7
Cat hadn’t got me into anymore cellars, but I can’t honestly say he’d been sitting home tending his knitting—not him.
One hot morning I went to pick up the milk outside our door, and Cat was sleeping there on the mat. He didn’t even look up at me. After I scratched his ears and talked to him some, he got up and hobbled into the house.
I put him up on my bed, under the light, for inspection. One front claw was torn off, which is why he was limping, his left ear was ripped, and there was quite a bit of fur missing here and there. He curled up on my bed and didn’t move all day.
I came and looked at him every few hours and wondered if I ought to take him to a vet. But he seemed to be breathing all right, so I went away and thought about it some more. Come night, I pushed him gently to one side, wondering what I better do in the morning.
Well, in the morning Cat wakes up, stretches, yawns, and drops easily down off the bed and walks away. He still limps a little, but otherwise he acts like nothing had happened. He just wants to know what’s for breakfast.
“You better watch out. One day you’ll run into a cat that’s bigger and meaner than you,” I tell him.
Cat continues to wait for breakfast. He is not impressed.
But I’m worried. Suppose some big old cat chews him up and he’s hurt too bad to get home? After breakfast I take him out in the backyard for a bit, and then I shut him in my room and go over to consult Aunt Kate.
She sets me up with the usual iced tea and dish of cottage cheese.
“I had breakfast already. What do I need with cottage cheese?”
“Eat it. It’s good for you.”
So I eat it, and then I start telling her about Cat. “He came home all chewed up night before last. I’m afraid some night he’s not going to make it.”
“Right,” says Kate. She’s not very talky, but I’m sort of surprised. I expected she’d tell me to quit worrying, Cat can take care of himself. She starts pulling Susan’s latest kittens out from under the sofa and sorting them out as if they were ribbons: one gray, two tiger, one yellow, one calico.
“So what you going to do?” she shoots at me, shoveling the kittens back to Susan.
“I—uh—I dunno. I thought maybe I ought to try to keep him in nights.”
“Huh. Don’t know much, do you?” she says. “Well, so I’ll tell you. Your Cat has probably fathered a few dozen kittens by now, and once a cat’s been out and mated, you can’t keep him in. You got to get him altered. Then he won’t want to go out so much.”
“Altered?”
“Fixed. Castrated is the technical word. It’s a two-minute operation. Cost you three dollars. Take him to Speyer Hospital—big new building up on First Avenue.”
“You mean get him fixed so he’s not a real tomcat any more? The heck with that! I don’t want him turned into a fat old cushion cat!”
“He won’t be,” she says. “But if it makes you happier, let him get killed in a cat fight. He’s tough. He’ll last a year or two. Suit yourself.”
“Ah, you’re screwy! You and your cottage cheese!” Even as I say it I feel a little guilty. But I feel mad and mixed up, and I fling out the door. It’s the first time I ever left Kate’s mad. Usually I leave our house mad and go to Kate.
Now I got nowhere to go. I walk along, cussing and fuming and kicking pebbles. I come to an air-conditioned movie and go up to the window.
The phony blonde in the booth looks at me and sneers, “You’re not sixteen. We don’t have a children’s section in this theater.” She doesn’t even ask. She just says it. It’s a great world. I go home. There’s no one there but Cat, so I turn the record player up full blast.
Pop comes home in one of his unexpected fits of generosity that night and takes us to the movies. Cat behaves himself and stays around home and our cellar for a while, so I stop worrying. But it doesn’t last long.
As soon as his claw heals, he starts sashaying off again. One night I hear cats yowling out back and I go out with a bucket of water and douse them and bring Cat in. There’s a pretty little tiger cat, hardly more than a kitten, sitting on the fence licking herself, dry and unconcerned. Cat doesn’t speak to me for a couple of days.
One morning Butch, the janitor, comes up and knocks on our door. “You better come down and look at your cat. He got himself mighty chewed up. Most near dead.”
I hurry down, and there is Cat sprawled in a corner on the cool cement floor. His mouth is half open, and his breath comes in wheezes, like he has asthma. I don’t know whether to pick him up or not.
Butch says, “Best let him lie.”
I sit down beside him. After a bit his breath comes easier and he puts his head down. Then I see he’s got a long, deep claw gouge going from his shoulder down one leg. It’s half an inch open, and anyone can see it won’t heal by itself.
Butch shakes his head. “You gotta take him to the veteran, sure. That’s the cat doctor.”
“Yeah,” I say, not correcting him. It’s not just the gash that’s worrying me. I remember what Aunt Kate said, and it gives me a cold feeling in the stomach: In the back-alley jungle he’d last a year, maybe two.
Looking at Cat, right now, I know she’s right. But Cat’s such a—well, such a cat. How can I take him to be whittled down?
I tell Butch I’ll be back down in a few minutes, and I go upstairs. Mom’s humming and cleaning in the kitchen. I wander around and stare out the window awhile. Finally I go in the kitchen and stare into the icebox, and then I tell Mom about the gash in Cat’s leg.
She asks if I know a vet to take him to.
“Yeah, there’s Speyer. It’s a big, new hospital—good enough for people, even—with a view of the East River. The thing is, Mom, Cat keeps going off and fighting and getting hurt, and people tell me I ought to get him altered.”
Mom wets the sponge and squeezes it out and polishes at the sink, and I wonder if she knows what I’m talking about because I don’t really know how to explain it any better.
She wrings the sponge out, finally, and sits down at the kitchen table.
She says, “Cat’s not a free wild animal now, and he wouldn’t be even if you turned him loose. He belongs to you, so you have to do whatever is best for him, whether it’s what you’d like or not. Ask the doctor and do what he says.”
Mom puts it on the line, all right. It doesn’t make me feel any better about Cat. She takes five dollars out of her pocketbook and gives it to me.
I get out the wicker hamper and go down to the cellar and load Cat in. He meows, a low resentful rumble, but he doesn’t try to get away.
Cat in the hamper is no powder puff, and I get pretty hot walking to the bus, and then from the bus stop to the animal hospital. I get there and wait, and dogs sniff at me, and I fill in forms. The lady asks me if I can afford to pay, and with Mom’s five bucks and four of my own, I say Yes.
The doctor is a youngish guy, but bald, in a white shirt like a dentist’s. I put Cat on the table in front of him. He says, “So why don’t you stay out of fights, like your mommy told you?”
I relax a bit and smile, and he says, “That’s better. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of tomcat. I suppose he got this gash in a fight?”
“Yeah.”
“He been altered?”
“No.”
“How old is he?”
“I don’t know. He was a stray. I’ve had him almost a year.”
All the time he’s talking, the doctor is soothing Cat and looking him over. He goes on stroking him and looks up at me. “Well, son, one of these days he’s going to get in one fight too many. Shall we alter him the same time we sew up his leg?”
So there it is. I can’t seem to answer right away. If the doctor had argued with me, I might have said No. But he just goes on humming and stroking. Finally he says, “It’s tough, I know. Maybe he’s got a right to be a tiger. But you can’t keep a tiger for a pet.”
I say, “O.K.”
An attendant takes Cat away, and I go sit in the waiting room, feeling sweaty and cold all over. They tell me it’ll be a couple of hours, so I go out and wander around a lot of blocks I never saw before and drink some cokes and sit and look up at the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge to Queens.
When I go back for him, Cat looks the same as ever, except for a bandage all up his right front leg. The doctor tells me to come back Friday and he’ll take out the stitches.
Mom sees me come in the door, and I guess I look pretty grim, because she says, “Cat will be all right, won’t he, dear?”
“Yes.” I go past her and down into my room and let Cat out of the basket and then bury my head under the pillow. I’m not exactly ashamed of crying, but I don’t want Mom to hear.
After a while I pull my head out. Cat is lying there beside me, his eyes half open, the tip end of his tail twitching very slowly. I rub my eyes on the back of his neck and whisper to him, “I’m sorry. Be tough, Cat, anyway, will you?”
Cat stretches and hops off the bed on his three good legs.