<SPAN name="toc3" id="toc3"></SPAN>
<SPAN name="pdf4" id="pdf4"></SPAN>
<h1><span style="font-size: 173%">2</span></h1>
<div class="tei-figure"><ANTIMG src="images/image02.png" width-obs="573" height-obs="450" alt="Illustration: Dave looking at Cat locked in cage." /></div>
<p>Cat makes himself at home in my room pretty
easily. Mostly he likes to be up on top of something,
so I put an old sweater on the bureau
beside my bed, and he sleeps up there. When
he wants me to wake up in the morning, he
jumps and lands in the middle of my stomach.
Believe me, cats don’t always land lightly—only
when they want to. Anything a cat does,
he does only when he wants to. I like that.</p>
<p>When I’m combing my hair in the morning,
sometimes he sits up there and looks down
his nose at my reflection in the mirror. He
appears to be taking inventory: “Hmm, buckteeth;
sandy hair, smooth in front, cowlick in
back; brown eyes, can’t see in the dark worth a
nickel; hickeys on the chin. Too bad.”</p>
<p>I look back at him in the mirror and say,
“O.K., black face, yellow eyes, and one white
whisker. Where’d you get that one white
whisker?”</p>
<p>He catches sight of himself in the mirror, and
his tail twitches momentarily. He seems to know
it’s not really another cat, but his claws come out
and he taps the mirror softly, just to make sure.</p>
<p>When I’m lying on the bed reading, sometimes
he will curl up between my knees and the
book. But after a few days I can see he’s getting
more and more restless. It gets so I can’t listen
to a record, for the noise of him scratching on
the rug. I can’t let him loose in the apartment,
at least until we make sure Mom doesn’t get
asthma, so I figure I better reintroduce him to
the great outdoors in the city. One nice Sunday
morning in April we go down and sit on the
stoop.</p>
<p>Cat sits down, very tall and neat and pear-shaped,
and closes his eyes about halfway. He
glances at the street like it isn’t good enough for
him. After a while, condescending, he eases
down the steps and lies on a sunny, dusty spot in
the middle of the sidewalk. People walking have
to step around him, and he squints at them.</p>
<p>Then he gets up, quick, looks over his
shoulder at nothing, and shoots down the stairs
to the cellar. I take a look to see where he’s going,
and he is pacing slowly toward the backyard,
head down, a tiger on the prowl. I figure I’ll sit
in the sun and finish my science-fiction magazine
before I go after him.</p>
<p>When I do, he’s not in sight, and the janitor
tells me he jumped up on the wall and probably
down into one of the other yards. I look around
a while and call, but he’s not in sight, and I go
up to lunch. Along toward evening Cat scratches
at the door and comes in, as if he’d done it all
his life.</p>
<p>This gets to be a routine. Sometimes he
doesn’t even come home at night, and he’s sitting
on the doormat when I get the milk in the morning,
looking offended.</p>
<p>“Is it my fault you stayed out all night?” I
ask him.</p>
<p>He sticks his tail straight up and marches down
the hall to the kitchen, where he waits for me
to open the milk and dish out the cat food. Then
he goes to bed.</p>
<p>One morning he’s not there when I open the
door, and he still hasn’t showed up when I get
back from school. I get worried and go down
to talk to Butch.</p>
<p>“Wa-a-l,” says Butch, “sometimes that cat sit
and talk to me a little, but most times he go on
over to Twenty-first Street, where he sit and talk
to his lady friend. Turned cold last night, lot of
buildings put on heat and closed up their basements.
Maybe he got locked in somewheres.”</p>
<p>“Which building’s his friend live in?” I ask.</p>
<p>“Forty-six, the big one. His friend’s a little
black-and-white cat, sort of belongs to the night
man over there. He feeds her.”</p>
<p>I go around to Twenty-first Street and case
Forty-six, which is a pretty fair-looking building
with a striped awning and a doorman who
saunters out front and looks around every few
minutes.</p>
<p>While I’m watching, a grocery boy comes
along pushing his cart and goes down some
stairs into the basement with his carton of
groceries. This gives me an idea. I’ll give the
boy time to get started up in the elevator, and
then I’ll go down in the basement and hunt for
Cat. If someone comes along and gets sore, I
can always play dumb.</p>
<p>I go down, and the coast is clear. The elevator’s
gone up, and I walk softly past and
through a big room where the tenants leave
their baby carriages and bicycles. After this the
cellar stretches off into several corridors, lit by
twenty-watt bulbs dangling from the ceiling.
You can hardly see anything. The corridors go
between wire storage cages, where the tenants
keep stuff like trunks and old cribs and parakeet
cages. They’re all locked.</p>
<p>“Me-ow, meow, me-ow!” Unmistakably Cat,
and angry.</p>
<p>The sound comes from the end of one corridor,
and I fumble along, peering into each
cage to try to see a tiger cat in a shadowy hole.
Fortunately his eyes glow and he opens his
mouth for another meow, and I see him locked
inside one of the cages before I come to the end
of the corridor. I don’t know how he got in or
how I’m going to get him out.</p>
<p>While I’m thinking, Cat’s eyes flick away from
me to the right, then back to me. Cat’s not making
any noise, and neither am I, but something
is. It’s just a tiny rustle, or a breath, but I have
a creepy feeling someone is standing near us.
Way down at the end of the cellar a shadow
moves a little, and I can see it has a white splotch—a
face. It’s a man, and he comes toward me.</p>
<p>I don’t know why any of the building men
would be way back there, but that’s who I figure
it is, so I start explaining.</p>
<p>“I was just hunting for my cat ... I mean,
he’s got locked in one of these cages. I just want
to get him out.”</p>
<p>The guy lets his breath out, slow, as if he’s
been holding it quite a while. I realize he doesn’t
belong in that cellar either, and he’s been scared
of me.</p>
<p>He moves forward, saying “Sh-h-h” very
quietly. He’s taller than I am, and I can’t see
what he really looks like, but I’m sure he’s sort
of a kid, maybe eighteen or so.</p>
<p>He looks at the padlock on the cage and says,
“Huh, cheap!” He takes a paper clip out of his
pocket and opens it out, and I think maybe he
has a penknife, too, and next thing I know the
padlock is open.</p>
<p>“Gee, how’d you do that?”</p>
<p>“Sh-h-h. A guy showed me how. You better
get your cat and scram.”</p>
<p>Golly, I wonder, maybe the guy is a burglar,
and that gives me another creepy feeling. But
would a burglar be taking time out to get a
kid’s cat free?</p>
<p>“Well, thanks for the cat. See you around,”
I say.</p>
<p>“Sh-h-h. I don’t live around here. Hurry up,
before we both get caught.”</p>
<p>Maybe he’s a real burglar with a gun, even, I
think, and by the time I dodge past the elevators
and get out in the cold April wind, the sweat
down my back is freezing. I give Cat a long
lecture on staying out of basements. After all, I
can’t count on having a burglar handy to get
him out every time.</p>
<p>Back home we put some nice jailhouse blues
on the record player, and we both stretch out on
the bed to think. The guy didn’t really <span class="tei tei-hi"><span style="font-style: italic">look</span></span> like
a burglar. And he didn’t talk “dese and dose.”
Maybe real burglars don’t all talk that way—only
the ones on TV. Still, he sure picked that lock
fast, and he was sure down in that cellar for
some reason of his own.</p>
<p>Maybe I ought to let someone know. I figure
I’ll test Pop out, just casual like. “Some queer-looking
types hanging around this neighborhood,”
I say at dinner. “I saw a tough-looking
guy hanging around Number Forty-six this
afternoon. Might have been a burglar, even.”</p>
<p>I figure Pop’ll at least ask me what he was
doing, and maybe I’ll tell him the whole thing—about
Cat and the cage. But Pop says, “In case
you didn’t know it, burglars do not all look like
Humphrey Bogart, and they don’t wear signs.”</p>
<p>“Thanks for the news,” I say and go on eating
my dinner. Even if Pop does make me sore,
I’m not going to pass up steak and onions, which
we don’t have very often.</p>
<p>However, the next day I’m walking along
Twenty-first Street and I see the super of Forty-six
standing by the back entrance, so I figure I’ll
try again. I say to him, “Us kids were playing ball
here yesterday, and we saw a strange-looking guy
sneak into your cellar. It wasn’t a delivery boy.”</p>
<p>“Yeah? You sure it wasn’t you or one of your
juvenile pals trying to swipe a bike? How come
you have to play ball right here?”</p>
<p>“I don’t swipe bikes. I got one of my own.
New. A Raleigh. Better than any junk you got
in there.”</p>
<p>“What d’you know about what I got in there,
wise guy?”</p>
<p>“Aw, forget it.” I realize he’s just getting
suspicious of me. That’s what comes of trying
to be a big public-spirited citizen. I decide my
burglar, whoever he is, is a lot nicer than the
super, and I hope he got a fat haul.</p>
<p>Next day it looks like maybe he did just that.
The local paper, <span class="tei tei-hi"><span style="font-style: italic">Town and Village</span></span>, has a headline:
“Gramercy Park Cellar Robbed.” I read
down the article:</p>
<p>“The superintendent, Fred Snood, checked
the cellar storage cages, after a passing youth
hinted to him that there had been a robbery.
He found one cage open and a suitcase missing.
Police theorize that the youth may have been
the burglar, or an accomplice with a guilty
conscience or a grudge, and they are hunting
him for questioning. Mr. Snood described him
as about sixteen years of age, medium height,
with a long ‘ducktail’ haircut, and wearing a
heavy black sweater. They are also checking
second-hand stores for the stolen suitcase.”</p>
<p>The burglar stole a suitcase with valuable
papers and some silver and jewelry in it. But
the guy they were hunting for—I read the paragraph
over and feel green. That’s me. I get up
and look in the mirror. In other circumstances
I’d like being taken for sixteen instead of fourteen,
which I am. I smooth my hair and squint
at the back of it. The ducktail is fine.</p>
<p>Slowly I peel off my black sweater, which I
wear practically all the time, and stuff it in my
bottom drawer, under my bathing suit. But if I
want to walk around the street without worrying
about every cop, I’ll have to do more than
that. I put on a shirt and necktie and suit jacket
and stick a cap on my head. I head uptown on
the subway. At Sixty-eighth Street I get off and
find a barbershop.</p>
<p>“Butch cut,” I tell the guy.</p>
<p>“That’s right. I’ll trim you nice and neat. Get
rid of all this stuff.”</p>
<p>And while he chatters on like an idiot, I have
to watch three months’ work go snip, snip on
the floor. Then I have to pay for it. At home I
get the same routine. Pop looks at my Ivy-League
disguise and says, “Why, you may look
positively human some day!”</p>
<p>Two days later I find out I could’ve kept my
hair. <span class="tei tei-hi"><span style="font-style: italic">Town and Village</span></span> has a new story: “Nab
Cellar Thief Returning Loot. ‘Just A Bet,’
He Says.”</p>
<p>The story is pretty interesting. The guy I met
in the cellar is named Tom Ransom, and he is
nineteen and just sort of floating around in the
city. He doesn’t seem to have any family. The
police kept a detective watching Number Forty-six,
and pretty soon they see Tom walking along
with the stolen suitcase. He drops it inside the
delivery entrance and walks on, but the cop
collars him. I suppose if it hadn’t been for me
shooting my big mouth off to the super, the
police wouldn’t have been watching the neighborhood.
I feel sort of responsible.</p>
<p>The story in the paper goes on to say this guy
was broke and hunting for a job, and some other
guy dares him to snatch something out of a cellar
and finally bets him ten dollars, so he does it.
He gets out and finds the suitcase has a lot of
stocks and legal papers and table silver in it,
and he’s scared stiff. So he figures to drop it back
where it came from. The paper says he’s held
over to appear before some magistrate in
Adolescent Court.</p>
<p>I wonder, would they send a guy to jail for
that? Or if they turn him loose, what does he do?
It must be lousy to be in this city without any
family or friends.</p>
<p>At that point I get the idea I’ll write him a
letter. After all, Cat and I sort of got him into
the soup. So I look up the name of the magistrate
and spend about half an hour poring through
the phone book, under “New York, City of,” to
get an address. I wonder whether to address him
as “Tom” or “Mr. Ransom.” Finally I write:</p>
<p><br/><span class="tei tei-hi"><span style="font-style: italic">Dear Tom Ransom:</span></span></p>
<p><span class="tei tei-hi"><span style="font-style: italic">I am the kid you met in the cellar at Number
Forty-six Gramercy, and I certainly thank you
for unlocking that cage and getting my cat out.
Cat is fine. I am sorry you got in trouble with
the police. It sounds to me like you were only trying
to return the stuff and do right. My father is
a lawyer, if you would like one. I guess he’s
pretty good. Or if you would like to write me
anyway, here is my address: 150 East 22 St. I read
in the paper that your family don’t live in New
York, which is why I thought you might like
someone to write to.</span></span></p>
<p class="tei tei-p" style="text-align: right; margin-bottom: 1.00em"><span class="tei tei-hi" style="text-align: right"><span style="font-style: italic">Yours sincerely,</span></span><br/>
<span class="tei tei-hi" style="text-align: right"><span style="font-style: italic">Dave Mitchell</span></span><br/>
<br/></p>
<p>Now that I’m a free citizen again, I dig out my
black sweater, look disgustedly at the butch haircut,
and go out to mail my letter.</p>
<p>Later on I get into a stickball game again on
Twenty-first Street. Cat comes along and sits up
high on a stoop across the street, where he can
watch the ball game and the tame dogs being led
by on their leashes. That big brain, the super of
Forty-six, is standing by the delivery entrance,
looking sour as usual.</p>
<p>“Got any burglars in your basement these
days?” I yell to him while I’m jogging around the
bases on a long hit.</p>
<p>He looks at me and my short haircut and
scratches his own bald egg. “Where’d I see you?”
he asks suspiciously.</p>
<p>“Oh—Cat and I, we get around,” I say.</p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />