Read Online Another Insane Devotion by Peter Trachtenberg - Free Book Online Page A

their bedroom. Unlike the older boy, he didn’t mind being wet. He stood with his towel drooping below his dimpled belly and a puddle of water gathering on the floor between his feet. His denial wasn’t convincing; it held a note of secret pride.
    â€œListen,” I told him. “You don’t pee in the tub, that’s just gross.”
    â€œBut I didn’t pee, man!”
    â€œI’m not saying you did pee. But you don’t do it.” I saw the illogic of this. “You cannot pee in the tub.”

    â€œYou pee, Wilfredo,” Cedric insisted. His disgust, if it had been real to begin with, had given way to triumph. “I saw you pee, man. You nasty! You a nasty, ugly bighead.”
    That was when Wilfredo threatened to fuck him up.
    â€œHey!” I barked. Where had I learned to bark like that? Wilfredo was taller than Cedric and probably outweighed him by thirty pounds, but there was no way of predicting how a fight between them might end. As I later learned, when I had to wrestle Cedric off the golf cart of a security guy who’d brought us home from the county fair after the kid had a tantrum outside the tent where the Jack Russell agility trials were supposed to happen, he had a grasping, clawing, elastic strength that was wholly out of proportion to his size.
    For most of the day, the cats had avoided the boys, but now Bitey entered the room. She brushed against me and then approached the children, staying just out of reach. Most cats approach kids this way, and it’s easy to mistake it for teasing until you reflect that even a small child is ten times the size of a cat. Bitey didn’t look fearful. Her tail was up, and her underslung jaw gave her the air of something looking for a fight, or at least not shying away from one. “Don’t grab her,” F. warned. “Just put out your hand like this.” She demonstrated, holding hers at cat’s eye level, then scratching the upraised chin. “Hello, Bitus, you noble creature. Let her come to you.”
    I don’t remember if either boy was able to pet her. Bitey could be affectionate, but on her own terms. A year before, she’d disappeared for a month before showing up at a house on the other side of town. During that time, I did little but look for her, putting up flyers, riding my bike for miles in every direction
while imploringly shouting her name to the winds, stopping every so often to rattle the container of dry food I kept in my knapsack. But when I came to be reunited with her at her rescuers’, my heart so swollen with love I might only have been its caddy, the flunky whose job it was to carry a heart around while it throbbed and felt, she barely gave me a glance and sauntered past me to inspect a flower in the yard. When I picked her up, she struggled. Maybe she’d forgotten whose cat she was, or maybe I was being reminded of the futility of the phrase “whose cat.” The woman who’d found her had grown attached to her, and I invited her to come by our house the next day. Stoically, I’d decided that if Bitey wasn’t happy with F. and me, maybe she’d be better off with her. I think the woman had the same idea. She showed up looking hopeful. But now, Bitey ignored her while coiling and coiling around my ankles, grinning so widely you could see the pale pink washboard of her palate and purring cynically.
    I left the room while F. read to the boys from a book about a farting dog. When I came back, Bitey was lying at the foot of Wilfredo’s bed; it was really a folding cot we’d borrowed from someone. She lay facing away from him with her paws straight out before her, like a little sphinx, her eyes slitted. “What’s that cat’s name?” Wilfredo asked. F. told him, and he announced, “Bitey loves me.” His mother hadn’t packed pajamas for him (later we’d learn he didn’t own any); he was wearing underpants and some