We saw no place suitable before Jax, and things didn’t look encouraging south of it on the map, so we left I-95 there and headed east for the ocean, hoping for a miracle.
And got one. Wandering around in the dark through one of those sleepy little seaside retirement communities, convinced we were doomed, we happened upon one of the cheesiest motels I’ve ever seen in my life. Years ago it might have been something nice, but huge gated townhouse communities for seniors had been developed on either side of it in recent years, cutting off its beach access, and now it was clearly teetering on the ragged edge of bankruptcy. There was plenty of room in the parking lot for two or three dozen vehicles, as long as we were prepared to pay the standard rate for a dozen motel rooms we had no intention of sleeping in.
Well, some people used them, and it’s possible some of us even slept in one. Zoey and I went into one to use the shower, which was marginally better than the ones you find in campgrounds, and we might well have drifted off in front of the tube afterward. But while I was discovering there was nothing on I really wanted to watch despite ninety-nine-channel cable, I saw my first Florida cockroach come out of a baseboard, and so did Zoey, and that was it: we reboarded our bus and sealed it tight.
Which was a bit of a problem at first. Even with the breeze coming in off the ocean, it was a rather warm night by our Yankee standards. We talked about cracking windows—cockroaches, even ones that big, couldn’t actually climb up the side of a bus, could they?—but when we finally got around to trying it, Zoey saw her first Florida mosquitoes, and that was the end of that idea. (A couple of them got into the bus, but fortunately I had a two-by-four and excellent reflexes.)
Shortly after that, fortunately, we had the epiphany that generally comes to northerners their first night in Florida: the stunning realization that, just as excessive cold can be mitigated by putting on more clothes, excessive warmth can be ameliorated by their removal. Luckily, we were still so far north in Florida that the process reached equilibrium short of the point at which we’d have had to remove our skin. Soon we were all properly dressed for the climate—which meant pulling all the curtains, to avoid scandalizing the senior citizens who kept driving, strolling, hobbling, or wheeling by outside.
“This is really nice, Daddy,” Erin said. “I like it when it’s warm enough to be naked. Is it always warm in Florida?”
“Usually a lot warmer than this, from what I hear,” I said. We were sitting side by side at the computer, a modified Mac II I’d wired up to its own 12-volt, playing games together. “Down where we’re headed, I think they pray for nights this cool. Do you think you’ll like really hot weather?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never tried. Do you think you will?”
“Definitely,” I assured her.
“How do you know?”
“For the same reason you’re winning this game.”
“I’m winning because you’re not paying attention,” she said.
“Exactly.” I stopped sneaking peeks and stared frankly at my wife, who was curled up nearby with a Randy Wayne White novel. “Any weather that makes your mom dress like that is good weather.” Zoey ignored me and kept reading, but she pinkened slightly, and I thought I heard a faint purring sound. “In general, the less clothes people have to wear, the better I like it. I’m a nudist at heart. Used to be a practicing nudist, once, but Long Island’s just too cold for it.”
“Really, Jake?” Zoey asked. Erin, sensing that I had lost interest in the game we’d been playing, quit out of it and opened up the paint program instead.
“Aw, just for a year or so, back in the Sixties. Bunch of us in this huge old house with a really good furnace, kind of a commune. We had a sign by the door on the way out, said, ‘Did you remember to dress?’ And another outside by the doorbell that said, ‘Viewer discretion is advised.’”
“How did it work out?”
I thought I heard that purring sound again, and gave her my best leer. Odd, but pleasant, to know that my wife found it so enjoyable to imagine me walking around naked. “Very interestingly. Nudity did have a few drawbacks, though.”
“Like what?”
“Well, when you play guitar naked, you end up with these really dopey-looking creases curving along your chest.” She and Erin giggled. “And a cat jumping up on your lap unexpectedly can be a real, uh, catastrophe.”
I expected Erin to complain about the pun. Instead she giggled again, and said, “I know what you mean. This one tickles.”
I glanced over and dropped my jaw.
There was a cat on her lap.
He—I was quite certain it was a “he”—wasn’t a hell of a lot smaller than she was, the size of a bobcat but not as pleasant-looking. He was orange as an autumn pumpkin, with a white cross on his back either his family coat of arms or protection against vampires. But I suspected the vampires were the ones in need of protection: he was muscled like a balrog. As I studied him, he yawned, displaying sabertooth fangs, and briefly unsheathed his front claws, which looked like he could dice a cucumber by simply flexing his toes. He had baleful yellow eyes with scalloped edges around the pupils. He was permitting Erin to adore his ears.
“How the hell did that get in?” I said. So that was where that purring had been coming from!
“What?” Zoey said, making a blunt instrument of her book and looking wildly about for mosquitoes. “Where?”
“That,” I said, and pointed at the cat. “There.”
She looked where I was pointing. “Jesus.” She put her book down and sat up. “I didn’t see it come in past us when we got off and went into that motel room…and I’m sure it didn’t come back aboard with us: I was looking close to make sure no cockroaches followed us in. He must have come in a window before we closed them.”
I didn’t buy it. “He couldn’t have climbed up the side of a bus.” I took another look at those claws. “Well…maybe he could, but we’d have heard him.”
“Maybe he hopped up onto the engine compartment, then on up to the roof, and…no, that’s silly.”
“I can’t see it,” I agreed. “I’ve seen cats jump up into an open window, but I never saw one jump down into one. He’d have broken his neck trying. Erin, do you know how he got aboard?”
“No, Daddy,” she assured me. “He just climbed up on my lap. I thought you guys found him somewhere. Can we keep him?”
“No, honey,” Zoey and I said together. “He must belong to somebody, sweetheart,” Zoey added.
“He’s got no collar,” Erin pointed out.
By golly, she was right. And the cat did have the faintly ratty look of the stray, did obviously need some love. Zoey and I exchanged a long and meaningful glance. We already knew we were doomed. For some reason we opted not to admit it, and wasted a good deal of time arguing with Erin. Of course she batted aside arguments faster than we could make them up. Diligent search with a flashlight, which the cat endured with massive patience, failed to turn up a single flea to bolster our case. Twenty minutes later the thing was tucking into a bowl of minced-up chicken leftovers and an adjacent bowl of water, purring like a chainsaw. (Erin, whose knowledge of cats was largely theoretical and colored by common mythology, wanted to give it a saucer of milk, but I explained the effect it has on the adult feline digestive system in real life, and the limited appeal, in an enclosed space, of a cat with diarrhea.)
Right up until then, Zoey had still been resisting, but as she watched the savage thing wolf down its food, she softened. “All right,” she conceded. “What are we going to name the damn cat?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s its name, Erin?”
“I’ll ask,” she said. She reached out her little hand and stroked the cat’s neck with unusual dexterity. “Excuse me,” she said, “but what’s your name?”
The cat broke off eating, looked over its shoulder at her—then got up and trotted across the bus. It stopped before the table the computer was strapped to, and leapt up onto it, unerringly picking the o
nly possible clear landing spot, just to the right of the mousepad. For a wild moment I thought it was going to step over the mouse and start typing…but what it did instead made me giggle involuntarily.
It started playing with the mouse.
Just like a cat playing with a mouse—or so I thought at first. Its motions seemed random, alternating between batting it around and pressing on it. But onscreen, the cursor moved to the tool bar, selected a tool, moved it back to what looked like the precise center of the document window. The cat pressed one more time, and then stopped, nudged the mouse away, and looked over at Erin. I squinted at the screen. The tool the cat had selected had been the pencil. And in the center of the screen now lay a single dot.
“I get it!” Erin cried. “Do you get it, Daddy? Mommy? His name is Pixel. Hi, Pixel!”
The cat meowed, leapt down from the table, came right to her, and butted her with his head.
And I started to get a very strange feeling. My ears began to tingle, and I felt hair lift on the back of my neck. A sudden incoherent suspicion had come to me, one that filled me with something like superstitious awe, a kind of reverent terror.
But no—it couldn’t be. It couldn’t possibly. No way in hell. Not in a million years.
Could it?
I couldn’t even bring myself to share it with Zoey. I discussed it with Omar the next day, over a private CB channel, while she and Erin were in the back. I thought him the one best qualified of all of us to pour cold water on my astonishing conjecture. Instead, he agreed with me.
“It fits everything I know, Jake,” he told me. “I corresponded with her. When the old man died and she decided to move east, she couldn’t take a cat. So David Gerrold offered to take it for her, and she accepted. But after a couple of weeks, it took off from Gerrold’s place, apparently to the immense relief of his dogs, and hasn’t been reported since.”
“Well, where did she move to?”
“About five hundred yards from where you were sleeping last night.”
“What?”
“I didn’t want to say anything. I’m sorry Jake: I was dying to tell you, naturally, and everybody else too—but just think about it. Everybody would have wanted to go and visit her, you know that. You think she needs a hundred barflies and a talking dog showing up for tea?”
I had to agree, though I hated to. “Forget that for now,” I said. “Are you telling me you think it could have followed her all the way across the country? With the trail at least two weeks cold to start?”
“Do you doubt it?”
Of course I didn’t doubt it. Cats have been famously known to follow much colder trails much longer distances. I just wanted to doubt it…because the alternative was too awesome to encompass easily.
“God damn it, Jim, are you seriously telling me you think—”
“I can’t prove it,” he said. “But it fits the known facts. He answers to his name.”
“I have Robert Heinlein’s cat on my bus.”
“The Cat Who Walks Through Windshields,” he agreed solemnly. “Man, that’s heavy.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“You mind if I pass the word?”
“Uh…” I pulled out and passed a senior citizen, an action that was becoming automatic. “Shit no, I guess not. Go ahead. I’m gonna need a while to deal with this.”
“Ten four,” he said, and was gone.
Pixel hopped up on the dashboard and looked at me. I looked back at him for a long while, and eventually noticed that I was smiling so broadly at him, my ears hurt.
“Welcome aboard, sir,” I said. “We are honored to have you with us.”
“Myert,” he said graciously, and faced forward to watch the road.
“Hey, Zoey!” I called. “Come in here and sit down. Bring the kid.”
“Are you out of your cotton-picking mind?” Zoey greamed when I told her. (Cross between a groan and a scream, remember? Similar to a scroan.) “Stipulate that a cat could make it from California to the Florida coast without being turned into road pizza or other ethnic food. Say he finds his way all the way to the new home of Virginia Heinlein. Why the hell would he leave her again? And hitch a ride with a caravan of escaped mental patients headed for the looniest corner of the land?”
“Beats me,” I admitted. “Maybe that retirement community she’s in now doesn’t allow pets, and he doesn’t want to get her turfed out—I don’t know, Zo.”
“Without sneaking in at least once to say hello and good-bye first? You said Omar told you the last he heard, Mrs. Heinlein hadn’t seen any sign of Pixel. Her Pixel, I mean.”
“He did sneak in, Mommy,” Erin said.
We both turned and looked at her. “Say again?” I said.
“He did sneak in and see her. He just didn’t let her see him.”
Zoey and I exchanged a glance.
“Why not, honey?” she asked.
Erin was already losing interest in the subject; she was hunched forward over her safety belt, inspecting her toes. “He knew it’d only make her sad if he moved back in with her. You know, remind her of him. Of Mr. Heinlein. Pixel came to check on her, because Mr. Heinlein asked him to, and then he saw she was just fine and he decided to come with us next.”
“Oh.”
Pause.
“How do you know that, Pumpkin?” I asked, already suspecting the answer.
“Pixel told me,” she said. “When are we gonna get there, Daddy?”
It was the combination that floored me. The first statement was extraordinary, even for a child as unique as Erin; the question might have come from any child that ever lived. (And probably had.) It was clear from her manner and voice that she had vastly more interest in the second topic than the first. I couldn’t help it: I broke into giggles, and she glanced up in mild surprise. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, nothing. Uh…my guess is we’ll be there in another four hours.”
“Good. Pixel wants to see it.”
Bemused as I was, that caught my attention. “Really?”
“I told him all about it. He says it reminds him of stories Mr. Heinlein used to let him read over his shoulder, by some guy named Varley. How come you never read him to me, Daddy?”
Zoey and I had a policy; every night, one or the other of us would read Erin to sleep. Naturally we had started with the best. (During waking hours, she often read other things of her own choice, generally nonfiction—though usually on the computer screen: she still found books a little awkward to handle at that age.) “We’ll get to him after we work our way through all the Heinleins and Sturgeons. We’ve still got a few of those left to go.”
Zoey cleared her throat. “Uh…honey? They have pretty strict rules there. I’m sorry, but I don’t think they’ll let Pixel in. He’ll have to wait outside with Uncle Ralph.”
Erin finished admiring her toes and straightened up. “They can’t keep him out,” she said positively.
Huh. If she and Jim Omar were, correct, and this was in truth and in fact the Pixel, she certainly had that right. I glanced around. “Where the hell is he, anyway?”
“Four buses back,” Erin said.
“Oh. Well, as long as he—huh?”
“He went back to meet Uncle Ralph,” she said.
“But—” Since last I had seen that cat, with my own personal eyeballs, on this bus, we had been continuously in motion—at fifty-five miles an hour. Ralph was indeed four buses back up the line today, riding with Fast Eddie.
“He says he wants to meet everybody. He’s just starting with Uncle Ralph ’cause they’ll be able to understand each other better.”
I started to comment…then changed my mind. I had been deliberately staying off CB, because I didn’t want to listen to fifty people asking me if I really thought that was Robert Heinlein’s personal cat I had there with me, especially when I didn’t know what to answer; let Omar sort it all out had been my plan. But now I nudged the gain up and picked up the mike. “Yo, Tricky Fingers, you got the
Stringbean on the front door, come back?”
“Yeah?”
Eddie hates CB lingo; I only use it to tease him. “Say, good buddy, how’s the pussy situation at your twenty?”
“It’s him, Boss. No shit.”
“Say again, good buddy.”
“Quit it, willya? He’s Pixel.”
“He’s really there, then?”
“Him and Ralph are rappin’. Damnedest ting youse ever hoid. Ralph growls. Pixel meows. Den Ralph translates.” He lowered his voice. “I tink Ralph is scared shit of him. I don’t blame him, eeda.”
I could hear a little of it going on in the background. “Jesus,” I said. “How the hell did he get from here to there?”
“He’s Pixel,” Eddie repeated. “G’bye.” And he signed off.
I couldn’t blame him. The conversation there was probably more interesting. I shut down the CB again and met Zoey’s eyes. “My God,” I said. “It’s true.”
She sighed, and relaxed slightly. “I guess it is.”
“Omar called it. The Cat Who Walks Through Windshields.”
Her face broke into a broad smile, as warm and nourishing as the Florida sun itself. “Holy shit. What an omen.”
“I don’t believe in omens,” I said.
“Neither do I,” she agreed happily.
I found myself smiling back. “But what a fucking omen!”
Four hours later our ragtag caravan pulled into Disney World.
Erin had been right: Pixel had no trouble at all getting in. Nor did we. We’d phoned ahead, and learned that the Disney booking office was absolutely unfazed by the prospect of accommodating a party of slightly over a hundred people arriving in some thirty vehicles, most of them extremely eccentrically modified schoolbuses. I got the impression we were the fifth or sixth such group that day.
And that is about all I propose to say here about my time at Disney World. I won’t even say we all had a wonderful time, because if you’ve ever been there, you already know that, and if you haven’t, you won’t have a clue what I mean. I know there are a lot of folks of my age and general hairiness these days who feel a knee-jerk need to put Disney down. Fuck those people. I know there are good and several reasons to question some of the goals, strategies, and tactics of the Disney corporate empire as a whole. I don’t care. In my life I have managed to see both Disneyland and Disney World…and I will remember both a lot longer and a lot better than I’ll remember, say, Washington, D.C.
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