The House Guests (11 page)

That summer of 1949 we took our short turn at Wanahoo. Dorothy had drawn the plans for the house. We went over them with Floyd Abrams, the local builder, and told him to get started whenever he could. We boarded the cats with Dr. Sellman and told him that when we had found a place to spend the school year, we would send him word to send the cats to us by Railway Express.

Once again we set out for New Mexico. We decided to follow the coast and dip down into Florida and back out again. We crossed over through Orlando and through Tampa, and on a bright, hot September day came across the Courtney Campbell Causeway and into Clearwater.

What’s so wrong with this? we asked each other.

By the next day we had located and rented a little frame house on Acacia Street on Clearwater Beach, two blocks from the Gulf, owned by a friendly and generous lady named Mrs. Payne. By the following
day we were reasonably well settled in, and Johnny had started school. We sent for the cats. On the third day an officer of the law arrived with a warrant for a traffic violation. Under nature of violation was written: Child in school. You have to wear Florida plates to enjoy that privilege.

We wondered how the cats would weather the trip down and how they would adjust to the semi-tropics.

      Though it was certainly not long ago, shipping pets by Railway Express was a far more plausible venture in the late forties and first half of the fifties than it is today. The cost of shipping two big cats in a big plywood crate with wire windows at either end was not exorbitant. You would cover the box floor with tom paper, fasten their water dishes and food dishes solidly into the corners, tack a sack of canned food with can opener to the outside, and glue simple feeding instructions to the outside. Railway Express would fasten a card to the crate upon which employees en route would write the day and time they were fed and watered, and sign their names.

The cats would ride from Utica to Florida and back in an average two and a half days and arrive in a state so mildly traumatic that a couple of hours would see them back to normal.

But each year the rates went up, and each year the train schedules worsened, and each year the men along the way seemed to give less of a damn about a pair of damn cats, and they arrived in increasingly worse condition until, finally, it became impossible.

So this, too, relates to the myth of our ever increasing standard of living. We live in a culture where service is increasingly slovenly, surly, and reluctant, where schedules mean less and less, where every
species of life including the human animal is held in less esteem each year, where all the glossy gadgetry disintegrates at an ever increasing rate, where mediocrity in all things has become a goal—with all excellence suspect.

There is nothing mysterious, of course, about this accelerated decline. My sixth-grade geography teacher told us that the individual life was cheap and cruelly used in China because of the terrible population density of four hundred millions of them. Today we approach half that number in less than half the space, so that the mass insularity of the anthill is the inevitable result. Thirty-seven witnesses can watch a woman murdered. Millions of kids can learn group adjustment as if it were a commendable skill. Over half the humans in the world have no memory of World War II. In an acceleration of the technologies, it is cheaper to repeat experimentations than to conduct a search for previous results. As life gets ever more inconvenient, trashified, and irritating, it is possible to convince through electronic repetition the brand-new millions that everything is, in fact, getting better and better and better.

It is still possible to ship pets. One purchases an approved crate constructed of light metal. One drives the necessary distance to a major airport where there will be a direct flight to the major airport nearest the destination. One makes the air-express arrangements, confirms the loading, then phones someone at the far end to go to the airport and arrange to receive the animals. It is wise to get the proper tranquilizers from the vet so the animals’ response to extreme trauma will be dulled. And be prepared for heavy expense. This is yet another one of the conveniences of the jet age.

A pleasant voice over the telephone told us that a box of cats had arrived, and we drove at once to the Railway Express office in Clearwater, put the car top down, and loaded the rather fetid crate into the back seat. It mewed in a dreary way. Back at Acacia Street we set it down in the driveway, and I undid the hasp and opened it, and the cats arched out, blinking at the bright sun. Their first response, then and thereafter, was to find a place of dust or powdered marl and roll and roll. Then, as always, exploration was carried on in shoulder to shoulder formation. Always, after they had been in a crate together, or after they had been at a boarding kennel in the same cage, they tended to stay very close together for a period which related directly to the length of time they had shared confinement. It seemed to represent both habit and security.

And both of them would holler. They would walk around and, at intervals of two or three minutes, give a yowling and forlorn cry. We were never able to figure out why they did this. It is possible that when a wild feline moves to a new part of the forest, instinct requires this announcement of the new address, but one would think it might make prospective meals harder to catch.

We recall one time, one of the last times we had them shipped down by rail, after service had deteriorated badly. It had taken four days. One or both of them had been sick and had diarrhea. Their crate was horrid. I opened it in the driveway of our Point Crisp house. Geoff hopped out and with his lumpy, purposeful stride walked directly to our thick hedge of Australian pine, stuck his head into it, and just stood there for a long, long time.

After their tandem tour of the premises in Clearwater we introduced them to their kitchen corner where their first Florida snack was served, and then
to their window. After much washing, hollering, investigating, they settled down to the long naps of tired tourists, sleeping so close they were in familiar contact.

There was record heat that fall in Clearwater. The cats searched for relatively cool corners. At times they panted audibly like dogs, pink tongues lolling. They ate lightly, drank often, and except in the cool of early morning, made no unnecessary movements. The big tree outside our bedroom windows was full of noisy birds.

We noticed that Geoff wasn’t doing very well. He became very unresponsive. He ate less and less. His chunky sides sagged until his backbone began to look scrawny and pathetic, and at times there would be a milky film over his eyes.

A veterinarian with an establishment near the St. Pete dog track was recommended to us, and we took Geoffrey there. The pleasant man examined him and asked us questions about him.

At last he gave his surprising diagnosis. Geoffrey was psychologically depressed. When cats become depressed they show what is called the third eyelid, a milky membrane that comes up from under the lower lid. He just simply did not care for Florida. He was homesick for a terrain he had found more agreeable. Recommendation: Give him a great deal of attention, coddling, affection. Try to keep him entertained. We had been respecting what we thought was ill health by trying not to bother him too much, and this apparently was further contributing to his state of depression. It further confirmed our own estimate of the complexity of these furry house guests to have what was apparently an eminently practical and businesslike D.V.M. tell us that cats in this condition will actually
sometimes become weaker and more withdrawn and eventually die.

Old Turtlehead got unexpected benefit from Geoff’s therapy. There had always been a perceptible jealousy. From the beginning, if we paid too much exclusive attention to Roger, Geoff would trudge gloomily away. If we paid too much attention to Geoff, Roger—in exasperation—would bite him. So we all had the habit, if we patted one cat in passing, we patted the other if he was nearby.

Geoff endured the attentions for a time and then gradually became more responsive. He began to eat better. The third eyelid was seen less frequently and then not at all. He filled out again, and that lumpy pacer’s stride took on the purposeful porkiness of old. He found a good hunting area in an overgrown vacant lot nearby. He brought in a huge, indignant bluejay who, when released, spent a good part of the afternoon on a low limb screaming obscenities and evidently accusing Geoff of unfair tactics. Both cats filled the house with lizards. That was something Roger could catch, too, though not in the quantity Geoffrey achieved. Roger could never quite comprehend the standard tactic of the small green ones. When they would try to scurry away he would plant a foot on their tail. The lizard would keep on going and the little green tail would writhe for a little time and then grow still. He would stare at the tail, snuff at it, look at the lizard’s escape route, then cock his head to one side and then the other. Cats and dogs express bewildered curiosity in exactly the same manner.

We learned that the housebound lizards could easily be induced to run into the open mouth of a brown paper bag after the cats had lost interest. We did miss some of the little green ones, and later we would find their bodies clinging to window screens in the high corners between screen and sash. Totally dried and
darkened, they looked far more prehistoric, savage little symbols of the frightful giants of the quaking earth an aeon ago. Johnny began saving the perfect ones, along with fishbones and bird skulls and the empty hulls of giant insects, shark teeth, oddly shaped stones. When, not too many years later, he began to draw with serious intent, began to show that almost ruthless unconcern toward other activities which is the plight and the strength of the artist, he turned to these things as models as he trained eye and hand.

The cats brought in another kind of lizard, which none of us cared for and which even the cats seemed reluctant to fool with once they released them in the house. These were larger ones, fat, thick, black, damp, and short-legged. Their escape efforts on hardwood or linoleum were more snakelike than lizard-like, and when Geoff brought one in he would have his lips pulled high in his gesture of distaste.

Having heard that some of the small Florida lizards were poisonous, having been told horrific tales of crazed and paralyzed cats, we were worried about what might happen. But they certainly had no inclination to eat the lizards. Roger, for several days, had a swelling and infection which could have come from a lizard bite, but we could not be certain that was the cause.

At Piseco and at College Hill we had learned that our cats loved to accompany us on walks. Geoff was happy to plod along at our speed, staying several steps behind us like a small dog, pausing sometimes to investigate some interesting scent along the way, then hurrying to catch up to his self-assigned position. Roger made a vast, nutty game out of it, hiding until we had passed, then rocketing by us and hiding again to either pounce out as we passed, or to repeat the previous performance. If walks became too long it
was usually Roger who would lose interest first and go on about his own affairs.

At Acacia Street this habit became a nuisance. After Geoff had recovered his morale, Dorothy and I fell into the habit of, after dinner, walking through the pleasant night to a little bar several blocks south and over on the other side of Mandalay Road, the main street on Clearwater Beach. The cats thought this was a splendid ceremony and tried to go along with us. But there was too good a chance of their getting run over on Mandalay either going over there with us or wandering around the area after we had gone inside. So we would close the cat window if they were in the house. If they weren’t, we would walk and keep an eye out for them and then con them into coming close enough for capture so we could take them home and shut them in.

But you cannot safely con a cat very many times. They arrived at a catlike solution. When we were ready to leave for our pair of cold beers and game of table shuffleboard, the cats would be outside. Calling them was useless. They were invisible. So we would start out and look back and see the pair of them, night after night, walking together along the sidewalk following us, a half a block away. We would see those two conspirators under the street lights, and if we called, they would stay just a half block behind. If we went back, they would melt into the darkness to reappear again, a half block behind us after we gave up the hunt. When we started home, after a half block or a block, both cats would suddenly be underfoot, perfectly willing to be picked up and carried across Mandalay and set down again, and they gamboled and horsed around all the way home.

Roger chilled us to the bone one night on the way home. At a cross street near the house we stopped on the corner to let a slow-moving car go by. Just as it
was reaching the corner, Roger pulled his idiot trick of rocketing past us. It was under a street light. He cut it so fine he actually had to add a little extra curve to get around the far front wheel of the car. We yelled at him, I think after he was out of danger, it happened so fast. When we crossed with Geoff, he was waiting over there with that cat grin of high spirits, fun and games, prancings in the night.