Dead Cat, Floating Boy

Now she stands, too. The backed-up traffic extends by this time all the way to the stoplight down the block. I imagine a TV news camera shooting the scene artsily from pavement-level: dead cat on curb, framed by car bumpers; mourners standing tall, heads bent, the woman’s outfit nicely echoing the deceased’s; church spire in background, pointing to Cat Heaven.

May she use my phone to call the animal disposal people?

I find momentarily piquant the thought of her in my house, using my telephone, and then loyally reprove myself: It’s our house, our telephone, our monogamously happy life. Better get on to your yoga class, I advise her, before the cops impound your car. I’ll pop the poor guy into a garbage bag and put him out with my trash.

She gives me a full-faced look of lovely concern. Won’t he get yucky? When’s your pick-up date?

Not to worry; I’ll take care of it. I even retrieve her blood-spotted towel. Here you go, now.

She smiles, takes the towel, touches my forearm lightly with her other long-fingered hand, looks wonderfully into my eyes with her, oh, forget-me-not-colored ones, and thanks me so much.

Not a problem. Have a good life.

So wide and moist a smile. You too!

By when I return with a plastic garbage bag the gray Honda is gone, and traffic on the arterial has resumed its normal rush-hour flow. The limp cat-corpse, hoisted by the tail for headfirst bagging, is surprisingly heavy. Uncertain of city regulations in the matter, I incorporate the bundle into a larger bag half full of leaves and weeds and put the whole into a tightly lidded trash can at the alley-end of our driveway, trusting that it won’t stink by pick-up time, two days hence. Over wine and hors d’oeuvres a short while later on our backyard porch, I retail to my homecome mate an edited version of the little incident. Cute Meet, we agree, and toast our own of so long past.

I hope and trust that she has had, is having as I write this, a good life, that emotionally and physically endowed young woman. The first of three sequels to our encounter is a note from her in the mail shortly thereafter—on garbage-collection day, in fact, when the remains of our path-crossing occasion passed without incident into the municipal trash-stream. Addressed to Good Samaritan (with the same presence of mind that had concerned her regarding “our” cat’s potential yuckiness, Ms. Leotard had either made mental note of my street address or—intriguing thought—had returned to the scene post-yogaly to register it, perhaps to verify as well that I had done my promised job), it read only Thank you, kind sir, and, parenthesized under illegible initials, (the cat lady). No name or return address; I liked that. End of Story, it declared in effect, as if she had sensed . . . and, like me, had dismissed . . .

The stuck story that this nonadventure relieved me from was meant to have been inspired by a season-old item in the daily newspaper of the southwest Florida city where my wife and I had spent the winter before this dead-cat Baltimore spring. In mangrove marshes well up the gulf coast from our rented condominium, a fat and severely autistic ten-year-old boy had somehow “drifted away” from his parents and siblings at a swimming hole, the article reported, into the vast circumambient swamp. Over several following days and nights, while helicopters, air boats, swamp buggies, and foot-slogging rescuers searched in vain, he had floated through the warm, labyrinthine waterways: naked (he seems to have shucked his shorts somewhere along the way), oblivious to snakes and alligators and mosquitoes, buoyed up and insulated from hypothermia by his obesity, entertained by the sight of those overflying machines. Evidently he quenched his thirst as necessary from the freshmarsh water he floated in; no one knows whether and what he ate. On the fourth day he was spotted by a sport-fisherman and retrieved—unalarmed and evidently unharmed except for incidental scratches and a bit of sunburn—a full fourteen miles from the swimming hole. His parents had no idea, they declared, how he had managed to drift away unremarked, to a distance beyond ready refinding. They had alerted the authorities, they declared, as soon as they noticed his absence. He wanted to go back, they declared he declared upon his untraumatized restoration themto, to see the helicopters.

Taylor Touchstone, the boy’s name was—cross my heart—and in the weeks following that newspaper account the image of him adrift among the mangroves like a bloated infant Moses among the cattails became a touchstone indeed to my imagination: a floating touchstone, like the lad himself. As now in the matter of the Dead Cat, I made notebook entries on the Floating Boy, whose serene misadventure spoke to me in a way I recognized. In addition to Moses (set adrift to escape pharaoh’s massacre of the Hebrew firstborn, then found and retrieved by his would-be killer’s maiden daughter) I noted other mythic heroes floated off or otherwise rescued in early childhood from vengeful or fearful authority: baby Perseus snugged in his sea-chest, baby Oedipus plucked from hillside exposure, the Yavapai Apache prophet’s baby daughter floated off in her cottonwood canoe—the list is long. More generally, I noted other voyagers from domesticity into dreamish irreality and back—Odysseus, Sindbad (the list is even longer)—and floaters into radical metamorphosis: sperm and ova, fetuses in the Amniotic Sea—all of us, come to that, floating through our life-stories like unread messages in bottles or galaxies in the void, and into dream-country every mortal night. Ukiyo-e, I made note of: the ephemeral “floating world” of Japanese painting—and, by association, those as if-magical Japanese Crackerjack-favors of my pre-World War Il boyhood: tightly folded little paper somethings that one dropped into a glass of water and waited for the slow exfoliation of into intricate flowers or brightly colored castles.

Just so (I noted), like seeds at sea, do art’s gametes float in the fancies of those whose calling it is to fertilize and deliver them. Some sprout / bloom / fruit with the celerity of time-lapse nature films; others eddy like that messaged bottle tossed experimentally into the Pacific by (Japanese) students in August 1985 and found ten years later on a beach north of Honolulu, the Togane High School Earth Science Club members who launched it having long since graduated and set out upon their own life-voyages. And some, to be sure, remain forever flotsam, embryos no longer gestating in the muse’s womb but pickled in the formaldehyde of fruitless notes.

So was it with this suspended floating-touchstone tale, displaced now by the dead-cat interlude with its mild but not insignificant erotic aura (if the doorbell-ringer had been male or unattractive, I trust I would have performed the same neighborly service, but my imagination would have been unengaged). “The cat came back,” went a song from my small-town childhood; likewise the above-told cat-encounter:

Indeed, the species’s homing abilities are so acute that cats can be notoriously difficult to ditch; thus (together with their knack for literally landing on their feet) the folk proposition that they have “nine lives.” In an afore-alluded-to earlier life-chapter of my own, when I was about that comely cat-woman’s age, my then spouse and I prepared to make our maiden expedition to Europe on the occasion of my first sabbatical leave from university teaching. We would pick up a Volkswagen microbus in Le Havre at autumn’s end, camp our way therein down to the Mediterranean with our three young children, winter somewhere cheap in the south of Spain, then tour from campground to campground through western Europe in the spring. We arranged to take the kids out of fifth, fourth, and second grades for a semester, rent out our little house in the countryside near the university, and sell our aging car. One problem remained: the family pets. The fish in the tropical-fish tank, we explained to the children, would be “returned to the store”—and perhaps some were, although a memory haunts me of being discovered by my ten-year-old daughter in the act of flushing several down the toilet (“Da-a-d!”).

The cat was another matter. Survivor of a frisky pair of litter-mates named Nip and Tuck, the latter was a handsome three- or four-year-old dear to all of us since his kittenhood. Except that his coat was smoky gray instead of black, his markings resembled those of that Baltimore casualty: tidy white bib, nose-blaze, and forepaw-tops. Taking him with us by crowded camperbus through a dozen foreign countries was out of the question, likewise imposing him on friend or neighbor for half a year; and boarding him with a vet for so long a period was beyond our straitened means. Anyhow, “Tucker Jim,” as the children called him, was used to roaming freely the rural neighborhood and nearby woods; we couldn’t imagine kenneling him for months on end even if we could have afforded to. His similarly free-ranging sister had one day simply disappeared, perhaps struck by a car on her country rambles, perhaps shot for sport by a farm kid or a bored deer hunter (the venue here is the Alleghenies of central Pennsylvania, where schools are closed for the opening day of deer season and prudent parents keep children and pets grounded till the fever abates). My then-partner and the-then-I concurred that sometime in this pre-departure season dear Tuck must likewise officially disappear; as to the covert means, however, we disagreed, as alas we had found ourselves lately doing on more and more matters of importance. She was all for having him “put to sleep”; I held out for turning him loose a sufficient distance from home in the farm and forest lands round about the state university where I then taught. That would only condemn him to a slow and painful death instead of a quick and painless one, she argued, and cited the SPCA’s support of her position. I didn’t deny that possibility—although wily Tuck had demonstrated his hunting skills on enough field mice and songbirds, even while well-fed at home, for me to doubt that starvation was a likelihood in his case. My position was simply that in his position, if offered those unpleasant alternatives, I would unhesitatingly opt to take my chances in the wild.

What if you disappear him and we lie to the children and then he finds his way back and we have to disappear him again?

Second time we’ll tell them the truth. But I’ll disappear him good.

Do as you please. But you know what they say about cats.

I did, but, in this instance anyhow, did—not as I pleased, for it was no pleasure, but as I truly thought best: packed the chap into our up-for-sale station wagon one late October afternoon while the kids were in school; drove him a dozen miles over the Allegheny ridges, through forests of oak and hemlock, mountain laurel and rhododendron; chose a roadside spot where woods bordered corn and alfalfa fields, to give the guy some options (farmhouses and outbuildings just up the lane); grubstaked him with a paper bowl of 9 Lives cat food and another of milk in the dry ditch just off that lightly traveled road; sincerely wished him the best of luck . . . and drove away, returning home by a fairly extensive loop rather than directly. I wince at the memory of that evening’s charade of gradually mounting concern, and the next day’s and the next (Where’s old Tuck? Still hasn’t come home?); of the children’s calling and combing the neighborhood, and my mate’s low-volume after-their-bedtime reproaches (I keep seeing him out there somewhere, meowing for us). (You’d rather see him chloroformed and tossed into the vet’s incinerator?) (Yes! Yes.); and of my multiple burden of guilt, shared concern for the animal’s welfare and the children’s sorrow, and complex apprehension that Tuck might find his way home after all.

He didn’t. The family’s half-year Europe sojourn was of a value surely worth the sacrifice. Three dozen autumns later, I still stand by my course of action in l’affaire Tuck and, less firmly, the parental cover-up as well (Would it have been better overall to tell children aged ten, nine, and seven that we were in effect dumping a virtual family member in order to make the trip? They would have pleaded with us to spare him and stay home; we would have been obliged either to override their tearful protests or to present them with a fairly brutal fait accompli . . . ). Other much-loved cats and dogs and tropical fish followed our return; other cars, other houses and universities in other states as those children floated, sometimes bumpily, into and through their adolescence, and their parents ever more rockily through the terminal stages of their once-happy union—which ended as the offspring one by one sprang off to college.

Such things happen.

Did I ever tell them, it occurred to me to wonder now in these dead-cat notes, what really happened to Tucker Jim? They’re older these days than their father was in those, and presumably could handle the Truth. Am I, perhaps, telling them for the first time here? (How would you have handled it, mes enfants? Those of you especially who’ve had pets and children and marital vicissitudes of your own?) I wonder, for that matter, what really did happen to the good gray puss: that prolonged and wretched death foretold by my ex, the abundantly blessed next life-chapter enjoyed by her ex, or something between? Look here, Tuck boy, you still float through my memory thirty-six years later, now and then: Of how many cats can that be said?

(Big deal, I imagine him meowing: You ditched me, man. Literally.) (But hey, it was either that or . . .) (Yeah, right: Lucky Tuck.)

Where are you now, fellow? Where are those fresh-faced children smiling gamely from my photos of Europe 1962/63? The snows and roses of yesteryear, ubi sunt? Where, for that matter, this shorter while later, is that leotarded lass en route to yogaland, who in a different story might have been a Cute Meet indeed? Where now is the cat-corpse I bagged and dumped on her lissome behalf, where the briefly stymied talester who dumped it, that house in that city, and the life itwith involved? One knows where, to be sure, in a general way (See So-and-So’s 101 Uses for a Dead Cat, recommends the still-prowling sardonic ghost of Tucker Jim)—but where are they all exactly, as I put this question?

That, too, in some instances at least, deponent can report, and in one case will: We being both of us newly retired from teaching and its attendant life-rhythms—which in our case had for many years involved busily straddling the Chesapeake between our “teaching house” in town and our weekend/summer retreat on Maryland’s Eastern Shore—during a second trial Floridian winter Down There with the other Snowbird pensioners, my wife and I judged our urban base to be no longer earning its keep and arranged its sale to another, younger schoolteaching couple. During that same winter, as it happened, we were recalled north from sunny Geezerville on the unhappy errand of assisting the transfer of an aged parent, Alzheimer’s-cursed, into a New Jersey nursing home for the closing chapter of her life-story. We stopped over in Baltimore, to begin preparing the Teaching House for springtime occupancy by its new owners. The two businesses each melancholied the other, sharply reminding us of our own new life-stage and ongoing drift down Time’s nontidal river. And in the course of inspecting the house’s exterior and grounds—refastening a storm-loosened shutter, picking car-tossed litter from the streetside shrubs—I came upon the second sequel to that dead cat nonadventure: on our front lawn, down near the seldom-used sidewalk of that traffic arterial, just a few dozen car-lengths from its predecessor... another dead cat, this one so flattened by traffic before being somehow shifted from street to lawn (perhaps by snowplows), and so weathered and decomposed in our absence, that without examining the corpse more closely than I cared to I couldn’t judge its sex or even quite its fur color. Indeed, so virtually merged was it with the winter lawn, it seemed more the imprint or basso-relievo of a cat than the former animal itself.

A calling card, it amused me to imagine, from Ms. Lotus Position, as—who knows?—perhaps the first had been: the 102d Use, her kinky way of striking up a potential new relationship, starting a new story. Still there, Mr. Good Samaritan? Still interested?

No and yes, Ma’am’selle: Your GS doesn’t live here any more, practically speaking, but (disinterestedly) interested he remains—not in your shapely self, thanks, but in this all-but-shapeless souvenir, so desiccated past disgust that I let it rest in peace where it lay, reasonably confident that by spring lawn-mowing time it would be recycled altogether.

As in fact it proved to be except in the recirculating tide of my imagination, where it remained a floating touchstone. Two months later, over late March wine and cheese at our last cocktail-time in the Teaching House before the movers came to shift us from the city for keeps, Maybe it was old Tuck, I proposed to my wife: It took him thirty-six years, but the cat came back. Tracked me all the way from that life to this one, he did, from Pennsylvania to upstate New York and Massachusetts and then back here to Maryland, and just as he was dragging his weary old bones down the last city block to this house, the Cat Lady nailed him with her cat-gray Honda.

Cute em-ee-ay-tee, replied my patient partner, and we touched wineglasses in a sober toast to Time: It spared him the disappointment of finding you not home.

Tuck would’ve waited me out, I declared, or tracked me to Florida or the Eastern Shore. What’s thirty-six years, after all? It took me that long to get from where I was then to where I am now.

Mm hmm. And where is that, exactly?

Good question, beloved sharer of my life-story and reader of these lines, to whom I respond as to myself: Why, where that is exactly is at the floating point of this pen as it writes at the floating point of this pen; it’s at the track of your eye as your eye tracks the words the words in this final sequel to or reprise of that now-disincarnate cat, in its decomposition composed at last.

(Sez you, comes back the ghost of Tucker Jim. For even as there are touchstone images that the narrative use of far from exhausts; that when we believed we had done themwith not only continue to float or prowl upon their uncomprehended way but return, return to tease or spook us, so there are stories, Reader, this themamong, that hopefully substitute the sonority of closure for the thing itself; that may sound done but are not; that, like an open parenthesis, without properly ending at least for the cross-fingered present stop.