The House Guests (12 page)

In the spring at Acacia Street, mockingbirds nested all over that area. At another time and another place I had acquired considerable respect for one mockingbird talent. We had stopped on a Saturday night at a motel in southern Texas near Harlingen. There was a navigable stream behind it. At dawn Sunday morning some jackass began cutting hardwood boards with a power saw. I complained at the office when we checked out. The man at the desk said it was a mockingbird, who had learned the noise from a small boat yard nearby. I did not really believe it until finally I tracked the sound down and located the creature in a treetop being a power saw.

Just last fall at Point Crisp there was another startling example of the mockingbird art. Roger had a hairball he had been trying to get rid of for several days. In his attempt to disgorge it, he would crouch and make an unmistakable gasping, wheezing, creaking sound of nausea that would go on and on without satisfactory result It was a rhythmic, repetitious noise. He didn’t seem very well last fall, and the effort would leave the old boy shaky. It was warm and the doors onto the screened terrace were open. I had come downstairs from my office, and as I walked through Dorothy’s studio I heard him straining away out on the terrace, so I went out there to check on him. I didn’t see him anywhere. I went into the living room and saw him asleep on the couch and thought I
had imagined it all. Then, behind me out on the terrace the sound started again. I looked out and saw a large mockingbird sitting on a low limb of a bush just outside the screening and perhaps three feet above ground level, being a sick cat. Roger would often go out there to be sick, and the bird was as close as he could get to the place Rog usually went. As he made the noise he was cocking his head this way and that, peering in through the screen, quite obviously looking for the cat. I called Dorothy, and she listened to him, to the uncanny precision of the imitation, and we decided that the bird was, in what he construed as an accurate manner, calling the cat.

In the warm spring nights on Acacia Street the mockingbirds sang all night long, repeating their improvisations in series of four, adding fragments of cardinal, bluejay, mourning dove, gull, heron, red-winged blackbird. It could get to be compulsive, counting the series of four and listening for an eventual repetition. I managed to teach one of them a wolf whistle and, sooner or later, that would also crop up in that interminable serenade of nesting time.

The cats learned respect for an entirely different attribute of the nesting mockingbird. Jays would make an endless squawking fuss at such piercing volume that often they could drive a cat back indoors by getting on his nerves. Other types of birds would, like the jays, make tentative passes at the cats, staying at a safe distance. But those mockingbirds, during the nesting season, actually pecked hell out of both cats. When either cat crossed an open space by daylight, a mockingbird would take a bomb run from behind the target, come in low and hard and fast, administer one good knock on the skull, and zoom straight back up out of reach. The experience was not only painful, but it was a horrid indignity. Both cats had three and four little peck holes on top of the head centered in
little bald, gray, circular patches half-dime size where hair stopped growing. Both of them learned defensive tactics, though it seemed to pain them. In daylight they would walk under the protection of hedges and bushes or walk very close to the side of the house. When one of them came to the end of his protection of the moment, he would stop, select the next shelter, look around with obvious anxiety, then run across the open space. The holes healed, and the hair grew back, and in time they learned how to take advantage of all shelter without looking so nervous about it—in fact, giving the impression the entire procedure was entirely accidental.

There are not as many mockingbirds these days, and with the decrease in numbers their boldness has lessened. Their preferred diet is bulky insects, and their clan has not prospered on the fare of poisoned bugs we have provided for them in our ghastly and futile efforts to eliminate mosquitoes. Mosquitoes, adjusting quickly to poisons, achieving immunity to one dire brew after the next, are bigger, huskier and more numerous than ever, and now thrive all year round in Florida. For the first time in modern history the spraying equipment in the Fort Myers area was used so intensively all winter that by spring when the millions turned to billions, there had been no chance to dismantle, clean, and maintain their hard-pressed and increasingly futile equipment.

Ten and twelve years ago, both at Piseco Lake and in Florida, in the long dusks of hot weather there were shimmering legions of dragonflies, darting, wheeling, feeding on the mosquito, the gnat, the sand fly—such numbers of them that sometimes they would perceptibly darken the sky. But we poisoned them with the sprays, and they are gone. Now, at Piseco, we get stung all season rather than just up to about the eighth of July on the average, and in
Florida we get welted all year round instead of from April to October.

Rachel Carson made a profound objection on the basis we are poisoning all the living things on our planet. I object on the basis we are far worse off now than we were when we started. Ask the ranchers who, in these recent years of incomparable progress have had thousands of head of cattle killed by mosquitoes so dense the young beef have choked to death and the mature animals have, in panic, run themselves to death. I think the mockingbirds would vote for immediate federal control of this stupendous idiocy presently conducted for the most part by self-styled experts who can’t even read the warnings on the container. The mosquito-control man in Sarasota County, Mel Williams, is one of those rarities, a valid expert, who feels that spraying is a questionable and partial answer. He gets results by eliminating the breeding areas, but we can do nothing about the clouds of trillions of them which blow in from less enlightened counties when wind and weather are exactly right.

One point has never been properly emphasized in this endemic condition of overspraying by local governmental bodies throughout the country. Capital expenditures are made on a low-bid basis, and under these conditions there is small chance for any squeeze, grease, or rakeoff. But the lethal goo for the spray equipment is purchased as are other “supplies,” and here it is tradition in thousands of counties and thousands of communities that the men in office get their little sweetening in the form of kickbacks from the suppliers, thereof be the item paper clips, liquid soap, prison potatoes, or compounds so lethal that children have died after playing with the containers they came in months after they have been emptied. So when Joe Courthouse needs pocket money, he will
cheerfully drench his community with another thousand dollars’ worth of bird-killer, explaining that he is fighting the good fight against noxious, disease-bearing bugs. If they buy a hundred-year supply of liquid perfumed soap for the city hall washrooms, they are in trouble. But you never pile up an incriminating stockpile of poison. You can spread it as fast as you can buy it, and so can the man who beats you in the next election. And the more attractive the kickback, the bigger the volume. No wonder it has become such a huge, profitable industry in an astonishingly short time.

Federal licensing of compounds and federal permits for each spray project based on prior saturation of the area would take a lot of the beguiling charm out of this gravy train.

Also, in Florida, it would be very interesting to find some way of hamstringing the arrogant and powerful citrus industry so that the terrifying discovery of four or five Mediterranean fruit flies would not immediately result in the air-dropping of untold tons of poison of unknown side effects on humans, birds, and animals in densely populated areas. Fellows, how come they manage to have so much fruit in the places the fruit fly comes from?

The cats reached another point of evolvement during residence on Acacia Street. Roger perfected his con-artist technique and became a shamelessly lazy slob. In the very beginning he did all the washing of himself and the kitten brother. Somewhere along the line there must have come a time when he did half. But by that winter he arrived at the permanent minimum. After eating they would wash each other’s faces. Rather, Rog would give Geoff a couple of apparently diligent licks to get Geoff started. They would sit facing each other. Roger would suffer himself to be thoroughly washed, returning not a lick,
fatuously enjoying every moment of it. As soon as Geoff began to show signs of stopping, Rog would give him another couple of swipes, and that would get Geoff going again. Roger, that winter, began to wear the visible signs of the con artist—a shining white face and tattle-tale-gray feet. Cats do not wash each other’s feet. Geoff was always tidy. He took care of himself in his spare time.

A cat—fed, clean, content, and pleasantly tired from outdoor adventure—seems to have a curious ability to find some place to rest which will put it on display in a pleasing fashion. It is such a subtle trait it is most difficult to detect. Cats like high places. They like soft places. Often these are also artistically pleasing to the human eye when adorned by a resting cat. Except in the very hottest weather, a cat’s sleeping and resting positions are graceful. When it is very hot, the trusting cat will sleep on its back, hind legs splayed, front legs sticking up in the air, bent loosely at the wrist. We had an opportunity for many years of observation of these two animals, and we are both convinced that given a choice of two places of equivalent cat comfort, more than 50 per cent of the time the cat will select the one where it looks the best. For example, if there is a dark couch with two dark cushions and one cushion in a bright, clear color, all equally soft, the cat will spend 60 per cent of his couch time on one or another of the dark cushions, and 40 per cent on the bright one, thus showing a preference though not a consistent and invariable one.

Both cats broke things. Roger would bust them in reckless, racing cat-games. Geoff had a far more deliberate procedure. Resting quietly on a mantel, a bureau, a table, a breakfast bar, he would reach out and start gently patting some frangible thing toward the edge, moving it a quarter of an inch per pat.
When it fell and shattered, he would hang over the edge and stare down at all the pieces, then stare at whoever was chewing him out with a sort of What-do-you-know-about that! expression. Sure broke, didn’t it?

As the school year drew to a close we realized we could spend our first full summer at Piseco. We had been in correspondence with Floyd Abrams about the camp, and it had been well started, and we could be there for the rest of the work. We made arrangements to rent a small camp not far along the lake shore from Wanahoo, almost directly across the lake from the new camp. We wanted to return to Clearwater, but the house on Acacia Street was too small. Before we left we found a larger house on Bruce Street, several blocks further north along the island, where there would be less traffic than on the Acacia corner, and acquired it long enough before we left so that we could carry things over and store them there, little by little.

A neighbor on Bruce told us during one of these trips that there were cats living under the house, a female and a litter of half-grown kittens too wild and scary to get close to. She said she had been feeding them, but she was going away and did not know how they would manage. She said that there was also a tremendous black tomcat in the area, equally homeless and unapproachable. This is a too-common situation in Florida. Sappy tourists who stay for a few months acquire the pretty kitty for the kids, then deliberately abandon it when they leave rather than take it with them or deliver it to the animal shelter. As a result there are thousands of cats in a semi-wild state, living in uncleared lots and in wild areas of the keys, scavenging for a living and doing badly at it. There is no point in railing at the class of human who will do this. Theirs is an insensate stupidity beyond
the possibility of shame or blame. If you, reading this, have a vague uneasy memory of having abandoned a vacation cat somewhere, rest assured that darling kitty did not find a nice home. It ended in the brush, railthin, scabrous, and scared, wondering what the hell happened to the darling people. Cats hang around a long, long time before they finally give up. They have a powerful sense of place—a den-affinity. To be locked out of the den is beyond comprehension. It is only the transients like ours who learn to unpack their suitcases anywhere.

We borrowed a cat trap from the humane society, an oblong cage with a trigger-place for the food which would drop the wire gate down. We would set it in the evening and go over and check it in the morning. One at a time we caught the female and her half-grown brood. The terror of the trap loosens the bowels. It was an untidy chore driving them to the shelter, hosing the trap down, resetting it. The animal shelter would try to place them, and, failing that, mete out a swift, painless death.

After we had cleaned out the colony under the house, we kept setting the trap and baiting it. But it remained empty. I caught a glimpse of that tom disappearing into a palmetto patch, looking back over his shoulder at me. The sun caught the high gloss of his black coat. He did not slink or cringe. He prowled, obviously foraging successfully, too savvy for box traps. Soon it was time to go, and we gave up the futile attempt, imagining that when we returned two and a half months later, black tom would no longer be around.

We checked outgoing train schedules, airmailed Dr. Sellman when to expect the cats, took the nervously mewling crate down to Railway Express, and sent it out, with food and instructions, prepaid.

Thus was devised the system we followed for years. Dr. Sellman would hold them until we announced our arrival and send them along. We would ship them back and he would hold them until we could pick them up and take them to Piseco.

From time to time during that period, Dorothy and Johnny would try with a carefully plausible argument to talk me into taking them north in the car—a nest amid the luggage, mild tranquilizers, maybe collars and leashes for roadside relievings, smuggle them into motels. But I never fell into the trap of being obliged to come up with a logical refutation of each point. I merely expressed vast astonishment that two otherwise intelligent people could even pretend to propose such chaos.