House of Dance by Beth Kephart Page B

Smash-faced propeller. Stump of awing. Splintered fuselage. Crushed cockpit.
    But Nick was even better on that tree than I. He would scuttle out to the maple’s farthest, hardest parts, up toward the sky or out toward the place where the limbs got lacy thin. “Checking out the stratosphere,” he’d say. A word that branded him smart. “Testing. Testing.” Like he was some kind of pilot. He’d shimmy up and the tree would shiver. When he stayed up there too long, I’d go get him some lunch, ziplock bags of bologna rolled up to look like logs, squares of cheese, a tall sleeve of saltines. Then I’d climb into the part of the tree that I’d nicknamed The Nest and wait for Nick to tell me something, and once in a while he would, and once in a while I’d go on about my celebrity father.
    Then one warmish afternoon, when I was outside doing nothing and Nick was who knows where, Mrs. Robertson’s cat, Claw, got wild for some bird that had built its nest on athin bough of the maple. The big lug had climbed up that tree but couldn’t get himself down; talk about sissy. “A predicament” is what Mrs. Robertson called it when she stomped over across her yard to ours and stood beneath the branches, looking up. By then Claw was mewing up a storm that the whole world could hear, and he would not stop his crying. “Come on, cat,” Mrs. Robertson stood there saying. “Nice boy, kitty, kitty.” But Claw was having none of her. He bared his teeth and stared, as if everyone and everything but him were to be blamed.
    “You know, Cloris,” said my mother, who had come outside to see about the commotion, “Claw will come down on his own. Give him time.”
    But Mrs. Robertson was fretting, and Claw was stubborn. That cat kept himself stuck, and he was clearly getting hungry, braying instead of mewing now, screaming, you might have said. Mrs. Robertson’s facewas never very pretty. Now it was scribbled every which way with worry.
    Finally there was nothing to do and Nick wasn’t home and my mother, trying to fix things, said: “Rosie, I’ve seen you. You’re a mighty fine tree climber. You can scoot on up and shake that branch and make old Claw come tumbling down.” A frame of reference and a strategy that left Mrs. Robertson staggered.
    “Your plan is to shake my cat from your tree?” she said, gasping between the words, from shock.
    “Do you have a better plan?” my mother asked.
    “No, I do not,” Mrs. Robertson said. “But even so.” She looked from the cat to my mother to me and back up the tree.
    “I guess that settles it,” my mother said. “I guess I will go get a blanket.” She went off in her sundress and her red flip-flops back into the house. Mrs. Robertson and I stood there,not talking, just waiting. After a while my mom returned, carrying our worst old plaid rag blanket, all folded up in a square.
    “You and I will stand on either side of this,” she said to Mrs. Robertson, snapping the thing out of its creases to its full size. “We’ll catch the poor thing when he falls.”
    “Claw is not a circus cat,” Mrs. Robertson said.
    “He’s a stuck cat,” my mother replied. “We’ll do what we can.”
    “I don’t know,” said Mrs. Robertson grimly, taking her side of the rag and pacing backward from my mother. “I sure don’t like it.”
    “Neither do I,” my mother said, her part of the rag in hand now. “He may be your cat, but this is my tree and also my blanket.”
    “Some blanket.”
    The maple was mature and secure in the ground. Its branches were messy over the lawn. When I stretched tall, I could grip myone hand around the lowest branch. When I pulled up, I could reach the next branch after that. That day I kicked off my shoes and took the slightest running start, to make my very best official tree-climbing-with-a-grown-up-audience debut. The branch was smooth and slippery to my touch, but my feet were off the ground.
    I climbed. It was a nice-enough day. I got close but not