Cats

by Reilly Fitzgerald

            “I hate cats. I see them as self-centred parasites that manipulate naive humans to care for them. It’s not that I haven’t been exposed to cats, so if you’re judging me as a heartless son of a so-and-so who has never given a little pussy the chance to enter his heart, stop it right now! I’ve dealt with cats throughout my life. And not just a cat or two, and not the same domesticated cat that goes by the name Fluffy or Cuddles and purrs around your feet (uurgh! God I hate it!) and runs to you at the sound of the can-opener; I’ve experienced all kinds of cats. I’ve experienced the full range of emotions and have come out as a more mature person who sees the animals for what they are-if a cat was a person (and I do know many cat-like people) someone might be able to tolerate her, but he’d be very hard pressed to love her.”

            “Why do you say ‘her’?”

            “I don’t know . . . When we were children cats were always ‘girls’ and dogs were ‘boys.’ I think most children think that way.”

            “Tell me about the different cats of your childhood.”

            “My grandmother always had cats about her home. They were wild feral things that skittered every time anyone but my grandmother came near. One, I remember in particular, had its tail bobbed off. We heard that someone tried to kill it with an axe, but the cat was too fast and he only got the tail. It was a stubby, grey tabby that was always pregnant or nursing a gang of four to six miniature duplicates of itself (with tails of course.) As children we would spend hours trying to gain the cat’s confidence, slowly sneaking up on it, waiting patiently while holding out pieces of milk-soaked bread, cornering it and gently coaxing it with cooing ‘here puss, puss’ commands. Nothing worked. She also taught her kittens the same mistrust; like their mother, they also avoided our attempts to reach out. We only wanted to show it affection. We wanted to feel its soft fur, feed it, care for it and its kittens but it wouldn’t let us. Nan would ‘shoo’ us out through the door with a swing of her broom, and feed the cat from a saucer under the kitchen table. I remember crawling in through the porch and looking around the corner of the door and seeing the cat curl its pudgy body around the thin knee-sock-clad ankles of my grandmother. She was the only one it trusted.

            “Do you want me to go on?”

            “Yes Mr. Turner. Please keep going.”

            “Well, we had cats of our own as well. Mom got my brother, sister, and I a light brown, beige-coloured cat from the SPCA one Christmas. She was told by the very friendly and helpful workers there that its name was Snowball, but my brother and sister were so young they couldn’t say its name, and it became Nobo. We loved Nobo, but the feeling wasn’t returned. There is a photograph from the time of Nobo, of my sister, my brother and I. It is hanging in my mother and father’s home. It is not your typical picture. Three of us are sitting in a row, dressed in bright seventies-styled clothing. I’m in green, my sister in red, and my brother in blue. None of us are smiling; we’re not even grinning. We are three very serious young children, and our faces and hands bear several scars from playing with Nobo. Nobo never did fit in with the family. It shit almost everywhere, except in the kitty litter box, and he threw up on our carpets, our furniture, and even in the car as we drove across the bridge that brought us back to the SPCA.

“We sat on the chairs in the waiting area with Nobo in a box whining and growling lowly. Mom had the box, that held the cat, on her lap. I sat in the chair on one side of my mother while my two-year-old brother sat on the floor, playing with his fingers, and my three-year-old sister fidgeted around Mom from the chair on her other side, continuously asking questions.

‘Mommy? Why are we giving Nobo away?’

‘I love him Mommy!’

‘Mom? When are we going?’

‘Mommy, what will happen to him after we give him away? Mom?’

“My mother just sat there, trying her best to ignore my sister’s nagging and the continuous moan from inside the cardboard box, waiting for one of the two young girls behind the counter to see her. We waited for a long time.

“When she finally could be seen, my mother brought the boxed cat to the counter and explained the situations and incidents that resulted in her decision to return the cat.

‘Why would you want to return such a sweet pussy cat? You’re a sweetheart aren’t you puss!’ said the pony-tailed girl behind the counter as she held the cat with two hands, wrapping its body under its front legs and bringing its nose to meet her lightly freckled cheek. The cat growled and pinned its ears back flat to its head.

‘It’s like there’s something wrong with the cat. It’s sick or something and it keeps attacking the children,’ explained my mother.

‘I don’t think a cat like this would act that way unless it was provoked in some way. Would you Snowball?’ The bigger and older girl called the cat by the name originally on its ‘adoption’ card.

‘Nobo,’ corrected my sister from below the front of the counter.

‘You realize that you made a very serious commitment when you adopted Snowball, Mrs. Turner,’ the younger girl stated matter-of-factly. ‘A cat requires a lot of love and attention. Are you sure you’ve really given Snowball all the attention he needs?’ she asked and turned to the cat groaning in her arms. She scratched it under the ears, and said, ‘You don’t want to leave your family do you Snowball?’

‘His name is Nobo’ repeated my sister. ‘Tell ‘em Mommy. He’s Nobo.’

“The girl held the cat out over the counter’s front edge, past my mother, and toward my sister and I, ‘You don’t want to give Snowball away do you?’

‘No,’ said my sister, and she started to cry. Mom immediately turned from the counter, grabbed my brother under her arm, clasped my sister’s hand, and simply told me to ‘Come on.’ On the way home we pulled off to the side of the road before we crossed the bridge and Mom cried”

“How did that make you feel?”

“I didn’t know how I felt at the time. I thought Mom was sad that she had to give Nobo away because that’s what my sister and I felt–my brother was too young to know exactly what was happening–but I realized later that it wasn’t giving away the cat that had made her cry; it was the way the ladies behind the counter had made her feel. They didn’t see a woman who had tried her best to give her children something they could love; all they saw was the friggin’ cat. She was trying to protect us from the crazy cat and they accused her of being heartless! That’s all you can expect from cat-people!

“Anyway, it was a few years before Mom tried again. I was nine. The cat was a very young kitten. It was grey and fluffy..I can’t remember its name but I will never forget the image of it as it tried to move around the dining room floor. It didn’t cry. Occasionally it would meow as if asking a question, ‘What’s wrong?’ The dead half of its body would be dragged along by the cat’s two front paws, slipping on the linoleum, hauling the awkwardly positioned hind legs, that were limp and dead, up to me. I was dressed for hockey. I never went. I sat in the waiting room of the SPCA, for the second time, in my hockey gear, crying.

‘It’s too young,’ said the lady behind the counter.

“A lot of time had to pass before the image of the broken kitten stopped haunting me.

“Can I stop now?”

“Sure, if you really want to, but you know that in order for this to work we have to explore everything.”

“I know. It’s just CATS, of all things . . . cats.”

“Do we really have to explain the process again Mr. Turner?”

“No, it’s okay, I know. Cats are my problem. Can I go back to my room now?”

“Sure, but keep our topic in mind. We have to remember everything.”

* * *

The ceiling was uniform. Tiles ran parallel from the front of the room to the back, and from side to side every second tile was placed halfway between the tiles on each side of it. Like bricks. There were eleven rows that each contained eleven tiles. Some started with a full tile against the side wall and others started and ended with a half tile. But there was one different tile. It’s stained. Water damage from a long since repaired leak from a pipe or the roof. No matter how much he tried to focus on the uniform tiles, his eyes wandered back to the stained one. It taunted him. The light from the hallway slipped through the space left by the slightly ajar door and illuminated the row containing the deviant tile. The stain looked like a cartoon caricature of a cat.

He closed his eyes knowing that the tile would still be there when his eyes opened again.

Cats. Cats. Cats. His mind wandered. He wass a boy again. He remembered saying, “The coolest cat in the world is Toby.” Toby was the neighbours’ cat from across the back garden. He could see Toby perched at the top of the pole that anchored the clothesline to the middle of the back yard. It seemed a defiance of several rules of nature that a cat of Toby’s size would be able to climb and precariously place himself atop a twenty foot pole. But there he was, in defiance of the odds. There was a bird toying with him, flying past him, jeering at him. But Toby simply sat there. It looked as if he was asleep. Rolls of fat and fur remained motionless as the cat sat still on its haunches. He remembered watching this game from his upstairs bathroom window. The bird dove closer and closer to the motionless cat. But nothing happened, and after fifteen or twenty minutes he abandoned the scene from the bathroom window after being called by his mother to supper. He remembered later crossing the back area that separated the two rows of houses and looking up at the top of the pole. It had been vacated by the cat some time while he had been eating his chicken and potatoes. He continued toward the back step of the house where Toby lived along with his owner, Cody. Cody had lived there all his life and the two boys had played together from the time they could crawl. As he reached the top step he saw at his feet a grey bundle of feathers. He recognized it as the bird that had been harassing Toby. It was a present.

He wouldn’t tell them about Toby.

* * *

“Have you thought some more?”

“Yes.”

“Are you ready to share?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

“I hate most cats. Most of them are self-centred creatures that use those around them to get their own way. I know some people who are like cats and I can’t stand them.”

“So now it’s most cats?”

“Did I say that? I didn’t mean to. I hate cats!”

“Okay, continue.”

“Well we had this one cat when I was a teenager. It was part Persian. It had white fur that stuck out from its body. It was like most other cats I’d known; it purred and meowed at anyone in the kitchen when it wanted food, and when it saw that the person was preparing the food, it would put on a real show of affection and rub its soft fur against the person’s ankles, tail straight up in the air, until the food was placed in front of it.

“One day as I sat on the chesterfield I saw the cat and the family dog do something I’d never seen before. The dog was lying on the carpet in a spot of sunlight that streamed in from the dining room window. It had taken great care in picking the spot and had circled it a few times before plopping down. His eyes were half closed as he drifted off.

“Dogs are different than cats; their affection is genuine. They are actually happy to see their care-giver at anytime and they always try to please. Call out a dog’s name and his ears perk up, his mouth opens in a partial pant, and he tenses himself for any command, eager to do anything his master asks. Call out a cat’s name and it totally ignores you. It’ll go out of its way to show the person who is trying to get its attention that they have absolutely no meaning in its life. Unless it knows it is being called for food.

“Anyway, the dog lay there in its spot of sunlight. Soon the cat entered the room. It quietly tread across the carpet and came right up to the dog. The dog tensed for a second as the cat rubbed its pure white body against it’s flanks. The cat began to purr as it nuzzled the dog, rubbing its nose and head following the lie of the dog’s fur and finishing with a sweep of its body and erect tail. The dog relaxed, started to fall asleep, and the cat circled the length of the dog’s body until it returned to the head. Then the bastard extended its claws, snapped at the dog’s snout, tearing into the flesh above its nose and causing the dog to yelp and jump away. The cat hissed as the dog ran into the kitchen, and then the cat dropped into the spot of sunlight previously occupied by the dog. See what I mean? They’re manipulative. Nothing matters but satisfying themselves. I hate cats. I know people who are like cats; they use you. They wrap you up emotionally and then, when it comes down to something they want, out come the claws. I hate cats.”

“Do you think you should dwell on those feelings?”

“Well it doesn’t matter now, does it!?

“Does it?”

“What’s done is done.”

“Do you think it could happen again?”

“I guess that’s why I’m here isn’t it? You have to tell me.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me?”

“Yeah. I guess. You know, I eventually got the reputation as a cat killer?”

“You did?”

“Yeah. I got married and started a little business. I painted signs. It wasn’t much, but it paid the basic bills. But sometimes that’s not enough is it? I had a little workshop to paint in. It wasn’t the most sturdy building, but it kept the elements away from me and my signs. But there were the cats. At night while I was in the house spending time with my wife–I never went out, I devoted all my time to making her life better–but while I was away from the workshop, the cats came.

My hillbilly neighbours had as many cats as illegitimate children. The mangy little creatures would squeeze through the cracks of my shop and roam around. They must have loved the feel of fresh paint on their paws because their prints covered the newly painted signs I spent the day creating. Sometimes entire cans of paint’d be knocked over and I’d find puddles of paint with a tacky crust covering my floor or my signs. So I set the traps.”

“Traps?”

“Rat traps. I’d put them out in my shop with pieces of bacon as bait. I knew it wouldn’t kill ‘em. The trap would be set off and it would scare the crap out of the cats. I hoped it would teach ‘em to stay away from my workshop. But it didn’t work. They were too smart or too picky . . . they never touched the bacon. Maybe if I used caviar!

“Anyway, maybe I bitched and complained a little too much. The neighbours believed I’d kill. Then they found one of their cats, way at the back of their garden. Its insides were outside.”

“Did you do it?”

“It doesn’t matter. Don’t you understand? That’s the only thing needed, you know. Get a reputation for something, whether it’s deserved or not, and you’re found guilty, whether you do it or not. So I became known as the cat killer.”

“You don’t like having a reputation as a killer?”

“No.”

“Then what can you do to change that?”

“I guess I could get a new life somewhere else. Somewhere where nobody knows me. Maybe I could find someone who truly loves me. Someone who isn’t cat-like.”

“Who do you know that is cat-like?”

“My wife.”

“What makes you say that?”

“This is the part of my story that you already know.”

“Tell me again. Maybe we’ll find something we overlooked before.”

“I loved her. Just like I loved Nobo and . . . what was her name?”

“The kitten that broke its back?”

“Mom broke it’s back . . . she accidentally slammed the door on it after she called my brother in from outside, so that I could go to hockey. She was trying to get out, but she shouldn’t have. She should have known to stay indoors. She was trying to get out . . . she didn’t want to be with me. I wasn’t good enough. I tried . . . I fed her. I spent time with her. I worked for her. I loved her. But it wasn’t enough; she tried to get out.”

“Are you still talking about the cat?”

“You don’t understand. She wanted to leave. She ignored me when I called her. It hurt. . .and I had the reputation anyway. When I heard her call his name I knew what I had to do. It was as if my whole life had led up to that moment.”

“What do you mean?”

He stares at the ceiling. Uniform blocks fit snugly together without defect. He quickly does the math as he searches for clarification. This room also has eleven rows of eleven tiles, but they are pure white. Pristine. He licks his parched lips and speaks without lowering his eyes. “Why can’t you see it? Don’t you understand . . . his name was Tom. His name was Tom.”