It never even began as something we agreed to. Many people have the mistaken belief that pacts with the devil have to be entered into knowingly. Our trouble began as nothing even remotely related to that. And it came in the innocuous guise of a ratty-looking alley cat. For the whole story, one has to go all the way back to the apartment and our neighbor. Christ, it’s still hard to look at the calendar and believe that was several decades ago.
He was strange, that was readily observable from the first. He had a kind of high school geek aura that clung around him like cotton candy on a muggy night at the state fair. Upper thirties, unmarried, uncaring about his appearance. In short, he was a prototype for either an accountant or a serial killer. And he lived right downstairs. Lived there until he went to Canada, he said. Now I wonder where the hell it was he actually left for?
He never talked much; he seemed to be the grown-up version of the kid who always got his underwear pulled up the crack of his ass in junior high. The kinda guy who’d rather hide behind a cheap pocket protector brimming with pencils and pens and a twenty-cent protractor than cause anybody any bodily harm. And this would have been by roughly age twelve.
When I saw him staked out in the parking lot that night, standing about thirty feet away from a box he had rigged up to hover above a small pile of cat food, it made me think. The first impression hadn’t lied. He was a to-the-wall loony.
After that I had to talk to him, and not because I wanted to sit around and drink beer or catch the latest flick at the movies. No, I just wanted to get a feel for the guy. So, as he ended up explaining to me several days later, he wasn’t actually trapping cats. It turned out he was merely capturing them and then giving them free-rein in his one-bedroom apartment until they felt “sufficiently at home”. I swear, those were his exact words. After that, up went the window and they were free to come and go as they pleased. I didn’t ask him for the particulars, but I guessed he let their training ground be his bedroom. He fished cats out of the dumpster like a bass pro haunting his favorite stump.
After several months and no sounds of electric saws running in the rooms beneath us, I surmised that the less dangerous profile probably fit this character. He was an engineer, he said. That seemed to fit. He worked at one of the plants just over the river. Okay, there was really no need to pry further. He had all the boring characteristics of a man retrofitted for a lack of imagination and a passion for numbers. He even mentioned something about a daughter living in Canada or somewhere near the Great Lakes, but looking back after all this time it is amazingly clear that he never mentioned anything concrete. There were never any visitors except for the increasing number of those goddamned cats, and no real history besides a glassy-eyed spiel that was too boring to listen to if you’d cared in the first place. But hell, the world’s full of lunatics and I didn’t pay him all that much mind. As long as I didn’t wake up in the night and find him standing over my bed with a meat cleaver, I thought: let sleeping dogs lie.
When he said he was leaving, that his ‘job’ was over we said “Okay, take care.” He seemed sort of sad, or as sad as a guy who always looked a bit sad could progress to. He seemed worried also. What about his cats? Running into him coming back from the grocery store or late at night in the laundry room; that was the thing he was mulling about to anyone within hearing distance. He must have seen his exodus coming before he began making his comments, because it was clear to my wife and me he’d begun refusing several of his regulars house privileges. When the window was closed I swear they’d line up like school kids in an alley peering through a strip club window. But, of course, he did have his favorite. There was one ratty old bitch that he just couldn’t forsake. But he did have a plan.
I wasn’t present when his first morsel went out. He’d talked to my wife; he knew she loved cats. We had one of our own so the devil had already sighted us out without us even knowing it. That, I believe, is how he actually works, sneaking and filtering himself in so slyly that you never know he’s there until it’s too late.
Our engineer couldn’t take the cat with him, you see. It was so far away and blah, blah, blah…. He suggested a solution and bugged out before I really agreed or even acknowledged a fucking word he’d said. He’d told my wife that C.L.A.W.S. (an animal adoption center halfway across town) would be happy to take the burden of placing this old rangy flea-bagger into a loving, and caring home. Of course, the fact that she was fully grown and had the personality of a rat behind sewer grating seemed to matter little. Only thing was (according to what he told my wife), we’d need to drop her off early on a Saturday morning and if the beautiful little rascal was not rushed into a child’s loving arms by 3 p.m., then we’d have to pick her up ourselves or face paying a small penalty of some couple hundred dollars.
Now when I first heard this story after he’d made his dismal exit in the pathetic smoke-machine he treated with more contempt than his clothes, I practically laughed until my pants feel down. I couldn't even fathom the depths of illusion in his meticulous, although obviously clotted brain. I am much older now, and know that many tricks start off thusly.
The first week we never even saw her. Not upstairs anyway, where we were. Oh, she’d dash around the common area and hiding places around his old doorway and window- access, running like Hell would rip her ass off if anyone came near. Then she got hungry and a little slower. Then she got a lot hungrier and decided to come upstairs. For the next twelve months every time anyone walked up to our door that goddamn cat was sitting there like a complaining welcome mat.
To set everything straight: we don’t hate animals. Never did, and the sight of a starving cat is not necessarily soothing. We started throwing a handful of food out every here and again. It goes without saying that soon we had an inside cat and an outside cat. I had several suggestions from friends of mine to bag her and send her off the side of a bridge, or to simply turn her loose miles away, but I never really paid serious mind to any of them. The cat was not my problem. An annoyance, sure, at times but not a problem. Not then.
My wife is from overseas. We had plans for Christmas. We would be at her parent’s house in Pankow for the better part of a month. It seemed a good time to break ties with our unwelcome hanger-on. And we didn’t have to feel bad about it either. Either the cat would slink off or float over to one of our neighbors. Her welcome had long worn thin with us.
We went and had the time of our lives. The thought of that damn cat never crossed my mind for one second during the whole trip. We saw all the sights, hung with the locals since she knew the streets, did all the things at least I’d never done before, and in the meantime learned what not to do also. All in all, a masterpiece.
Now I know how precious and rare true masterpieces are.
When we got back the cat was right there at our door like we’d just stepped out for a bite of dinner and were home a little late. She didn’t even seem agitated or dangerously starved, just patient, like she’d known all along we’d return. It had been a hell of a flight; the jet-lag was a bitch. I remember kicking her aside as we entered, damning her not-so-quietly under my breath as I shoved my suitcases inside.
I wreaked the car the next day.
Just fell asleep at the wheel for the first time in my life and ran a red light. The cop didn’t even give me a ticket because I looked so out of it. Said it was his discretion and decided to let it be, let the insurance company sort it out. I don’t even remember if the cat was at the door waiting when I got home that night. I guess it really doesn’t matter.
It was more of a bother than anything else: fresh off a European holiday and directly into a sustained inconvenience. But the car was finally fixed, not quite up to the standard it’d been, but fixed and shined up as if nothing had ever happened. It has become second nature over the years. I was never sued by the woman I hit, so I assume she was satisfied with her own repairs. Either that or she died herself a short time later; I don’t know which one is easier to believe.
But bygones are bygones,
right? We carried on and it didn’t take things long to get back to normal. My wife and I considered the irony it would have been to fly 5,000 miles across depthless ocean to be killed less than twelve hours later scarcely a mile from our driveway. Yet we laughed it away nervously and thanked our lucky stars that twisted metal was all we had to worry about.
Of course, that was only true for a short time.
I had seen the cat no more than twice more since our homecoming when my wife came into our bedroom late one night with an otherworldly look in her eyes as she began mumbling a stop-and-go litany that had no meaning whatsoever. Just before she started convulsing and foaming at the mouth I knew that she was not kidding around, and thanks only to the many small wonders of the universe, she made it through that night with two hemorrhages in her brain. The doctors believed she would die. I thought she was dying when she had the seizures and her pupils fixed.
But she survived. The teams of doctors voiced their surprise time and time again during those lost days in Room 693 as time seemed to stand still. When we finally left the hospital the doctors were preparing a paper on her case to be published in JAMA, and we had the additional weight of $45,000 in unpaid hospital bills left to face. The insurance was…let me say, insufficient.
The cat was there when we walked up to the door. Just sitting there looking well fed and healthy, an old friend arrived in the nick of time to welcome his acquaintances home. I was so disgusted and drawn-out that I didn’t feed the damn thing for a month or two after we returned. But after that, I tried never to miss.
My wife’s recuperation lasted almost six months. We had to sell one of our cars to help pay the monstrous hospital bills. Our dreams of owning a home swirled down the drain amid a wild montage of paperwork and bills.
But that wasn’t the worst part. You see, I was a teacher. Just a simple teacher at a simple middle school. I had never aspired to greatness nor expected to find it. I was content to be who I was. Many times I have looked back and tried to distinguish the finer points of my existence before the goddamned cat became a fixture. Without recognizing it at the time (a fault that many of us possess and less will confess in retrospect), I realize I was what the psychologist Abraham Maslow had defined as “self-actualized.” In simple terms, I was content and satisfied with my station in life. I have learned since that this is precisely the moment when one can most expect things to go to hell.
Many times since, on the darkest of nights when I can practically hear my soul oozing around in the marrow of my bones, I have wondered if the kid would have been killed if the Fed Ex truck had not blown a rod. And I tell myself, even now, that he would have because nothing depended on that fucking truck.
My preparation period was third hour, still very early in the morning, and I happened to have gone to the teacher’s lounge to check my cubicle for any “important” messages that might be waiting. None were. However, on leaving the lounge the principal hailed me, asking if I could step outside and bring some equipment in from a Fed Ex delivery. I was one of only five men on the staff and the only one present who’d be considered safe to walk in a mile Fun Run without having a coronary halfway through. I didn’t understand the request until I took a look outside. There was the truck with the back doors open, sitting across the empty street with a blown tire. Luckily for the driver the morning was cool. As I went to help with the package one of my students came walking up to check-in and I asked if he would give me a hand. Of course, he was happy to. We were walking across the grass when I happened to glance over at my truck in the parking lot. Something skittered in the gravel near my back wheel and I swear it looked like that cat. To this day I remember how strange I felt for no good reason, other than the fact that I was ten miles from home and I thought I’d seen her before I left.
I told the kid to go ahead, that I’d be right with him to give a hand. I had to check something out at my truck. There was no sign of any animal when I got there, living or dead, and certainly not that cat. When I heard the car’s brakes lock up my heart dropped to my feet. Before I could get around good there was a sickening thump and a wild bray of honking that still seems to echo in my head on the nights I lay awake, remembering.
Even before the ambulance arrived I knew the kid was dead. There was a faint pulse but I knew it. It was only after the paramedics had taken him away to the hospital that I found out what the package was we were going to retrieve from the broken down Fed Ex truck. Three fresh, full-sized CPR dummies to be used in the P.E. classes in the fall.
When I got home hours later, with the sun only a light bruise through the trees, I mounted the steps to our door. The cat was sitting right near the fern, close to the spot where her food bowl used to be. When she saw me I swear she licked her chops as if she’d just finished the most delicious thing she’d ever eaten. I approached quietly, being very careful to step around her when I opened the door.
As I sit here writing this I realize almost thirty-five years have passed, although it never seems that far away in my mind. That moment is frozen and embedded inside me. We moved out of those apartments shortly after the boy was killed. We’d begun to understand the uneasy nervousness of superstition. The last time I drove past the old address a strip-mall had been screwed into the slight undulations of the hills instead of the red-brick buildings that were decades old even before we moved in. However, it’s still strange to see where it started, almost as if there shouldn’t be such a place, as if I shouldn’t have such access.
I’m sure you’ve probably guessed. The goddamned cat followed us; she showed up at our new doorstep looking just as pleasantly plump as an old English castle tom. We felt the clouds circling above us, readying themselves to dump their torrent, but my resistance held for a while longer, even though my wife pleaded against my behavior.
It almost cost my brother his life.
Within days of our renewed acquaintance with the cat and my refusal of offerings, he was blind-sided by a drunk in the early hours of a wet Monday morning and damn near killed. The truck had to be cut from around him, although he stepped free with only small bruises and the shock of his life. I knew then that it was the final warning.
We began to feed the cat regularly.
The little house we live in now is comfortably nestled into the sharp L-shaped angle of a man-made pond that practically breathes with fresh water sport fish. It’s not big but it’s ours and it has proven a good place to while away the years and read a lot of good books. Through the window of the small study I have here, I can see the sparkling rim of the lake until long after dusk. A whole family of Canadian geese chose this spot as a nesting area last season and I anxiously await to see if they’ll repeat their pattern this year. It really is a restful place, a peaceful place.
Except for the shadow that crosses the yard at least twice a day with the persistency of a grandfather clock ticking endlessly away in a long hallway. She’s never changed. Never gotten any bigger or looked any older than when we left the apartment all those years ago. Sometimes at night she shrieks like a woman and I can hear my wife crying softly next to me, but there is nothing I can do. Nothing that is, except to get up and pour more food out.
She can never get enough.
Five
Making a Statement