The House Guests

by John D. MacDonald

  They expected the worst, and it happened, and we dropped them off at Dr. Sellman’s with ear-weary relief.

  • • TEN • •

  The last day of travel south was through torrential rains which were the aftermath of a hurricane, rains which for the first time soaked through the tarp laced over our cargo trailer, and through the suitcases, washing the unnecessarily vivid colors out of the suitcase linings and onto the clothing therein.

  We had written Randy when we would arrive, and it was raining hard that late afternoon when we got there, hardly in any mood to cope with the thousand irritating little problems involved in moving into a rented cottage. But Randy, bless him, had put a crew to work at the house. All the utilities were hooked up. The yard and house were spotless. Beds were made and turned down, opened packs of cigarettes on the end tables, Coke and beer in the refrigerator. Never have we been welcomed so imaginatively. A few days later when he came out to see how we were getting along, he brought a throw net, cast it over a fat mullet, split and cleaned the mullet on the dock, and showed Dorothy a fine method of broiling it.

  The cats approved the setup at once. They liked the bay side. They would go over onto the beach when we did, but they did not care for it. The glare seemed to bother them. In all that open space they had no chance of catching a sandpiper, a sanderling, or a tern. They seemed to regard the surf as ominous indeed and would become agitated when we went out into it. They would pace back and forth and we could see their mouths make hollering motions.

  We had seen a cat who had made an interesting adjustment to beach life. When we lived on Acacia Street, my sister and her husband had vacationed down at Madeira Beach. When we went down to see them there, Dorrie pointed out a cat at work. She had been watching him for days. A battered old timber groin extended out into the water. That cat would lie on the beach against the groin, in the actual wash of the surf. He looked like some wretched bit of flotsam, all soaked and caked, the waves washing over him. When finally some unwary water bird came near enough that sodden cat would spring and bring it down, kill it immediately, and carry it off the beach up into the sea oats to eat it. I have never heard of another cat who used this hunting scheme so contrary to cat habit and instinct.

  At Casey Key that season we witnessed a triumph of cat co-operation which Roger and Geoffrey never again topped, at least not for an audience.

  There were raccoons in the mangrove and water-oak thickets on the bay side. Our bay shore had been cleared. The thickets began at either side. A narrow dock extended straight out into the water. Dorothy had wanted to feed the raccoons some chicken skin, so she threw it out into the shallow water.

  She called me to the kitchen that afternoon to see the raccoon. He was a dozen feet from the bay shore and in about six inches of water. It was low tide. His soaked legs gave him a skinny look. He was fumbling around on the bottom with his clever brown hands, finding the bits of skin, putting them in his mouth. When he searched by sense of touch alone, he would survey the bay shore, turning his head back and forth, evidently aware of resident cats.

  Suddenly he saw Roger skulking quite carefully down through the tall grass which grew around the uprights to a short wooden water tower on the left. He settled down into the grass, out of our sight and apparently out of sight of the raccoon.

  Then Geoffrey appeared from the left. He came ambling across the open yard behind the house. The raccoon froze, staring at him. We could not believe that Geoff was unaware of the raccoon not forty feet from him. Geoff acted goofy. He pounced at some small grasshoppers. He went up onto his hind legs like a kitten to bat at a yellow butterfly. We decided that the mighty hunter was putting on a pretty sorry performance. There was an upended boat at the right side of the yard. When Geoff, taking his idle time, disappeared from the raccoon’s view behind the boat, the raccoon started eating again. And Geoffrey, suddenly swift, tense, and utterly businesslike, flattened out and crawled along the yard, staying close to the boat, keeping the boat between him and the raccoon. He stopped when he reached the end of the boat and stayed there, the end of his tail flicking.

  Suddenly Roger came galloping out of cover, right down toward the shore. The startled raccoon took off, angling in toward the shore, herded in that direction by Roger. At just the right moment, Geoff dashed out to intercept him. Roger was gaining. The raccoon slowed for just an instant, just long enough for Roger to wind up and give him such a mighty thump on the back flank with his right paw, we heard the impact in the house. Raccoon sped for the mangroves. I think Geoff got one whack at him, too, but I cannot be certain. They made no attempt to follow him into the thicket. They stopped, sat in neighborly fashion, and began to wash.

  In retrospect the utterly astounding thing was the absolutely calculated act Geoffrey had put on. See the happy cat? The cat is harmless. The cat is playing with bugs, see? The happy, stupid cat does not even know you are there. Roger had performed well too. Somehow he’d found the sense to wait until Geoff was in position before making his move.

  It was at Casey Key that both cats adopted the practice of following me over to the beach when I carried a fish rod and tackle box. If I went over empty-handed, I went alone. On the beach side they would drowse in the shade of the sea grapes beyond the sand and watch me. As soon as I got a fish on, they would come strolling down to see what it might be. I caught a lot of little trash fish off that beach. They would sit and watch me bring it in. If it was a trash fish, a little jack, or a blue runner, I would filet it immediately, rinse the two halves in the Gulf, and give them each a half. After one attempt they had learned the futility of trying to eat raw fish in the dry sand. Tails bannered high, they would walk back up off the beach and settle down in the grass, eat the fish, tidy up, and wait for the next strike. They seemed to understand about people fish. When I caught something we were going to eat, put it on the stringer to clean later, and made the next cast, they would go back to the shade. It always seemed to distress them when I took the rod and tackle box and went the wrong way, got into the boat, and went off into the bay. As long as I could see the dock, I could see them sitting there. When I came back in, when I was still a good distance from the dock, I would see them trudging down from the house.

  At that Christmas time in 1951, we were made forcibly aware of the presence of ex-house cats in the brush. They found they could come in the cat window and find food in the kitchen corner. The wrapped presents were under the tree. We went out one night and came back to find the living room filled with the unmistakable tang of tomcat. We tracked it down and found that the torn or toms had staked out our Christmas presents. We opened them that year at arm’s length. A few nights later I heard a noise in the house and got up and turned on the light and watched three strange cats shoot past me and speed out the cat window.

  We tried shutting the cat window at night. At intervals during the night our cats would take turns demanding service, and somebody would have to stagger out and let one or the other of them in or out. The twin beds were Hollywood beds without headboards, and the heads of the beds were even with the bedroom window sills. One night I merely unhooked the bottom of the screen and pushed it out, pushed the demanding cat out through the gap, and let the screen swing back. Dorothy suggested, and I agreed, that it was a pretty stupid compromise. We’d have cats walking on us all night long. Roger was the sort of cat you don’t want in bed with you. Geoff would settle down. But Roger was and is a yaffler. I believe James and Pamela Mason invented the word. It applies to a cat which gets on your bed and begins such a noisy, spirited job of washing itself it shakes the bed and makes a pronounced yaffling sound. (Rhymes with waffling.)

  But in an extraordinarily short time I could let cats in and out all night long without ever waking up. When they tramped across me, I’d push at the screen, and when they hollered outside, I’d hold the screen out and they’d leap to the sill. It seemed damned undignified to be the abject doorman for a pair of cats, but the arrangement worked the rest of the time we
were there. They used their window during the days. Whenever we tried leaving it open at night, we had strangers in for a snack and for loud, emotional serenades.

  It was there that some cat put a ragged edge on one of Roger’s ears. He was always covered with scars and scabs under the chin from being mercilessly bitten by small rodents. But this was a visible memo of combat, worn jauntily, rather like a dueling scar acquired at Heidelberg.

  It did not give him greater dignity. At seven years, by the standard cat-human ratio, he was nearing fifty. But if you were walking with him, he would suddenly break into a run, go fifteen feet up a palm bole at top speed, then hang there and peer down at you with a maddened gleam in his eye.

  It was at the Casey Key house that I stepped on him. I was opening a door and he was underfoot and I stepped back, stumbled upon him, came down with my hard heel on his right front paw in such a way I could not, for a moment, get my weight off him. He screamed bloody murder. I broke no bones, but I did split the pad in one place. The foot became badly swollen, and then it became infected. It turned into such a bad infection that the veterinarian had to open it up and put a drain through it from top to bottom. He suffered visibly. He limped pitifully. And it would irritate me beyond measure to have him walk toward me, pause, give me a baleful glance, then make a wide half circle around where I was standing. He held a grudge.

  In a matter of weeks he was completely healed. The last sign of any favoring of that front foot disappeared. He was as speedy as ever and, to all appearances, had forgiven me.

  But for a full year, and this I swear is true, if I offended that cat by, for example, scooping him off some place where I wanted to sit and setting him down on the floor, that con artist would look at me with unmistakable scorn, and then slowly and sadly he would limp away.

  There was one foolish trick I started doing with him that year. He hated it and yet it intrigued him. When he was stretched out on some slippery surface, like the waxed floor of the kitchen, I would bend over him and put one hand on one side of him and one on the other and spin him like a propeller and, with one finger on the nape of his neck, keep him going for a few moments. It gave him vertigo. He would get up and wobble around and look as if he was trying to gag. He would leave the room and, moments later, come right back and flop down on the floor in front of me and look up expectantly.

  You could not do that sort of thing to Geoffrey. He would have endured it in good spirit as he endured everything the people did, but he would not have understood.

  That spring I did well enough professionally so we began to think of having a Florida house. A few years of rentals can make you feel you are being nibbled to death. I told Dorothy to go house hunting for something we could hang onto for a few seasons, furnish cheaply, and then unload. She looked for days and found a new house on Siesta Key, the last house on a small peninsula called Point Crisp, which sticks out into little Sarasota Bay.

  We bought it before we went north. We’ve been there ever since, adding first a guesthouse, then an extension to the main house. For those six years—1952 through 1957—the cats shared our follow-the-sun life, and the cat things which happened seem to belong to one familiar place or the other, rather than to a specific year. Both places were familiar to the cats, the windows and the kitchen corners and favorite places remembered in the first minutes of arrival.

  • • ELEVEN • •

  There was the memorable instance of the big wave. When weather and tides were opportune, I used to knock off work in the late afternoon, take some frozen fishing shrimp out of the deepfreeze and with rod and gear take the narrow path through the three hundred feet of mangrove out to the sand bar at the end of Point Crisp and fish the dredged channel near the Inland Waterway marker.

  On one strange afternoon I caught sixteen fish, each of an entirely different species. The cats would invariably accompany me, walking along with me, tails pleasurably high. They liked it much better than the beach. They would sit behind me like a pair of dogs, and when the line tightened and the reel hummed they would stand up and move closer, as eager to see what would come out of the water as I. The people in small boats thoroughly enjoyed it. A lot of them snapped our picture. I wonder how many of those pictures are tucked away in drawers and albums in the north, showing “that fellow fishing with those two big gray cats.”

  One afternoon the fishing was slow, and both cats lay on the shells a dozen feet behind me. I always wore old sneakers and pants so I could wade around on the submerged part of the bar. A cabin cruiser came up the channel from the south. It did not seem notably large or notably fast, but as it went by I noticed it was dragging a wake behind it worthy of a Great Lakes ore boat. It slapped me at about mid-thigh, and I turned, too late to scramble for my tackle box. Roger, for once, was more alert. He went scampering to high ground with the wave in close pursuit. Just as Geoff sprang up, the wave hit him and knocked him down and rolled him over. He came up sputtering, and as the wave drained off the shells, he headed miserably for home. He gave a tired whine of complaint about every twenty feet until I could no longer hear him.

  Thereafter he did all his waiting up on the high ground. Roger braved the shell beach as before. When a fish was being caught, Geoff would come down to the edge of the water as before, but if while awaiting his share he happened to see a boat coming from any direction, even a skiff with a five-horse outboard, he would whirl and run to high ground, returning well after it had passed.

  Actually, Geoffrey was bolder about the water than Roger. One year we began to find the tails and the bills of small needlefish by the cat dishes. It puzzled us. There were small needlefish, sometimes called ballyhoo, in the shallow bay waters on either side of the house. It was some time before we actually saw Geoff in the act of catching them. The shallows behind the house were flat calm. These small fish swim right on the surface. Geoff had waded out to his armpits and belly hair, and he stood absolutely motionless, ears cocked forward. As we watched him he gave a sudden snap at the water, and came out with a four- or five-inch needlefish in his jaws. He walked around the side of the house, came in his window with it, went directly to his dish, dropped it, put his foot on it when it flapped, and then neatly ate all of it but the bill and tail, and went back out and waded slowly into the bay.

  Also, at Piseco, Geoff was the one who owned a frog. Every so often, all one summer, Geoff would go down to the lake shore and hop from rock to rock along the shore, pausing on each one to reach down into the water with one foot and feel all around the underside of the rock. Sooner or later he would find it, scoop it out, take it in his jaws and bring it up onto the terrace and put it down, and then purely hop the bejaysus out of it. We knew it was always the same frog, not only because of the markings but because, as the summer progressed, it became increasingly defeated and shopworn. He would give it gentle little taps on its rear end with one urging paw and admire the jumps until at last, when the frog was too dusty and dispirited to provide further entertainment, Geoffrey would walk away and one of us would take the frog down to the lake shore and drop it back into the water. If I remember correctly it was still in residence when we left, but one can imagine that it was terribly tired of cats. The next year Geoff spent quite a lot of time feeling around for it under the rocks before he gave up the search.

  Once, at Point Crisp, Roger got very incensed at a large and scruffy-looking osprey. It was acting so strangely, I do not think it was well. Ospreys are of the hawk family, with a very cold eye, a big, wicked, tin-snip beak, and powerful, oversized talons designed to grab fish on the surface and fly off with them. The osprey landed on top of the telephone pole near our garage, and Roger spotted it. He yammered at it to come down and face the fierce cat, and when it ignored him, he managed to climb up onto the roof of the attached garage. This put him so close the bird got tired of listening to him and flew down to our back beach, Roger after him. By the time we got out there they were twenty feet apart. Roger was giving him that cat ballad generally reserved for
night-calling cats, but he had no intention of getting any closer. The bird looked as if it wished he would get closer, just close enough. Thinking it might be ill, we immured Rog in the house, and I went to inspect the bird. I got to within ten feet and decided that was as near as I cared to get. It flapped off, flying not very well, but well enough to disappear over the key to the south.

  During the evenings each spring, Roger and Geoffrey would go over to the house of Al and Connie Sheen, our nearest neighbors, to serenade Caffeine, their orange and white girl cat. It was ritual. They were both male neuters, and Caffeine was a spayed female, but cats seem to respond to some spring rhythm more persuasive than any specifics of ability. Caffeine, inside her screened cage, would respond with her own song. Geoff was the more loyal suitor. When, each year, their attentions ended, we would often see Caffeine by day, coming across the lot between our houses, apparently feeling that spring had not lasted long enough.

  One summer at Piseco Dorothy heard some inexplicable thumping and thudding in the middle of the night and, realizing it had been going on off and on for some time, went to investigate. She found that the cats had gotten into a nest of baby rabbits, had brought them in, and, unaccountably, had been eating them in the shower stall. The mother rabbit is the only wild mammal in this country which will make absolutely no attempt to either defend her young or mislead predators. Realizing that bits of baby rabbit would be a horrid thing for children to come across in the morning, she cleaned the mess up then and there. The following morning when she was in the bathroom she looked into the shower stall and there, on the floor, saw one lone rabbit eye staring eerily back at her. At such moments it is very difficult to be fond of your house cats.