The Cat Megapack

by Gary Lovisi

  “Not to worry…they’ll stay put,” Rik persisted, while cupping the head of my white and gray cat pencil holder with his be-ringed left hand—with every other word, his rings clanked against the ceramic head of the holder. Nerves?

  “Well, I’d feel a lot better if they slept in the back, for the first couple of days at least,” I persisted. “Even if they are alley kittens, now that they’re here, they’re the store kitties, and I’d hate to think of anything bad happening to them so soon. Remember how sad all the regulars were when Chatty and Muffin passed on?”

  “Not just the regulars.” Rik kept on clanking his rings on my poor ceramic cat, until I figured out a way to get him out from behind the counter. “Rik, come here…look down that aisle—”

  The Hemingway kittens were both studying the spines of the children’s books before them, their heads moving in unison as they scanned the vertical titles one by one. Even if they weren’t littermates, they had to have spent time together before they were caught or bought or whatever Rik did to obtain them. Their behavior was so similar.…

  “That is so adorable…and so strange,” I found myself whispering, as if I were in a library, and not my own store.

  “They’re just smart,” Rik said a little too quickly, then added, “Probably trying to figure out which ones say ‘Food’…just kidding. I do wish I had a camera—”

  “We do,” I said, remembering the disposable one we’d found in the back book racks last summer, with only a couple of frames of film exposed. No one had come in for it, and I’d almost forgotten it was sitting on a shelf behind the counter—

  “Here, let me,” Rik whispered, taking the camera from me and slowly advancing the next frame forward, before crouching down and waiting for the instant flash to warm up, then clicked the button and snapped one shot…then, when the kittens didn’t move, he duck-walked closer to them, and took another picture.

  I could just imagine what the picture would look like—two, perfectly posed kittens, their beautiful pointy ears at attention, as they seemed to peer at the books before them, while surrounded by the warm, worn wooden floor, the polished wooden book shelf, and the primary-bright colors of the narrow-spined children’s books…just the sort of picture one might submit to a cat food calendar contest.

  Wanting to get a closer look at them, I stepped as lightly as I could in clumpy-lumpy boots down the aisle, but the magical image was gone as the two kittens turned their heads my way, and Scooter began to yawn. Luckily, Rik was able to capture the moment; the camera whizz-whirred and there was a bright, brief flash of white light. Mittens was frightened by the light and ran off toward the back room. Sensing that this might be a good time to shut Scooter up there, too, I reached down and scooped him up, telling him, “Your sister or whatever she is shouldn’t be scared…you tell her it’s all right to be photographed, ok?”

  Scooter stared at me solemnly, as if mentally digesting my words.

  But when I tried to walk into the back room, he reached out with both front paws and tried to hold onto the door frame, as if to prevent me from locking him up.

  “See, he wants to stay out a while…don’t you Scooter?”

  Scooter looked Rik’s way, then looked back at me, his green eyes glowing. Closing time wasn’t for another couple of hours, so I supposed I could watch him until Rik was getting ready to close the store—

  Rik continued to take care of the last customers of the day as I carried Scooter around the store, talking to him softly as I showed him the sets of nesting cats (some with tiny solid-wood mouse centers) stationed on some of the shelves, and the framed cat pictures, some cut from those calendars featuring famous Impressionist or Pre-Raphaelite paintings reconfigured as cat portraits.

  “Too bad none of these kitties look like you,” I told him, as I snuggled him under my chin, “But this one looks a little like poor old Chatty-cat”—he and I stopped before the cat-adapted “Isabella and the Pot of Basil” with its white-gowned-and-white-pawed tiger cat—“only she was all tiger-striped. Now if these two were gray and white, they could be Oscar and April,” I added, pausing before the feline version of “The Huguenot” Sir John Everett Millais certainly wouldn’t recognize as his own work. Scooter actually craned his head forward, and reached out one thumbed-paw to touch the head of the female “lover” in the print. Reflexively, I asked him, “So that’s April?”

  Scooter let out a “purrumph!” and looked up at me, his bright eyes dancing in his white and black face.

  Somewhat rattled by his facsimile of a reply to my words, I set off down another aisle, moving toward that framed Charles Wysocki print of the tiger cat lounging on the book shelf. Once we were standing before the walnut-framed art print, I whispered into Scooter’s furry neck, “You won’t find any of these titles on the shelves here…but I bet you wish you could read ‘A Tale of Two Kitties’ or ‘Delicious Field Mice I have Known’, hummm?” Scooter wiggled in my arms, making meowing noises, until I asked him, “You need the litter-pan? Or some food?” He immediately quieted down, then turned his head to look at me expectantly, as if to say, So, where’s the food you promised me?

  Rik was right…Scooter (and probably the shy Mittens, too) was smart. The only problem was, how did Rik figure that out in such a short time?

  Once I’d brought Scooter to the back room, and opened the metal popcorn canister where I stored the cats’ dry food, I realized that he and Mittens might not be able to chew the hard nuggets, so I ran a little warm water over them, to soften them up, before setting down the bowl of food on the floor. Scooter began lapping up the watery “broth” while Mittens more cautiously crawled out from behind some boxed books, staying low to the ground as she approached the food bowl, even as she moved her head sideways to get an occasional glimpse of me—once she realized that I wasn’t going to try and grab her, she moved into place next to Scooter, and began eating. While the kittens were busy, I picked up one of the litter pans, checked to make sure that there was some water in the other dish near the kittens, then quietly shut the door behind me after flicking off the light switch.

  Placing the other litter pan near the closed door (I hoped neither Oscar or April would be confused; while they were a loving pair, I doubted they had a complete brain between them), I squidge-squidged my way down the aisles until I reached the front of the shop, then quietly told Rik, “There’s some extra food in that Necco wafers tin under the counter for the lovebirds…the kittens can sleep on the folded blanket back there. Now you’re sure they don’t rip up paper?”

  “They’ll be fine…oh, you did leave the light on for them, didn’t you?” A thread-thin worry line formed in the middle of Rik’s forehead.

  “You mean they need a night-light? But they were living in an alley—”

  “—with a street lamp nearby,” he finished my thought quickly, then added, “It’s no biggie…I can turn it on for them before I leave. I’m sure they’ll be fine in there—”

  “They’d better be…and no ripping up my boxes or books,” I warned him, as I slid into my coat (which I never did have time to take to the back room that morning), and picked up my purse from behind the counter.

  Rik waited to reply until I was halfway out the door, so I wasn’t completely sure I actually heard what I thought he said:

  “They’ve been warned about that…no ripping, just reading—”

  As I’d anticipated, Oscar and April had slept all night in the front window, a feline version of Barrett and Browning, curled into a seemingly continuous ball of white-flecked gray fur, their flanks rising and falling in sweet unison. The molasses-brown brickwork of the window frame formed a rough-hewn frame around them, and I wished I’d had that camera with me—while they didn’t seem to know a mouse from a muffin, they were a beautiful pair. But as I opened the door, and flipped around the Open/Closed door-sign, I found myself worried about that other pair of cats in the store, the ones who had to sleep with an overhead night-light.

  Hoping that Ri
k was right about them, I nervously opened the door to the back room then peeked around the frame. The litter pan had been used, the food was gone, and the kittens…were actually sitting at attention, as if waiting for me. The only thing out of place in the room was a Richard Scary children’s dictionary, resting on the floor near their folded blanket-bed. I knew we had more than one copy of that particular book on the children’s shelf, but I hadn’t thought that we had another one waiting to be put on on the shelf…it didn’t seem like anyone had brought in any children’s books in the last few boxes of traded books—

  “See, I told you they’d be good—”

  “God, Rik, you scared me!” My heart was still lopping wildly in my chest when I turned around to face my afternoon-time-worker. Rik tried to hide behind a bag of take-out donuts, as he said in a don’t-hit-me voice, “I thought you heard the bell…sorry.”

  “I should’ve heard it…and you brought me breakfast, too. Yes, to answer you…they were good…but where did the book come from?”

  “Oh that…I took a picture of them, last night. I stopped in to check on them, make sure they had enough food. I thought it would be funny to get one of them ‘reading’ a children’s book. I forgot to put it back—” he ducked into the room, picked up the book, and carried it back to the children’s shelf, all the while holding the white bag of donuts in his left hand, just out of my reach. Behind him, the kittens watched intently as the book was lifted off the floor, and carried away from them. They almost seemed disappointed.…

  On the way up to the counter, I snatched the donuts out of his hand, and said between glazed bits, “I thought you had classes at night?”

  “I did…I stopped here afterwards. Oh, I almost forgot—” He dug around in the large patch pockets of his jacket, and pulled out a few cans of cat food, the tiny expensive brand I usually couldn’t afford more than once a year, as the lovebirds’ Christmas treat.

  “Here’s some for the window-dressing, and the rest’s for the kittens. Work-study’s been good this year, so I thought I’d splurge. I’ll buy them some more later this week—”

  “You needn’t do that…they’ll be earning their keep eventually, I hope…or don’t they ‘do’ mice?”

  “Mice shouldn’t be a problem…long as they’re well fed. You know how a less-hungry cat is a better mouser—”

  “Is that something they teach you at the university?”

  Rik nodded as he bit into a jelly-filled donut, then said something around a mouthful of half-chewed pastry.

  “What?” I licked the sugary glaze off my fingertips as he repeated, “‘Something’ like that. I work in the labs, with the animals—”

  “Uhhh…not so early in the morning. I haven’t the stomach for hearing about lab animals—”

  “No, these aren’t the kind that die. We—I…I work with the genetics department. Uhm, Jake does, too,” he added, realizing that I’d caught slip-of-the-tongue “we” seconds earlier.

  “So…that means breeding things, like kittens, maybe?” I thought Scooter and Mittens were too tame to have come from some mall—

  “Sometimes like kittens. Mostly mice and other rodents, though. Not to dissect, or feed to snakes, though. Nothing…yucky,” he added, with a smile, then turned his attention to Oscar and April, who’d finally woken up, and took turns stretching, yawning, and kneading the bright ombré canvas beneath them, before jumping down and milling around our legs. Peeling the pull-tab covers off the food, Rik knelt down and fed the cats behind the counter, giving them a can each. Taking a cue from my worker, I picked up a couple of the small tins of food and carried them to the back room…but the kittens had already left, to sit vigil in front of the rows of children’s books along the back wall of the store.

  Directly in front of that children’s dictionary—

  “Well if you two like it so much, it’s yours,” I said, sliding it off the shelf, and using it as a tray to carry the cans of food into the back room. I did feel guilty about not buying them any cat toys, and after Rik had bought all four cats breakfast, my guilt more than doubled. The kittens happily ate out of the opened cans, and while they noisily attacked the food, I placed “their” book next to their bedding…which was softly indented in two spots, one covered with white and black fur, the other a soft ombré of brown, tan and orange.

  Glancing around the rest of the room, I didn’t see any shredded paper, nor were there any claw marks on the sides of the cardboard boxes, so I found myself saying, “If you two did come from a lab, you must be used to things being clean…just keep it that way, ok?”

  I was sure the kittens only lifted their heads from their food to catch a breath of air between bits of food.…

  The kittens, Rik and I settled into a new routine over the next few weeks; he’d stop by the store before it opened, to check on the Hemingway kittens, as we’d both taken to calling them, then meet me coming in as he was going out. Rik would return in the afternoon, allowing me time with the kittens—Mittens was slow to come around, far more so than Scooter, but I soon found that she loved the nesting cats…so much so that one morning I found all the solid core figures, kittens and mice alike, nestled next to her side of the blanket she and Scooter shared. Thinking that she might be getting ready to go into heat, I gently checked her teeth, but none of her adult fangs were anywhere near ready to drop down yet. Scooter’s fangs were just beginning to bud out, swelling his gum-line, so I called the vet clinic to set up a neutering appointment for him, which was scheduled for three weeks from that day.

  But Rik wouldn’t have it—

  “Neuter a cat like Scooter? With his smarts? And all that personality? How could you take something like that out of the gene pool?” For a college boy, he could be terribly obtuse; without trying to come across like an out-of-it old nagger, I tried to explain, “But you can see yourself that he’s defective…those paws, and that kinked tail. I’ve looked it up in all the cat books we have here—those are mutant traits. Not desirable in the least. Besides, millions of kittens are born every day…why add more to the mix?”

  That narrow worry-line appeared on his forehead again, as he began patting the head of my pencil-holder cat, his rings clanging against the smooth ceramic. “But those kittens aren’t wanted…Scooter’s would be. How about we start letting the customers see him, and Mittens, to create a demand? Nothing like a pair of literary kittens to bring attention to a bookstore—”

  I still wasn’t sure about letting the people see the Hemingway kittens; I was used to seeing their strange paws, but not everyone was into cats with large mitten feet. Glancing around the cat-print covered walls of my shop, I noticed that Susan Herbert and Mr. Wysocki didn’t choose to use polydactyl cats in their paintings, despite their human-like paws. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure if all my clients would realize what a Hemingway cat was…after all, Minnesota was, and still is, F. Scott Fitzgerald country.

  It was almost as if Rik had read my mind, for he suddenly said, “Picture this…Scooter and Mittens in the window, with books by Hemingway and Fitzgerald, maybe even an opened copy of The Great Gatsby—it’s be a heck of a photo op, at the least. You know, free advertising.…”

  College boy had me there. For more years than I cared to admit, I’d made do with a small weekly ad in the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Star-Tribune, the cheapest one I could get, just enough to let readers know I was Out There. And while my “Barrett and Browning” cats attracted quite a bit of passer-by attention, I’d never been daring enough to try to create a window worthy of newspaper attention. I suppose it was being brought up during the age of Self-Praise-Stinks, the motto my parents drummed into my head almost from the cradle, but this was the Information Age, and I realized that Rik’s idea was a good one.…

  It took a little coaxing to lure Oscar and April out of “their” window (plus the small canister of cat treats Rik bought helped), but Scooter and Mittens seemed to instinctively understand what was wanted of them.

  Rik had
done some searching on the Internet and found some pictures of the descendants of the real Hemingway cats which he downloaded and printed out in color, and I’d found some art-quality prints of both authors, which I mounted on poster-board. I knew the sunlight would bleach out all the pictures within a few weeks or less, but I didn’t plan to keep this particular display up all that long—Rik promised me that a friend of his who worked at one of the papers would just “happen by” and take a photo of the new window display, and just as Rik had managed to “find” me some new store-cats within hours of my asking about them, he made sure that his friend came through for me.

  The photo ran on the front page of the Metro section of the Pioneer Press by the end of the week. A generous four-by-six color picture, showing the bottom half of the sign above the window, and all of the display itself.

  Surrounded by easel-propped photos of the Florida Hemingway cats, and the prints of Ernest and F. Scott, Mittens and Scooter were lying before an opened copy of Gatsby, their distinctive mitten feet resting on the exposed pages, their heads cocked at quizzical angles as they “read” the words before them. The caption read, “Hemingway-0, Fitzgerald-2”. The rivalry between those two gentlemen may have been decades old, but judging by the reaction that photo generated, feelings for Hemingway and Fitzgerald still ran as fervent and deep as the on-going Packer-Vikings brou-ha-ha. Every copy of anything written by either of the two authors sold out within a couple of days, and when Rik and I weren’t waiting on customers, we were supervising photo ops with the kittens and cat-lovers who couldn’t wait to have their picture taken with one of the Hemingway kittens.

  Since neither of the kittens displayed a penchant for ripping or shredding book spines, or honing their many claws on the edges of the shelves, we’d taken to leaving them out during the night…although with all the increased attention Barrett and Browning was enjoying lately, I did have qualms about letting people see the kittens at all hours—

  “—suppose someone tries to break the window, and take them?”