted to keep going.
He had another.
The burning taste of booze rose up in his memory, and then it tickled the back of his tongue.
Cedric lurched forward and retched violently onto the sidewalk.
When he stood up, he was able to maintain better posture. But he was still desperate for sleep. But he would not sleep here. He couldn’t.
Cedric raised his eyes as he walked forward, trying to find his balance. Ahead of him, he saw two orbs glowing in the faint moonlight.
They belonged to someone he recognized. But the little thing was standing in harm’s way.
“Nichelle? Why you in the street, you big dummy?” Cedric veered to the right, clumsily squeezed between two parked cars, and ran forward into the roadway, intent on scaring some sense into the cat.
The feline had no fear of Cedric, not since the first day she saw him, but she obeyed and slipped underneath a nearby parked car on the far side, still running away from him.
Cedric walked up against the vehicle and bent over to crane his view beneath the metal body. He tried to find those eyes, but he couldn’t see anything in the shadows.
“Cat?! What are you doing out here? Go home! Get out of here!” Blind, he straightened his spine again, feeling somewhat disoriented from having whipped his head downward.
Over the roof of the car, he saw a bit of fur jet diagonally away from him, again into the road. This road, however, set perpendicular from the one he’d crossed, formed the barrier between he himself and the graveyard.
“Cat?” Cedric thoughtlessly followed. “Cat, you’re gonna get run over, stupid cat!”
He crossed the street and looked around until he saw Nichelle looking back at him.
“What’re you doing, cat?”
Nichelle broke eye contact and darted between the iron fenceposts.
Cedric paused, looking left, then right, and he followed.
He was in the cemetery now, and he felt dizzy. The grass was damp and he felt moisture seep cold through the holes in the bottom of his shoes. His socks had dried in the pool hall, but again they became drenched.
The cat rubbed against a crooked headstone and looked back at him, gaze reflecting a bit of light.
Cedric felt tired, his focus faltered, and he knelt, then sat down in the moist grass. He had reached his limit. Maybe, he wasn’t sure, he closed his eyes and let his mind wander where it would.
It was summer, he thought, late summer. Maybe it was fall now, in the graveyard wet with rain, but it hadn’t been fall then, in the memory that rose before him.
It was summer.
His mother had sent him away to camp. Cedric did not much like this summer camp. He had been before. Yes, it was only fifty dollars, and a bargain at that. For fifty dollars, he would hear the gospel. For fifty bucks, he’d be out of her hair for a couple of days. Fifty bucks? The way he ate, you could hardly feed him for that much.
The divine, turned man, who had died for their sins. Now he knew that name, and had been liberated from ignorance. Now he would know why the people counted the years since the death. And if he chose to refuse the gift, that was on him.
He must have been eight that summer. Or was he nine? He couldn’t have been ten, could he?
Cedric wasn’t sure anymore.
But he was sure it had been a terrible summer. He’d hated camp. The food had been terrible; they’d served — what the fuck kind of food was liver and onions — but worse than that he’d slept terribly every night. Every night he went to bed exhausted and every morning he woke up exhausted. There was no room for dream here. He’d had the top bunk and it was awful with the suspicion that the ceiling would crush him dead. But then, perhaps it was better than to be suffocated by the mattress above.
Something about a rock and hard place.
And he’d had a terrible revelation in the lukewarm shower one morning, something that had struck his mind like lightning and left the smell of pitch —
‘Jesus’ wasn’t real. He couldn’t be real. Something about conflicting timelines, dinosaurs, whatever it was —
The Bible was inconsistent with reality. The words didn’t agree with what he could pull out of the ground. The evidence was there, if they’d only see it. Noah’s boat couldn’t float, much less house the whole kit and kaboodle.
Or maybe he’d thought something like that, he wasn’t even sure.
But he hadn’t wanted to go away to camp that year. He had wanted to stay home. He had begged, he had pleaded, practically on hands and knees —
But Mother hadn’t let him.
And why would she have?
Just several weeks prior, Cedric had discovered a lone kitten underneath his mother’s car.
Little Cedric, as he wasn’t then known, had been playing outside, minding his own business, when he’d heard the little sound. A tiny cry that would have been easy to miss, easy to forget, easy to ignore.
When he’d looked underneath the car, he’d seen the creature. Mottled, with fur missing in spots. Tiny eyes, tiny nose, tiny ears. Mew, mew, mew, it had called to anyone who might hear. Its tongue, pink, and those milk teeth, not yet big enough to find prey. Or maybe it had never been taught.
Cedric had gone, without permission, and retrieved a can of tuna from the cabinet. Yes, perhaps Mother would notice the absence when she went to fix the casserole, she had a knack for counting things, and that knowledge nagged at him, screamed at him, foretelling what was to come…
But Cedric, little Cedric —
He thought of the cat.
He peeled open the can and dumped the contents out on a plate; every last morsel.
He took it out of doors, a flagrant disobedience if he thought to hesitate, and set the offering at the edge of the car’s shadow.
And he waited.
The little cat had not come out immediately. But Cedric had waited.
Cedric opened his eyes and looked at Nichelle. His head spun and he wondered why she was here. He wondered why he was here, and his clothes were seeped with the rain’s leavings.
But he would not move.
He was drunk, he realized, but not nearly drunk enough to wander into these thoughts. These old places were covered in dust so that he could keep his eyes on the road.
‘Let bygones be bygones,’ he remembered someone saying.
But here he was, wet on the grass, digging up things that were meant to stay covered by the sands of time.
But sand will move. Wind, rain, even by fistful if one had patience: the patience to find the thing that had been buried.
The little cat, not Nichelle, no, certainly not Nichelle, but that little grey cat with the fur missing in spots —
He’d called him Bamm-Bamm. This wasn’t the name the mama cat had given him, but it would have to do.
And he’d fed him tuna water, drawing him in until his own human mother thought to notice.
She wasn’t stupid.
She’d been steely about the matter of the cat, doling out words like precious currency, as was her usual demeanor. Sometimes, not realizing his custom, he was entirely happy when nothing was said at all. Perhaps the silence hurt less than the alternative. He could dwell in his imagination, as technicolor as it was, rather than know he’d committed sin.
“The filthy thing stays outside.”
And he had rejoiced. Cedric had never had a gerbil in a cage, nor a turtle, no, and certainly never a dog, they were a fuss, they made a mess, they needed bathing and most importantly —
They all cost money.
The boy he was then was entirely reliant on his mother’s charity for his well-being. For this, he would eternally be in her debt, a debt he could never hope to repay. That was the price he paid for his birthday each year.
Cedric did not often raise complaint. Not only was it untoward, it was simply ineffective. It was a far better thing to, as he had heard them say —
‘Just grin and bear it.’
But something had possessed him the next day. After sorting through what she’d brought back from the store, a fire had been sparked within him and words rose to his mouth as if placed there by the gods.
“Mom, you didn’t buy kitten food. He’s… just a kitten.”
She didn’t look at him. One might think that was damnation, but, to the contrary, they rarely did use their eyes to see each other. That was their habit. And when she did raise her pupils, the blackness between them so plain, it pierced his little soul like ice.
“Kitten food, cat food — it’s all the same shit.”
Despite sitting, Cedric was beginning to feel dizzy again. He’d immediately felt relief after emptying his stomach, but the rest of the poison had long since absorbed into his veins. There was nothing left to do but wait for his body to expel the biproducts.
He eyed Nichelle, sitting beside a worn tombstone, and then the cat slipped away, out of his sight. Cedric, with no energy to follow, stretched his legs out and reclined, laying on his back on the ground. He felt exposed, vulnerable, to lay in such a way, but he was desperate for the whirling to fade.
There was a generous handful of stars sprinkled in the sky now, each getting their moment to scintillate before being obscured by a passing cloud. Cedric had always loved the sky, and yet, he’d be hard-pressed to name a figure beside Orion or Polaris.
But that didn’t keep him from looking.
Cedric was still looking at the stars when he saw something he had never seen before, flashing before his eyes like a film.
He was too old now to be banished to the kennel. In here, the present, he was in the house, watching that woman he had known for nineteen long years.
She opened the door to the house, letting the cat come through the door, luring the little thing by way of its desperate hunger.
But as Cedric watched, a pit grew at the bottom of his stomach. He knew how this one ended.
When he’d come back from camp days later, she’d answered his inquiries about the cat with three small lies:
“It ran away.”
Tears welling up in his eyes, he’d believed her. And after days turned into weeks that his offerings of food went undisturbed, he’d lost hope and believed her all the more, ignorant of any other possibility.
He laid there, some ten years later, sheltered beneath a blanket of stars, drunk upon a damp grassy carpet of the deceased. In his tilted condition, he caught a glimpse of their wisdom, watching his innocence shatter like thrown porcelain.
The woman picked the kitten up off the linoleum floor, digging her nails into the scruff of the cat’s neck. He cried out for her mercy, but she would not grant it.
Their squeals displeased her immensely.
So she shut the door and it never opened again.