Back Aa

It's Like This, Cat

<h1>2</h1> <div class="tei tei-figure" style="width: 100%; text-align: center"><ANTIMG src="images/image02.png" width-obs="573" height-obs="450" alt="Illustration: Dave looking at Cat locked in cage." /></div> 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. 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.” 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?” 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. “Is it my fault you stayed out all night?” I ask him. 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. 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. “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.” “Which building’s his friend live in?” I ask. “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.” 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. 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. 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. “Me-ow, meow, me-ow!” Unmistakably Cat, and angry. 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. 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. 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. “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.” 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. 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. 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. “Gee, how’d you do that?” “Sh-h-h. A guy showed me how. You better get your cat and scram.” 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? “Well, thanks for the cat. See you around,” I say. “Sh-h-h. I don’t live around here. Hurry up, before we both get caught.” 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. 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 look 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. 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.” 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.” “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. 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.” “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?” “I don’t swipe bikes. I got one of my own. New. A Raleigh. Better than any junk you got in there.” “What d’you know about what I got in there, wise guy?” “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. Next day it looks like maybe he did just that. The local paper, Town and Village, has a headline: “Gramercy Park Cellar Robbed.” I read down the article: “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.” 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. 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. “Butch cut,” I tell the guy. “That’s right. I’ll trim you nice and neat. Get rid of all this stuff.” 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!” Two days later I find out I could’ve kept my hair. Town and Village has a new story: “Nab Cellar Thief Returning Loot. ‘Just A Bet,’ He Says.” 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. 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. 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. 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: Dear Tom Ransom: 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. Yours sincerely, Dave Mitchell 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. 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. “Got any burglars in your basement these days?” I yell to him while I’m jogging around the bases on a long hit. He looks at me and my short haircut and scratches his own bald egg. “Where’d I see you?” he asks suspiciously. “Oh—Cat and I, we get around,” I say. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.