The Cat With the Abalone Eye

A hole had swallowed all of Lake Walter that summer. Lydia told me it went all the way down to the bedrock. She said she had heard that from her teacher, though it was more likely the fourth-grade illiterati. Mom said it drained into an underground river that flowed through a network of caves, but she drank nightly, and her facts seemed less believable after dinner. Still, the implications of what she said could swallow me in a spiral of morbid thoughts: swimmers struggling to exhaustion, small animals drowning in their hovels, Indian artifacts swept into unreachable crevices or expelled from the hillside, forever lost amongst the scree. To an eight-year-old whose toys were a pocket knife and a collection of spark plugs, that hole had more teeth than any folk creature in the county.

Our parents were gone until dark. My dad was working and Mom had taken the car to the Lavandaria, which was code for errands before the bar. We weren’t supposed to tell our dad. We were on our own for lunch, and all there was to do was what we shouldn’t.

“Do you want to go?” Lydia asked. “James will be there. He thinks he saw his grandma’s old cat out there, eating the fish.”

That ratty, one-eyed, calico had been missing since James’ grandma died. It used to be a regular around the lake, perching on stumps, boats, and dock piling, licking herself, eyes closed, in the sunlight that stretched through the canopy. It seemed when she was aware you were looking at her she’d reveal one furry socket where no eye had ever been, and one sizzling, silver disk. The extant eye was flaked with facets of various colors which fanned out from the center, evincing a saucer-like illusion. Unique as she was, she seemed like an unnecessary pretense for seeing the thing that drank down the lake in a matter of days.

“We won’t get pulled in?”

“No, Mom said that to keep us away. There isn’t any water left. James was just out there.”

“But it couldn’t collapse more, right? With people on it?”

“If it could hold all of that water without breaking, I think it can hold all of you, Eddie.” She yanked my shirt down, which had rolled up over my belly button.

“But it did break.”

Lydia continued to smooth out my shirt with her palms and tugged the bottom into place.

“What’s so special about seeing his grandma’s old cat?”

“He just thinks it might be the same one, but he wants to make sure.”

“Why?”

“Something she told him about it, I guess. Do you want to go?”

I looked out of the window at the skeleton piers, held back from collapse by green sinews. The cawing of the feasting gulls and the acrid taste of decomposition minced past the closed glass. I couldn’t fathom that missing volume surging beneath our feet, and I wanted to. What would be left in that hole? Was it a giant nothing that plunged down to the bedrock like Lydia said? Or was it full to the brim like a thimble full of rain?

“Come on. I don’t want to go alone. It’s scary without the water. Don’t you want to see the hole?”

I did, so I agreed.

Mud mounds rippled into dimpled cakes. Water grass dried in the sun and where the foam had burst there were faint etchings like scars of broken blisters on the mud. Stones lobed hemispherically like the eyes of sand crabs.

When the lake first drained, the Walter basin smelled pungent like sewage, and then it turned into a sharper sulphuric odor. But those smells burned off after a couple of days. Now there was the lively, fishy odor of sun-cooked corpses.

Crusty sand yielded underfoot, turning into dark, wet footprints, recording our passage across the new plain. Eviscerated carnage remained as evidence of the ecosystem. Everything seemed randomly arrayed up close, but when I looked ahead, it all lined up like field lines pointing toward the center of the lake and that hole.

“Why does James want to see that cat so bad?”

“James’ grandma said calico cats grant wishes.”

“No they don’t.”

“I know. That’s what I told James.”

James was older, thinner, and taller than me. He dressed in camouflage and knew a lot of knots, so I accepted that he innately possessed all the wisdom and skills of an Eagle Scout. I thought it would be interesting to see someone test his grandmother’s theory, where my humiliation wasn’t on the line.

And were it true—where would we keep the secret, and the cat, safe? I briefly considered the boat shed, where Mom used to keep her bottles until my dad shined her eye. It was also where my dad caught Lydia and James, one time, and chased James off with a loop of belt. It wasn’t a great place for secrets, so I reconsidered.

The mud skids were larger further out, like concave continents with jigsaw-puzzle edges. We’d found a central-bound lane of rocks and firmer ground between the rills.

“What do you think the hole looks like?”

“I don’t know. Like a hole. What do you mean?”

“Do you think we can see straight down?”

“Probably not.”

“You think it goes that far down?”

“No, I’m guessing there’s still some water in it.”

“I thought you said the water was all gone?”

“It’s gone from above ground.”

“James didn’t say if it went straight down?”

“I didn’t ask.”

Unbelievable.

“How big is it?”

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“If you had to guess?”

It was hotter further out. Mosquitos lit up my arms like cigarettes.

“There’s got to be a hundred cats out here, with all the birds and fish. More than one with a missing eye.”

“No cat has one eye like that. Remember how it was kind of multi-colored and silver? Like the inside of a clamshell.”

“Mother of pearl.”

“Mother of pearl comes from abalone, not clams.”

“Fine.”

“The ground is harder here. Let’s run.”

Lydia bolted, but I didn’t chase. My underwear was riding up, and my thighs were rubbing raw.

We were nearing to the center. Police barricades had been threaded together with yellow tape, some of which had come loose and looped limply on the ground. A figure skulked just beyond the perimeter, kicking at the mud. It was James.

Lydia stopped running shortly after she passed a sawhorse. James crouched near some debris and pointed something out to her.

I passed underneath the yellow tape and James stood up. He was holding something limp and loose in his arms. Lydia had picked up many of Mom’s mannerisms, and her scolding tone had a slanted, irritated drawl.

James held a limp one-eyed black cat. The eye stared back at me, unblinking, undilated, silver, and, in aspect, flat. A furry pocket sunk into her skull where the other eye would have been. Her black coat was patchy, and her pink stomach bulged from it with two rows of nipples. A swatch of blood from the matted base of her tail had dried on James’ arm.

“Hey there, Tolls. She just had kittens.” James always called me by my last name.

In a dugout underneath a log were seven balls with gummy eyes. I crouched next to the litter. They were mincing in ordered chaos; climbing and crawling, surmounting one another, and taking turns face-first into the ground; patterns repeating even as the roles changed. The mother watched from between James’s arms.

And there it was, behind James: the thing that held the lake. Though the size of a small car it was concealed in the debris. The ground leading up to it sloped, but the litter evened out the grade so it was barely perceptible. I could see just beyond the curl of its lip, and there was no water there. It was cooler near the hole, and the air smelled more damp and less of rot. Knowing that I was standing just above a possibly enormous drop was vertiginous and paralyzing.

“It’s her. It’s definitely her,” James said.

“She’s not even the same color as your grandma’s cat,” I said.

“But look at the eye, idiot.”

“Leave him alone,” Lydia said.

“Fine. Don’t pick on the fat kid. I get it. Sorry, Tolls. You’re not an idiot.” James held out a hand to help me up, but I pushed it away.

“She is the wrong color,” Lydia agreed.

“That doesn’t matter,” James said.

“The cat probably spent more time with my grandma when she was dying than any of the family did, which was a lot. My grandma loved her. Anyone who visited, she asked them to look after it. She asked me three or four times. My mom said it was the dementia. But I don’t know. To me, she seemed really concerned about it.

“The whole last week, my mom made me sit with my grandma so she wasn’t alone while the rest of the family made arrangements. Grandma was lying there on her back with her mouth wide open. The cat was perched on her chest, staring at me. Then, one day we came over and the cat had disappeared and my grandma was dead. I remember everything in that room ‘cause I’d rather look at anything other than a dying person. I never saw someone die before. And there wasn’t much to look at other than this cat, so believe me when I say I know this cat—and that eye.”

“And your grandma said it grants wishes?”

“Again, my mom says it was the dementia. But when Grandma asked me to look over it, two of the times she told me about the wishes. It’s from a Scottish folktale. Bring it a saucer of food, and she’ll grant you a wish.”

“You believe that?”

“Yeah, Tolls. Maybe I do.”

“But her color.”

“If she can grant wishes, why can’t she change her color? Besides, that’s her eye. And that missing one wasn’t lost in a fight or anything. It’s walled up like it was never there from birth.”

“So,” Lydia asked, “did you make a wish?”

James contrived a weak laugh. “If you had just one wish, what would be the best thing you could wish for?”

“More wishes,” Lydia said.

“Exactly. And look,” James nodded toward the stumbling newborns, raw and pink with sand in their ears.

“But none of them are calico either,” I pointed out.

“Look, forget about the color. That’s got nothing to do with it. Their color doesn’t come in for a while anyway,” James said.

If James could believe it, hardwired as he was for the mechanics of nature, I was willing not to disagree. But the more important thing to me, more mysterious and equally as unbelievable, for which acres of evidence surrounded me, was feet away and we weren’t discussing it. I found now that I was close to it, I was afraid to bring it up or even think of it, which might precipitate looking, or falling, into it. But James noticed.

“Go take a look, Tolls.”

“Have you?”

In answer, James walked closer to the hole and peered over the edge with the cat still in his arms.

“What’s in there?” Lydia asked.

“Come check it out.”

The ground was covered by logs, plastic litter, and long strings of slimy plants. Walking through the debris, down a barely perceptible grade of mud, my eyes and body sent different messages to my brain about the level of the ground on which I walked. It was a dizzying illusion.

The entire anomaly, event horizon and all, was about twenty feet in diameter, including the gradient. The hole proper— maybe ten. The perimeter was regular, in the sense as it appeared engineered. There was water about fifteen feet below. It was still and dotted with detritus and foam. A tree trunk broke through the nest of litter and braced against the wall, stopping about a child’s height short of the rim.

My vertigo flared, and I stepped back, panicked, choked by each beat of my heart.

“Careful,” James said.

“What’s down there, Eddie?”

I dry-mouthed the words as best I could: “You can see the water a little ways below.”

“What’s it doing?”

“Nothing. It’s just sitting there.”

“Is it deep?” Lydia’s voice was calming.

“I can’t tell.” I didn’t want to think about it anymore.

“Yeah, it’s real deep,” James said.

“How do you know?” Lydia asked.

“Because I made a second wish. I wanted to know how deep it was too, but I couldn’t just dive down and touch the bottom. Not without some help. ”

“You’re lying. You didn’t go in there.”

“I’m not lying, Tolls. I didn’t say I went in.”

“So, what was your wish?” Lydia asked.

“My wish was to find a way to get to the bottom. Then, I got an idea. I went home to look for some rope. I was sure we didn’t have any because we just used the last bit to make a net for my dad’s truck bed. But there it was. Brand new. A hundred and fifty feet of paracord. When I got back here, I found a rock, tied the rope around it, aimed it between the tree’s limbs, and let it drop. I ran out of rope before it went slack.”

The brown and yellow paracord had blended in with the rubbish. At one end, a monkey’s fist, large enough to hold a baseball.

James moved to the edge again, holding the cat close to his chest.

“James, could you at least put the cat down, please?” Lydia asked. “You’re making me nervous.”

“It’s fine, Lyds.”

The toes of James’ Chucks were just over the edge. The cat lay across his arms like a loaf of over-proofed bread. An instinct I didn’t know I was capable of urged me closer to James until I realized we were shoulder to shoulder. The tension across my chest made my shoulders ache. My heart was loaded with potential energy.

Crisp granules of sand scraped away from that edge, which, now that I stood on it, was hard and firm in contrast to the mud and muck before it. Instead of yielding underfoot, it was solid, and the sediment caked on it had baked dry. That edge was man-made. Engineered. I will never forget it—that men, not nature, were responsible for it.

James reached out his arms and held the cat over the edge. I knew he was just playing with Lydia and me, but when she yelled, my right arm swung up and snared a fistful of James’ shirt, nearly lifting his feet off the ground.

I’d wrestled my fair share of bullies at school. My arms were weak, but I knew how to use my weight to get the other guy on the ground. James landed on top of me, his elbow crushing into my chest. I realized the cat was gone when he planted a hand on me and the other on the ground, trying to use it to prop himself back up. But his hand slid in the mud, and he slipped again. I was still holding him back, so when he fell, all of his weight came down on my abdomen.

I grabbed the front of his shirt to keep him from trying to stand up again and putting any more weight on my gut. He squirmed free and punched me twice in the face and twice in my chest. When Lydia pulled James’s arm back and ordered him to stop, three long scratches ran with blood on his arm.

James’ heaved angrily. He freed his arm from Lydia’s grasp, but she stepped between him and me and shoved her hand into his chest.

He turned back and looked into the hole.

“What the hell, Tolls?”

“Is she gone?” Lydia asked.

“What the hell were you thinking?”

“You were holding her over the edge,” Lydia said in my defense.

James walked to the edge of the hole and stared into it. He stomped the ground and the ground shook.

“James? Where is she?” Lydia asked.

“She’s on the log. ”

Lydia joined him near the edge. After standing up and brushing myself off, I edged my way over too, putting Lydia between me and James.

“It’s all still in there,” Lydia said. “All of it. The whole lake. It isn’t even moving. I thought it would be swirling, like a drain.”

The cat mugged us from below, its eye a flashing coin with almost nothing of a pupil.

“Look at that,” James said. He knelt at the edge of the hole. Lydia lay beside him, her fingertips out of sight over the edge.

There was blood on the log, actively dripping.

“We need to get her out of there.”

“How?”

“How do you think? We have to climb down.”

Lydia pushed back from the edge. “James, she can get out of there on her own.”

“She’s bleeding pretty bad. And that’s like a five-foot vertical climb even if she makes it to the top of the log.”

“She’ll jump. Ours used to get on top of the refrigerator from the floor.”

“Your cat didn’t just have babies.”

“How are we supposed to get her out of there anyway?”

“I’ve got my backpack. She’s pretty exhausted and hurt. I bet I could get her in there.”

“You mean just dangle it over the edge like a basket? Hope she might just crawl in?” Again, the slur of condescension in Lydia’s voice was reminiscent of Mom’s.

“You really think that would work? One of us has to go in there.”

“OK, how?”

“We’ll use the rope. ”

“Your thin little rope?” Lydia asked.

“It has a two-hundred-pound test weight. It could even hold Eddie. In fact, he should be the one to do it since it’s his fault.”

My mouth went dry as James stared at me.

“But we’d never be able to pull him out. I’ll go.”

“And we’re supposed to hold you?”

“It’s not hard, Lyds. I’ll knot the cord into a kind of ladder with loops for footholds. Like the net my dad and I made, but just one length. All you have to do is hold the rope in place. Anchor it. Just don’t let go. I’ll climb in and out on my own.”

“With the cat?”

“In the backpack.”

Lydia asserted her opinion with sour eyes.

“It’ll be ok. I’ll be fine. The cat will be fine.”

James tied a couple of loops of rope. I expected them to be limp and the ladder to twist, but it kept its shape when he held it up. He’d twisted the cord through each node so that it corrected the tension, and each junction hung straight.

When completed, he created two additional loops at one end. One was large enough to cinch around Lydia’s waist. The other was near the end of what remained of the cord, and it was small, far too small to fit around me.

“You’re going to put this one on your ankle, Tolls. All you have to do is sit on this rock so you don’t slide. Lydia is going to sit in front of you. You hold on to her waist and don’t let go for anything. If for some reason she starts to slide, both of you grab onto the side of the rock as tight as you can. Your combined weight should keep me up.”

James helped Lydia pass the rope over her waist and then handed me the last bit. I slipped it over my shoe and around my ankle, which James cinched to his satisfaction.

The litter of kittens mewed next to us under the log.

“Don’t worry, buddies,” Lydia said.

James fitted his backpack and buckled the cinch around his waist.

“OK, I’m going in.” He rolled the ladder over the edge and watched over its fall. He adjusted it a little and directed us to change our positions slightly. When everything was set, he nodded to us and climbed down.

The length between him and Lydia went taught. Lydia’s shoulders bent forward with the weight now on her, and I held her tighter around the waist, digging my legs into the rock. With each step James took down, we leaned back to counter the pull. Then, he was out of sight.

James may as well have been on the dark side of the moon. There was no communication, and we waited quietly for any report.

I looked back toward our house, a gray smear against a green hill. The piers looked sturdy from the center of the lake, unlike the ancient, excavated look the had up close. There was something else out there moving. Out on the dry land, just east of where we came, a figure cut a silhouette out of the horizon. Someone was walking out onto the dead lake.

“Someone is coming,” I said.

“What?”

I was about to repeat myself when the rope jerked sharply, ripping Lydia from my hands. She launched forward, landing on her stomach. I fell backward, my elbows cracking against the rock. The loop around my leg tore past the knot of my fibula. My heel and the tension of my shoelaces were all that held it from slipping off.

If I could have done a sit-up, I might have been able to grab Lydia and pull her back—but I couldn’t, never had. That’s why I was the anchor. I was the fat kid. The dead weight in the back.

Lydia screamed. The rope slipped further down my foot. The heel of my shoe began sliding over my sock. I rolled onto my side and jackknifed, using my shoulder to inch my arms close enough to reach my toes. I fought against the pain in my stomach from where James landed on me. My chest, also sore from where he punched me, limited my reach. As I squirmed, trying to gain the distance to my ankle, soft-packed mud worked its way beneath the ligature. The rope, my shoe, my sock, all came off, and Lydia was dragged over the ledge, into the hole.

I watched her legs go in—that’s what I remember most. The image is so clear it’s unbelievable I did nothing to save her, even though I know I couldn’t have. Her knees, her shoes, cut tracks that pooled with dark water as they were gouged open.

And then there were no sounds. It was silent. The whole thing was silent except for the splashes of water, and then it was silent again. I hobbled to the hole and dropped to my chest at the edge, gripping the rim hard as if it mattered how hard I tried.

The figure in the distance was running now. Running and pumping his arms, useless like punches thrown in a dream. The figure was beating ground but seemed to get no closer.

I could see him now. He was old. Like the piers, he was bent and oddly shaped, running as if his limbs were different lengths.

“He’s too old!” I yelled. “Go back! Get help!”

And he yelled back while hobbling toward me, but I couldn’t make out what he said.

I tried to yell again, tell him that there was nothing he could do, and curse him for being more dead weight. But my words were soundless in my mouth.

The water was as still in the hole as it was when we’d arrived. The surface was bright and blue with tinges of green and shadows cast by the tree trunk and the clouds. Foam formed patches of white, and the reflection of the silver sun beat the surface into angles like a steel drum.

The face of the man who had finally reached me made no sense. Nothing made sense until he put his hand on my shoulder and knelt next to me. His touch brought me back to the world outside of the hole—even as we both looked back into it. I put my mouth onto the ground and stared back down at the iridescent sheen on the water that glared up from behind the tree trunk. One giant abalone eye staring up.