Wild Awake

the corner. Maybe she lived here because it gave her a morbid kind of inspiration for her paintings. Or because no matter how dingy it was, it beat living in the same house as Dad.
    Doug opens his door and goes into his room. I hover in the hallway, fingering the cell phone in my pocket, getting ready to call for help at any moment. I can hear Doug clomping around in there, knocking things over in the dark, trying to call his cat out of the shadows.
    “Kit-kit-kit-kit-kit! Kit-kit-kit-kit-kit!”
    I glance into Doug’s room. There’s a towel nailed over the window and no bulb in the ceiling fixture. All I can make out is a mattress piled with clothes, a few odds and ends of furniture, and a photo in the kind of cheap plastic frame you can buy at the dollar store. There doesn’t seem to be a kitchen or a bathroom. I wonder how many floors down he needs to go to use a toilet.
    A moment later Doug comes back to the door carrying something in the crook of his arm. At first I think it’s some bundled-up laundry, but he hands it to me, and it’s a scruffy white cat with pale red eyes and a stump where its back right leg used to be. It meows and tries to scramble out of my arms. Doug goggles at it fondly.
    “This is Snoogie. Sukey-girl found her in the alley.”
    I am trying to unhook Snoogie’s claws from my shirt. She meows again and tries to climb me like a tree. She manages to get up to my shoulder, then digs in her claws parrot-style and won’t let go, surveying the world with a look of such extreme cat-paranoia I start to wonder if she knows something I don’t. Doug reaches up and strokes her affectionately.
    “Snoogie’s a good cat.”
    Actually, Snoogie seems like a very bad cat. But I don’t say this to Doug, whose perception has clearly been warped by love and/or cheap beer. As I watch him pet her, I start to get anxious. What if I’ve come all this way for nothing? What if all he has to give me is a busted old lamp or some moldy bath towel he’s been hanging on to for five years? Maybe there’s a good reason my parents hung up on him the other times he called. My thoughts flit guiltily to my piano, sitting neglected in a dust-spangled shaft of light. Later , I promise myself.
    “Hey, Doug?”
    “Whassat?”
    Doug isn’t listening. He’s too busy gazing at Snoogie, who is currently attempting to climb from one of my shoulders to the other by way of my head.
    “Are her paintings here?”
    “Say ’gain?”
    Snoogie hops down to the floor and darts into Doug’s room. He finally looks at me.
    “Do you have Sukey’s paintings?”
    “There weren’t no paintings left at the end, nah. She got into one of her moods and started giving ’em away until there weren’t none left. She gave one to me, big yellow painting, but those crackheads came in here and stole it. You can’t have nothing nice here without someone coming around and stealing it. Hang on, I’ll grab you what I got.”
    Doug closes the door halfway and disappears into the murk. I hear him banging into something, swearing, and pulling open a stuck door. I glance into the room and see him rummaging through a closet packed with garbage— actual garbage, soda cups and napkins and cigarette boxes. It’s all tumbling out around his skinny ankles in a mini avalanche of crap.
    Great , I think, stepping back from the door. He’s one of those crazy hoarder people .
    “Hey, Doug?” I call. “I kinda need to go.”
    “Hold on, honey,” he hollers back. “I had to bury the bag real good so those crackheads couldn’t find it.”
    I hear cans rattling to the floor, and a grunt of effort from Doug. “Sukey and me were like family,” he wheezes. “People got to take care of each other down here. I woulda called you’s sooner, but I’ve been sick.”
    I roll my eyes. Sure . If by sick, you mean hammered .
    I poke my head through the door and see Doug hauling a big black trash bag out of the closet.
    “D’you want some help?”
    Doug doesn’t seem to hear me. He rests on his crutches to catch his breath. I step into his room and pick my way across the cluttered floor. “What’s in there?”
    The cat runs out from under a wooden coffee table and jumps onto the mattress. Doug gazes after it.
    “Sukey-girl’s things. The manager sent someone in there to dump all her stuff in the trash after the cops left and I said, that ain’t right.”
    Doug aims his foot at the middle of the bag and gives it a push.
    “Think you can lift