Revenge of the Paste Eaters (28 page)

My parents were perfect. My mother was beautiful and funny and just a little more alive than the other women. My father was quiet and strong and soft-spoken (unless you made him mad). I loved them. They loved me.

I had once been the center of their life, but that had changed. I had recently become a “Big Sister,” as if this were a title of great honor and prestige, or indeed, as if I had asked for or done anything to help effect this change in my life. All of my parents’ friends had come to see the baby, had cooed and aahed over the baby, had talked endlessly about and brought presents for the baby, and then they would turn to me and say, “
There
she is, the proud new Big Sister.” I was not warming to sisterhood as quickly as everyone had hoped.

As a necessary bit of history for my story, my father brought home a kitten for my mother back when I was too small to remember. I was one, at the time. The kitten’s name was Gus, and Gus was our family cat. My mother said Gus ran our house. Gus was an excellent cat and an exceptional mouser, but not a particularly satisfactory pet. When I tried to wrap her in baby blankets and feed her like my mother fed the new baby, Gus scratched me and stalked away. My mother would say, “There’s not much I can do about that—she’s a cat.” Gus slept at the foot of my bed. Several times she had her kittens there while I watched. I was fascinated, my mother less than pleased.

Both of my parents had grown up on dairy farms. Neither of my parents wanted to farm themselves. Farming was never-ending, unrelenting work. “I don’t want to be tied down to a herd of cows my entire life,” my mother said. I understood this. Anytime we went anywhere with my grandparents, we had to be back in time for them to do the milking by 5 p.m., even if we liked where we were and we had been having fun doing what we did. Even if something even better to do was planned for later, we had to leave because they had to go home and feed and milk the cows.

The only things I liked when we helped to milk and feed the cows were the cats. I was young enough that my job, helping with the cows, was primarily to stay out of the way and in the less active places in the barn. There were always cats around the barn. Most of them were half-feral and half-starved, so I would only get to see them when someone poured them a bowl of milk. Their hunger would temporarily overrule their fear. But there would be friendly cats as well, cats I could pet. Kittens to find in their burrows in the haymows. There were always kittens. The life of a barn cat was often short, but remarkably fertile.

Gus had probably been a barn kitten. Some farmer gave her to my father. She had apparently not enjoyed the communal life all that much, because after she came to live with us, she drove off every cat and dog in the neighborhood, often including her own children. And she was a pet, which is one step up from a barn cat, but in those days when money was tight and the farm across the road still smelled like manure in the spring and hay in the late summer, it was not a big step. My parents did not spend “good money” on vet bills. They never had her spayed. She presented them with two to three litters of kittens a year, six kittens to the litter, for a good ten years. We were not allowed to bring the kittens in the house—only Gus could come in the house. The kittens lived outside, where they were hit by cars, or hunted by coons or dogs or who knows what else, and where their expected life span was a little over six months.

No one I knew treated their pets any differently than we treated ours. We were normal.

My mother liked cats. I took the care and welfare of my kittens very seriously, naming each and every one of them, and I found them when Gus hid them from me and I handled them every day. But my mother would sometimes come out and look at them with me and play with them for a while. She was always quick to pick up on their personalities, and she loved to tell funny stories about things the kittens did. Our cats loved her.

I don’t have any memory of what the occasion was. Some friends of my parents had come over to our house. We probably had a big potluck picnic in the yard. There was a big, largely unused gravel pit behind our house, and in the pit there was a big pond, and for some reason my parents hauled a rowboat down onto the pond and my dad rowed my mother around on the water. I presume they must have hauled down more than one boat, so their friends could enjoy themselves as well. What I remember is that all of the adults seemed to have a wonderful time.

One of the kittens—one of maybe a hundred kittens in my childhood, a kitten my mother and I raised whose name I have long since forgotten—one of the kittens jumped into the water and swam behind my parents’ boat, swimming for all he was worth, as if he could not bear to be on land while my mother was out there on that godforsaken water. Wherever they rowed, he followed them, swimming madly, as if his life depended on his ability to keep up with her.

My father had a mean streak. Not a mean streak, really—a little-boy streak, let’s say. A little wayward bent of mischief that could overpower his better judgment sometimes. He may have deliberately rowed the boat farther than he had intended, just to see how far the kitten would swim.

Do I remember the kitten? He wasn’t very old, as I remember, maybe two or three months. In my mental picture he is a dark gray tiger, but then, in my mental picture—which may or may not be real—he is wet. The voice that directs me through the corridors of memory keeps telling me,
It doesn’t matter about the cat—it’s not about the cat.
But if I take away the cat, there is no story.

In my mental images I am standing above them all on a high bank overlooking the pond. I am not allowed to join them or go down into the gravel pit where they are because the pit is “dangerous.” I can see my father with his mischievous grin, rowing the boat along just ahead of the kitten while my mother protests, “Bob . . .” It’s not clear to me whether she wants him to stop, or if her protests are just part of the game. She is laughing. All of the adults are laughing, having a good time.

It seems so simple to me from where I am standing above them. My mother should stop the boat and pick up the kitten. Hold him in her lap for a while. He so obviously loves her, it is perplexing to me that she cannot see it—or that it seems not to make any difference to her if she can. It makes my chest hurt, standing there up above them, to watch how hard he is willing to work just to be with her and how little it matters to her that he does.

Floating in my mind, disconnected from this memory apparently, just lost in the halls of childhood memory is a question.
Just what
would
it take to impress you?

My mother may have stopped the boat. I don’t remember. She may have.

A day or so later the kitten died, my mother said, of exhaustion and probably pneumonia.

I had easily a hundred cats in my life, when I was a child. I can tell a lot of cat stories, many with more details certainly than this one. I don’t know why it’s stuck so stubbornly in my mind all these years, just a story about a silly kitten that wanted to be with my mother so much he killed himself trying to reach her, and she thought it was funny.

tyger, tyger, burning bright

as i think this
through it is just about two weeks after the amazing Las Vegas act of Siegfried and Roy came to an unpleasant end. A performing tiger grasped Roy by the throat and towed him backstage for a timeout. Many people are amazed that this kind of thing could happen to a man who worked with big cats all of his life (well, two people are amazed), while others are just amazed he’s still alive. Neither amazes me, particularly. I live with a tiger. What amazes me is that the man worked and lived with tigers for thirty years and apparently he was allowed to sleep.

My tiger weighs twelve pounds. He doesn’t know this, of course: if you were to introduce him to one of Siegfried and Roy’s six-hundred-pound cats, he would fluff up his ruff and growl and lash his tail as if he were annoyed by the trespasses of another animal so obviously too stupid to live. He would give the interloper the opportunity to flee, not because the notion of combat concerned him, but because that is what tigers do. And because he is not completely stupid, if the interloper refused to leave, my tiger might walk over to sit under a low-lying chair and issue endless strings of threats and foul consequences, but he would not run. On a trip to the vet once he hissed at my truck, which weighs considerably more than a white tiger.

Roy is alive because his tiger was vexed; there is no doubt in my mind. If the tiger had wanted him dead, he would be dead. The problem Roy ran into—that all of us who live with tigers run into—is that vexing a tiger is neither difficult nor a notably slow process. My tiger, for instance, can go from dead asleep to vexed in a millisecond. I can be sleeping peacefully in my bed, flop out a hand and accidentally strike my sleeping tiger, and find him wrapped around my hand like an inverse porcupine, all twenty claws burrowing for bone, all four hundred teeth just locked around my wrist, gnawing for my jugular.

I have my own professional opinion of what happened between Roy and Montecore onstage that day. I wasn’t there, I didn’t see it, but any number of opinions have been offered with equally impressive qualifications and this is mine.

Montecore was having a bad day.

Montecore said to himself, “Enough of this puny little twit who can’t even hunt for himself—I’m taking over the pride.”

He said to himself, “I’ll just grab him gently by the throat and drag him over to the side and explain the new rules to him. He’s not a bad man—he feeds me—he just needs a little training.”

When your tiger weighs twelve pounds and he decides to take command of the house you simply say, “Excuse me?” and he wanders off to take a bath and smooth out the kinks in his coat. When your tiger weighs six hundred pounds and he decides to take command of the house, you may not get the chance to say anything.

Perhaps Roy was just overtired that day.

I suggest this because I too live with a mobile alarm clock. I woke up this morning (one of the many times I woke up this morning) when twelve pounds of tiger jumped off the headboard and landed on my belly. I woke up when he burrowed under my blankets and affectionately kneaded my left ear with his claw. I woke up this morning when he settled in beside me, belly to belly, and retracted all twenty of his nails, which were still embedded, like tiny journalists, in my soft and comforting flesh.

I gave up that whole silly notion of sleeping in eventually because I had to go to the medicine cabinet and stanch the bleeding anyway, but as I did so I imagined this scene in my mind. Roy is in bed. Asleep. He stayed out late the night before—much the way I did—and now he is trying to make up his sleep. One of the many tigers who live in his house comes galloping through in a rip-tear (which all cats are prey to), skids to a stop on the carpet, and thinks,
Oh my God—it’s morning and he’s still asleep.

I’ll just climb up on this headboard here and bounce on his chest.

I will wake him gently as I wake my fellow tigers by lying belly to belly next to him and gently kneading his pathetic fur with my claws.
This is a sign of intense affection among tigers. This is why all cats have seven different kinds of hair layered in their coats—to survive the affections of their peers.

Look at that foolish man, he has accidentally buried his head under his blankets. I will just burrow in and gently wash his ear with my tongue.
I have never been washed with a tiger tongue, but if my own tiny tiger is any gauge it must be like being scraped with stainless steel Velcro.

Why do you put up with this?
my friends ask me—as I am sure they ask Roy. I expect the question makes about equal sense to us. Because they are cats. Because that is the way cats are. Because part of living with anything is respecting those qualities that make it unique and define what it is. It does not surprise me in the least that while they wheeled Roy out on a stretcher, his greatest concern was that they not hurt his cat.

The cat did nothing wrong.

The cat was just being a cat.

That particular cat weighed six hundred pounds, but what he did is not remarkably different from what my twelve-pound companion, so aptly named “Babycakes,” might have done in the same situation.

Cats are cats. Dogs are dogs. Grizzly bears are grizzly bears. I suspect the bear expert who was just recently mauled to death by his expertise would say the same thing: we can choose to see an animal however we like, but what we want to see will not change their nature. Their own rules for behavior are instinctual, immutable, and effective. They work.

Roy Horn understood the risk and he willingly took it and thirty years later he was badly hurt. I am sorry for his injury. I am sorry about the man who was mauled to death in Alaska by bears.

As I sit here writing, my cat, who has worked so hard to get me up, has migrated up into my lap and then into my arms, where, his heart beating against mine, he has settled into a nap. He sees no irony in this, and for him, there is none.

insurance

when i was about
nine years old I ran over to our telephone to call my best friend and share some amazing piece of information with her and when I picked up the receiver she started talking to me. I had never dialed her number. The phone had never rung. Astounded by this undeniable evidence, I determined that I had extrasensory perception and I was destined to grow up to locate dead bodies for the FBI. Inevitably some would doubt me, but I would become legendary for my gift, which I decided, right there on the spot, would be finding missing children.

That was forty-five years ago and so far exactly no missing children have reported their whereabouts to me, but I was young then, and I did not yet understand how quickly dreams can wither and die.

I shared my dream with my father’s mother, who told me she too was blessed with the Gift. She gave me several examples of her talent, all of which caused my eyebrows to furrow and my eyes themselves to flit nervously over to my mother. I wanted to become rich and famous for doing good (effortlessly, if at all possible). I had not anticipated that seeing the ghost of some several-days-dead neighbor might come as part of that package. I was willing to
find
dead people—I was not particularly anxious to talk to them, or watch them wandering around my house.