The House Guests (17 page)

On one strange afternoon I caught sixteen fish, each of an entirely different species. The cats would invariably accompany me, walking along with me, tails pleasurably high. They liked it much better than the beach. They would sit behind me like a pair of dogs, and when the line tightened and the reel hummed they would stand up and move closer, as eager to see what would come out of the water as I. The people in small boats thoroughly enjoyed it. A lot of them snapped our picture. I wonder how many of those pictures are tucked away in drawers and albums in the north, showing “that fellow fishing with those two big gray cats.”

One afternoon the fishing was slow, and both cats lay on the shells a dozen feet behind me. I always wore old sneakers and pants so I could wade around on the submerged part of the bar. A cabin cruiser came up the channel from the south. It did not seem notably large or notably fast, but as it went by I noticed
it was dragging a wake behind it worthy of a Great Lakes ore boat. It slapped me at about mid-thigh, and I turned, too late to scramble for my tackle box. Roger, for once, was more alert. He went scampering to high ground with the wave in close pursuit. Just as Geoff sprang up, the wave hit him and knocked him down and rolled him over. He came up sputtering, and as the wave drained off the shells, he headed miserably for home. He gave a tired whine of complaint about every twenty feet until I could no longer hear him.

Thereafter he did all his waiting up on the high ground. Roger braved the shell beach as before. When a fish was being caught, Geoff would come down to the edge of the water as before, but if while awaiting his share he happened to see a boat coming from any direction, even a skiff with a five-horse outboard, he would whirl and run to high ground, returning well after it had passed.

Actually, Geoffrey was bolder about the water than Roger. One year we began to find the tails and the bills of small needlefish by the cat dishes. It puzzled us. There were small needlefish, sometimes called ballyhoo, in the shallow bay waters on either side of the house. It was some time before we actually saw Geoff in the act of catching them. The shallows behind the house were flat calm. These small fish swim right on the surface. Geoff had waded out to his armpits and belly hair, and he stood absolutely motionless, ears cocked forward. As we watched him he gave a sudden snap at the water, and came out with a four- or five-inch needlefish in his jaws. He walked around the side of the house, came in his window with it, went directly to his dish, dropped it, put his foot on it when it flapped, and then neatly ate all of it
but the bill and tail, and went back out and waded slowly into the bay.

Also, at Piseco, Geoff was the one who owned a frog. Every so often, all one summer, Geoff would go down to the lake shore and hop from rock to rock along the shore, pausing on each one to reach down into the water with one foot and feel all around the underside of the rock. Sooner or later he would find it, scoop it out, take it in his jaws and bring it up onto the terrace and put it down, and then purely hop the bejaysus out of it. We knew it was always the same frog, not only because of the markings but because, as the summer progressed, it became increasingly defeated and shopworn. He would give it gentle little taps on its rear end with one urging paw and admire the jumps until at last, when the frog was too dusty and dispirited to provide further entertainment, Geoffrey would walk away and one of us would take the frog down to the lake shore and drop it back into the water. If I remember correctly it was still in residence when we left, but one can imagine that it was terribly tired of cats. The next year Geoff spent quite a lot of time feeling around for it under the rocks before he gave up the search.

Once, at Point Crisp, Roger got very incensed at a large and scruffy-looking osprey. It was acting so strangely, I do not think it was well. Ospreys are of the hawk family, with a very cold eye, a big, wicked, tin-snip beak, and powerful, oversized talons designed to grab fish on the surface and fly off with them. The osprey landed on top of the telephone pole near our garage, and Roger spotted it. He yammered at it to come down and face the fierce cat, and when it ignored him, he managed to climb up onto the roof of the attached garage. This put him so close the bird got tired of listening to him and flew down to our
back beach, Roger after him. By the time we got out there they were twenty feet apart. Roger was giving him that cat ballad generally reserved for night-calling cats, but he had no intention of getting any closer. The bird looked as if it wished he would get closer, just close enough. Thinking it might be ill, we immured Rog in the house, and I went to inspect the bird. I got to within ten feet and decided that was as near as I cared to get. It flapped off, flying not very well, but well enough to disappear over the key to the south.

During the evenings each spring, Roger and Geoffrey would go over to the house of Al and Connie Sheen, our nearest neighbors, to serenade Caffeine, their orange and white girl cat. It was ritual. They were both male neuters, and Caffeine was a spayed female, but cats seem to respond to some spring rhythm more persuasive than any specifics of ability. Caffeine, inside her screened cage, would respond with her own song. Geoff was the more loyal suitor. When, each year, their attentions ended, we would often see Caffeine by day, coming across the lot between our houses, apparently feeling that spring had not lasted long enough.

One summer at Piseco Dorothy heard some inexplicable thumping and thudding in the middle of the night and, realizing it had been going on off and on for some time, went to investigate. She found that the cats had gotten into a nest of baby rabbits, had brought them in, and, unaccountably, had been eating them in the shower stall. The mother rabbit is the only wild mammal in this country which will make absolutely no attempt to either defend her young or mislead predators. Realizing that bits of baby rabbit would be a horrid thing for children to come across in
the morning, she cleaned the mess up then and there. The following morning when she was in the bathroom she looked into the shower stall and there, on the floor, saw one lone rabbit eye staring eerily back at her. At such moments it is very difficult to be fond of your house cats.

At Point Crisp we found we had some very unpleasant-looking rats living in the tops of the cabbage palms. Geoff grabbed one and brought it in and let it go in the hall, and it ran into Johnny’s room and up the draperies and sat on the top of the drapery fixture, squeaking. Geoff looked at it for a moment, then went out to see what might be in his dish. He seemed to be saying, “There’s a rat for you. Have fun.”

We grabbed him and shoved him into Johnny’s room and closed the door. He began an immediate complaint to be let out. He had no further interest in the rat. Nor could we interest Roger in it.

Johnny and I armed ourselves with a broom and the dubious pellet gun and went into the bedroom. We looked and looked and we could not find the rat. Yet there was no way it could have escaped. So we began a rat hunt. When you hunt a rat you do not stick your hand behind books and feel around for him. Finally we had looked everywhere except the bed, and when we began to take that apart, a rat-sized hump began to move back and forth erratically under the blanket. I raised the broom to give it a mighty swat, but Johnny yelled no and asked me what I thought his bed would be like if I hit it. So we prodded it out, and it ran over to a chair beside the white plaster wall. It paused for a moment near a chair leg, and I shot it, expecting no result at all. The pellet hit it in the throat. It sprayed an astonishing amount of blood halfway up the wall, ran in circles
spraying at random, then collapsed and died in a little red puddle.

Geoff released another one in the kitchen another year, a young one. It hid in the back of the underside of the deepfreeze behind the coils and compressor. With a flashlight I could see it back there, but I couldn’t get it out. When we thought it had left, we found it had moved into comfortable quarters under the dishwasher. There was a hole in the base of the dishwasher some three inches square. The cat-food corner was handy. So was the counter top. The rat would come out at night and haul astonishing quantities of food away, back into his nest. When I finally trapped him, using a huge rattrap with raw bacon lashed to the trigger, he had grown so huge the trap was just a damned inconvenience that sent him clattering around the kitchen in the middle of the night, unable to fit himself back through his hole. I got up and killed him with a fireplace poker, Geoff purring approval.

One day on Point Crisp a big, elderly fox squirrel fell off a telephone pole. Our neighbors, Dot Rhoades and her daughter, Judy Currier, asked our help. Johnny brought him home in a box. The squirrel seemed very feeble, and his muzzle was so white it looked to me as if he was expiring of age rather than illness. For a time it looked as though he might recover, and then he died, and before burying him I snipped off his magnificent tail and put it on a high place to dry. When it was ready, Roger was absolutely mad about it. By that time, Geoff, aside from the occasional solitary game, usually of his own devising, was not very impressed with playthings. He would play for a short, busy time with anything stuffed with catnip, and then, with the precision he had learned on Adirondack mice, he would open it up and eat the contents.

But the squirrel tail fanned old memories in Roger. Long ago he had been given one by Johnny. Dorothy had discovered that if cat toys were taken away from them and put away, the enthusiasm was renewed when they were produced again.

She is a light sleeper. She woke up in the middle of the night in Clearwater to the sound of a drawer being opened stealthily. And then another. With remarkably poor judgment, she did not awaken me, but instead sprang out of bed, went quietly to the doorway of the nearby living room, and snapped the lights on. Roger, blinking in the sudden light, sat on top of a breakfront desk. Several of the small drawers were open. The drawer pulls were of that type formed of a length of wood with a groove on the underside. As she watched him, Roger turned his paw over, hooked the underside of the drawer and pulled it open. He dipped his head in, picked up the squirrel tail, and jumped down off the desk. He had smelled it in there, but it had taken him a little time to find the right drawer.

At Point Crisp he was delighted to be presented with a new one. He savaged it for hours.

There was a year Geoff nearly died, the year we thought he had. Quite suddenly he began to act peculiarly. We took him to a very good veterinarian, Dr. Ezekiel Thomas, located a few minutes away on the South Tamiami Trail. Dr. Thomas told us he was one very sick cat, running a high fever. He gave him a shot, decided he would be better off at home, and gave us pills to give him.

We should have closed the cat window. He went out and he didn’t come back. Johnny was away at school Dorothy was just out of the hospital. We hunted for him into the night, calling him, then slept poorly and began the hunt the next morning.

In the afternoon I spotted him under our guesthouse.
It is of post-and-beam construction, elevated on four-foot piers. He was under there in the shade, panting. I called him, and there was no response. I should have gone under there immediately, but instead I went part way back to the main house, calling to Dorothy that I had found him. When I turned back it was just in time to see him moving slowly into the heavy brush beyond the guesthouse. I ran after him, but he had disappeared completely. A heavy mangrove jungle three hundred feet long and a hundred and fifty feet wide is an impossible locale for any detailed search. We did the best we could. After three more nights and days, after the grisly watch for buzzards over the mangroves, we were very depressed people, wondering how in the world we would write Johnny to tell him Geoff was gone for good.

During the evening, on the fourth night, we heard a faint, frail mew. Geoff came slowly through the cat window. I cannot guess how he managed to leap to the outside shelves because he was so weak that he had difficulty walking. He was down to six skeletal pounds. He drank a little warm milk, ate a very small morsel of warm hamburger, and went exhaustedly to sleep in a comforting carton beside Dorothy’s bed. When Dr. Thomas examined him again he said that the cat had somehow gotten over the worst of it and would most certainly recover.

We should have guessed that he would go off by himself when mortally ill. In that sense he was a more primitive animal than Roger. Roger, even when slightly ill, makes outrageous demands for attention, suffers visibly with thespian art, and wants to stay as close to people as he can get.

The one thing that made us so happy he came back was that cat’s special capacity for love. No one ever got up in the night to go to the bathroom in our house without having Geoff stir himself and come lumping
in to sit in the darkness and lean against a leg, a small, warm furnace of purrs. He was not demanding food or amusement or a chance to move to the people-bed. He would merely come in and say hello, and then stump on back to wherever he was sleeping at the time.

After his illness he slept a great deal and ate hugely. His strength and energy came back quickly. Dorothy took advantage of a curious craving that cat had. There had been a previous time when Johnny, recovering from an illness, was supposed to take brewer’s-yeast tablets, eight of them with each meal. When Dorothy set the table, she would put the eight tablets by his plate. Certain confusions began to arise. He would say she hadn’t put them there. She would swear she had and accuse him of taking them and forgetting he had. One day Geoff was caught in the act of reaching a stealthy paw onto the table and hooking the tablets off and gobbling them. We ran a test. He adored them. We would put a dozen on the kitchen floor, and Geoff would vacuum them up, chomping each one before swallowing it. Roger, interested in what Geoff was eating so greedily, snuffed at a tablet and then backed off and tilted his head and looked at the brother cat as if he suspected Geoff of some kind of insanity.

During his recuperation, I think Dorothy gave that cat enough brewer’s yeast to keep Gussie Busch going for months.