He puts his arms around his father, and his father’s tighten around him.
That man in the pizza place, Bird says, slowly. What did he say?
He’s one of us. His father’s voice is half muffled against Bird’s hair and buzzes inside Bird’s skull. And he’s right. What he meant was, these kinds of things—they might happen to you, too.
His father’s arms loosen, and he holds Bird at arm’s length.
Noah, he says. That’s why I keep telling you, keep a low profile. Don’t do anything to call attention to yourself.
Okay, Bird says.
His father goes to the sink, begins to run cold water over his bruised knuckles. And because it feels like the door between them is still ajar, Bird sets his palm against it. Pushes.
Did my mother like cats? he asks.
His father stops. What, he says, as if Bird has spoken in another language, one of the few he doesn’t know.
Cats, Bird repeats. Did she like them.
His father shuts off the water. Where is this coming from? he says.
I just want to know, Bird says. Did she?
His father glances quickly around the room, his habit whenever Bird’s mother comes up. Outside, all quiet, only the occasional siren passing.
Cats, he says, looking down at his raw and reddened hand. She did. She adored them.
He looks at Bird searchingly, with a gaze more pointed than Bird has seen in a long time. Like he’s spotted something unusual in Bird’s face, like a sheath has been removed.
Miu, his father says slowly. Her surname.
He writes the character in the dust on the top of the bookshelf: a square crisscrossed to represent a field, two smaller crosses sprouting from the top.
苗
It means seedling, or sometimes crops. Something just beginning to grow. But it sounds like a cat’s meow, doesn’t it? Miu.
And, he says, his voice warming the way it does when he grows excited, when he’s talking about things that he loves, like words. It has been a long time since this happened. And, his father goes on, if you put this, which means beast, in front of it—
He adds a few more strokes, a pared-down suggestion of an animal sitting at attention:
貓
—this whole thing means cat. The beast that makes the sound miu. But of course you could think of it as the beast that protects the crops.
His father is in his element, as Bird hasn’t seen him in years. He has almost forgotten his father could be like this, that his father had this in him. That his eyes and his face could light up this way.
The story, his father says, is that once there were no cats in China. No house cats, anyway. Only wildcats. Classically, cat was written like this—he sketches another character—
貍
—which really meant a wild creature, like a fox. Then Persian traders taught them to domesticate their wildcats, and they added this—
He begins to write a third character, made of two halves. First, the character for woman. Then beside it, so close they almost overlap, the symbol for hand.
奴
Slave, his father says. Wildcat plus slave, a domesticated cat. See?
Together they look down at the characters written in the dust. Miu. His mother. Beast plus seedling meant cat. What kind of beast would she have been? A cat, for sure. Woman plus hand meant slave. Had his mother ever been domestic, or domesticated?
With one swipe of his palm his father wipes the top of the bookshelf clean.
Anyway, he says. We used to talk about these kinds of things, your mother and me. Long time ago.
He rubs his palm against the thighs of his pants, leaving a faint gray streak.
She liked that idea, he says after a moment. That the only thing separating her from a beast was a few little strokes.
I didn’t know you knew Chinese, Bird says.
I don’t, his father says absently. Not really. But I can understand some Cantonese. I studied it, for a while. With your mother. A long time ago.
He turns to go, and then, just as suddenly, turns back.
That book.
And then, after another long pause: Your mother used to tell you that story, didn’t she.
Bird nods.
I remember, his father says.
And as he begins to speak, it comes back to Bird, all of it: not the words on the pages of the book, not the few bare-bones sentences his father uses to tell it to him now, but the way he remembers hearing it, in his mother’s voice. Painting a picture with words on the blank white wall of his mind. Long buried. Crackling as it surfaced in the air once more.
Once, long ago, there was a boy who loved to draw cats. He was a poor boy, and most of the day he worked in the fields, planting rice with his parents and the others in his village in the spring, harvesting the paddies beside them in the fall. But whenever he had a spare moment, he would draw. And what he most liked to draw, what he drew most often of all, were cats. Big cats, little cats, striped and calico and spotted. Cats with pointy ears and skinny eyes, cats with black paws and black muzzles, cats with white patches on their chests like eagles. Shaggy cats, smooth cats, cats leaping, cats stalking, cats sleeping or cleaning their fur. On the flat rocks by the river, he sketched them with a burnt stick. He scraped them into the sand on the shores of the nearby lake where the fishermen pulled in their nets. On dry days, he scratched them into the dust of the path to his house, and after the rains he carved them into the thick mud where puddles had once glistened.