The Third Cat Story Megapack: 25 Frisky Feline Tales, Old and New

by Damien Broderick

  “Was sitting in the living room, watching, and all of a sudden Bill Murray’s in my head. In Stripes, the scene with the fancy drill work—” Wrong-tie was pantomiming a shouldered rifle, that much David could see out of the comer of his left eye “—an’ when they ask Bill where his commander is, Bill, he shouts, ‘All blowed up, Sirrrah.’ And Bill, he was in my head, all that day, day it blowed up. Just Bill going, ‘All blowed up’—”

  David quickly thumbed some bills out of his pocket, left them by the tall sweating glass and vacated the bar (the agent would just have to haul mismatched lapels over and look for him), Wrong-tie’s shouted “Sirrrah!” booming over-loud in his ears.

  Outside, Fifth Avenue was almost devoid of pedestrians, so there was really no reason why David should have bumped into anyone, or stepped on any living thing, until.…

  …the cat wound itself through and around his legs, forcing David to come to an off-balance stop in mid-stride. When he looked down, the cat was still there, a dark smudge against the already darkening sidewalk.

  It was just standing there, off to his right, looking up at him with pus-covered green eyes. It was a male; the spreadout face and almost flat nose were unmistakable. Unneutered. And either old or starved enough for it to have a splatter of stiff white hairs in among the flat black fur. The ears were the shape and texture of rotted morrels, almost without points. In fact, the cat’s ears were so cauliflowered that there was almost no openings left in them.

  The left hind paw was missing from the hock on down. The tail was short, fading away to pencil-thinness. Stiff, broken whiskers jutted out from either side of the mouth, and from the lips hung pendulous rodent ulcers. One fang was broken off close to the gum line, the top of the tooth encrusted with shining, mottled black and brown tartar, like mold gone unchecked on the skin of Brie cheese.

  A three-legged cat…wandering around in New York City. David looked around, assuming he’d see a street person nearby, waiting for him to take pity on the animal and offer money to its “owner.” Yet another scam, like the black youths and not-so-young men who hung near intersections, waiting for a red light and the chance to swish a filthy rag or squirt fluid from a pump bottle on the windshield of some car, and who wouldn’t wipe off the scummy water until they were paid. Fivers or better. Not that David didn’t pity those who called cardboard boxes or sheets of newspaper spread over a grate home. He’d lived the borderline life himself, or as close as dammit to borderline. And the hungry animals hauled around by street people may have been company, family, even…but David felt sorrier for the ones who hauled their kids around from shelter to abandoned car to park bench.

  But the cat was alone. Ungracefully it sat on rat-furred haunches, staring at David with pigment-spotted green eyes. No one passed either of them for a few seconds. The wind picked up, a cool pressing hand urging him to get back in the bar, or go to his office, or get back home, but something about the cat (the very smelly cat—its odor wafted up to him, redolent of old ear wax, dried excrement and whatever else the animal had rubbed against) made David hover over it, numbed mentally and physically.

  Perhaps David hovered too long, for without so much as the characteristic wiggle of the rump, the cat sprang up into his arms. Up close, its smell was a living creature in his nostrils, clawing up into his brain, pawing open a forgotten nest of memories. The cat flexed rough-padded paws on his jacket, worn yellowed nails pressing his skin through the double layer of fabric. The thing’s mouth was foul; the setting sun glinted off drool-slimed rough lips. And yet, his eyes were so trusting, so utterly, unequivocally trusting that David was sure the cat would willingly snuggle into his jacket, hiding silently and gratefully during the subway ride home. David could even feel/hear the thing’s stomach rumbling, through his jacket and shirt. But the moment came when David had to either support the furry body with his arms, or let the cat drop.

  When the cat hit the pavement, it paused to stare at him—not with reproach, but with that same blind trust and affection. Before David could make up his mind whether to follow it or to briskly walk away, the cat lifted its pathetic rat tail and scooted off, moving surprisingly fast on three feet.

  The odor of its paws remained on his jacket, a sharp tangy reek of old pee, cement and vegetation. Park grass, perhaps, or straggler weeds growing up between slabs of broken pavement. Brushing off his jacket, flicking away flecks of something dried and brown and unpleasant, David felt his tongue curl, finally flattening against the roof of his mouth in distaste and something else, something like guilt.…

  Before David and his sister and Dad and Mom and her mom (not yet crazy, but boy was she getting there) moved from the crappy house on the far outskirts of town, the dump with no insulation, no running water, and no sidewalk, that had been all they could afford many lean years ago when they first moved to Ewerton, Wisconsin from downstate Illinois, to the much better house close by downtown, the big white cement-block house with the high ceilings and hardwood floors in most of the rooms, David’s family had to get rid of the cats. Not the indoor cats, not Diablo and Blackie and Arthur, but Missy (Arthur’s mother), and Bandito and Terri, his litter mates. The females, all unspayed (“Not enough, not enough money”) had already mated, producing sickly litters (Terri’s kittens had all died), so Grandma’s decree went down—the girls were to be banished to the chicken coop in the back yard. They were in heat constantly, some sort of hormonal screw-up (or maybe cancer, David realized years later, after Diablo—also unspayed, but relegated to the back porch of the old house—lived for another eighteen months with mammary cancer, finally dying in his parents’ new house, after the hegira from the big white house), and half-wild to boot. So Dad, hoping that they could eventually have the three pretty females fixed, always in that hoped-for later, fenced them in, put them in the chicken coop where they lived for a year, maybe more. Living on scraps of food and oatmeal, by Grandma’s decree.

  David hated thinking about it all, about how brutal life in the country had made them. Like starved creatures themselves, all of them. The hungriest time in his life which David sought to bury deep, deep in his subconscious—a time he almost did manage to forget…except for what happened to the cats.

  The three cats weren’t too bad off in the coop; they were fed, their poop was shoveled out for them, and the snow covered their pee come winter. The walls of the coop were thick and sturdy. (His mom had put her foot down when it came to Diablo, the cat he and his sister found out by the sash and door factory two summers before their move. Diablo was delicate, a refined and good cat, and she lived in the house, or out in the back porch when in heat. Grandma bitched, but Mom was getting fed up herself by then.) But when the money Mom and Dad had saved for the new house was finally loosed from Grandma’s account, she laid down a last ultimatum, a final jab in her fury about being ousted from the ugly house in the country she’d grown to love. The three indoor cats could stay in the new house. There was a basement for the males. But the “crazy cats,” the females who spent their days pumping, endlessly pumping their hindquarters when not eating, Missy, Bandito and Terri (named for the black patch of fur around one eye, like the people in those old Terryington cigarette advertisements) had to go. As in…as in on the day after they’d moved into the new house (the day the old lady kicked Diablo just because she was pissed about moving away from “her” home), David and his dad drove out to the old house, bearing a last breakfast of hot oatmeal and milk in a big plaid thermos (it was late February, not cold-cold out, but still—) for the girl cats. David watched them slurp up their final treat, until he had to walk away to stand behind the ugly gray house and wait with eyes shut while Dad fired his rifle. Four times. Four times, for three cats.

  And in the pick-up on the way to school, the high school set out in the boonies on the other side of town, David half-listened to his Dad say how the cats didn’t run away, but waited their turn, trustingly. David didn’t ask which one got shot twice, or why she’d been shot twice, as the last w
armth of the slain cats seeped into David’s feet. Dad had placed the bodies in a plastic sack in David’s foot well, prior to driving their bodies out to the dump. Cats there or not, David wasn’t about to swing his feet over by Dad.

  Years later, when Diablo died, his folks said to hell with the city ordinance against burying pets in the city and laid her to rest outside the living room double window. And planted a rose bush over her that grew middling tall, high enough to reach out and snag you when you least expected it to do so. And no matter how many cats his folks and his sister got later on, David could still hear those four shots. For three cats. But Dad said they didn’t run away.…

  After figuring Screw the agent, screw the meal, David trotted to the nearest subway entrance, but he kept seeing the last image of the black tom cat, the last look he’d gotten before hurrying away from the bar. The cat had only scurried so far, just close to the mouth of a narrow gap between two buildings. Then it stopped, sat down, and waited for him. Even after he’d let it drop to the ground. Even after he’d scooted off, bumping into people going the other way. It had looked at him without rancor, waiting patiently for him to return for it. And David didn’t stop shaking inside, tongue still protectively jammed against his upper palate, until he was jerking along with the moving subway deep under the ground where the cat was still no doubt standing, waiting for him in pure trust and faithfulness.…

  When David’s magazine folded, not after six but fifteen issues, David went back to doing what he had done before. Assistant Editor at the sf magazine. He was used to the work, and the money was still good. David even managed to move to better digs, three rooms plus bath, not too far from Central Park. He ate at better restaurants, ones which never featured beans or rice in their entrees. He gradually gained some of the weight he’d lost in his physically hungry years, but still got enough exercise to keep himself looking reasonably fit, reasonably hungry, and held onto his savings. The YMCA still had rooms to let.

  Then, after some of the stories and novelettes from the last issue of his now-defunct magazine went on to gain berths in the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy ballots, and a story actually won a Hugo (and was rumored to have come in very high in the Nebulas), David’s ship came in. A cargo ship, at that. He was offered the editorship of a rival sf magazine, the one whose pages supplied most of the rest of the writing award ballots. At one and a half times his old salary. Taxi time. His days of walking past stinking street people (she touched me, with those claw hands—) and mangy gimpy cats were all but over; when no taxis were available, he knew which routes were free of hooded watery eyes and trusting felines, or nearly so. When necessary, he lowered his eyelids, washing unpleasant scenes in a veil of wavering rainbows and eyelashes. He began to take vacations, far out of the city, where the street people did not dwell and the animal shelters had the time to round up limping strays.

  Then, not long after his Christmas vacation in Pennsylvania, David was forced, due to traffic, to drive back into the city through Harlem. The Lincoln Tunnel was jammed with inching cars, and unfortunately the George Washington bridge wasn’t too jammed, so David reluctantly drove through Harlem as quickly as traffic and the slippery streets would allow, all the while feeling a nameless dread, a calling of poor to formerly poor that pulled at him like the irresistible force of gravity upon a body falling from a great height to the hard coldness of the pavement below. The rented car was his awning, his shield against the brutal pull of gravity upon his body, his memory, his heart, upon the deep hungering void within him.

  David tried to keep his eyes on the ice-encrusted center line, tried not to notice the dull splotches of the people’s faces outside the car—the street sitters (more than a few with dogs and scabrous cats in tow, still more with vacant-eyed youngsters), the wanderers, the crazies lashing out at the icy air, the wall-slouchers. He tried not to see the broken windows, the badges of wood and chain-link and tin the buildings wore, their shining surfaces failing to shine much in the white-cold late afternoon light. Newspapers yellowed to the color of dying, jaundiced skin, fluttered a few inches above the ground, too bedraggled to take full, free flight.

  David tried to keep moving—until the yellow light turned to red too late for him to spurt past the yellow line, and David found himself caught. The heater puffed warm air at him, air that gradually took on a different, worsening smell as the light stubbornly stayed red. David tried to breathe through his mouth, but that only made his mouth taste terrible, like yeasty old underwear and sweaty rags and rancid bacon and ear wax and dried dung and old sour tom-cat-pee and pungent vegetation. With an undercurrent of freshly cooked oatmeal.…And still the red light shone, misting slightly in the cold, stretching seconds of agony into minutes of agony. Thinking that a watched light never turned green, David cast his eyes off to his left, looking up, up, up—and then, he saw the window.

  At least twelve stories up in a fourteen story building. A gray-tan structure, most windows jagged teeth surrounding maws of black within, save for the window near the right hand side of the building’s front façade. The one almost near the flat roof, the one with the old air conditioner jammed into the glassless space.

  Rags, mostly red plaid against dingy white, were stuffed around the gold-tan air conditioner. A few raw tatters flapped listlessly in the wind, overhanging the window sill outside. What space there was above the air conditioner was filled with some jagged glass, taped in place. And then David saw the swipe of black against the top of the window, a glancing shadow with only the mere suggestion of a form. But the black shape was cat-sized.

  And only as the light finally flickered back to green did David’s mind admit to him, Someone lives up there. In the emptiness, the filth, the cold…and it could, it just might now, have only three legs. And its owner could be layered with Peter Pan collared blouses and rags, and crowned with a turban of old sweaters. For perhaps want had found trust and formed a home, not just a dwelling, a squatter’s nest, but a home.

  David found a parking space between a rusted-out Saab and a muffler-less Ford of uncertain make or year. His mind a dizzying rush (paw gone below the hock eyes like oily marbles Dadfiredfour times wonder who got blasted twice rancid bacon smell on her on her clothes “joy of my life always” it waited for me in the alley), David did remember to lock the rented car—the hub caps were on their own—before hurrying up to the boarded-up front door of the building. Tin under the wood, and a thick chain. With a padlock. No go.

  Thankful that the biting cold made the gangs of kids and roaming adults sluggish, huddled near warm steam gratings, David hurried around to the back of the building, squeezing through a bricked alley. The very bricks smelled bad, as if something reeking and maybe even oozing had rubbed against them frequently. And the stubbled, broken cement between the narrow, hovering walls was dotted with mounds of pale, runny cat excrement…and one pile still steamed, pure fragile white steam.

  There was no opening to the back of the building, but there was a long fire escape, rusted herringbone stitches against the crumbling fabric of the structure. As he uncertainly ascended the metal ladder, feeling like a dizzy kid climbing his first big slide in the park, David wondered if the street woman had had enough of the bus terminal. Either that, or her stink and her strangeness had long ago become too much for even her fellow cocoon-sitters to tolerate. As the rusty railing left chalky, gritty stains on his soft-gloved hands, David figured that the cat (it can’t be that cat, not all the way over here) wouldn’t mind a little stink for company, not with its sewer breath and crap-encrusted paws.

  The fire escape slats were surprisingly sturdy, the flat rungs clean from frequent use, no doubt. That odor (that horribly familiar odor) clung to the very metal, lingering in the cool air, enough to make his eyes water…but he did remember not to go opening his mouth again. As it was, he’d had to spit a few times over his shoulder to rid his tongue and teeth of the fulsome aftertaste of the car’s forced air heat. And as he climbed, pausing at each landing, he ti
cked off the floor numbers on his cold-stiffened fingers. Starting again on his left hand after the tenth finger was ticked off, his steps grew slow, faltering. Suppose he walked into a crack house? Suppose someone killed him? But the worst “suppose” of all stopped him in between the eleventh and twelfth floors, where he stood vulnerable and unshielded on the open metal steps. Suppose the woman and the cat really were there…waiting?

  Just what he’d do under such a circumstance was something he’d only know by finding out—and then just doing it, period.

  When he reached the twelfth floor, the window nearest the fire escape was broken out, all shards of glass carefully removed, no doubt to facilitate easy entrances and exits by someone perhaps swaddled in layer upon layer of filth-stiffened clothes.

  As David climbed into the building through the window, his nostrils quivered when his face brushed too close to the wood frame, for her smell had rubbed into the very wood, in the places where the paint was only a colorless memory. But the smell did keep his mind off the fact that he was doing gyrations up over a hundred feet in the air, in Harlem, with only a metal staircase between him and the filth-littered alley below. At least no one was in the alley; David could only imagine how idiotic he looked, breaking into a building while wearing a Yuppie uniform of L.L. Bean slacks and down-filled jacket.