Thirst by Ken Kalfus Read Free Book Online Page B

imperceptible. Then the wind picked up and it gained altitude. The cat’s cries diminished until nearly inaudible, but not quite.
    We ourselves didn’t speak. There had been a moment of elation when the gondola cleared our heads, but now we didn’t even smile. “Catch,” Osinski said, palming a football, but no one took up the offer. We just looked into the sky. Once in a while the wind caught a sound like that of rusty hinges or worn brakes.
    For a long time the balloons didn’t appear to move. They just hung there, the gondola the size of the full
moon. I entertained the belief that it would always be there, as a kind of punishment, the cat over our heads, mewling as we walked to and from school, played spongeball, and grew up and got married.
    Yet I felt no relief when Nathan announced, “It’s coming down.” A gust of chill wind blew grit into our eyes. When our eyes cleared, we saw that Nathan was right: the apparent size of the gondola was a little greater than it had been a minute earlier. One of the balloons had lost most of its helium and hung off the milk carton like a shriveled, broken flower.
    The balloons descended much more slowly than they had risen, blown gently past our block. We ran through the Rosettis’ backyard and pushed ourselves through the hedges onto the property of the house on the next street. The cat, however, had lost no more than a little altitude. Not yet ready to land, it sailed over the next block and the block after that. We fell back through the hedges, claimed our English racers and stingrays, and took off after it.
    Our housing development was a labyrinth of “drives,” “lanes,” and “ways” that twisted around each other, so that the gondola hovered at our shoulders and behind our backs as we furiously pedaled after it. Several times it disappeared behind a house or a stand of trees. We emerged at last from the development, at the shore of the pond, just as the balloons were skimming over the pond’s surface. As soon as the gondola touched the surface, its forward motion was arrested, and it fell in.
    We bicycled to the edge of the muck and dismounted quietly. I made a conscious effort not to look at my
friends. Instead I stared across the pond, watching a spot a little short of where the gondola was sinking.
    Osinski finally broke the silence. He said, “Glub, glub, glub.”
    I let my bicycle drop to the ground and waded in, still wearing my dungarees and sneakers. The slime was warm and oily, and when it touched my crotch I shivered. My feet slipped on various things on the pond-bed—rocks, tires, broken beer bottles, probably condoms, probably dead cats. It took me about forty-five seconds to get to the gondola, which had tipped to its side away from me. My motion pushed it for a moment out of my reach and nearly turned it over. When finally I got there I found the kitten huddled in a corner of the carton, drooling from fear. It hissed and extended its claws as I grabbed its scruff.
    I returned, my friends watching me without expression on their faces, Nathan and Osinski with their arms crossed. I thought of the dead, who from another shore watched the living in eternal silence. I put the kitten down. I don’t know what I expected, but all it did was whimper a few times and then interrupt itself to vigorously scratch its left ear. Holding it against my handlebars, I brought it back to our neighborhood, even though there was no man, woman, child, or beast who would have missed it.
    The cat didn’t show any ill effects from the flight, nor even any recollection of it. It did, however, remember the lox, and after that it never strayed far from our back door.
    I never quite adopted the cat, and never named it,
but it more or less became mine, and years later when I went to college, I took it with me. Now fat and old, and always dissatisfied with its food, the cat surreptitiously lived in my dorm for a year and a half. By that time I had gone through several roommates