Cat Tales (7 page)

S
UCH WERE the beginnings of the Great Spilled Water Mystery that preoccupied the human members of the Gummitch household for weeks. Not every day, but frequently, and sometimes two and three times a day, Gummitch's little bowl was upset. No one ever saw the young cat do it. But it was generally accepted that he was responsible, though for a time Old Horsemeat had theories that he did not voice involving Sissy and Baby.

Kitty-Come-Here brought Gummitch a firm-footed rubber bowl for his water, though she hesitated over the purchase for some time, certain that he would be able to taste the rubber. This bowl was found upset just like his regular china one and like the tin one she briefly revived from his kitten days. All sorts of clues and possibly related circumstances were seized upon and dissected. For instance, after about a month of the mysterious spillings, Kitty-Come-Here announced, “I've been thinking back and as far as I can remember it never happens except on sunny days.”

“Oh, Good Lord!” Old Horsemeat reacted. Meanwhile Kitty-Come-Here continued to try to concoct a kind of water that would be palatable to Gummitch.

As she continued without success, her formulas became more fantastic. She quit boiling it for the most part but added a pinch of sugar, a spoonful of beer, a few flakes of oregano, a green leaf, a violet, a drop of iodine . . .

“No wonder he rejects the stuff,” Old Horsemeat was tempted to say, but didn't.

Finally Kitty-Come-Here, inspired by the sight of a greenly glittering rack of it at the supermarket, purchased a half gallon of bottled water from a famous spring. She wondered why she hadn't thought of this step earlier — it certainly ought to take care of her haunting convictions about the unpalatableness of chlorine or fluorides. (She herself could distinctly taste the fluorides in the tap water, though she never mentioned this to Old Horsemeat.)

One other development during the Great Spilled Water Mystery was that Gummitch gradually emerged from depression and became quite gay. He took to dancing cat schottisches and gigues im promptu in the living room of an evening and so forgot his dignity as to battle joyously with the vacuum cleaner dragon when Old Horsemeat used one of the smaller attachments to curry him; the young cat clutched the hairy round brush to his stomach and madly clawed it as it
whuffled
menacingly. Even the afternoon he came home with a shoulder gashed by the Mad Eunuch he seemed strangely light-hearted and debonair.

T
HE MYSTERY was abruptly solved one sunny Sunday afternoon. Going into the bathroom in her stocking feet, Kitty-Come-Here saw Gummitch apparently trying to drown himself in the toilet. His hindquarters were on the seat but the rest of his body went down into the bowl. Coming closer, she saw that his forelegs were braced against the opposite side of the bowl, just above the water surface, while his head thrust down sharply between his shoulders. She could distinctly hear rhythmic lapping.

To tell the truth, Kitty-Come-Here was rather shocked. She had certain rather fixed ideas about the delicacy of cats. It speaks well for her progressive grounding that she did not shout at Gummitch but softly summoned her husband.

By the time Old Horsemeat arrived the young cat had refreshed himself and was coming out of his “well” with a sudden backward undulation. He passed them in the doorway with a single mew and upward look, and then made off for the kitchen.

The blue and white room was bright with sunlight. Outside the sky was blue and the leaves were rustling in a stiff breeze. Gummitch looked back once, as if to make sure his human congeners had followed, mewed again, and then advanced briskly toward his little bowl with the air of one who proposes to reveal all mysteries at once.

Kitty-Come-Here had almost outdone herself. She had for the first time poured him the bottled water, and she had floated a few rose petals on the surface.

Gummitch regarded them carefully, sniffed at them, and then proceeded to fish them out one by one and shake them off his paw. Old Horsemeat repressed the urge to say, “I told you so.”

When the water surface was completely free and winking in the sunlight, Gummitch curved one paw under the side of the bowl and jerked.

Half the water spilled out, gathered itself, and then began to flow across the floor in little rushes, a silver ribbon sparkling with sunlight that divided and sub-divided and reunited as it followed the slope. Gummitch crouched to one side, watching it intensely, following its progress inch by inch and foot by foot, almost pouncing on the little temporary pools that formed, but not quite touching them. Twice he mewed faintly in excitement.

“H
E'S PLAYING with it,” Old Horsemeat said incredulously.

“No,” Kitty-Come-Here countered wide-eyed, “he's creating something. Silver mice. Water-snakes. Twinkling vines."

“Good Lord, you're right,” Old Horsemeat agreed. “It's a new art form. Would you call it water painting? Or water sculpture? Somehow I think that's best. As if a sculptor made mobiles out of molten tin.”

“It's gone so quickly, though,” Kitty-Come-Here objected, a little sadly. “Art ought to last. Look, it's almost all flowed over to the wall now.”

“Some of the best art forms are completely fugitive,” Old Horsemeat argued. “What about improvisation in music and dancing? What about jam sessions and shadow figures on a wall? Gummitch can always do it again — in fact, he must have been doing it again and again last month. It's never exactly the same, like waves or fire. But it's beautiful.”

“I suppose so,” Kitty-Come-Here said. Then coming to herself, she continued, “But I don't think it can be healthy for him to go on drinking water out of the toilet. Really.”

Old Horsemeat shrugged. He had an insight about the artistic temperament and the need to dig for inspiration into the smelly fundamentals of life, but it was difficult to express delicately.

Kitty-Come-Here sighed, as if bidding farewell to all her efforts with rose petals and crystalline bottled purity and vanilla extract and the soda water which had amazed Gummitch by faintly spitting and purring at him.

“Oh, well,” she said, “I can scrub it out more often, I suppose.”

Meanwhile, Gummitch had gone back to his bowl and, using both paws, overset it completely. Now, with nose a-twitch, he once more pursued the silver streams alive with suns, refreshing his spirit with the sight of them. He was fretted by no problems about what he was doing. He had solved them all with one of his characteristically sharp distinctions: there was the
sacred
water, the sparklingly clear water to create with, and there was the water with character, the water to
drink.
U

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) was best known for his
Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series of sword-and-sorcery
adventures, but he also wrote a broad range of fantastic fiction, including such classics as
The Big Time
and
The Wanderer
(which features a memorable cat-woman alien). An entire volume of his cat fiction,
Gummitch and Friends,
was published by
Donald M. Grant in 1992. This includes the
Hugo-winning novella, “Ship of Shadows.” Leiber ultimately collected just about every award the field
has ever had to offer.

NON-EXISTENT CATS

by Tony Richards

T
HIS, AS THE TITLE already tells you, is all about cats that aren't there. And by ‘cats,' I mean the small domestic kind, not big lions and other stuff, or cool, jazz-type people.

Are you with me so far? Good.

Anyway, it started like this: The phone went, about nine in the morning. I was half way into my pants, the store opening at ten, and had to hop over to answer it. And when I pick it up I hear like,
“Lenn-iieee!”

My name's Leonard Melnic, by the way. Just Len to my friends. My girlfriend's the only person that I let call me ‘Lenny' since, like what, I'm still going to have people call me Lenny when I'm one hundred years old or something? I'm twenty four, and am into comic books and garage music and all kind of films, except sub-titled ones. I have this party trick where I play bongos and eat a whole Big Mac at the same time —
you
try it. Not so easy, huh? And I work at that big alternative bookstore on Union, Rolling Paper.

My girlfriend's Megan, and she's only — erm — eighteen, and a Goth. Which means she has long, very straight dark hair with purple streaks in it, and is into S&M clothes and imagery, though not the reality. We tried a spanking session once, at
her
insistence, and she didn't speak to me for practically a whole week.

So anyway,
“Lenn-iieee!”

And it's Megan, which surprises me since she only works at the beauty parlour in the afternoon and is usually right out of it until at least ten thirty.

“Hey, what's up?”

“Get over here,
please!”

“Are you all right?”

“Of course not! There's been a cat in my room! I got up to pee, and there were scratches on the furniture!”

So I look at my watch. Megan's is ten minutes away. The store? Twenty, in the other direction.

“Is it still there?”

“That's what I want you to find out!”

And then she starts making this whimpering noise that simply breaks my heart.

The strange thing about Megan, see, is that even though she's a Goth and into all kinds of witchy stuff like candles and amulets and Tolkein posters, she just can't stand cats. In the first place, they give her the creeps. And in the second, she's allergic to them.

I don't like them either. They're all sniffy, like some fox who won't give you the time of day. And they have this thing where they jump in your lap and you try to get them off, and they don't want to move and dig their claws in. Yow! But I'm not scared of them the way Megan is. So I get over there.

I go up the staircase to her third floor walk-up, and when I knock on the door I hear this thump, like someone jumping around. And the door comes open a few seconds later, and there's Megan standing there, looking cute in just her scanties, but looking pretty wideeyed and scared with it.

“What was that noise?” I ask her.

“I was standing on the bed.”

“I thought that was for mice? What, like a cat can't climb up on a bed?”

“Oh, shut up, stupid! Just get in here!” And she yanks me inside, strong despite the fact she's pretty tiny.
“Look
for the damn thing!”

So I begin The Great Cat Hunt. Megan hops back on the bed, teetering around and looking foxier than ever. And she keeps trying to direct me, going, “over there, look behind that,” and such-like. But who's doing the work here, me or her?

All I find of interest, in the end, is a pile of old teen romance mags in the bottom of a closet, and a big purple vibrator that I've never seen before. And Megan jumps off the bed and snatches it out of my hand and puts it away at that point, so she's obviously calmed down a little.

“There's nothing here,” I tell her, still smirking a bit about the vibrator and the way she's looking flushed. “It probably went out through the window.”

“That's the crazy thing!” she wails now. “There weren't any windows open! How could the thing get in
or
out?”

So I ask her to show me the scratches. And there they are, clear as day, on two of the legs of her rickety dining table and one of the chairs. I bend down and inspect them carefully. And finally, I purse my lips.

“Hmm, it looks like a cat.” I hope that my tone sounds impressive. “Do you think it could be Mr. Paws?”

But Megan sounds less than overwhelmed by my brilliant deduction.

Fortunately for her, there are no cats in her building since pets aren't allowed. But if you look out her kitchen window into the space out back, you can usually see a big fat tabby sitting on the first floor window ledge of the building behind this one. He belongs to an old lady, and is the laziest cat you've ever seen, only ever moving himself at meal-times. We looked out the window now, and there he was, a rotund ball offur.

Mr. Paws couldn't climb onto a cinderblock, let alone up here.

So we're both pretty puzzled. I do my best to calm her down, which involves kidding her a lot and tickling her. And the fact that she's still in her underwear starts to get to both of us.

But I'm already late at the store. I swear it, man, this Protestant Work Ethic shit? It's gonna be the death of me.

N
INE-THIRTY the next morning, the phone goes again.

“Lenn-iiee!”

And I think,
oh fuck.

“My
curtains
are shredded! I think it's still hiding in here!”

But I know perfectly well it isn't. Megan's place isn't that big, and I searched every square inch of it. I remind her of that, getting rather annoyed while I do so.