Mutiny

Chapter One

 

A kitten’s misfortune – Jay does some work – KC steals drugs – A rat is dead – Pressing forward despite urine – An awful smell - Cocaine and hamburgers – The beast discovered – Illegal hit – Aftermath.

 

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms”

 

The fucking kitten was NOT the solution. Kim Nicole Cayenne, 23 years young and having given real, painful, vagina-centric birth two times, harbored no disillusions on that point. Nothing that shits, she knew from cold experience, ever solved anything. Her mother had told her that, on her 15^th birthday, and KC remembered thinking how wrong that sounded, and saying how stupid her mother was.

Mother…

She’d said, in a mock whisper deployed to portray rage held back,

I’m aware of no such thing, and you’re embarrassing me.

Her mother had always been an asshole, but these days KC found herself wondering if maybe she’d been just a bit out of order herself. She'd felt her second marriage (the one to this boy Mickey’s father, Jay) crumblintg to dust in her hands for a long time now, and Jay let her know - everyday - how much of that shitty condition was her own fucking fault. Maybe they were both right. Either way, In these last few days, KC found herself holding on harder than ever, even as she watched the last bits blow off on a grey New England breeze, prisoners to the wind, lacking even the weight to plummet successfully.

The kitten wouldn’t fix any of that. Her mother was still an asshole and so was Jay, KC Cayenne had serious doubts about her own self, and far worse, she still lived in Vietnam (the resident’s pet name for Venetian Corner, the “Mobile Accommodation Development” of North Kingstown, RI where KC had lived since she was 20). She was still broke, and her ass was still growing, dripping from its original housing, and melting towards the ground at a dependable clip. So, she figured, while the new kitty couldn’t reasonably be expected to douse the various and plentiful raging infernos of her life, it might at least be counted on to cool-mist the hot wreckage, perhaps make preparation for rebuilding. Besides, Ames Michael Cayenne (6 years old, mega-cute, “Mickey” to all that knew him) had been asking for a pet since he’d been born, and the closest thing KC’d been able to muster was the schizoid meth - beast that was his father. That – more than anything else – was what brought KC here today: She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done right by her son, and she felt she owed him – at the very least - the effort. Besides, everybody loved kittens.

***

To be completely fair, the kitten actually was the solution for a while. From the minute she’d arrived at the house-trailer, the new pet had been making friends, dissolving old feuds, and – generally - uniting the household with the singular, optimistic cuteness that only very young kittens can possess. Tammy Fay Justice ( KC’s other bundle of joy, from another crack-head, and twice the boy’s age), playing against type for – perhaps – the very first time, welcomed this new, miniature princess into their midst with enthusiasm that actually seemed genuine.

Mickey was floating around the yard two feet off the ground, charging his buddies loose dimes for a look, and quarters for a brief cuddle with his new, awesome kitten. Tammy Fay was talking about shoplifting kitten clothes from the dollar store, and thinking about what she’d have to do to her boyfriend to convince him to drive her there. KC actually got laid twice in one night. So subtle was the kitten’s power and so potent, that it was able to move even Jay’s coke-damaged penis by the sheer force of its fluffy, benevolent presence. For three weeks, the mini-cat held sway over the entire household and things were – for the first time in a long time – better than tolerable at the Kim-Nicky Stroam-Cayenne’s. But just like always, the minute KC realized this, the whole shit disintegrated before her like a sandcastle dissolving at high tide.

As usual, the entire situation could have been avoided if Jay wasn’t such an asshole. The kitten, right up till the event, had been much more than a mere feline-shaped aphrodisiac. The occasional bouts of not-too-terrible sex were but a by-product of a top-down renovation, coming quick after the little cat’s arrival. Other tell-tale signs had included an apparent determination to begin drinking after lunch instead of before breakfast, a one-bag-of-coke per weekend rule, and the chronic wearing of both shirts and shoes, sometimes at the same time. KC was too shocked to be impressed, and found herself appreciating Jay’s efforts with a matching coke policy, and a vague commitment not to fuck anybody else for a while. At night they’d taken to rescuing the kitten from the kids room and teasing her for hours on end with fake mice and (jay’s favorite), the “kittylaser” cat toy.

it’s an army issue laser. You know, from the sights? On a gun? These guys are geniuses. They’re like: “let’s remove the laser, and cats and kittens ‘ll fuckin’ love it!” Sick!!

Jay loved that fucking kitten.

***

KC had gone over that night every night since that night at least a thousand times. Each time she recollected the same, and each time she found herself more confused about the way things ended up. Things had been great, she felt certain they would stay that way, and she felt like celebrating. Thus Wednesday through Friday of that week became one long day. Since Wednesday was almost Friday, KC was drinking. Since it was A day, Jay was drinking. Since they both felt awesome, and since they both got their SSI checks late Tuesday, there was a big bag of weed on the coffee table next to small bag of cocaine. Both bags would spend the next three days disappearing in slow motion, then reappearing, only to slowly melt once more as the duration passed. The kids, both already possessed of a keenly developed sixth sense regarding their parent’s partying, mostly slept out. The kitten spent the binge leaping and buzzing around the house-trailer like a stray bullet, ears pinned back, eyes reduced for the drug-toxic atmosphere. Eventually, nobody would ever know quite when, the kitten disappeared.

At some point, the mini-cat had gone into the recliner. What about that fucking recliner? It had been vestigial in the last few years, forced out of the living room furniture rota by virtue of the fact Jay’d pissed on it once in his sleep a few years back. After that, nobody wanted to sit there, but because there was always other shit to be paid attention to, and because nobody wanted to deal with the piss-chair or even look at it, it never got thrown out. Eventually (Jay said) it stopped reeking of pee, and he’d been sitting on it again the last couple months. In fact, Jay had taken it a step further, now spending the majority of his free time during the day in the chair, watching conspiracy documentaries on his iphone with his favorite blanket up over his head.

This is exactly what he’d been around the time the kitten disappeared, and KC – thinking back on that fateful morning – had been able to trace the kitten’s demise back to one memorable instant: She’d been washing the weeks dishes and yelling at Jay to feed the kitten, trying to get to him in those key moments between bed and chair when he was far more apt to honor her commands.

“Jaaaaaaaay feed the fucking cat!

She jumped when he surprised her, out of bed so early:

“Im right behind you asshole. We got bacon?”

This next part stood out in T’s memory like the HD commercials during reruns of “Sanford and Son”: Jay asking about bacon, avoiding her cat-feeding request, and suddenly airborne, heaving his entire six-foot-something, composed-mostly-of-fat, frame

into empty space,

then onto the chair,

hard.

Tammy heard springs and fabric giving way as if the whole works might be seriously considering disintegration, took an extra 3-4 seconds to actively hate her husband, and went back to deciding not to wash the dishes. Jay burped and said:

They’re taking more and more of your liberties away every day sweetheart, and you don’t care. For fuck’s sake WAKE UP!

The “Up” part sort of faded out, as Jay flipped to one of his favorite episodes of “Magnum” just at the best part.

***

The smell. Looking back on it, her strongest memory was of the smell. The kitten was a stinky motherfuck to begin with, with a litterbox that needed cleaned immediately after voiding, lest an angry, ammonia-reek settle over every room in the whole place. But whatever death-blow Jay’s untimely sitting had visited upon the thing, the stench in the aftermath made any litter box of ANY cat, anywhere. It began two days after the chair-jump, amidst a chaotic, house APB for the lost kitten, gone these two days.

“Fuck. You fuckin’ stink”

said Jay, deadly accurate in his situational awareness, as per usual.

Hours later, the Mr. and Mrs. Jay Stroam-Cayenne were way deep into a hard-target search that began with a thorough up-fucking of the house-trailer, continued through a massive, and severely disorganized mauling of the general area around the house-trailer, and ended with late night speed-smorgasboard during which the kitten was mourned lightly, and discussed at some length:

Fuckin stinks in here, even with the piffs…

Said Jay, looking around the place as if he’d just beamed in from deep-space. He continued after a long, snorty pause:

Fuckiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin…Fuckin’ you gotta tell the kids. NofugginwayIMfuggintelina’fuckinkids…Fuck.

And the next day, a miracle occurred: KC did tell the kids. What’s more, instead of leaving again, the vicious brats actually responded. It took the whole family – operating with something like unity for the first time since untold previous lives – 48 hours to turn everything for three square acres to a wretched, disgraceful, multi-faceted search-scar. Jay, in an incredible and amazingly rare feat of community galvanization, had selected and trained three guys from his horse shoe team to help him upend his prized 1993 infinity (leather AND a roof! Kayce! Dream Car!!), and flip it to it roof so that Jay could remove its guts and root out his kitten. The car was still roof-bound, gutted, and spun sideways in the driveway, its component pieces scattered about the thing in a smelly array of parts, fluid, and ancient motor oil. They all of them slept elsewhere that week, as the smell inside the trailer was ramping up. By Friday the air inside the house-trailer was un-breathable to any human whose nasal function hadn’t been severely compromised by drug use. The kids, again, had sought refuge in other trailers in other parts of Vietnam. Jay and KC kept the faith

***.

Even so, when Sunday came around, the kitten still hadn’t, and despondency was giving way to the inevitable paranoid blame-laying. The smell had gotten worse and worse until Saturday, when it disappeared altogether. KC did her best to disregard all of it: the kitten, Jay, the awful smells, and was successfully tuning out everyone but the Zach Brown Band. She was cranking his latest, and shaping raw hamburger into patties for the Patriots. The kitten had been lost, but football was football.

Because of this, the loud music and the raw meat, KC didn’t see the actual event evolution. To be fair, things happened awfully fast and it’s doubtful she’d have been able to stop the fateful events even with eyes and ears on the proceedings. As it happened, she never got the chance to find out. It took minutes: Tammy Fay said something about how she would have never let the cat out, started trying to spit on the boy, sitting next to her on the couch:

Ptew! Tew! Ptew!

She was thrusting her head at him, trying to get some distance, but her mouth was dry, and she could muster only microscopic blips of saliva in groups of twos and threes. Even so, the boy understood what was happening and began to sound the alarm:

WahhhhhhhhAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

It was his high note, perfected over years and deployed only in the most sensitive geo-political episodes in the house-trailer. KC stopped her meat-smooshing and tried to override the boy’s screaming with some strident banshee-cries over her own, enhanced a few clicks by the cocaine she’d stolen from Jay before he’d gone to “work” for the day. To be fair, he’d owed her 50 bucks since before they moved in, so KC’s conscience was clear as a bell. Besides, Jay’s “Work”, was stealing basic cable and hard wiring it for anybody in Vietnam that had anything he could eat or drink or snort while he did the deed. Tonight he’d be home with his “Wages” for the day, and the pilfered yayo would go unnoticed. All that in mind, she hadn’t been shy in the dosing. By the time of the exchange with the kids, KC was gritting her teeth and stuttering, reeling off patty after patty like a hamburger factory. Just then Jay rolled in, three hours early and speaking in one long, fast, word:

FuckinbullshitMacsaysIstillowehimmoneyandit’snottruethatfuckerowesMEmoneyanywayshe’sgotmethlikeathousandtonso’dynamiteandIneedsomeregularcoketotaketheedgeoffandIneedtimet’fugginthink…

He went through the entirety of the house-trailer hiding spots during the tirade, and ended up posted, like some vibrating totem, directly in front of KC breathing in gaspy huffs. KC could see no pupil in his head, just microscopic black pinpricks on a field of twitchy brown. KC found herself backing towards a drawer with sharp things in it almost before she knew what she was doing. Jays breath smelled like two skunks flattened by a semi, KC knew how he could be. Instead though, his tiny eyes were showing the rut. With Jay it was almost always about food.

KC was feeling pretty speedy herself, and Jay’s weird advances felt like interrogation even though the few lucid brain cells she had left were politely insisting that the feeling was incorrect. She spun and ducked but the sequence hit a snag when thousands of flight-reflex synapses cracked off in her skull at one cokey instant. Instead of hitting the door and escaping out into Vietnam like she should have, KC stopped when she reached the trailer-house front door, turned, and sat instead on the couch and began miming a frantic search for the remote.

Jay observed the odd behavior and immediately sensed that drugs had been stolen from him. He forgot about sex and hamburgers, and bore in on KC, still fake-searching under couch cushions for the channel changer.

Heyyougotuhhhhyougotsomeshitinyou’renose.

Jay threw it at her like acid, and KC vapor-locked again. She sat back, leaned forward, and sat back ten times before Jay spoke again:

Wellwhat?Well?Yougotsomethinginyourfaceuhhhyournose.

Jay got focused then. He bent at the waist, mushed his nose into her personal space, and rasped:

You fuckin’ bitch. Where?

Then he was tossing the place, same route as before, muttering and spitting:

Hmm. Fuckin’ bitch. Payin the rent. I fuckiiiiiiin. Where is it? Fuckin bitch fuckin’ bitch fuckinnnn…

***

Thinking back on it, years later, KC would always remember every second of it - in crystalline, HD resolution - from the minute Jay came back around to the couch, and shoved his hand down into the gap, on the opposite side from where she was curled into a coked-up defensive ball. He was muttering still, but KC recalled that by the time he’d sunk his hand into the cushion gap, Jay’s already jumpy grasp of syntactical coherence had fled the scene. His pathological stream of toxic invective had become a buzz of slow-phasing vowel sounds:

Nehhhhhhhuhhhhhmm?hmmmmmmehhh…FUCK!!!

He jumped and KC looked up. This was the part she loved best. Sometimes, when she was feeling discouraged or depressed, she’d sit down wherever she was, and watch just those 40 odd seconds of her life, running through it from different imaginary camera angles until she felt better. She’d start just then, leaning her whole body across the couch and pulling back on the cushion Jay had been fiddling with when he’d cried out. She’d take care to acknowledge Jay’s suffering on the way over. His vowel noises had morphed back into profanity with the pricking of his finger, and he was whipping it back and forth going:

Oooh. Fuck. Oooh. Fuck. FUCK! Hurts…

She’d thrill, remembering how she pulled the cushion back, and stuck her head down close to the gap. How Jay stopped swearing, touched his forehead with hers, looking from the opposite side. How they’d both sucked in concerned gasps with the extraordinary reveal:

The Kitten, along with the empty, blue-tinged cello-bag, looked up from an open space of one square foot at the bottom of the couch. The hideous smell, more concentrated this time, released face-ward as Jay and KC looked in. The tiny, enraged animal was working over the meaty skeleton of a Vietnam garbage rat like a team of piranahs consuming a wildebeest. KC could hardly suppress a laugh, realizing almost instantly, where the kitten had gone, why he’d stayed away, and what the cause of the haunting smell had been. Jay wasn’t near as quick, and so the laugh-spasm only made him angrier. He knew KC had stolen his drugs so fuck a rat and fuck a kitten. The time of beatings had arrived, and Jay started thinking about places that would hurt, yet keep realizing about the pilfered coke and just about to act, and – finally and best of all – the kitten’s attack.

Jay didn’t even have time to let go the couch before the coke-addled cat was on him. KC watched, shocked, as the little beast ran up Jay’s arm like a rocket-sled heading for a cinderblock wall. It smashed into Jay’s face with a fierce-looking head of steam, but instead of bouncing to the floor, making for underneath something, the little shit stuck fast. The scene froze for in front of her for one split second and KC saw the kittens claws release, burying themselves into the left side of her husband’s face and causing a weird scream / bellow, barely audible through the feline belly covering his mouth:

 Mrrrrf…UUUUGGHH….HMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmm…OHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

Then he was dancing, grabbing at the painful, furry facemask and thrashing about the already thoroughly tossed house-trailer. KC was laughing out loud by that point, but she caught her breath quick and tried to decided that enough was enough. She stood and rushed the twisting Jay, but her intoxication had betrayed her spatial awareness, and she came in way too hot. Instead of maintaining a helpful distance, KC plugged Jay with a shoulder-lowered chop block. He’d been standing at the door, twitching great twitches, and she lined him up with the complete momentary focus of a champion coke-fiend. Jay took the hit in his soft ribcage and immediately felt his entire torso crushing into his lungs. He went slack, but instead of submitting to gravity and falling to the sanctuary of the 1970’s – era trailer-shag, Jay felt himself flying. KC felt herself flying. Most importantly, the cat felt itself flying, and drove its claws deeper into Jay’s face to ensure a safe landing. The three of them launched backwards, through the unlatched trailer door, and down – hard – on the steamy August pavement. Another muffled exclamation issued from Jay’s mouth in flight, but it was cut short by the inevitable meeting of Jay with the ground:

MmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF…AHHP!!

She landed on Jay, so KC was actually OK. She bounced up quick as she could just in case the neighbors caught the act, whispered toward Jay’s unmoving form, still – she noted with some degree of amusement – covered at the face by cocaine cat.

OK Ok. Get up. We’re fine…OK. Come on. People will see and the kids’ll yell at me Jay…

Cmon Ja…

And that’s as far as she’d gotten before Jay began screaming again.

KC started at the new yelping, and again when the cat finally loosed its claws and split the scene. She watched it bolt for the front gates of Vietnam, meowing and spitting all the way. Then KC looked down.  Her first thought, seeing Jay’s wrecked countenance after the great cat battle, was that he’d somehow landed face down on some eggs. “He must have taken a few in the face”, she thought, “Serves him right”.

But eggs wouldn’t explain the continued screaming. KC knelt for a better look, but Jay’s thrashing was making examination unsafe. Then she watched most of Jay’s left eye come squeezing from between his stubby, twitching fingers, and KC ran inside and made a call to the local police.