Cletus

My skin was slick with sweat, and the monkey bars left them smelling of pennies.  

“You wanna race?” She sidled up to me as if we’d known each other all our lives, were only picking up a conversation briefly interrupted.

I looked up at her silhouette, a shadow falling over me where she blocked out the light, tendrils of late afternoon sunbeams radiating out around her slight frame as if she herself were ablaze.

“I wanna join the circus. Gotta be fast for the circus.” The statement bewildered me; she must have noticed. 

“Elephants,” she explained, and stuck her hand out to hoist me up out of the mulch. A frayed Band-Aid was wrapped around each of her fingertips.

So we raced. She won; of course she did. People rarely ask you to race if they anticipate losing.

She had auburn hair cut to graze her jawbone, and a thick curtain of bangs, a cowlick propping up the far edge of the fringe. She would rake her fingers through her hair, mussing it up; her head always seemed to be itchy.

“There’s a python loose in the trailer park,” she whispered to me conspiratorially as we huddled under the suspension bridge. “It ate my cat.”

I was immediately and irrevocably convinced she was the most interesting person I’d ever met. 

“Do you have a grown-up with you?” My father asked her when we loaded up our van, the park all but deserted now. He looked around, searching, but found only Spandex-clad power walkers and a woman pushing a dachshund in a stroller.

She’d started to lope off, all knobbly knees and long, angular limbs. There was so little of her, really, but she seemed expansive.

“No sir,” she chirped, the slightest whisper of a lisp rounding the r. Then she spun on her heels and sprinted toward the treeline at the edge of the playground, but not before pressing a damp scrap of notebook paper into my palm: seven numbers scrawled in gel pen and a heart.

My father stood rooted to the spot, shifting uneasily from one foot to another, eyes on the trees. Several long minutes passed before he shook his head, clapped his hands, and heaved me into the backseat.

—

“Her name is Clytemnestra,” I said, my voice betraying my awe.

“That’s interesting,” offered my mother.

“That sounds like an STD,” said my brother.

“That’s enough,” barked my father.

“But she says everyone calls her Cletus for short. Like the boys’ name! Isn’t that funny?”

My parents share a bemused look across the table, my mother’s fork hovering, a sauteed asparagus spear dangling limply off the tines.

–

Her arms and legs were speckled with polka dot scars from scabs picked one time too many. As we got older, the constellations they formed shifted and danced across her skin, congregating along the valley of her inner arm, painted the olive and ochre of fading bruises, a blue vein coursing down the middle like a swollen river. My mom, an ICU nurse, had complimented her the morning after a sleepover, when, haggard as a platoon fresh from the foxhole, we’d padded into the kitchen, naked arms outstretched toward the steaming plate of waffles she offered.

“Good veins,” my mother said approvingly.

“Good for what?” Cletus asked.

“Good for needles!” my sister answered, landing a playful pinch on Cletus’s bicep.

“Good for nothin’,” Cletus said, itching her scalp. “I hate needles.”

I looked down at my own veins, barely visible under summer skin, and frowned.

–

There was nothing exceptional about Cletus, really, except for how unlike me she was. She was bold, but never rude in the way fiercely independent children often are. A quiet self-confidence engulfed her, a surety there was nothing she wanted to do but couldn’t, whereas I inherited my father’s buzzing anxiety, his hesitant demeanor. We complimented each other, Cletus and I, my mother liked to say, by which I’m fairly certain she meant that Cletus was everything I was not. In fact, sometimes Cletus felt like everything all by herself, and oftentimes I found myself wondering what, aside from a pantryful of snacks and a willing ear, always overeager to agree to whatever scheme she’d crafted, I brought to the proverbial table. Nevertheless, I was ferociously loyal to her, lived in a state of perpetual veneration; she had picked me, chosen me from a playground bursting with potential playmates, appeared in my life like a rabbit pulled from a hat and painted everything with a glossy sheen of magic. I wondered if that alone made me a bit magical too.

–

Autumn roared in, as if it had been waiting just offstage, on the first of October. Cletus and I were wandering lead-footed through the yard, kicking at fallen sticks, searching for something to occupy ourselves.

Cletus had big, expressive honey eyes, the color of the leaves crunching under our feet. I watched them pass over the oak in our front yard and widen with excitement as our cat, Admiral Dumpster, picked her way down the trunk and bounded through damp leaf-litter toward Cletus, alighting in her outstretched arms.

“I love cats,” Cletus mused. “When I die, I’d like to come back as a housecat.”

I wrinkled my nose. “I’ll pass on pooping in a box, thanks.”

But Cletus hadn’t heard me. She was caressing the Admiral wistfully, burying her face in her soft tortoiseshell coat. “Imagine it: come and go as you please, and no one ever bothers tryin’ to tell you what to do. But you’re always warm, and looked after, and someone’s always ready to hold you and cuddle you whenever you want.”

A gust of wind sent a shower of leaves cascading down on our heads, and a shiver ran through me. Admiral Dumpster jumped out of Cletus’s grasp, tail aloft as she sprang towards the cat door and the warmth of the furnace. Cletus brushed the wisps of fur off of her bare arms, smiling after her.

“Aren’t you cold, Cletus?” I gasped, chilled. “Why aren’t you wearing a jacket?”

“I just don’t get cold, I guess,” Cletus shrugged, despite a field of goosebumps bubbling across her skin.

–

“Her house has wheels,” I reported, charmed, to my grimacing father.

My siblings, tired of the litany of wonder I recounted after each playdate, heaved a sigh in unison.

“Can you imagine? She could just up and drive off anytime! Just sail away!”

“Well, it’s not as simple as all that,” my father said slowly. “She’d have to have some help from her parents to haul off a trailer. Besides-”

“Cletus doesn’t have any parents,” I interrupted. “How about that!”

She was Pippi Longstocking come to life. I wasn’t exactly sure what a single-wide looked like, but I imagined Villa Villekulla, and Cletus lording over it, with climbing bougainvillea trellises, and a kitchen splattered white from flour for flapjacks, and a besaddled python roving through the garden.

“So who takes care of her?” My father’s unease peaked.

“Cletus takes care of herself.” Of that, I was sure. To me, she already was a housecat, coming and going as she pleased, no one to tell her what to do.

Dad cast a worried look at my mother, who waved it away. “Kids,” she said through a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “Someone takes care of her.” 

–

The summer before sixth grade, she licked her thumb and swiped it upwards across her eyebrows so they were plastered to her face like wooly caterpillars; I gently told her they were sticking straight up. “That’s the point,” she sneered, and I wondered if there was something about being beautiful I didn’t understand.

She looked at herself approvingly in the mirror.

“Ah, damn.”

I shot an alarmed glance at the door, hoping my father wasn’t within earshot.

“What?” I asked.

“I forgot something at home’s all. I’ll be back.” She climbed out of the vanity sink where she’d perched to swipe too-light foundation, plucked from my mother’s cosmetics bag, across her cheeks and smoothed her rumpled dolphin shirt.

“What d’you need? I’m sure we’ve got some.”

Cletus grimaced. “Just some medicine. I’m just gonna run home, then I’ll come back and we can do the thing.”

‘The thing’ was the dance performance we’d been painstakingly choreographing for weeks now; my nightmares were filled with Cletus’s lilting lisp counting 5, 6, 7, 8. She was convinced that a wayward talent scout would stumble upon our performance and whisk us away for a world tour, where we’d have all the Little Debbies our stomachs could handle.

“I’ll just come with. We can go over the counts on the way.”

Cletus hesitated, but soon we were traipsing through back alleys, towards the trailer park (manufactured home community, my mother corrected me) on the other side of the park. Cletus’s mood darkened with each step, and I watched her grow more and more agitated, itching her scalp, her arms, her face aggressively. In contrast, my anticipation was cresting. I’d spent years imagining the splendor of her storybook neighborhood, where houses moved of their own accord and children governed themselves. When Cletus muttered something about ignoring the bugs, I just knew that a whimsical enclave of fireflies and ladybugs and flitting butterflies with wings like lace populated her home, helping with household chores, Disney princess-style.

We turned onto a pockmarked road, strolled past a cinder block wall with a hand-lettered wooden sign, the words Glenbow Estates burned into its face. There was a chunk missing from the bottom corner of the wall, which was beginning to crumble. “Ol’ Boo Nelson had too much Coors last time Tech played State,” she explained, though I hadn’t asked.

There was a graffitied metal payphone that looked barely functional, with its support pole dented such that the whole structure listed to the side, from which a water-logged yellow phone book with a rippling, puckering cover dangled on a beaded metal chain. Behind it, an aluminum-sided rectangle propped up on cinder blocks stood like a ruin in the middle of a lot consumed by chest-high grass. The roof was covered with a sun-faded, frayed blue tarp.

Cletus turned toward it.

“What are you doing?” I hissed, head on a swivel. 

She shook her head, as if trying to knock loose an errant thought. “What’s your problem? C’mon.”

There are moments from my childhood I recall vividly, but this moment, with my Converse crunching on loose gravel, and Cletus turning toward the house, hair whipping around like a halo as she did, the smell of sweat and dust, the rattle of a chain link fence and the deep, threatening bark of a pitbull, is perfectly preserved in my psyche, an exhibit curated by time and regret and shame and deep, deep sadness. The vision of Villa Villekulla in my head melted away, the bouganvillea withering into kudzu and weeds, the campy Winnebago chock-full of flapjacks and postcards from faraway places morphing into a rusted single-wide with a spongy-soft floor and walls yellow with nicotine. 

As I shut the door behind me, a colony of cockroaches skittered across the linoleum and I jumped, sending empty beer cans clattering as I did. There was a thick layer of grime coating the floor. A squadron of flies whizzed past. Cletus scratched her head, watching me. Silently she padded back into a hallway, closed a door behind her. After a long pause, the toilet flushed and she reemerged, looking pale.

“Cletus,” I began, casting a distressed look around. “Are you okay? Where are your parents?”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Never been worried about my parents before.”

The light was dimming as evening crept closer. I smacked a switch on the wall, and confirmed my creeping fear that there was no electricity.

“Cletus,” I whispered again. “You can’t…you can’t live like this. Who takes care of you?”

“You know I take care of myself,” she said fiercely. “Are we gonna go do the thing or what?”

The choreography had been purged from my brain. A siren blared in its place.

“No, we’re not. We’ve gotta call someone, or something. My dad will know what to do if we just-”

“I don’t need anything, I told you!” She was raging, agitated again, her face flushed scarlet in a way I’d never seen before. The bowlcut of a little girl and the face of a cornered animal.

“You know what, actually? I’m not in the mood to do the thing anymore either. I think you should go. Really.”

“What?! Cletus, I’m just trying-”

Her bony arms dug into my shoulder blades now, pushing me toward the door.

“I said get out!” She hollered. The metal door swung shut and the lock clacked into place, and suddenly I found myself alone, tearing pooling in my eyes, in the purple-pink sunset cloaking lot 12 of Glenbow Estates.

–

If that moment with Cletus, outside her house, is preserved in my memory as if on archival film, the following months are little more than scribbled notes on crumpled paper. The details of what happened were hazy, pieced together like a patchwork quilt from the snippets the police could share with us and newspaper clippings. Cletus didn’t come around again, even on Tuesday, and she knew that was my mom’s grocery shopping day, when the Little Debbies were plentiful. She didn’t answer the phone. After a month, my mother, ever the optimist, who’d remained steadfastly convinced that she had a doting family waiting in the wings, finally called the police. The owner of the trailer park, some scuzzy slumlord from two counties over, maintained that lot 12 had been vacant for a number of years, after the Havertys skipped town in the middle of the night. The phone number I’d memorized by heart over the years, could dial without looking at the keypad, connected not to any home, but to a payphone in Glenbow Estates. 

–

August in the city was muggy. But it was a Sunday afternoon and I had been determined to get out and enjoy the last lingering remnants of the weekend despite the haze that clung to my sundress like I’d stumbled into a spiderweb. The finer points of the big presentation I’d prepared for our star client ticked themselves off in my head on autopilot as I pushed my way through the crowded sidewalk. I longed to turn my brain off, just for a few minutes, but the anxiety that took root in my childhood and grew, blossoming and fruiting throughout my adolescence and into my late twenties played like static in the background of all of my thoughts, busying itself with checking, double-checking, worrying and triple-checking, fretting and planning. The crowd seemed to press in on me and I could feel sharp claws of panic needling the back of my throat. On impulse, I pushed my way toward the nearest shop and dove in, breathing in the uncluttered air, taking desperate gulps of solitude.

The particular scent of puppy, milk and musk and hot breath, mingled with ammonia in the air. Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the dim light and the ringing in my ears subsided, replaced with plaintive mewls and raucous barking. There were certainly less pleasant techniques for calming oneself than cuddling a kitten or two at the shelter.

I wandered the rows of stacked cages, fingers dancing across the cold metal lattice, reading the distinctly feline names of each as I made my way past. Napoleon. Popsicle. Benedict. Tiptoe. At the far end of the aisle, a clipboard hung on the kennel of a graying tortoiseshell cat, in glittering green-blue gel pen, bore a name that cemented my feet to the ground, legs quaking beneath me. CLETUS, the haphazard scrawl said. My fingers snaked themselves through the grid of the kennel door of their own accord. The cat looked almost as if it had been expecting me. It blinked slowly in greeting, as if we’d known each other all our lives, were just picking up where we’d left off, and rubbed its face across my grasping fingertips.

“Ah, I see you’ve met Clytemnestra,” a volunteer wearing rubber waders stopped mid-gait when she saw me. I willed my knees not to implode beneath me, and she must have interpreted my expression, collapsing in on itself, devastation winding its way up through my toes, into my belly, past my throat, as a critique.

“Yeah, I know; it’s a little highfalutin for a raggedy old thing. She’s been here forever, waiting. Not many people interested in an eleven year old cat, I suppose. Just looking for a home of her own!” She smiled and shrugged, a sort of what are you gonna do? and began to lope away, wrestling the power washer she wheeled behind her.

“I’ll give her a home,” I whispered, then again, louder. “I’ll give her a home.”

The girl spun around to face me, surprised, but then a smile spread across her face. “Alright, then.” She clapped her hands, growing more excited. “Okay!”

Soon I was streaking down back alleys toward my apartment, dust rising in small clouds beneath my Converse, clutching a black mesh carrier and a certificate of adoption with the big red words THANK YOU FOR SAVING ME! across the top. I threw open the heavy door, breathless, and collapsed onto the hardwood, burying my face in soft dappled fur, breathing her in.

“Don’t worry, Cletus. You’re home,” I sobbed, and a purr began to vibrate in her throat. “I’ll take care of you.”  

–

Officially, there was no record, at the local hospital or anywhere else, that Clytemnestra Haverty had ever been born, seen a pediatrician, a dentist, attended school. When at long last the trailer was torn down so a new tenant could move their home onto the lot, the small, desiccated body of an eleven year-old girl in a dolphin t-shirt, woefully underweight and half-eaten by rats was found, curled into a ball on the dirty bathroom floor.