by Bob Tarte
A more patient man might have played doorsy with her for the rest of the evening, but there was a ceiling in our bedroom that needed staring at. I grabbed a gallon jug of alleged spring water, propped open the door with it, and retreated into the house. The cat hopped out into the downpour but darted in again by the time I had returned to the porch with a dollop of budget-price canned cat food. I touched her as she gobbled up the fish by-product and filler. As she raised her back to meet my hand, her whole body trembled. This wasn’t the take-charge cat that I met in the yard a couple of hours earlier. This was a nervous kitty that felt confined by our porch even though she had a ready exit.
I wasn’t surprised when she slipped back out into the rain after she finished eating. But I was floored by what happened next. She popped in again when I presented her with another helping of food. And instead of wolfing it down at once, she raised her head and fixed me with a look whose meaning I somehow understood. Despite her deep uneasiness, she wanted me to pet her while she ate.
It was almost more than I could stand. Her intensity. Her conflict. Her fear. Her hope. Our cat-food bills. Tears came to my eyes.
I WAS NEARLY as conflicted as she was about her presence on the porch. It wasn’t just a matter of adding another cat to our house. It was my concern about the kind of cat she was. Over the years most of our cats, birds, and bunnies had been sweet. Others definitely occupied the bitey, noisy, cantankerous, or just plain irritating side of the teeter-totter. But we had never knowingly taken in a difficult animal. We may have been softhearted, but we weren’t full-blown crazy. And while it may have been written in the stars that some pets would bring us trouble, it hadn’t been written in their faces when we first met them, or we never would have brought them home.
The white-and-black cat was different. She was already in our home, and she had already proven that she was difficult by being demonstrably more intelligent than I was. Had I been faced with the magnitude of problems that confronted her—homelessness, hunger, a possible infection or injury, and the imminence of freezing rain—I wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to seek out the most logical people who might help. I would have fallen to the ground, tucked my head between my knees, and given up. That’s just the kind of man I was. Without the talking-moose weather radio or the people on television, I never knew when rain was coming. I barely knew day from night. The prospect of having a cat around who would beat me in every battle of wits, including weather prediction, was daunting. But there she was on our porch.
Then there was her emotional intensity. Compared to my single kazoo note of anxiety, she was an entire orchestra of skittishness, suspicion, wariness, and premonition zipped inside a cat suit. It wouldn’t be easy to deal with such a temperamental being. And speaking of temperamental, our sweet white cat Moobie had recently undergone surgery to remove a tumor from her shoulder. Fearing that we might lose her was bad enough. But during her recovery she had become even more of a demanding diva than usual, bringing persnicketiness to new extremes—even for a cat. I still hadn’t recovered from the psychologically draining experience of catering to her whims, and by every indication The Little Kitty would be even higher maintenance. But there she was on our porch. And off our porch. And on our porch again.
Although these factors argued against keeping her—assuming that she was capable of being kept—there was another big fat reason for being hesitant about taking in another cat. That was big fat Lucy, our third, most recent, and most vexing feline addition to the house. But I didn’t even want to think about Lucy and spoil the moment as I peeked out onto the porch and saw The Little Kitty peering back at me. I melted. I wanted what was best for her as long as this meant staying with us and using the porch as her headquarters for chipmunk search-and-destroy missions. I didn’t want her to vanish into the trees.
She tilted her head, and her face fleetingly resembled a dozen different animals: a flying fox bat, weasel, bush baby, panther, lemur, spotted gecko, Our Gang star Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, and obscure creatures I didn’t recognize. Way in the back of my mind I saw myself easily transforming her into a fat and lazy pet who would snooze away the afternoon with me. I didn’t know, of course, what a wild ride the wisp of the woods would take us on. By opening the door to her I had opened our lives to a whole new level of catdom.
Chapter 2
Dark Hour of the Walleye
It was still raining cats, dogs, and something that resembled water when I peered out at the stray a few minutes before bedtime and found her stretched out on the porch floor.
“She shouldn’t sleep on the cold cement,” Linda said. She had never said that about me.
Grabbing one of the many pillows that she had consigned to our closet because it had failed her in the softness, hardness, thickness, thinness, or noncrinkling department, Linda set it on top of a cardboard carton. The white-and-black kitty took to the spot at once, curling up on the pillow for several seconds before ducking out the door to make sure that her passage to the outside world remained. Then she trotted back inside with a sheen of droplets on her fur.
As Linda yanked down the bedcovers a room away, I fumbled at the door to stare out at the kitty. Next to the door on a wooden chair sat Lucy. I could see Lucy, but I could hardly see the chair. The massive cat watched me work the little locking thingy on the doorknob through slitted eyes that boasted wisdom, satiety, and the urge to bite. She lifted her head an inch off the seat cushion, and though I knew exactly what to expect, I took the bait and scratched her neck. She scrunched up her face with pleasure, all the while angling her hippopotamus mouth up until I could see her jaw as it tensed on the verge of a strike. I slid my hand down her shoulder. She pivoted her head and licked me once, then twice, before flicking my hand with a fang as I jerked away. Her beatific face positively glowed.
A vet once described Lucy’s coloration as “diluted tabby.” Imagine the world’s cheapest dish towel, like the kind that I’d give Linda for Christmas. The stiff white surface is boldly printed with the image of a tabby cat, complete with an M on the forehead and bull’s-eye whorls on the sides. Somehow the towel gets caught under the washing machine agitator and finally wiggles free after two thousand wash cycles. The faded blur that remains—ghostly gray with hints of brown and a few dull splatters from bleach—resembles Lucy’s twilight tones, complete with a vague M on the forehead. To make the resemblance nearly perfect, stretch the fabric in whatever direction significantly expands the girth. Then sew on a set of false teeth that catch on your skin whenever you touch the towel.
Empress Lucy surveyed her kingdom from the dining room chair. I had dragged it into our seating-challenged living room the previous Christmas when my sisters and their husbands were visiting. The chair was only supposed to rest near the door for a few hours before scooting back to the end of the dining room table. But as my sister Bett ducked into the kitchen for a plate of molasses cookies to pass around, Lucy pried her bulk up off the floor, shifted it to the chair, and growled when I attempted to shoo her away. I hadn’t dared to move it back ever since.
As I ventured another scratch beneath her collar, I thought of how I couldn’t conceive of two more dissimilar cats than the skittish waif on our porch and the sea lion on our chair. Even though the stray and Lucy were as different as night and not-night, they had one thing in common that gave me pause. Both of them were cats, and every cat that we had ever taken in was crazy. Sometimes we got lucky, and the good qualities far outweighed the bad, as with the sweet but demanding Moobie. Other times things went sour, and we got stuck with a big fat nuisance like Lucy, whose only positive contribution was to serve as a bad example. The old saying “once bitten, twice shy” was literally true with her. Although Lucy and I had worked out our major differences, she was still a strong argument against ever taking in another living creature. I didn’t even want to gamble on a fern.
THE DAY THAT I decided to adopt Lucy is seared into my brain like my first morning at kindergarten, the disastrou
s junior high date with Monica Plumb, and the Tom DeLay episodes of Dancing with the Stars.
That morning I awoke in a rare good mood to the distant sound track of Linda emptying the dishwasher. I would spring out of bed to help her, I decided, even as I burrowed deeper into the covers and considered the dining pleasures that awaited me that evening. It was the day of the office Christmas party, an event which I had scrupulously avoided for nine years. But the previous year I had attended on a whim, partly to satisfy my curiosity about my fellow workers’ spouses, but mainly because the Italian restaurant where the party was being held was only fifteen minutes away—thus satisfying my primal urges for food, companionship, and not driving far. I hadn’t intended to enjoy the party, but it happened anyway. My boss and his wife had turned out to be excellent hosts, and the pan-fried walleye was equally engaging.
As I luxuriated under a pile of covers, a cat vaulted up the foot of the bed, strolled along the length of my body, and planted its paws firmly on my chest. I opened my lids to the blazing light of Moobie’s eyes bearing down on me. Fearing a radiation burn, I extracted an arm from beneath the quilt and petted her. Purring noisily, she moved out of reach and sat down, straightened her upper body, and poured every erg of her life force into a stare that jarred me even through the sheet stretched over my face. I could easily resist Linda’s early morning stirrings. But Moobie’s summons was impossible to ignore. I jackknifed out of bed and promptly filled her feed dish before playing a round of dodge ’em with Agnes on the basement stairs.
I didn’t eat much for breakfast, because I wanted to stay hungry for the party—plus, we were having grits again, which I enjoyed only slightly less than a heaping bowl of sand. At work I decided to skimp on lunch and squirreled away my windmill cookies for another day. Web designer Dave sat across from me. I had never met a more affable soul and figured he’d be thrilled to discuss the pan-fried walleye with me. Strangely enough, he didn’t have his mind on dinner at 8:18 AM and wanted to prattle on about losing his house instead.
“We’re moving,” he told me. “Neighbor Girl’s bought a gun.”
Dave frequently regaled me with tales of his crime-ridden neighborhood. There was Neighbor Girl, the fifteen-year-old who sneaked out of her parents’ house in the middle of the night only to wake everybody on the block with her boyfriend’s muscle car. There was Redneck Guy, who hogged the driveway he shared with Dave. And he often told me about his cat, Lucy.
“I was wheeling my computer chair back to my desk, and Lucy jumped up on it. She’ll also jump into a laundry basket if I’m dragging it across the floor. She’ll ride on a rug, too.”
Our cats hated anything involving motion not of their own making. Dave also told me how Lucy would beg and beg to go outside, only to park herself on the porch barely six inches from the front door. “She’ll sit there for hours watching cars go by. If she sees a rabbit or a squirrel living it up, she’ll watch more intently, but she’s too fat and lazy to run after it.”
Lucy seemed like a healthy alternative to Agnes, the bane of our local chipmunk population. I’d hoped to meet Lucy someday. I’d filed away the idea along with other vague plans like digging a heated tunnel to our barn or staying in a good mood for an entire hour.
“Why did Neighbor Girl get a gun?”
“Their house was broken into.”
“So your house could be next.”
“I’m more afraid of Neighbor Girl. I’ll be emptying a wastebasket some night and have to throw myself behind the garbage can when she opens up on me.”
Now he and his wife were going to have to ditch their rented house in favor of an apartment in a safer part of town. But the landlord didn’t allow cats. And then, he said, “My dad changed his mind about taking Lucy, so she’ll have to go to the animal shelter.”
I had hated the thought of a pampered, eight-year-old computer-chair-riding cat ending up in a shelter. Surely we could make room for her at our place. I had a motive other than simply doing a good turn for a fellow animal. At fourteen, Moobie wouldn’t be around a whole lot longer, and she was the nicest cat I had ever met. While friends, relatives, and everyone I bumped into at the local feed mill bragged of having a cat that sailed into its twenties, we hadn’t been so lucky. Our first cat, Penny, had suffered a seizure when she was Moobie’s age and had used up all her lives in a matter of a few seconds. Although Moobie was irreplaceable, I wanted a touchy-feely cat on hand to help soothe our eventual loss of her.
“Is she affectionate?”
“Very,” he had assured me.
Later, after living with Lucy for a while, I realized that I should have pressed Dave as to how he defined the term.
BUT THAT DAY, two thoughts fought to dominate my limited attention span as I trudged out to the barn. The more important of the two was broaching the subject of Lucy with Linda. Much more trivial, and therefore significantly more magnetic, was the rapid approach of the hour in which I would leave for the office party. I didn’t get out much, especially for dinner. Due to Linda’s chronic back problems, we seldom engaged in public activities that required sitting. Restaurants were out, and so were concerts, movies, lectures in unknown languages, and go-kart racing, unless I attended these alone. And what fun is solitary go-karting?
Images of Uncle Sonny’s Italian Villa beckoned like a fragrant flower. “What exactly do you suppose a walleye is?” I asked Victor, our head Muscovy duck, as I herded the ducks and hens into the barn. “It isn’t a very flattering name for a fish. What if I called you ‘caruncle-beak’?”
Victor threw his head back, opened his jaws like an alligator, and panted, giving my questions the contempt they deserved. His fleshy face mask—which a duck expert had graced with the pithy-sounding term caruncle—seemed redder than usual. Ramone, an uncharacteristically shy member of the same fraternal order, hung back in the barn from the undulating mass of ducks and hens awaiting their late-afternoon treat. Apparently he’d been picked on. I suspected that Victor was the culprit, although Ramone was always a bit more skittish. That level of baseless anxiety made the two of us soul brothers, so I tried my best to make sure that he received his share of table scraps. Tossing fruit his way was fruitless, however. The cut-up grapes, mixed with cooked corn and peas, sent a tide of gabbling fowl sweeping toward him, and he retreated into the gloom.
“You’re not going to miss this good food, not tonight of all nights.” In hopes of distracting the feathered piranhas, I tossed a handful of grapes and veggies to my immediate right, then arced a second handful far back toward Ramone, but this only succeeded in creating two phalanxes of ducks and hens. “You’ll go to bed hungry,” I warned, but he failed to rally. I completely understood.
BACK IN THE HOUSE, I peeled off my boots, stocking cap, gloves, and jacket, decreasing my body weight by 72 percent. I kept an eye out for Agnes as I climbed the basement stairs, moving slowly enough to allow myself a moment’s preparation before I broached the Lucy topic with Linda. Early in our marriage, before we had started giving orphan ducks, geese, and hens a home, Linda had been the one to introduce animals into our house. Sometimes she succeeded by persuasion, as when she had talked me into getting grumpy bunny Binky. At other times she got critters in the door via artful smuggling, as when she presented me with Howard the dove on a wedding anniversary or Chester the canary on my birthday.
Over time, I had developed a soft spot for them that was coincidentally the same size as my head. I loved their attentiveness, the grace with which they dealt with problems, their tenacity, and just about every other attribute they had that I lacked. Furthermore, animals were just plain affectionate, including parrot Bella who was always demanding neck rubs. I had been the instigator of Bella’s addition to our family, and now I needed to lobby for Lucy. Linda did both the lion’s and the lioness’s share of the work caring for our animals, and adding one more critter might push her over the edge.
As I squeaked open the door from the basement, I could tell that Dusty had put her
in a mood that wasn’t what you’d call pet friendly.
“What’s going on?” I asked. Dusty’s cage was shrouded with his overnight cover. He peered at me through one of the holes that he had chewed in the dark green sheet.
“He won’t let me cook dinner. Because I’m in here, he thinks I have to do something for him every minute.” That explained the parrot shrieks I had heard outdoors on my way back from the barn. Howard the dove landed on her head as she complained about Dusty. “These animals!”
“Speaking of which . . . There’s a guy at work who has to put his eight-year-old cat Lucy in a shelter,” I said, beginning to ever so slowly lay the groundwork for the case I intended to build. “He’s moving, and his new landlord won’t let him have any pets.”
“Maybe we should take her,” Linda said, deflating my argument in one fell swoop. “What’s she like?”
“Well, Dave says she’s very affectionate.”
“Find out if he’ll let us have her.”
“I’m sure he will. But you don’t think adding an extra cat will cause trouble?”
Behind the bed sheet, Dusty managed to free his bowl from its clamp and throw it explosively to the floor, spraying seed shrapnel in every direction. Linda shut her eyes and didn’t say a word for a moment. Howard the dove clung to her hair.
“Anything but another bird.”
ANXIOUSNESS NIBBLED AT me as I headed for the restaurant. Few things happened in my life without an overlay of unease. Humdrum events like waking up in the morning, shopping for kitty litter, or opening an e-mail all troubled me to varying degrees. Arriving at a party was fraught with potential mishap. What if I strolled in too early and bore the disapproval of a waitress? Just as bad, I might be a tad late and doomed to wander from table to table searching for my candy cane–emblazoned place card.
The weather contributed to my sense of impending faux pas. It was snowing, and since I didn’t see well after dark under dry conditions, the wet precipitation turned me into a menace. The reflections of headlights, stoplights, and convenience store signage in the slick pavement addled my brain.
