The Barker Street Regulars (6 page)

On a cold Friday afternoon, in full daylight, though, I felt perfectly comfortable in driving along the road. Rowdy was in his crate in the back of the car, but if the engine quit, I could get him out and walk safely to a telephone. Kevin was wrong, I reflected. He knew
Rowdy so well that he’d forgotten how the dog appears to strangers. Despite the recent warm spell, patches of ice floated on the river. It was too early in the season for crew practice and much too cold to sit on the benches. No one was skating. I passed a solitary cyclist headed in the other direction. That’s how I thought of the woman, as a solitary cyclist. The phrase was Conan Doyle’s. It was the title of a story. A ragged couple pushed a shopping cart that probably contained everything they owned. Nancy’s belongings wouldn’t have filled half the cart. She’d been ninety-three. And frail. Althea was only ninety. How old was that French woman, Jeanne Calment? A hundred and twenty? Althea could easily have another thirty years. Helen Musgrave could have forty or more. Gus, my lobby ladies, all the others? I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I’d only been alerted, I could have rushed Rowdy to the Gateway, and Nancy would still be alive.

Parked in a turnout was a dark panel truck, a van with no windows except the two by the front seats and, of course, the windshield. My eye caught the flash of something white near the riverbank. I naturally assumed that it was a dog and slowed down to see what kind. My brain cells identify any unknown object as canine. I’m always easing on the brakes to get a good look at paper bags blowing in the wind. But there was no wind today, and the white object wasn’t at ground level, but in the hands of a tall, lean man standing by the river and wrestling in a peculiar, scary-looking way with what I now saw was definitely not a white dog. Still, the white thing wiggled and squirmed in a way that looked animate. Kevin’s warnings about this stretch of Greenough Boulevard had made me suspicious. And I was mindful of death. The man had a furtive look. The white thing was
struggling. At the risk of making a fool of myself, I pulled over, slammed on the brakes, cut the engine, and, leaving Rowdy in his crate, leaped out of the car without even closing the door. As I sprinted toward the man, I yelled, “Hey, what are you doing?”

The thought flashed across my mind that I was accusing a kind and innocent reader of trying to drown today’s
Boston Globe.

But I wasn’t. The man must have been so preoccupied with his task that he hadn’t paid attention to the sound of my car, and, of course, I hadn’t slammed the door. Startled, he flung the white thing onto the ground, gave it a brutal kick toward the water, cursed at me, and made a dash for the dark panel truck. As he backed out of the turnout, he hollered, “Hey, bitch, it’s not even my fucking cat!”

I wished afterward that I’d imprinted every detail about that truck on my memory. I had no excuse. I’d been reading Sherlock Holmes every day for weeks. Still, I didn’t notice whether the panel truck was black or dark blue, and I can almost never tell one make of car from another unless I’m close enough to read “Dodge” or “Chevrolet.” I did not get the plate number, didn’t even look at it, had no idea whether it was even a Massachusetts plate. But I got a good look at the man. He was in his thirties, I thought, six feet or so, thin, with brown hair that somehow looked expensively cut. The sides were short, and the hair on top hung in what I had some idea might be known as a shingle. It occurs to me that shingles is a disease. Anyway, his hair, I thought, might have been cut in an effort to disguise his most memorable feature, which was a prominent bulbous forehead. He had on the kind of fashionably loose-fitting suit that I see mainly on actors
in movies set in California. The suit was dark green. On a freezing February day, he wore nothing over the suit, no coat, no parka. He must have thought it would take him only a second to drown what indeed proved to be a cat.

T
HE WHITE OBJECT THAT
lay on the ground at the river’s edge was a pillowcase fastened shut with rough twine. Before picking up the pillowcase, I explored it quickly with my gloved hands. The animal inside squirmed, fought, and yowled. I had to remind myself that it would be no kindness to release the creature and let it dash off to starve to death or be killed by a car. My fingers found what felt like, and subsequently proved to be, a smooth rock about the size of a football. I hoped the man had smashed his toes on it.

I am still not sure how I transported the cat, the bag, and the rock to my car. My intention was to support the rock with one hand and the wiggling animal with the other. The poor thing might already be injured; the man had, after all, hurled the pillowcase to the ground and kicked it. If I simply picked up the pillowcase and carried it, the stone might do additional harm. I ended up, I think, half dragging the pillowcase to the tailgate of my Bronco.

Rowdy’s crate, occupied by close to ninety pounds
of perpetually hungry predator, was just in back of the front seats. Kimi’s empty crate was at the rear. I unlocked and opened the tailgate, then briefly left the pillowcase and its contents on the ground. Hurrying to the still-open driver’s side door, I fished around on the floor behind the seat, found an old dog blanket that I always carry, and hastily shrouded the back and sides of Rowdy’s crate. In the big covered cage, he looked like a gigantic, furry parakeet. “Within seconds,” I warned him over the caterwauling from the pillowcase, “I am going to put a cat in the back of this car, and I don’t want your opinion on the subject. Is that clear? Good boy.” So far, at least, he was doing nothing except looking interested.

After trotting back to the rear of the car, I opened Kimi’s crate and did my best to support the little animal as I lifted the pillowcase. Once I had cat, bag, and stone inside the crate, I tried and failed to untie the twine and had to go dig my Swiss Army knife out of the glove compartment. By the time I returned to the rear of the car, Rowdy was shuffling around and thumping in his crate. The poor frantic cat was momentarily silent. With one hand, I held the pillowcase shut, and with the other, I used one of the knife’s four or five blades to cut the twine. Then, holding the crate door shut, I tucked the knife in my pocket. My eyes had moved from the crate. When I looked back at it … Well, sorry, but the cat was out of the bag.

To prevent the rock from slamming into the cat as I drove, I had to reach back in the crate and retrieve the pillowcase. The cat was now huffed up in a ball of enraged, hissing fur in a far corner of the crate. The poor thing wasn’t much to look at. From the head down, it wasn’t too bad. It was short-haired, and its body was uniformly black. Its face, however, was disfigured by an
irregular white splotch that might have been cute, I guess, except for the presence of a squiggly pink and brown birthmark that meandered down the splotch and spilled all over the cat’s nose. One of its ears was intact. The other was badly ripped and looked infected. From its eyes oozed a greenish-yellow discharge. When I eased open the door of the crate and reached in for the pillowcase, the cat suddenly lashed out with one paw and gave me a deep scratch. “Damn it! Ouch!” I screeched. But I managed to shut and latch the crate. “Rowdy, no more noise! Enough! And you, cat, no more noise from you, either.” I slammed the tailgate shut, thus giving myself about three seconds of silence. Alaskan malamutes don’t exactly bark. Rather, they express themselves. Rowdy’s self-expression took the form of eager, high-pitched whining interspersed with deep rumbling and percussive body slams against the sides of his crate. Meanwhile, the cat, instead of meowing in some species-appropriate fashion, bawled and wailed like a human infant. In desperation, I popped the first tape that came to hand into the tape deck, turned up the volume, and blasted the animals with Hank Williams’s classic rendering of “You Win Again.”

According to the clock on the dashboard, the trip home took twelve minutes. That’s impossible. It took at least twenty-four hours. Furthermore, once I got home, it took what felt like another full day to settle the animals. I started by taking Rowdy into the house. Then I dragged two big dog crates from the cellar, set them up in what is supposed to be my guest room, and incarcerated the dogs. “You,” I said sweetly to Kimi, “I trust even less around this poor cat than I trust Rowdy, and that’s saying something. This cat is a temporary visitor in our home, it has just survived a terrible trauma, and we are going to be kind and gentle and considerate to it
until we can find somewhere else for it to go. UNDERSTOOD?”

Congratulating myself on my wisdom in occupying the ground floor of the house instead of installing myself in the second-floor or third-floor apartment, I made another trip to the cellar, rummaged around, and finally found a puppy crate that would do for the cat. It was an old airline-approved carrier that had been sitting disassembled in the basement for so many years that I had to carry it up, put it in the bathtub, scrub it, and then fasten it together before I could use it for any animal, even a scraggly, ugly, and probably diseased cat that had given me a scratch that was still bleeding. I will skip over the experience of transferring the cat from Kimi’s crate in the car to the puppy crate to my kitchen except to state the obvious, namely that cat scratches really, really sting and that even the world’s most hideous and ungrateful cat deserves to be rescued from drowning. “Now,” I murmured gently to the cat as I deposited the carrier on the kitchen table, “I’m going to fix you a lovely dish of tuna, and we’re going to get you out and take a good look at you.” Muttering soothing remarks about poor, hungry little kitties and the evils of cruelty to animals, I opened a can of tuna. The sound of the electric can opener and the smell of raw protein got the dogs going, but I promised them lots of attention later, reminded them that they’d both get to go to a show tomorrow, avoided the subject of baths, and shut the guest-room door. Returning to the kitchen, I dished out the tuna and placed a nice smelly bowl of it on the table in front of the puppy crate. Slowly, calmly, and quietly, I opened the crate. Through its door whizzed a streak of black that sent the Pyrex bowl flying to my new quarry tile floor. Shards of glass lay in a pile of tuna. The cat
had vanished. Until I found it, I couldn’t let the dogs loose.

It was now three-thirty in the afternoon. I hadn’t eaten lunch, hadn’t had any caffeine since breakfast, hadn’t written a word. Nancy was dead at ninety-three. Althea was ninety. Some vicious s.o.b. had put this poor cat in a weighted pillowcase and tried to drown the animal in the river. And I hadn’t even gotten the number of his license plate. My hands were bleeding. The dogs were fussing. The cat was hiding somewhere. Where? No matter where, Rowdy and Kimi would sniff it out. I still had both dogs to bathe and groom, and in a few hours, Steve would arrive, if you could call it that, in the same state of stoical unavailability he’d been in since the beginning of the whole mess created by Gloria, Scott, and the so-called animal communicator, Irene Wheeler. Without even cleaning up the tuna and glass, I took a seat at the kitchen table and burst into tears.

Only a few minutes later, my second-floor tenant and dear friend, Rita, rapped on the door. If Rita weren’t a therapist by profession, she’d still be the kind of person everyone talks to, mainly because she has endless curiosity about people’s inner lives. Rita will spend eight or ten hours listening to her patients, arrive home exhausted, pour herself a drink, put her feet up, and then ask you how you’re feeling and really want to know. Now, however, the last thing I wanted was to tell Rita how I was feeling. All I wanted was not to feel it at all. I opened the door for Rita, anyway. She wore a new red coat and matching heels. Her hair had been freshly trimmed and lightly streaked. She looked so un-Cambridge, so New York, so groomed and manicured, so stylishly dressed, so accessorized, as she says, that by comparison I felt like
the pile of broken Pyrex and dead fish still lying on the floor.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “The dogs! Did something happen to one of your dogs?”

“No, they’re fine, they’re in their crates, and I can’t let them loose because there’s a cat in here somewhere. Rita, someone kicked it and tried to drown it, and … This has been a horrible day from the second I woke up. One of my people at the nursing home died. She was ninety-three, but—”

“But you still didn’t want her to die,” Rita said. “Holly, I’m sorry, but I can’t talk now. I have a patient, and I have to run. I was just going to pop in to ask what you know about finding lost dogs.”

“Willie?” Willie is Rita’s Scottie. “He was barking twenty minutes ago.”

“A dog of one of my patients. She’s frantic. I thought you might have some idea of how she should go about—”

Ordinarily, I’d have told Rita to have her patient call me, and I’d have swamped Rita with advice about posting photographs, informing every dog officer in the state, advertising in the papers, organizing brigades of friends, and alerting those champion finders of lost dogs, neighborhood children. Now, I just went into my study, found a handout on the topic, gave it to Rita, and said that I hoped her patient found the dog. After offering another apology for having to leave, Rita rushed off.

Rita is a natural therapist. After her departure, I began to pull myself together. I swept the floor and vacuumed up every bit of broken glass. The dogs, I realized, didn’t have to remain in their crates. I led them, one at a time and on leash, to the door to the fenced yard. I made myself a sandwich out of the New York sharp cheddar that I use to train the dogs. The
cheese was manufactured for human consumption, I reminded myself; I hadn’t yet descended to lunching on liver treats. I had a cup of strong coffee that fortified me for a systematic search for the cat, which I finally found in the first place I should have looked: the long, narrow space between the head of my king-size bed and the wall. When Kimi steals food too big to wolf down in one gulp, it’s where she dens up to gnaw her booty. I can usually lure her out with a combination of food and the word
Trade!
spoken in an enthusiastic, talking-to-dogs tone of voice. If there’s a talking-to-cats tone, I haven’t mastered it. Lying flat on my stomach, I peered in at the cat, whistled softly, made stupid clucking noises, drummed my fingers lightly on the floor and offered bits of cheddar and tuna. I got nothing for these efforts but a kink in my neck and a couple of loud hisses.