By now, it’s almost two in the morning and Cap is tired himself, but he puts the cub on his bed and, using the hairbrush he bought at the store, starts currying the cub’s fur, pulling out knots, straightening all the snarled hairs until the cub begins to look presentable. Presentable for death, Cap thinks. He turns out the light and goes to sleep.
Cap is wakened in the morning by a rough licking on his cheek. It’s the lion cub and it’s standing shakily next to Cap in the bed. His eyes, although still covered by the bluish haze, are open, awake, aware. He’s standing, a bit wobbly on the shifting bed, but standing.
Cap reaches up and pulls on the cub’s ears.
“Hey there, feller. You’re supposed to be dead. What you doin’ standing up on my bed, getting ready to eat me, huh?”
Cap rolls out of bed and pours more milk into the bottle. The cub sucks at it voraciously, pulling on the nipple so it almost tears, pushing hard against Cap’s hand. He’s obviously been starved.
“You really are a tough one, feller. That’s what I think I’ll call you, Tuffy; if you live long enough.”
Cap’s beginning to feel he might very well be the owner of a live, more or less healthy, growing lion cub. It’s something he hadn’t bargained for. He puts the rest of the hamburger Tuffy didn’t eat the night before on the floor and Tuffy snuffles it down. He looks up at Cap, strolls around the bed.
Cap sees where he’s made a mess in one corner.
“Oh, boy, just what I need.”
Cap cleans up after Tuffy, showers and dresses as the cub follows him around the room. He knows he has to buy more food and some kind of collar and leash for the cub. Cap’s supposed to race the next day up on the Beverly Hills board track. He needs to join the team and help pack up the cars, all the equipment.
Cap goes out the back way again, puts Tuffy in the car he borrowed, and goes around front to pay his bill. He shops on the way and buys three more pounds of meat with two bottles of milk. He’ll have to win more races just to feed this cub.
At Beverly Hills, on the board track, Cap does win. It’s his first win in five races, so he considers Tuffy his lucky omen. He introduces Tuffy to the rest of the racing team. They aren’t too enthusiastic about a lion cub being around, but after somebody’s driven and won a major race you don’t argue much. The lion is Cap’s problem anyway. Cap doesn’t seem to have anything for women so maybe he’s got something special for lions.
The next weeks Cap drives in an open car, cross-country to a race at Maywood, near Chicago. Tuffy is in the front seat beside him. Cap stops every hour or two to feed the cub, curry his fur, or give him a chance to do his business. Tuffy, by now, is beginning to act like a real lion, that is, sleeps most of the time. But, when he isn’t sleeping, he’s sitting up on the passenger’s seat staring out the front windshield or out the side as the landscape passes by. There isn’t too much traffic but Tuffy carefully observes passengers in cars that pass and they in turn look carefully at him.
The road is mostly paved but Cap has three flat tires, about right for the trip on those roads.
Sometimes while Cap is driving, the cub puts one of his heavy paws on Cap’s arm almost as if he’s helping. By the end of the trip, Tuffy’s hair is beginning to shine.
Cap has no fear of Tuffy; that’s one of Cap’s troubles; he doesn’t know when to be afraid. Tuffy doesn’t seem to fear Cap either.
At Maywood, Cap wins again. He knows how, in a certain way, he’s driving for Tuffy; trying to make things right between them, even though Tuffy is locked up in a cabin outside town.
Cap knows better than to go into a hotel with the rest of the driving team. They’d go crazy if he walked in with a lion cub. Somehow, Cap feels that having a lion as a pet is right for him. It fits with everything he feels about his own life. Tuffy is a perfect blend of his love for animals and his need for risk, his attraction to danger.
Then, gradually, Cap begins to think about what will happen to Tuffy if he crashes, is hurt or killed. The team would probably take him to the SPCA or a zoo. The careless ease, lack of fear, he’s always known dissipates. The team, the other drivers, can’t understand what’s happening and Cap can’t tell them.
Three months later, in Atlantic City, he has the crash that was coming; his combination of fear and bravado catches up with him. He wakes in a hospital having suffered several fractured ribs, a scalp cut, and a broken collarbone.
Cap senses he’s finished as a major racing driver. He’s lost his nerve. Whatever it was that kept him concentrated on the task at hand, whether farming, fighting, playing, fighting war, whatever it was, is gone. He knows fear, the prospect of death, injury, the same as everyone else. His imagination has in some strange way been set free.
While in the hospital, partially drugged by morphine, suffering from shock, pain, Cap keeps asking for someone to go take care of Tuffy. Tuffy is locked in a cheap cabin at a lodge, inland three miles from the beach. It was the only place Cap could be sure of keeping him. Tuffy is now six months old, larger than a large dog, and frightens almost everyone who sees him.
The nurses and doctors in the hospital are convinced Cap’s delirious as he keeps talking about his lion and how somebody must feed it. Cap doesn’t know what to do.
There is a young woman who was in the stands at the race. She works as an operator for the telephone company and came to the race only because the girls with whom she works dragged her there. Her name is Sally.
Sally is a quiet, simple girl with notions. She bobs her hair and has it dyed a light blond color. She wears lipstick and heavy eye makeup. Her idols are Jean Harlow and Carole Lombard. She buys movie magazines, song sheets, True Confessions, and, daring for those times, smokes cigarettes. She’s a hopeless, childlike romantic.
When Cap crashes, she’s terrified and wonders what’s happened to him. She telephones the hospital from her board at work and finds he is seriously but not mortally injured. She talks to the nurse and discovers no one has come to see him except for a few visits by members of his racing team.
She decides to dress in her newest outfit and go visit. She wears a cloche hat, long beads, and her new button-down-front dress. They can only throw her out. She has a simple-minded adulation of the notorious, and Cap Modig is notorious in his field.
When Sally comes to visit him, Cap is mortified, scared. Not since he was a little boy has he been in bed while a woman was in the same room. He still has his irrational mistrust of the ambiguous, unpredictable: art, music, sickness, and especially women. Here are two of them stalking him at the same time.
Sture’s head is bandaged to cover burns and minor abrasions as well as the eight stitches just above what would normally be his hairline. Sally does not know he is bald. She thinks him incredibly handsome for an older man. Cap is thirty-two, Sally twenty.
Cap is very concerned about getting someone to feed Tuffy. After accepting Sally’s consolations, and after being embarrassed by her obvious adulation of him as driver—adulation he feels he doesn’t deserve at all, when in his heart he knows he’s finished—he finally gets around to it.
“Miss, would you do me a big favor? I hate to ask but there’s no one else and it’s something that must be done. I’ve been worried crazy about it all the time I’ve been here.”
Sally looks at him, so pale in the bed: his head, all his chest, his arm in bandages and one arm in a sling. “I’d like to help however I can, Mr. Modig.”
Cap looks at her. Almost before he starts, he realizes how crazy it will sound, how he can’t expect a young, glamorous woman to do what he wants done.
“I don’t know how to ask this. You see, I have a lion cub in a cabin outside town. It isn’t far from here, not more than three miles, and there’s a bus that goes right by. It’s called Shore Lodge. He’s there in the cabin and is probably starving. I haven’t been able to get any food to him for three days.”
Cap stops as Sally puts her hands over her mouth, her eyes open. Tears start springing into
her eyes.
“I’m sorry, miss. I only thought I’d ask. I’ll have to figure some other way. Maybe one of the team will come visit again and he can go feed him.”
“Oh no, Mr. Modig; I’ll do it. Do you mean you have a real lion here in Atlantic City? How long can he go without food and stay alive? Maybe he’s dead!”
“I hope not. Grown lions can go a long time without food and he’s almost six months old now. But he must be hungry. He wouldn’t ever hurt anybody. He hasn’t learned to hunt or anything. To be perfectly honest, he’s probably my closest friend in the world, except for my parents.”
Sally stares at him. She hadn’t thought of a race driver as someone with parents, and she’d thought he’d have many friends. She thought he was like a movie star, an artificial sort of person, more or less unreal, made up in magazines, living a separate life, nothing like everybody else.
“What does he eat? Tell me exactly what to do.”
She looks Cap straight in the eye for the first time. She sees him. She sees the shy farm boy who has only just learned to love—his first love a lion cub.
And Cap sees her. He sees past the bob, the peroxide-bleached hair, the eye makeup. He sees the little girl playing grownup.
“Over there in that closet are my clothes. In my jacket is a wallet. Go over and take out the wallet.”
Sally does as she’s told. She feels as if she’s entering into something very intimate; she’s never gone through the pockets of a man’s clothes. She has no brother and her father died when she was fourteen. She carries back the wallet, formed to fit in the back pocket of a pair of pants as Cap usually wears it, sweat-stained.
“Now open it up. In the back part you’ll find money. Take out five dollars.”
Sally opens the wallet, takes out money. She closes the wallet. She goes to the closet, puts the wallet back in his pocket. She stands with the five dollars in her hands, looks at Cap.
“You don’t need to give me money, Mr. Modig. I have money. I have a good job with the telephone company.”
“That’s no reason you should pay for Tuffy’s food. Tuffy’s my lion. I think you’ll like him; he’s very loving and kind.”
Cap stops.
“I’m still not sure I should let you do this.”
“Is it dangerous? Will he try to eat me up?”
Her question is so obviously sincere Cap smiles, then laughs. It hurts his head, his shoulder and ribs. He coughs.
“No, he’s perfectly safe. It’s just he might be so excited he’d break past the door and escape. Even though he’s young, he’s very strong.”
“I promise I’ll do my best, Mr. Modig. We had a big dog once and I took him for walks. I could hold him when nobody else could. I’m stronger than I look.”
“I’ll bet you’re strong. By the way would you call me Cap or Sture, please? You make me feel old calling me Mr. Modig.”
Sally looks down at the five dollars in her hand. She looks up, shifting from one foot to the other.
“Would you stop calling me Miss, too, Mr. Modig, I mean Cap? It makes me feel I’m talking to you on the switchboard and I don’t feel that way at all. Please call me Sally, that’s my name.”
A blush comes over her face, and she turns her whole body away from Cap. He, in turn, feels a sweat rising on his forehead under the bandages.
“O.K., Sally. First go buy five pounds of hamburger. You don’t have a motorcar, do you?”
Sally smiles and shakes her head.
“Not on what they pay a telephone operator I don’t.”
“Do you know how to drive?”
“How can I drive if I don’t own a motorcar?”
They both smile at each other. It’s a brief moment of ridiculous joy. Cap has a hard time getting back to the subject: his starving lion, Tuffy.
“O.K., then. I guess you’ll need to take that bus, it’s the bus going out the Blackhorse Pike.”
“I know the one, the number twelve. I’ve taken it out to a place where there’s dancing and music, a place in a big elephant. Do you know it?”
“No, I’m sorry I don’t. I don’t know how to dance, anyway.”
“Maybe someday I can teach you. It’s fun. But first you need to get better and out of bed.”
Cap looks at her. She’s so shy in some ways and then so direct in others. She’s like a good animal.
“Yes, but first we must feed Tuffy; that is, you’ll have to feed him. I forgot; you’ll need the key.”
Cap points to the closet again. “In my right pants pocket you’ll find a key attached to a piece of wood. It has the number of my cabin on it; I think it’s thirteen.”
“No wonder you had bad luck and crashed. You know you were winning before you had that terrible crash. I was so excited and proud of you. You were so brave.”
Cap is blushingly embarrassed. Sally goes to the closet. Reaching into his pants pocket is even more adventurous, more intimate. She feels the hard round wood of the key holder and pulls it out. She holds it up for Cap to see. “Is this it? It’s number thirteen.”
“That’s it. When you get to the cabin, open the package of meat before you open the door. Then, holding tight on to the doorknob, slip the package into the door and close it quickly.
“Listen on the outside to hear if Tuffy comes and eats; that is, if he’s still alive or still in there. He might have made so much noise because he was hungry the owner could’ve called the SPCA and they might’ve hauled him off.
“If he’s there you’ll hear him eat; he makes a lot of grunting and snuffling sounds, you can’t miss it. If you don’t hear anything, open the door carefully again and listen, then look to see if he’s there. If he’s there and isn’t moving don’t go into the room, just come back to me here and I’ll call the SPCA.
“You never know with a lion; he could only be asleep and when he sees you, you might not know what he’s doing. I don’t think he’d ever hurt anybody, but then he hasn’t been hungry like this since he was a little cub.”
Sally is listening with her eyes open.
“What do I do if he isn’t there?”
“Then go to the owner of the lodge and telephone the SPCA. You can explain what’s happened.”
“Will I be arrested?”
“No, just tell them I sent you. I’m sure Tuffy will be there, though. He’ll be hungry and restless. Also he’s probably lonely. He’s never been alone by himself so long in his life.”
“He really is your best friend, isn’t he?”
“Yes. I find it hard making friends. I have a lot of people I like and I think they like me but we don’t become friends, or maybe we are friends and I don’t know it.”
“I’m your friend, Sture.”
Cap stares. It’s a long time since anyone’s called him Sture. He looks away. He’s wishing he could escape from the bed; he’s scared and at the same time inside he’s churning, the way he does on a tight turn, wheel to wheel with another car.
“I guess you are, Sally. And if you can rescue Tuffy, I’ll never forget it.”
With that, Sally turns and leaves the room. Cap settles back in his bed and tries pulling himself together. He’s feeling more shaken by the last half hour than he was when the car spun out and burst into flames. He feels he has fallen into some kind of new life, starting with Tuffy and now this young girl.
Sally finds number thirteen at the lodge without trouble. No one at the lodge office seems to notice her. The cabin is one of the farthest back, against the pine barrens so common in that part of New Jersey.
She listens carefully at the door but hears nothing. After unwrapping the hamburger as Sture has told her, she slowly turns the key in the lock. She pushes the door in and Tuffy the lion shoves his muzzle into the space. Sally is frightened, shocked, surprised so she almost lets go of the door. She forces herself to put the meat on the ground at the threshold and shoves it in with her foot. Tuffy pounces on the hamburger immediately, gulping and swallowing with grunts and groans of
contentment. He looks up at her twice while eating. Each time Sally is prepared to pull the door shut but Tuffy continues to concentrate on his food.
Finally, with his large, rough tongue he’s licking the last bits of meat from the package. His yellow, round eyes look up at Sally. Then he quickly forces his face through the opening in the door and leans so hard she can’t hold back. As the door swings farther open, Tuffy can apply his full strength and wrenches the doorknob from her hand.
Sally stands with her fists against her mouth as Tuffy comes out, stalks around her, and begins rubbing his face, his body, against her so hard he almost knocks her over. He’s behaving exactly the way any domestic cat would, except he weighs almost a hundred pounds.
Sally pulls herself together and goes into the room. Tuffy follows her. She closes the door behind him. He isn’t trying to escape, he’s only wanting company; as Cap has foretold, he’s almost more lonely than hungry.
The room smells. Sally sees where Tuffy has made his messes. She takes a newspaper from the table beside the bed and scoops them up, flushes them down the toilet. She opens a window slightly from the top to air the room.
Tuffy stays close to her rubbing hard against her whenever she stoops or stops. When she’s finished, she sits on the side of the bed. Here she is in the cabin of a man she hardly knows, feeding and cleaning up after his lion. She’s between crying and laughing. What would the nuns say? This is even more of an adventure than a Gloria Swanson movie.
Tuffy comes up and rests his large head across her lap on the bed. It’s such a natural thing for a dog but seems wrong for a large cat. Sally pushes his head away and Tuffy starts prowling around the room.
Sally finds some milk in the wooden icebox in the kitchenette. The ice has long ago melted, so it’s warm but not sour. She pulls the melted ice-water pan out into the middle of the floor, pours milk into another pan, and puts it beside the water. While Tuffy drinks, she carefully edges her way to the door, opens it quickly, and goes out. She locks it behind her and walks surreptitiously past the office of the lodge keeper. It’s the kind of lodge where casual visitors to guests’ rooms are tolerated, even expected.