The House Guests (14 page)

Once again I was back in the viaduct long ago. But that cat had been dying, and this one would not die. I tried two more shots and then suddenly saw after the leap and yowl that followed the second one that there was just one reflecting gleam of eye in the cat-blackness. My stomach turned over, and I went out into the hall closing the door behind me. “This goddam toy pistol,” I said. “This lousy feeble stupid excuse for a …”

I must have looked just as miserable as I felt. Dorothy said, “If it isn’t strong enough, maybe you’d better just open the screen in there and he’ll go out.”

I was tempted. I’d spent a long time in there.
Maybe he’d heal, off in the brush. They wouldn’t be honorable scars of combat. I’d been like some stupid bird, trying to peck him to death. And I was not going to tell her in front of my small son that Lieutenant Colonel MacDonald had managed to blind the cat in one eye, in a battle plan of remarkable stupidity. If he did recover, he’d be back. He had that look.

Then I admitted to myself how it had to be done, and I told her I’d hurt him too much to turn him loose, and I went back in. When I went in, he did a strange thing. He jumped into the air on the far side of the twin beds, not at me, but just up into the air, as high as my face and ten feet away from me, claws extended and white fangs showing, cursing me as he jumped.

It took me two shots to get the other eye. With that gone, he turned as utterly meek as the cat in the pond. In a low crouch he went to the wall and began a slow circuit of the room, staying close to the baseboard, making a thin keening sound of fright, searching some way out of this sudden total darkness. I moved to intercept him and swung the bat and struck him heavily on the broad tomcat skull. He dropped at once, quivered, and was still. His face was a terrible blankness of wet black fur. I went to the door, weak with reaction, opened it, and said, “Well, I guess I finally …”

Whereupon the tomcat made a horrid wailing sound and his long tail began to twitch. I ran back and hit him again.

He looked no smaller in death. Dorothy brought me a big, sturdy grocery bag. I grasped the end of his tail, using a paper towel to hold him with, and, holding the upright bag open with my left hand, I found I did not have an arm span long enough to raise him high enough to get him into the bag. Dorothy had to come and hold the bag open so I could lift him in. I did not
weigh him. I was not interested in him as a trophy. He had to be over twenty pounds. I carried the bag out and put it in the trunk of the car and then came in to do something about the bedroom. The rug was almost wall to wall. The room had a strong pungency of tomcat, plus the other scents of death. His excrement had splattered the rug. Roger and Geoffrey tiptoed about in that room for all the world like spinster tourists inspecting a disaster area. Dorothy got Johnny to bed. We shooed the cats out, shifted furniture, rolled the rug up, and carried it out to the carport. Leaving Dorothy to the distasteful chore of scrubbing the area where he had died, I drove to the causeway which goes from the beach to the mainland, parked near the first bridge and walked out onto it with the heavy paper bag. It occurred to me that if any local law came cruising by they might think, from the shape and weight of my burden and from my furtive manner, that I was disposing of a human head.

After two cars went by, I dropped the bag into the bay, into the Gulf. I leaned on the railing for a little while. It was a hot night. It seemed strange to me that there should be such a residue of emotional exhaustion. It did not seem, to use the only expression I can think of, quite manly. Yet I had been through a war and had acquired a fairly precise knowledge of my strengths and limitations and had learned I could manage as well as the next man.

Yet, somehow, even today that grotesque slaying of the black tom is more vivid in my mind than much of the clattering, grunting, deadly inefficiency of men trying to slay each other. Perhaps war is such a profound implausibility, it provides its own insulation against reality. Those fearless eyes in black fur under the bed had been a reality which was perhaps in some telling resonance with the drowning of the
other cat so long ago. And perhaps a writer is curiously vulnerable to these subterranean relationships.

After the rug came back from the cleaners, apparently pristine, it was a long time before Roger and Geoffrey ceased tiptoeing in there to sniff at traces far too faint for the deadened senses of people.

This account makes rog and Geoff sound far too girlish and timid. The three dog incidents while we lived in that house will bring them back into proper focus.

The first one made me laugh until I hurt. A chesty and self-important little dog lived directly across the street. I cannot recall him bothering Rog very much, but during our first few weeks there, whenever he spied Geoff out in the open, he would come barreling over at top speed, in full voice, and chase Geoff into the carport and up to his window ledge. Geoff would come in, all haired up, twice his normal size, his aplomb considerably shaken. He was not used to having dogs chase him, but somehow the one across the street had gotten the initial jump on him and kept pursuing the advantage with great enthusiasm.

Fortunately both Dorothy and I were in the living room the day Geoff decided how to handle it. Or, possibly, the decision was made because we had been there to witness his flight. At any rate we heard the frantic barking coming closer, and Geoff came in the window. He sat on the table inside the window and glowered out at the dog still barking in the carport. He stayed very swollen. Quite suddenly, and with the air of a man spitting on his hands before tackling a hard job, he went back out that window at full speed. For an astonished second the dog stared at the alarming apparition bearing down at him. He took one slashing slap across the chops, spun, and went kiyi-kiyi
home, Geoff a step behind him. Geoff stopped at the edge of the street and sat and washed. From then on there was no nonsense from that dog. Sometimes, from a safe distance, he would bark, but he did not put much feeling or expression into it.

Later that season I heard some kind of commotion out at the side of the house, and then a sustained wailing sound of heartbreak. Dorothy heard it too and we went out to investigate. There were young Australian pine trees there, planted in a row several feet apart. The grass had grown high under the trees, and the limbs sagged low. The trunks were about two inches thick. Roger sat washing about six feet from the tree, and Geoff was at about the same distance on the other side of the tree. Both of them looked entirely smug. The mournful complaints still came from the base of one tree. Peering under there, we saw a ruff of orange hair nestled down in between the grass and the tree trunk. Dorothy grabbed one cat and I grabbed the other and, to their displeasure, fed them in through their window and pulled it down from the outside so as to remove them from whatever the action was.

We went back to the tree, and I parted the grass and stared at what, from the color and the sound, I thought might be a Pekingese. The sad song stopped, and slowly and timorously, a full-grown collie unwound itself and stood up. It had been wrapped entirely around the tree trunk and had flattened itself into an incredibly small space. It was a young dog, though full-grown. It stared around, saw that the enemy was not in sight, then with tail tucked under, in total silence, it sped away through a neighbor yard and out of sight. We never saw it again. When we opened the window the cats came out and looked for it and seemed surly about the interference.

That same season, in the following spring, the cats
put on a display of thoughtful co-operation which surprised and enchanted us. Though we saw much the same thing happen many times later on, this was the first time we had witnessed it. It was a hot day. Our neighbors had visitors. The visitors arrived with one of those little, unidentifiable dogs which have a shrill yapping bark and which bark constantly, apparently just for the joy of it.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and the constant shrill yapping got on our nerves before it finally began to bother the dozing cats. At last they went out together. There was a gap in the thick, high hedge dividing the property. Roger went strolling casually through the gap in the hedge, came to an abrupt and horrified stop, and arched his back as though to say, My God, a Dog! Thereupon he whirled and ran for his life back through the gap and along the side of the house. The little dog chased him in furious glee. Roger led him past where Geoff was crouched in wait behind a bush. When Geoff sprang upon the small dog, Roger whirled and joined the fun. Between them they did not so much chase the dog back through the gap as bowl him along. The dog screamed. They sat on our side of the gap, washed for a little bit, and came back into the house and stretched out again. In the hot, lazy afternoon the little dog’s whimpers died away, and there was a pleasant silence, a restful silence.

Before we went north for the summer in 1951, we decided to move further down the coast, down to the Sarasota area, where perhaps we could live on the water. Clearwater was beginning to show the commercial results of the enormous population pressure in the Tampa area, and waterfront was already at a premium which had taken it out of our reach. We knew by then Dick Glendinning, the writer, in Sarasota, and Sally. Dick helped us find a rental for the
following season, on Casey Key opposite Nokomis. We rented a frame cottage on four hundred feet of gulf-to-bay land owned by Randy Hagerman, one of the owners of the Plaza Restaurant in Sarasota, stowed possessions there, and headed north.

      That was the first summer we spent in the new camp. It was a delight, for people and for cats. The south shore of the lake was more wild than the old shore where the camps were close together. We built on a rock ledge and had a cement deck overlooking the lake. Our road was over eight hundred feet long. It was and is a good place to live and work.

The cat window was in the front, opening out onto the cement ledge of the waist-high fireplace on the terrace.

Later, Roger was to discover that he could leap up under the shield and into the mouth of the flue. This was an idiot performance, and he would stay up in there, peering down, quite obviously very satisfied with himself. When it acquired a heavy coating of soot up in there he stopped. Cats do not voluntarily dirty themselves.

The flaw in the window arrangement was that they reached it from the inside by hopping up onto the glass-topped table in the dining end of the long kitchen, next to the wall of stone which was the back side of the living-room fireplace. Our cats were quite self-effacing about this exit system. Staying close to the wall they would hop to chair, to table, and glide out. By never giving an inch we had managed to train them never to hop up onto the table where the people
were eating. They did beg scraps sometimes, but in a mild and mannerly fashion. Roger was the one who came closest to taking advantage. He would sit patiently on an empty chair and then, with the stealth of an awareness of guilt, he would put one paw on the edge of the table. His name said in a tone of accusation was usually sufficient to make him flatten his ears, gulp, and pull the paw back. When this did not work, you could commit the indecency of leaning forward and blowing into his face. He has always despised and resented this. He will stalk away, pausing to stare back two or three times. He manages to express incredulity and resentment. How can you possibly be so crude? Geoffrey never took such violent exception to it.

We did not mind the Piseco window arrangement. In fact, it was handy on those days so cold we did not want any window open. It could be readily reached to be opened for a cat and closed again.

But visiting cats and kittens made it a little less than ideal. I remember one time when Charlie, in momentary confusion, tried to leap from the floor to the window sill. Trouble was, there was a good solid hunk of plate glass in the way. He gave himself a thump that left a little knot on his head. For days he preferred to holler at the door to get in and out. And, summer before last, a visiting kitten, enormously busy, had the habit at mealtime of jumping up into a lap at the part of the table furthest from the window, scrambling onto the table, and charging through the groceries on his single-minded way out.

Roger has always had a precise awareness of his table rights. Circumspect about intrusion at any meal, he will nonetheless leap up onto the table without hesitation, when Dorothy is reading there or writing letters, and spread himself out amiably atop whatever she is trying to do.

Neither cat tried to steal anything from the table. With one startling exception—the time Geoff got hooked on pills. But that comes later.

At Piseco I took wicked advantage of my increasing knowledge of cat psychology to cure Roger of a habit that was slowly driving Dorothy out of her mind. We had one of those sling chairs, or safari chairs as they are sometimes called, canvas with slots or pockets which fit over the four extremities of a frame made of bent and welded metal rod. The canvas was black. Roger thought it the finest invention of man, a perfect hammock to take the curled shape of a somnolent cat. And he left a thick deposit of gray hair against the black each time.