The taste of ash

The first time I saw Ruth, she was screaming.

Barefoot in the gravel. Three in the morning. The Shady Pines parking lot, and this woman standing there like someone had thrown her from a moving car.

She was screaming from her belly. Not her throat.

I thought I knew her for a second. I didn't.

The mobile home was burning.

Not a clean fire. A greasy fire, orange, eating the vinyl and the carpet and the cheap glue. The smoke went down instead of up. It stuck to everything. To skin. To tongue. I spat. Chemical taste.

The patrol car was parked on the other side. Her husband inside. Handcuffed. Forehead against the glass. Bobby was looking at nothing. His eyes did nothing. Two pale things in his face. He had a stain on his shirt. Gas or vomit. Or both.

Danny Peale told me later he'd found him behind the trailer. Where the lot makes a small square of packed dirt the Shady Pines tenants call a yard. Eight feet by six, edged with cracked cinder blocks. Some of them planted tomatoes in the rocky soil, scrawny plants that grew crooked in earth that didn't want to give. They watered in the evening with a leaky hose and they watched the fruit come and they told themselves they had something. A place. A square of their own. Bobby was standing there. Upright. The five-gallon can in his right hand, the arm hanging, and the can hanging with the arm as if the two were part of the same limb.

Ruth wasn't looking at the car. Not the handcuffs. Not the can. She was looking at the mobile home door. The place where the door had been. A black hole. The heat coming out of it in waves.

— Miskee!

A volunteer next to me. Sweatpants, flashlight shaking.

— It's the cat.

I said nothing. Eleven years I've been doing this. I moved forward.

The heat took me at the threshold. Not hot air. A pressure. Something that says step back. I went in anyway.

My eyes watered but it wasn't tears. It was chemistry. They dried on my cheeks before they existed.

I got on all fours. Near the floor, there was a band of air left. Twelve inches. I crawled. The carpet went soft under the gloves, stuck, pulled at the fabric and the knees.

And I was looking for a cat.

A cat.

At least there I knew what I was doing. The cat needed someone to come. I'd come. A cat. A box on fire. A man who crawls. The rest is noise.

If I died in there, that's how they'd tell it. At Sawyer's. The counter. The neon lights. The fryer. Danny Peale leaning in with his warm beer and his too-loud voice.

— You know how Burl went?

— No.

— A cat. A goddamn gray cat at Shady Pines. The roof came down.

— You're shitting me.

— I'm not shitting you.

And the silence after. The kind that sticks. That nobody picks up.

And behind the joke there was something else and it was ugly. My name on schedules and pay slips and the duty board. Nothing on a table where someone sets two plates.

I saw him.

Under the bed. Ten feet. The fire was already eating the room. The ceiling was warping and dripping.

I called out. My voice came out dry. I called again.

He didn't move. He was nailed under the box spring. Yellow eyes dilated to the edge of the iris. The eyes of a thing that has understood there is no way out and looks anyway because looking is the last thing left. Two discs of panic in a small gray head. The body gathered behind. The whole animal compressed into a dense point. A fist of fur and bone and terror that refused to open.

He tried to come out. Muzzle first. One inch.

His whiskers caught. All at once. The heat swallowed them. I watched them curl and vanish like dry threads and the cat pulled back and he was smaller than before.

Above, the ceiling swelled. I knew that belly. When it drops, ten feet becomes a wall.

I moved forward.

Ten feet is nothing in a hallway. There it was an ocean. The heat had weight and it pushed back gently at first and then it punished you if you insisted. I slid my arm under the bed and I grabbed the cat and I pulled him out.

He sank his claws into my forearm. The skin gave. It opened. I squeezed. He clawed harder. I squeezed harder. That was it. That was the transaction. The only transaction possible. He was tearing my arm apart and I was pulling him out of there and neither of us had a choice and neither of us was wrong. I pressed him against my chest. A bundle of muscle and panic.

About-face.

I crawled toward the exit. Behind me, the ceiling gave.

The sound filled everything. A displacement of air that hits you in the back and pushes. I came out on my knees. The gravel bit me. The night air struck my face and I breathed like a man who'd forgotten you could.

The patrol car was gone. Danny had taken Bobby. What was left was the firefighters, the truck, and the floodlights.

And Ruth. Barefoot.

I set the cat down.

He moved toward her. Not running. Going straight. Ruth bent down, picked him up, buried her face in the fur.

She made a sound. Not a word. The cat was purring, covered in soot.

That's when I saw her arms. Pink blisters, shiny. Fresh burns. She'd tried to go in. She'd stopped or someone had pulled her out. I never found out. She wasn't looking at her burns.

The flashers swept across her face. Between two flashes her skin returned to its color for a second. Her lower lip trembled. It was Bobby's rage still holding on. That trembling did something to me. The smell of laundry on a line and a sugar-sticky table on a Sunday and the sound of a dish being set down and things you don't notice when they exist.

She looked up. She looked at me.

She kissed me.

Two seconds. Her lips tasted of ash. And underneath another taste, warmer. Alive.

Someone shouted an order. The cat meowed. Ruth stepped back. We said nothing. The blood from the scratch dripped into the gravel.

And I knew something had just happened that doesn't come undone.

Ruth had nowhere to go. I took her to my place.

The drive happened in silence. Miskee on her lap. Black trees, mailboxes, dark houses. The click-click of the blinker when I pulled into the driveway. That was all the sound there was.

Her bare foot landed on my kitchen floor. I looked at that foot.

My house of a man alone. It wasn't dirty. Clean by absence. Tidy so that nothing disturbed nothing because there was nothing to disturb and nobody to be disturbed. The use of a single man is a circuit. From bed to bathroom to counter to pickup to station to pickup to counter to bed. A circuit that leaves no trace because a single pair of feet doesn't wear down a floor. The bare counter. The table with one chair. Just one. I went to get a folding chair from the garage. When I set it across from mine I said nothing.

On the living room wall, a nail. The lighter outline of a frame around it. The nail had stayed.

The cat went in first. He made the rounds. Every room. He sniffed the baseboards, the table legs. He climbed on the fridge. Came back down. He pushed open the bedroom door, left again. He came back to the kitchen and settled on the folding chair.

He curled up and closed his eyes.

Ruth was on the porch. Feet on the railing. Ash on her lips. The dawn sun was coming down and the light was dirty and yellow on the wood. I noticed the angle of her feet. The squint in her eyes.

I remember all of that. With a precision that serves no purpose.

For a second I wanted to keep her there. The way you keep a thing you've found and put in your pocket and show to no one.

In the morning, a smell of coffee woke me. Hot coffee. The smell found the hallway and the hallway carried it to the bedroom and the smell came in under the door. Somewhere in the brain a drawer opened and in the drawer there was a morning from long ago and a woman who wasn't Ruth. The smell was the same. Coffee doesn't know who makes it. Coffee smells the same in every kitchen in the world and that's why it's the cruelest thing there is. Someone had made coffee in my kitchen.

I went to the kitchen.

Ruth was cracking eggs into a pan. The cat slept on the fridge. The sun fell on her nape and on her hands.

I stopped in the doorframe.

Not because it was beautiful.

Because it was normal.

Normal. The thing you only recognize when it's there. When it's not there it leaves a void but the void has no shape. And then one morning someone makes coffee and cracks eggs and the void fills up and the void was the exact shape of that. Of a woman. Of a pan. Of a morning. Normal like when I was a kid and the sound of the spatula was the sound of the world working. You forget the taste of water when water is all you drink. You don't know anymore that normal has a taste. And then someone gives you something else and the day you drink water again the taste hits you and the taste is the taste of nothing and the taste of nothing is the taste of everything you'd stopped feeling. Ruth was making eggs in my kitchen and it knocked the wind out of me.

Ruth said without turning around:

— There's no sugar left.

A kitchen voice. A voice that says there's no sugar left the way you say it's raining. A voice that assumes someone is there behind her and someone will answer. Six syllables that said I'm here and you're here and the kitchen needs sugar.

I took out a jar of honey. I set it on the table. She had a micro-smile that went out immediately.

That evening, we sat on the porch. The crickets. The cat on her lap. Me with a beer. Her with nothing.

But I sensed something else. In the way she watched the road. The way she held the cat too tight. Not tenderly. Firmly. The way you grip a handle so you don't fall. In the morning, she folded my shirts too carefully. Every fold a repayment. Every aligned edge a penny returned. She was giving back what she hadn't finished taking.

— You should stay.

Ruth kept stroking the cat.

— I can't. I have a husband.

I said nothing.

— I know what he is, Ruth said. I know what he does. I'm not stupid, Burl. I know he drinks. I know he hits. I know he burns. You think I don't know?

She touched her jaw.

— He broke it once. In the kitchen. He held me by the hair and hit me with the flat of his hand. I felt the bone give. It makes a small sound. Dry. Inside the mouth. And then he sat on the floor and he cried. On his knees on the linoleum. He cried harder than me. He said sorry, sorry, sorry, and he couldn't stop.

She didn't move. Neither did the cat.

— The next day he drove me to the ER. He stayed all night. He slept in the chair. His hand on my arm. He wouldn't take it off.

She breathed in.

— And I thought. With my jaw swollen and the taste of blood in my mouth. I thought that man needs me more than anyone will ever need me.

She scratched the cat behind the ear.

— It's the same man, Burl. The one who breaks and the one who cries. The hand that hits and the hand on my arm at the hospital. It's the same hand. There aren't two.

She let a silence pass.

— You don't know, she said.

It wasn't mean. It wasn't sad. It was like saying the temperature outside.

— You don't know what it is.

I said nothing. There was nothing to say.

The next morning, the clothes were folded on the chair. T-shirt, pants, socks. Edges aligned.

Ruth was in the kitchen. Shoes on. My ex-wife's. The white sneakers. The fabric gone gray. The left lace black because Jolene never replaced things with the same things. Two years in the closet. I'd never been able to throw them out. And now they were on Ruth's feet. I looked at the shoes and I saw both women and I was losing both at the same time. One was leaving two years back and the other was leaving now and the shoes made the trip between both departures. Shoes carry whoever puts them on. They keep the shape of the foot and that memory fades as soon as another foot enters.

— Where are you going?

— I called a cab.

— When?

— This morning.

I opened my mouth. I closed it.

— Ruth.

She stopped in the doorframe.

— Thank you, Ruth said. For everything. For the cat.

I nodded.

She walked out. The screen door slapped shut.

The last eyes I saw weren't Ruth's.

They were the cat's.

He watched me from her arms while she walked toward the cab. An animal look. It tells you nothing. It stays.

The gravel cracked under the tires.

My house stayed the same. Same furniture. Same walls.

Except the silence had changed. It pressed down. A full silence. Full of the smell of coffee. Full of the sound of eggs. Full of there's no sugar left. Absence renews itself. Absence is new every morning. You open your eyes and you know again that someone isn't there and the knowing is fresh and sharp like the first time and the first time is every time.

I never spoke about Ruth again.

It wasn't a secret. It wasn't that. It's just that there was no sentence for it that wasn't already a bar story. I saved a cat and the woman kissed me and she stayed a few days and she went back to the husband who set the fire. Said like that it's nothing. It's small. It's the kind of thing Danny Peale would tell at Sawyer's between two beers and people would nod and say damn and move on.

The scar on my forearm made a white line from wrist to elbow. The first thing I saw in the morning. The last at night.

And yet it was all I had.

It's still all I have.

Time passed.

I went back to work. The fires kept coming. Calls, shifts, motions.

One evening, Pearson's. Mobile home. Same carpet. Same smoke. I suited up. I moved forward.

The heat hit my face and my mouth knew before my head did.

The kiss came back. The sensation. The ash. The smoke.

I hesitated.

One second. Maybe two.

Behind me, a voice shouted. A kid, a new guy. He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me out. I laughed at a joke after. Nobody said anything. But I caught a look and they'd felt it.

After that, every fire carried the same thing. Staying one second longer.

One evening, I came home from a fire. The smell of smoke on my skin. My keys in the lock.

A meow behind the door.

I opened.

Miskee was there. Sitting in front of my door like he had an address.

Thin. Filthy. One ear torn. The coat full of knots. The whiskers bent. The ones that had grown back had done so crooked. The fire had warped the follicle and a warped follicle makes a warped whisker. The cat's scar. His white line. The same text as mine. The same night. The same fire. Two different bodies. Two languages. The same thing.

He looked at me.

I let him in.

I opened the fridge. Canned tuna, milk, a leftover under cellophane. I emptied the tuna onto a plate. I set it on the floor.

The cat ate. I watched him eat.

After that, I looked for Ruth.

The phone. The internet. The neighbors. Shady Pines. Where the burned mobile home had been, another one had been placed. Same model. Same color. The new mobile home had a planter in front of the door. Tomato plants. Scrawny. Growing crooked. Bobby watered them in the evening with the same leaky hose. I watched his hands on the hose. The same hands. He looked like a man who sleeps well.

Nobody knew anything. No number. No address. Ruth had vanished the way people vanish who leave no trace.

The cat was there. Ruth was not.

I didn't ask myself why he'd left.

That evening I sat in my kitchen.

Miskee climbed onto my lap. He weighed almost nothing. Three kilos maybe. A small warm weight. Three kilos of dirty fur that had crossed the county to lay on my lap a warmth without fire.

And the vibration of the purring passed into my bones. It was low and it was patient and it asked for nothing. The cat wasn't purring for me. The cat wasn't purring for himself. The cat purred. The verb without an object. Without reason. And it was exactly what I needed because I'd used up reasons.

The taste of ash on my lips came back one last time.