Cat Tales (9 page)

Even the overhead sign was now missing letters;
ANGELIQUE'S
reduced to
ANGEL'S
.

He opened the café's door, and no ginger cat jumped down from its chair to wind about his legs and meow a greeting. The air smelled of cigarettes and fryer grease.

“I'm looking for Angelique.” Ben raised his voice to be heard above the football match playing on the widescreen.

“Don't know any Angelique,” answered the burly man behind the bar.

“You must know her! This was her café. Angelique's.” His voice sounded desperate even in his own ears.

The café had been a wreck of a building when she'd bought it. Financed by a loan from a well-to-do aunt who had considered it a wise investment in her niece's future. Angelique had credited her cat Thomas with its discovery. “You knew exactly what I wanted, Thomas. Always looking out for me, aren't you?” Ben laughed at Angelique's attributing Thomas with an uncanny nature, and she laughed with him. Thomas's leading Angelique to the site — albeit in a merry chase — remained a puzzle, though. According to Angelique, the site was far beyond Thomas's territory, and it was unlikely he'd been there before.

“Are you sure you want to do this,” Ben had asked, surveying the broken windows, the sagging ceiling, and warped floor. “Oh yes,” Angelique had answered, a fierce, determined gleam in her eye. “This is only the beginning, the first big step.” And he'd helped her rip out the inside of that place and rebuild it to her specifications .With Thomas supervising from his perch on a ladder, meowing his encouragement, ensuring they always broke for lunch.

Once, when Ben and Thomas were alone, Angelique running an errand, Ben had turned round and found Thomas sitting on his perch staring at him with narrowed, unblinking eyes. The hairs on the back of Ben's neck had pricked. Was the cat more than he seemed? Then Thomas had flicked a paw at a passing moth and became nothing more than a cat again.

“Look, what do you want from me?” the bartender demanded of Ben. “I'm the hired help, okay? I started six months ago.” He went back to washing glasses. “The place was Angel's then.”

Ben turned, pushed open the door, and stepped back into the graveled parking lot. He'd been gone too long, he thought, he'd returned too late. His reasons for leaving seemed trivial now.

“I need to get away from here,” he'd told Angelique. Had it been three years ago? Her future was assured by then, her café more popular than even he could have imagined. “This town's too small, and there's so much out there I want to see.” He'd held her close, this home-town girl who was so special. “I can't promise I'll be back,” he'd said, not wanting her to feel she had to wait for him. “I understand,” she'd whispered in his ear. As he'd left she'd stood in the door-way of her little café, her beloved cat Thomas cradled in her arms, her eyes shimmering with unshed tears.

His first few months on the road had been exhilarating.

Long stretches of empty highway that disappeared into spectacular sunsets. Azure, snow-capped ranges hovering on a distant horizon. White surf surging against a rocky shoreline. Big cities with bright lights and their fast-paced lifestyle. New places, new faces, new experiences. They'd help blot out thoughts of Angelique.

The months kept sliding by while he moved about the map, taking one job after the other. His latest occupation was driving transports long distance. As the number of miles accumulated, though, and more time slipped by, he found himself, inexplicably, growing increasingly restless. The urge to move on hit him hardest in the evenings. The feeling that down the road or in the next town, he'd find something bigger, better, more satisfying.

W
HEN HE spotted a ginger cat looking up at his hotel window one night, “Thomas!” burst out of him so unexpectedly, it surprised even himself. But the jammed window refused to budge, and by the time he'd raced downstairs, there was no sign of the cat. “Thomas?”

He laughed at himself, then. Thomas was hundreds of miles behind him. The cat had simply been another ginger cat. Ben shook his head over his inexplicable reaction and returned to his room, blaming the ache in his chest on the pizza he'd bolted for lunch.

He was eating supper in a roadside tavern the next time he saw a ginger cat. He looked up and choked on his mouthful of chicken. The cat was sitting on the hood of his transport serenely washing its face with a paw. Ben raced for the door, pushing past the proprietor who snatched at his sleeve. “Hey, you haven't paid.” When he reached the transport, the cat had vanished. Ben searched for paw prints which should have marked the hood and the thick dust on the ground. There were none, and he determinedly dismissed the cat as a figment of his imagination brought on by fatigue.

Over the next few weeks Ben saw or thought he saw a ginger cat almost every time he turned around. Especially late evenings. A blur of orange caught by the corner of his eye. An orange tail disappearing round a corner.

T
he night he saw a ginger cat sitting on the front steps of a house, he'd had enough. He slammed the brakes so hard his transport almost slithered into the ditch. The cat continued to stare at him, the tip of its tail twitching. “Thomas!” Ben shouted. It had the same white chest, the same white front paw. Ben tried to keep it in sight as he clambered out the driver's side and raced round the front of his truck. But when he reached the front walk of the house, the step was empty.

Ben hammered on the door. He had to know what was going on. Were there that many ginger cats in the world? “I want to ask about your cat,” he said to the woman who opened the door. “We don't have a cat,” she answered.

“A neighbor's cat, then, or a stray. Big, ginger cat with a white chest and one white front paw.” He was out of breath, his heart racing.

“I haven't seen a cat like that around. Why? Have you lost one?”

The question brought Ben up short. As if someone had held up a stop sign and the brakes of his truck had locked. Had he lost a cat? Had he lost a cat and something more? He couldn't deny any longer that the ache in his chest each time the cat appeared was really a stab of loneliness. That the reason he always saw the cat as Thomas was that Angelique would have been close by.

Ben climbed back into the cab of his truck. He would make this final delivery and then turn round. What he'd been restlessly searching for didn't lie ahead of him but behind. He couldn't wait to get back to Angelique's.

Now, here he was outside the café, and he'd arrived too late. Even the shutters hung crooked on the café's dirty windows. Had he lost Angelique forever? Had she married and moved away? He suppressed the thought that something terrible had had happened to her.

The evening's chill and damp seeped into him, and Ben hugged himself for warmth. He'd never felt so alone, so bereft. He'd held the café's image in his mind as never changing, with Angelique forever standing in the doorway cradling Thomas.

When a ginger cat disappeared into the alley up the street, Ben almost missed it. Was it his imagination again? Another subconscious desire? Or this time was it really — “Thomas? Thomas, wait!” He raced up the street.

The alley was deserted. “Thomas!” he called all the same, the stabbing ache unbearable.

Round the corner of a building at the alley's far end, the ginger cat appeared. It studied him with pale eyes.

“Thomas?” Ben whispered. The cat meowed. Then it trotted toward him, tail high in recognition. Ben gathered the cat up and felt the deep rumble of its contentment. “Thomas, old man, you don't now how good it is to see you.” The cat butted Ben's chin with its head, as pleased, it seemed, to see Ben.

“Where's Angelique? How'd she lose the café? I'll do anything to get it back for her.”

“Anything?” a familiar voice laughed. Ben turned round. “Will you mop floors and wait tables?” Angelique asked.

Ben set Thomas down. Then Angelique was in his arms, and nothing had ever felt so right, so good.

“Anything,” he whispered, not wanting to let her go, breathing in the familiar, sweet scent of her hair, feeling the warmth of her body. “Anything and everything as long as we are together.” She kissed him then and melted away the cold ache in his heart. “I've missed you,” he said.

Then Angelique took his hand. “Are you hungry? I'll cook supper, and then you can tell me where you've been, all that you've done, and all you've seen.”

Ben let himself be led, Thomas going before them. “I knew you'd come back to me. But Thomas was growing anxious. You'd been gone so long. He's been out almost every night of late, looking for you, I think, worried you were lost and wouldn't find us.”

Thomas now sat on the back veranda of a large Victorian house, looking both regal and smug. “He has?” Ben shot the cat a bewildered look. Thomas's smile was inscrutable.

“I . . . when I saw what had become of the café . . .” Ben tore his gaze away from the cat. “I didn't know what to think. I thought the café was your life.”

“Don't you remember me saying the café was only the beginning?”

She opened the back door, and Ben found himself in a kitchen, with copper pots hanging overhead, tantalizing aromas rising from steaming pots, a cook filling plates that were carried away by waiters. He caught a glimpse through an open door of couples seated round linen-draped tables, dining in the soft glow of candlelight. “I sold the café in order to buy this place. It now belongs to me and the bank.”

Ben burst out laughing. Here he'd assumed something dreadful. That he'd been seeing the ginger cat as a cry for help, that Angelique needed rescue.

“I wouldn't have known to look for you here,” he admitted, embarrassed he'd underestimated Angelique so badly.

“Of course you would have,” she insisted. “Angelique's had to stay with the café, but I named the restaurant with your finding us in mind.” She pointed at the bib of her white apron. Below the embroidered figure of an orange cat, printed in gold letters, was a name Ben knew would have surely drawn him.
CHEZ
THOMAS
.

Sandra Beswetherick's short stories have appeared in
magazines published in Australia, Great Britain, the
USA, and Sweden. Her story “The Twilight Zone on
the Rideau Canal” is part of the Canadian mystery
anthology
Locked Up,
launches in April 2007. Sandra lives near Seeley's Bay, Ontario, with her husband and two cats. They share their property with
deer, coyote, the odd skunk, and several raccoons.

3 HAIKU

by Mark Budman

You have more names
Than a Spanish grandee. Your lives
I'm too envious to count.

  Your eyes change colors
Like a girl's moods. Circe!
   Turn me into a mouse.

Your paws weave time
Oh, awaiting Penelope!
Your Tom will return

THE CAT

by Charles Baudelaire

Come, my beautiful cat, to my amorous core;
Retract your claws inside your paws
And let me plunge into your wise eyes once more
That are mingled of agate and metals.

When my fingers caress at leisure
Your head and your back's elasticity
And when my hand's become drunk with pleasure
From your palpating electricity.

I see my woman in spirit. Her regard,
Like yours, amiable beast,
Profound and cold, cuts and cracks like a sword;

And, from her head to her feet,
A delicate look, a dangerous perfume
Swims around her brown body's bloom.

BLACK PUMPS & A
SKANKY TOM

by Pat Esden

F
ERP DIDN'T MIND living in the camper trailer that the selectmen had set up for him behind the fairgrounds. He didn't mind it, but he liked sitting on Church Street watching traffic better than staring out a window at the vacant grandstand.

No one had actually told him he couldn't spend his days hanging around downtown. They just said that with winter coming he'd freeze to death living on the streets.

Ferp turned on the faucet and studied his hands as he washed them, rough as a boar's ass, but even after ten years on the streets he didn't have any frozen fingers. You didn't survive by being stupid; his Pappy had taught him that. And he weren't stupid enough to believe the winter cold had spurred the selectman's generosity. The coming of the leaf-peeping tourists and the ski crowd had made them want to get him off the streets.

But he weren't about to complain, that wasn't the generous thing for him to do. Let the selectmen feel compassionate; after all he didn't really mind the camper. It didn't suffocate him like living in a house did.

And there were the cats.

Ferp reached up over the sink, took down the box of powered milk and shook a couple of cupfuls into a galvanized pan. The state gave the stuff out for free on the 15th of every month. He held the pan under the faucet, slowly adding water to the powered milk — awful stuff, but the cats liked it.

Scuffing across the braided rug, Ferp opened the camper door. The frosty air clung in his nostrils as he shouted. “Punky, punky, punky!” No need to call them twice. The critters appeared from everywhere: blacks, calicos, tabbies, and a couple of cats so ragged-up from fighting it was hard to tell what they had started out looking like.

Ferp yanked on his left pants leg to help his bum knee raise and lower as he stepped down onto the pallet that served as his stoop. He set down the pan of milk and bent over to examine the gifts the cats had left for him in the night: a mouse head, a thin bit of intestine, a chickadee's wing, and a charge card —

Now that made no sense.

He picked up the thin rectangle of plastic, turning it over and holding it out so he could read it without his glasses. No, not a charge card: it had a picture of a bus on the front with a bar code on the back, mangled up a bit, but definitely a bus pass.