Creamy Bullets (15 page)

Cat in Residence

A
t night, when my wife and I are together at home, we get into our “Night Uniforms.” Her Night Uniform is usually baby blue sweats, long sleeve thermal shirt, and a black hoodie. My Night Uniform is being nude. There are some variations to my Night Uniform though. If I keep my socks on it’s called The Lewd Uniform. If I keep my socks and a t-shirt on it’s called The White Trash Uniform. We keep our blinds shut tight.

Most of the time, we stay up until midnight, changing into our Night Uniforms often as early as 8pm. We sit on the couch, zoning out to the television and drinking decaf coffee. We’re not a very talkative couple but we’re relaxed in our own way. My legs tuck themselves under Annie’s and she’ll read magazines during the commercials.

On other nights, we walk around the neighborhood looking for cats to play with. Our street is full of them. We don’t have our own pets because we travel too much. Same thing goes for kids. There’s too many things loaded on our blackberries and scribbled in our day planners and not enough time for much else. I run a marketing firm and Annie writes for travel magazines.

Last year, an elderly couple moved into the bungalow apartment next door. They have two cats, a brother and sister that look exactly alike. I saw these animals strolling down the sidewalk outside our kitchen door as I washed dishes. I walked out softly and called to them but they scampered away. Annie told me later that they ran from her too.

Some cats will come right up to you. They’ll bow their head and rub against your hand. They’ll lay on the ground and stretch out for you. Some will let you pet them once before walking away teasingly and then coming back just as you’re about to walk off. Our neighbor’s twin short-haired Tabby cats watched us, leery and leaning the opposite direction from us, for quite a while. We put a water bowl on our back porch to show them we wanted to be friends.

Eventually, one of them approached me when Annie was away writing an article on some warm weather resort—her assignments sometimes blurred together for me. He had a nametag that said Baxter. He also had a bell attached to his collar, unlike his sister. He seemed pretty calm as I petted him. I noticed his sister under a parked car, watching us. I took a few steps toward where she was, but she darted away silently. Baxter stayed near me though, and began purring.

“Well, he seems friendly toward you,” the old lady next door said. She was outside, smoking on her porch. I had met her once but couldn’t remember her name.

“Oh, hi,” I said. “What do you call your other cat?”

“That’s Bubble,” she said, taking a drag. “She’s a scaredy-cat.”

By the time Annie got back into town, Baxter was drinking water out of the bowl on our back porch and even coming into our apartment for short visits. While Bubble still wouldn’t let me touch her, Baxter would roll onto his back and let me rub his belly while playfully attacking my hand. He almost looked like a tiger cub but his legs were mostly white, like he was wearing boots. Whenever Annie cooked meat in our kitchen I’d give Baxter some scraps. Annie shook her head and said we were corrupting the neighbor’s cat and that they probably didn’t even eat meat. We had started calling his owners “his parents” and just in case his “parents” could hear us talking through the wall, we gave him the secret code name, Mr. Hoo-Ha. But my wife loved the fact that Baxter came inside. It was our chance to pretend we had a pet.

“It makes me feel like we’re having an illicit affair with him or something,” she said. “His parents go to work, he walks over, and we let him right in. He must have slept on our bed all afternoon yesterday.” She didn’t really know the full stats. When I was home working alone, Baxter would stay inside our place for at least nine-hour stretches. I was a little surprised about his laziness, and that he didn’t get up to eat or look for a place to pee. He’d sit somewhere with his arms and legs tucked under his big round middle. Annie and I called this “Turkey Position” because it made him look like a Butterball.

Only a few weeks after this, Baxter started coming around at night, often running at full speed down the sidewalk when he’d see our car pull up. His bell would ring impatiently as we unloaded groceries from our trunk. We’d let him in and he would go straight for our room. He’d lie on our bed for a few hours while we changed into our night uniforms and watched TV or read. We’d let him out when it was time for us to take over the bed. One night though, he slept on top of our dresser, on a precarious pile of clothes. We didn’t notice him there until the morning, when he joined us in bed, laying snug between us, purring loudly.

In the morning, we snuck him out the other door and then made coffee and breakfast for ourselves in the kitchen. “I wonder if Mr. Hoo-Ha’s parents knows he comes over here,” Annie said. We both imagined scenarios where the neighbors came over and saw Baxter there, eating chicken off the little cat plate we bought him (it had a drawing of a chicken on it). The old woman would be most upset and she would swear loudly and lunge at us like on one of those bad afternoon talk shows. Somebody’s shirt would get ripped, a wig would flop off, and maybe a chair would be thrown.

Of course, it became a ritual. Baxter would stay all day at our place if one of us were there. Then he’d go home just long enough to eat and a couple hours later he’d be jingling his bell outside our door. Maybe he liked us because we were younger. Maybe he didn’t like living with his sister, Bubbles, who was still wary of us, even though we tried to lure her in with chicken a few times too. Maybe he liked our flannel sheets. We couldn’t be sure. I read somewhere that when a cat looked at you through narrowed eyes, it meant he loved you. Baxter had that look sometimes.

When the weather started to get colder, Annie took the opportunity to write a story in the Bahamas. A Tropical Halloween. I had to stay home and write a holiday campaign for a struggling toy store chain. I hadn’t seen Baxter for a few nights. I was secretly hoping he’d come and sleep next to me while Annie was away.

As I was getting ready for bed one night, I heard the jingle jangle of Baxter’s bell outside the door. I let him in and he went immediately to the couch and jumped on one of the oversized pillows. He sat straight up like a sphinx and seemed more serious than usual. “Hey Mr. Hoo-Ha,” I said. “Did you come over for a sleep-over?”

“You better get comfortable,” he said. “I think we should talk about a few things.”

I can remember this feeling coming over me right then. Not one of shock exactly, but one of secret shame—like he was a dead relative seeing me in my own private moment; Uncle John making a special ghostly trip to tell me how I should have chosen a more noble career. I wasn’t about to believe a cat was actually talking to me. “Who…are you?” I asked him quietly. I was somehow still aware that the neighbors might hear me through the walls.

“You know my name,” he grumbled. “And it ain’t Mr. Fuckin’ Hoo-Ha.”

I noticed he had a slight British accent and his words sounded as sharp as his teeth. His mouth didn’t move like animals that talk in movies. It was fluid and natural, like he’d been practicing in a mirror.

I almost laughed as I blurted several questions at him. I can’t even remember what I asked. I just opened my mouth and question marks came out. I felt dizzy and I awkwardly stumbled sideways a little.

“Now just calm yourself down,” Baxter told me. “Sit your ass over here. We got shit to talk about.”

I made it a point not to sit too close to him. He seemed in a bad mood and I didn’t want him lunging at me. He looked impatient and I detected a scowl that stretched from ear to ear. He made no effort to answer my questions about his speaking ability but did confide in me that he hated his owners (he wouldn’t call them his parents) because they were vegetarians and wouldn’t feed him tuna. “Look,” he said, “where I come from, I had friends in the neighborhood who were getting chicken Purina and beef stew Whiskas. I felt inferior because of my diet. I felt like a pussy. The only protein I got was from garbage cans.”

I tried to ignore the irony of him saying he felt like a pussy. He looked at me with such urgency that I couldn’t look away—and I wanted to so badly, to see if there was some totally realistic hologram machine beaming this from somewhere. And then I started to think about petting Baxter and how it would never be the same. Or at least I wouldn’t allow him to speak while I petted him. That would be too weird.

“Are you listening to me?” he asked heatedly. “The bitch has got to go.”

I tried to snap my attention back to what he was actually saying. When he said bitch I thought he meant a female dog, but soon realized he was talking about my wife. “She’s hardly here, and when she is she doesn’t give me water or let me sleep in the cupboard like you do.” He halted for a second and his voice became heavy with pain. “She even kicked me once,”—he bowed his head toward his crotch—“right here.” He started mournfully licking the area she allegedly hurt. I didn’t know it at the time, but Annie had kicked Baxter the week before, when she saw him peeing on my jacket.

I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry,” was all I could think of. He looked at me as if my apology was worth nothing.

“There’s something else,” he said then. “I hope you can trust my intuition about this.” He pawed at the pillow pensively and then took a few steps toward me. “When Annie returned from her trip last month, she let me in and I slept on the couch with her after she unpacked her bags. I was next to her lap and I smelled something odd, something wrong.” The phone rang at that moment, surprising both the cat and I. “Don’t answer that,” Baxter said. I knew it was Annie, calling to say good night. I leaned toward the phone and Baxter could see I was going to answer it. “God damn it,” he muttered.

“Hello.” It was Annie, as expected. “Nothing. Just getting ready for bed…uh huh…no, I’m just tired…I fell asleep watching TV.” Baxter watched me sternly and shook his head. He was mouthing something to me but I couldn’t figure it out. I listened to Annie on the other end as she talked about what she was working on. Baxter grew impatient. “Hang up,” he said loudly.

“Who was that?” Annie asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I accidentally turned the TV up for a second.”

“What are you watching?” she asked. She sounded a little mad.

“Something…about cats,” I said. Baxter jumped off the couch and ran over to where the cordless phone was plugged in. He grabbed the wire with his front paws and started chewing on it. I thought about pushing him away from it. I knew I couldn’t kick him. The phone line started to crackle. “I think the phone is running out of batteries,” I said. Baxter stopped chewing and I was soon off the phone.

“You can’t tell anybody about this. You understand?” he asked me.

I told him I understood but I wasn’t sure if I really did. He said he had to go back home and that his owners were keeping closer tabs on him. “I think they know I come over here,” he said. I asked him if he talked to anyone else, like his owners. “They couldn’t handle it,” he said. “They’d probably ask me a bunch of stupid shit anyway.”

I was about to ask him if Bubbles also talked but stopped halfway. I suddenly felt very self-conscious. Baxter must have known what I wanted to ask. “My sister hasn’t talked for two years,” he said. “She used to talk to this boy in our old neighborhood. He was in a wheelchair and she felt sorry for him. But he tried to use her for sexual things once and she just clammed up. I’ve given up trying to talk to her.” This story gave me an uncomfortable feeling that made me hum introspectively. Baxter went to the door and let out a couple of soft meows. His cat sounds alarmed me for some reason and made me think I was waking up from a dream. I stared at him wondering if he was even a real cat.

“Hey,” he yelled sharply. “That means let me out.”

I couldn’t concentrate on anything the following day. I called in to the office and told them I was working at home. Instead I spent three hours Googling “talking cats” to see if there was any factual documentation of such a thing. Around lunchtime, as I made myself a ham sandwich, I heard Baxter’s bell outside, clanging on the water bowl as he drank. I opened the door for him. “Hey,” I said.

He came in and waited for me to shut the door. He seemed tired. “Got any of that tuna?” he asked. I opened the fridge and told him we did. “I need some,” he said. I thought he was being a bit pushy but at the same time it was kind of cute. I put some on his plate. “I started digging last night,” he said as he chewed.

“Digging for what?” I asked.

“Look in here,” he said. He walked over to the low cupboard and nudged the door open. “There’s a hole in the corner of your cupboard. And there’s a hole in our cupboard, on the other side. There’s a small tunnel connecting the two but it’s too small for me. In a couple more nights though, I should have a nice passageway.”

I looked into the cupboard and saw the square opening, about the size of a postcard. All I could say was “Wow. Okay.”

Baxter narrowed his eyes at me and gave me a look that could have been a smile. “This way I can come over whenever I want to. I could eat your chicken scraps and sleep in your bed.”