Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (4 page)

“What a prince,” said the vet.

“I think they were before me,” said Dave, looking at the two men in the waiting room. The man with the turtle had fallen asleep, the turtle was moving ponderously down his outstretched legs toward the floor.

“They’re waiting on blood tests,” said the vet, standing up. He walked over to the sleeping man, picked up the turtle and turned it around so it was crawling up instead of down the man’s legs.

“Follow me,” he said to Dave.

Arthur loped into the examination room beside the vet, his tail thumping.

“What’s the problem?” asked the vet.

Dave said, “I just uh . . . I just wanted . . . uh . . . I just wanted you to check him over. He has been a little . . . listless.”

He looked down at Arthur.

Arthur’s tail was wagging furiously. He looked anything but listless.

The vet lifted him onto the examining table, looked into his eyes, his ears, his mouth. Listened to his heart.

“He seems fine now,” he said. “Do you have air-conditioning at home?”

“It hasn’t been working properly. At night,” said Dave.

“It could be the heat,” said the vet. “Keep him out of the sun. Give him lots of water.”

Dave nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said.

The vet looked puzzled.

“Bringing him here. At this time of night. For nothing. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be silly,” said the vet. “There is nothing wrong with worrying about your pet. It’s not owners like you who owe me an apology.” The vet was washing his hands. “I just wish everyone cared enough about their animals to bring them in before real problems develop. You wouldn’t believe the things I see some nights. You wouldn’t believe how some dogs are treated.”

Outside, Arthur looked up at Dave, his tail wagging. Before they pulled out of the parking lot he licked Dave’s hand.

They passed a Dairy Queen on the way home, and Dave pulled over. Dave had a vanilla milkshake. Arthur had a soft cone with sprinkles and nuts.

When they got home, Arthur checked his bowl and finding it empty, headed upstairs.

He was lying in his basket when Dave came up. Dave looked at him and at the vent in his bedroom. He began to shut the bedroom door and then stopped. Instead he went downstairs and fetched an electric fan from the basement. He set it on his bureau, turned it on and crawled into bed. Morley was already asleep.

“We’re back,” he whispered. “Everything is fine.”

Twenty minutes later Arthur opened one eye. Lifted his head and looked around.

Galway

Galway, the cat, arrived in Dave and Morley’s life courtesy of Dave’s sister, Annie. Annie left Galway with Dave when she returned to Nova Scotia after living in and around Boston for almost a decade.

The cat, lean and beige, arrived with an ominous warning. “I don’t like to say this out loud,” cautioned Annie, “but whenever the cat’s around, things seem to go wrong.”

Annie named the cat Galway after the American poet Galway Kinnell—a gesture of affection for the poet’s work.

It didn’t take long, however, for Dave to recognize that the cat, either by coincidence or some quirk of destiny, had a poet’s sensibility—being shy, to the point of misanthropy, and failing, in any real sense, to make connections in her new family. She terrorized Arthur, the dog, picked on Dave and largely ignored Morley and Stephanie. Only Sam, then nine, seemed able to meet Galway on equal ground.

One thing that leads a person to poetry is an inner life of some activity—often even turbulence. There is a weight of emotion, a burden of feeling that has to come out.

Galway had been living with Dave and Morley a year before she began to overgroom. Dave isn’t sure when it began. One day, in the middle of the winter, he noticed Galway had licked the hair off both her front paws. It was not long after when he noticed there were bald spots on her hind legs.

The vet suggested the sleepers.

“Those little one-piece pajamas,” he said. “The ones you put babies in. With the snaps. Cut out the legs. And a bit at the back. So . . . you know.”

Dave said, “You’re kidding.”

The vet said, “It will stop her licking.”

Sam thought Galway looked cute in the pajamas. “She looks like a monkey,” he said. “I’ve always wanted a monkey.”

Galway thought otherwise and disappeared. She was somewhere in the house—she emptied her food dish during the night. You could sense her shadowy presence, but no one saw her.

“It makes you wonder,” said Dave, “if there are other animals moving around the house you never see.”

Galway reappeared abruptly after a week. One evening while Dave was watching television he looked up, and there was Galway smouldering hatred from the top of the bookshelves. She was still wearing the jammies, though the legs were frayed at the bottom and chewed through at the knees. She had been rubbing at the only fur available—the fur on her ears and the back of her head. She had gone completely bald. In the ripped and threadbare pajamas and with her rat-like head she had the threatening menace of a skinhead.

She was still around the next morning, but she didn’t acknowledge anyone. And she began grooming again. She started with the little balls on Stephanie’s chenille bedspread. In two days Galway licked Stephanie’s bedspread flat. One night Morley got up, went to the bathroom and caught Galway grooming her toothbrush. It took Morley two seconds to teach the cat not to do that again.

She moved on to Arthur. One afternoon Dave came home and found the dog splayed out on the floor with Galway perched on his back, grooming his ear. Arthur, who habitually rushed to greet anyone who walked through the door, looked at Dave self-consciously, then sighed contentedly and dropped his head back to the floor.

“I don’t think she’s necessarily
crazy
,” said Dave. “Maybe not even neurotic. I think she’s bored. I think she needs a challenge.”

And that is when Dave decided to toilet train the cat.

“If I’m going to take the time to teach her things, they might as well be useful things. Anyway, it’s a skill that seems to dovetail with her interests.”

Dave had seen something on television about a cat who could use a toilet. He figured it wouldn’t be difficult to train her. Like teaching any animal a new trick, the most important part would be to move slowly. The most important part would be patience.

He decided the first step would be to move Galway’s litter box out of the basement. He would do it in stages, so he wouldn’t upset her.

He set the box in a corner by the back door. Galway spotted it at dinnertime. She stared at it for a full minute. Then she walked slowly across the kitchen, down the stairs and dumped on the floor where the litter box used to be. She stared deliberately up at Dave while she did it.

“I was moving too fast,” said Dave. “I tried to take her too far too fast.”

He took the litter box back downstairs, but not to its original position. He set it a couple of feet closer to the stairs.

It took him two months to coax the box, and Galway, out of the basement, through the kitchen, up the stairs and into the upstairs bathroom. By April, Galway was doing her business in the cardboard litter box in the bathroom right outside Dave and Morley’s bedroom.

The next step was to lift the box from the floor to the top of the toilet. If he could get Galway to use the box while it was perched on the toilet, Dave figured it would be nothing to cut a hole in the bottom and eventually get rid of it altogether.

“No more kitty litter,” he said one night ebulliently. “This is actually going to work out.”

He believed that.

Not wanting to repeat his earlier mistake, Dave decided to move the box up to the level of the toilet seat by imperceptible degrees. Once he got it to the right level he could slide it over and onto the toilet. He chose May 1 as the day for the beginning of the ascent. On May 1 he balanced the litter box on a couple of books and waited to see what would happen.

What happened was Galway looked at her litter box and then dumped in the bathtub.

“You have to expect setbacks,” said Dave, the optimist.

“Not in my bathtub I don’t,” said Morley.

But Dave didn’t give up. By mid-June Galway had stopped over-grooming. By the end of the month most of her hair had grown back and, to everyone’s surprise, she was jumping, albeit resentfully, into her litter box, which by then Dave had perched on a stack of books, beside the toilet, at seat height.

“We’re almost there,” he said one night. “On July 1, I’m going to tie the box onto the seat. I didn’t really believe we would get this far.”

When July began, Dave had the box resting on the toilet seat with a hole cut in the middle and, to everyone’s amazement, Galway was climbing into the box and doing her business through the hole. She was also scratching the wallpaper off the wall next to the toilet.

“It’s instinct,” Dave explained patiently one night to Morley. “She’s wired to cover up her business as soon as she’s through.”

So Dave tried to be there for her—to be there to flush as soon as she was done. It seemed to be the least he could do. He tried to impress on everyone how important this was—to be there to flush when he couldn’t.

Before long Galway stopped scratching the wall.

Then one evening they were downstairs eating supper and the upstairs toilet flushed. Everyone stopped and looked at one another.

Morley said, “Who was that?”

Dave said, “Sweet Jesus,” dropped his cutlery and lurched upstairs. There was Galway, standing in her litter box with her head at the hole, watching the water swirling around in the toilet below her.

Who would have believed it?

Dave was ecstatic.

He was home free.

He would keep enlarging the hole and trimming the sides of the box until all that was left was a cardboard toilet seat cover. Eventually he could do away with that. Then maybe he would write a book. A bestseller. Get rich. Who would have guessed?

Then, out of the blue, disaster struck.

It struck at ten one night while Dave was watching the news on television. The toilet flushed and Dave looked around. Morley was beside him. Sam was in his room. Stephanie was out. The small smile that was tugging at the corner of Dave’s mouth widened.

Pride before the fall.

As Dave sat in front of the television feeling prideful a hideous shriek filled the house. It was a piercing shriek of desperation unlike anything Dave had heard in his life—a howling, yowling, wailing wall of terror. Morley reached over and gripped Dave’s arm. The shriek was so horrifyingly loud that it lifted the hair off both their necks. Dave thought,
There’s a maniac loose upstairs hacking someone apart with an axe
. Except it sounded worse than that, worse than murder. So desperately worse that it was no longer the sound of murder—it was murder itself. Murder was in his house and it sounded
just like someone trying to flush a cat down the toilet
.

Dave said, “Oh my God.”

He pried Morley’s hand free and flew up the stairs.

Sam was on his way down. His eyes bulging.

“THERE’S A HUGE SEWER RAT CLIMBING OUT OF THE TOILET,” he shouted as he pushed past his father.

Dave threw himself through the bathroom door.

He had to look twice to be sure it
was
Galway. The bottom of the cardboard litter box had given way just as the toilet had flushed. Galway had fallen into the toilet at its fullest. She had plugged the hole so the water in the bowl couldn’t escape. She was drenched, her wet, matted hair pressed to her rat-thin body. The toilet was slurping and sloshing and overflowing. Galway was yowling and clinging to the rim as the centrifugal force of the water slowly dragged her around the bowl.

Dave watched her make one complete rotation, and then—without thinking—he reached down to pull her out.

He had heard all the warnings about going near drowning people. He had missed the ones about drowning cats. When he reached into the toilet, Galway sank her claws into his wrists. Dave screamed and flung the cat over his head, launching her the length of the hall. She landed in a soggy and pathetic pile of wet fur in front of Sam’s bedroom door. She hit the ground running. They didn’t see her for another week.