rolling around one minute and batting at Jimmy’s hands the next. Once dry, the animal had blossomed to twice its wet size. And yet he was still pathetic and hungry.
Jimmy found a can of beans beneath a mattress. The can wasn’t too rusty. He opened it with his screwdriver and fed the slick pods to the cat one at a time while his own feet thawed, tingling like electricity the entire time.
After the beans, the cat had taken to following him wherever he went to see what he might find next. It made the hunt for food fun, rather than a never-ending war against his own growling stomach. Fun, but also lots of work. Up the staircase they went, him back in his boots, the cat silently pawing behind and sometimes ahead.
Jimmy had learned early on to trust the cat’s balance. The first few times it rubbed itself against the outer stanchions, even twisting itself beyond them and back through as it ascended the steps, Jimmy nearly had a heart attack. The cat seemed to have a death wish, or just an ignorance of what it meant to fall. But he soon learned to trust the cat even as the cat began to trust him.
And that first night, as he lay huddled under his tarp in the lower farms, listening to pumps and lights click on and off and noises he mistook for others in hiding, the cat tucked itself under his arm and curled against the crook his belly made when his legs were bent and began to rattle like a pump on loose mounts.
‘You were lonely, huh?’ Jimmy had whispered. He had grown uncomfortable but was unwilling to move. A cramp had formed in his neck while a different tightness disappeared from deep in his gut, a tightness he didn’t know was there until it was gone.
‘I was lonely too,’ he had told the cat softly, fascinated by how much more he talked with the animal around. It was better than talking to his shadow and pretending it was a person.
‘That’s a good name,’ Jimmy had whispered. He didn’t know what people named cats, but Shadow would work. Like the shadows in which he’d found the thing, another spot of blackness to follow Jimmy around. And that night, years back, the two of them had fallen asleep amid the clicking pumps, the dripping water, the buzzing insects and all the stranger sounds deep within the farms that Jimmy preferred not to name.
That was years ago. Now, cat hair and beard hair gathered together in the spines of the Legacy books. Jimmy trimmed his beard while he read about snakes. The scissors made crunching noises as he pinched a load of hair, held it away from his chin and hacked it off with the dull shears. He sprinkled most of the hair in an empty can. The rest drifted down among the pages, large swoops of meddling punctuation mingling with hair from the cat, who kept walking back and forth under his arms, arching his back and stepping across the sentences.
‘I’m trying to read,’ Jimmy complained. But he put down the scissors and dutifully stroked the animal from neck to tail, Shadow pressing his spine up into Jimmy’s palm. He meowed and made that grumbling sound as if his heart were going to burst and begged for more.
Tiny claws clenched into little fists and punctured a photo of a corn snake, and Jimmy guided the animal towards the floor. Shadow lay on his back with his feet in the air, watching Jimmy carefully. It was a trap. Jimmy could rub his belly for only a moment before the cat would suddenly decide he hated this and attack his wrist. Jimmy didn’t understand cats that well, but he’d read the entry on them a dozen times. One thing he hated to learn was that they didn’t live as long as humans. He tried not to think of that day. On that day he would go back to being Solo, and he much preferred being Jimmy. Jimmy talked more. Solo was the one with the wild thoughts, the one who gazed over the rails, who spat towards the Deep and watched as his spit trembled and tore itself apart from the wild speeds of its racing fall.
‘Are you bored?’ Jimmy asked Shadow.
Shadow looked at him as though he were bored. It was similar to the look that said he was hungry.