56 – Three needy cats
Bitzy was gone.
Vanished while we were at the model, perhaps slipping out of
the apartment when the men two nights earlier when we were too stoned to
notice.
She had been acting strange since we brought her back from
the airport, out of her element, as if she existed in the Mountain Time Zone of
Colorado, and could not adjust to the change when we moved her here.
We searched high and low, crawling through the apartment on
our fours for a cat’s eye view of the world, she was nowhere to be found.
Louise was as upset at the loss of the cat as she had been
over Tim, crying on my shoulder, yet I could do nothing to comfort her.
The whole effort to bring the cat here seemed wasted to me –
after all we had done in the last hours in Boulder for a cat she refused to
leave behind, only to have it abandon her here, another painful sign of a
change the night of drugs had suggested, an ill omen that stirred up an unnamed
terror in me as if I already knew things would get a lot darker soon.
I suggested we might get another cat.
I expected outrage, and her to launch into a tirade about no
other cat being able to replace the one she’d lost.
But Louise only blinked at me, mumbling, “Another cat?”
“We can’t bring back the one you lost,” I said. “But we can
find one that might help fill the void.”
Behind the tears a doubtful look. She gave me a weak smile,
but shook her head, “I’m not sure…”
“How about a kitten?” I asked “You love kittens.”
She glanced back into empty space of the apartment from near
where we stood at the kitchen counter. She seemed to sense of vacancy, and
shuddered.
“We can go look” she said.
As with almost all of our journeys, we either walked or we
procured a cab, and since we knew this would likely require visits to a number
of places, I hurried out and down the stairs to the phone booth at the end of
the block to call a cab for a drive downtown.
We visited a number them with the same vigilance we had when
searching for Bitzy inside and outside the house. We didn’t find kittens, but
other, needy almost desperate cats behind bars, gazes glazed over from lack of
hope that anybody would want any of them, when Louise wanted to take them all
home, and would have, had I not stopped her, telling her she needed to decide
on one, and when she could not, we wandered back to Hollywood, letting the cab
drop us off near Fountain and Vine, where to our ill luck we saw a pack of kids
in front of the Ranch Market with a cardboard box spilling over with kittens –
or so it seemed, three kittens so exuberant they seemed like an army, each
leaping up to grasp the edge of the box so as to climb out.
“Look!” Louise said, sounding happier than she had at any
time during our long Odessey, her voice nearly as shrill as the kids.’ “Aren’t
they cute?”
“I guess so,” I said, trying to sound uninterested.
She reached in and picked up one of the kittens, which
squirmed in her hands and squeaked.
“This one has a white paw,” she said. “Look.”
She held the little devil up in front of my face, so I could
not help but look. I nodded. The cat’s blue/green eyes glittered with the
lights from the store over us. The little monster squeaked again, then suddenly
flung itself at me and clung with all four paws full of claws to my chest.
Louise turned back to the box and picked up another kitten,
an all gray one.
“It looks just like smoke,” she said, holding this one up
for me to examine as well, then shoved this one into my arms two cats crawled
up my chest, clawing me as if mountain climbers.
Louise retrieved the third, which looked pretty much like
the first, a calico with markings that criss-crossed its face. This one simply
lacked the white paw the first one hand.
Louise cooed over this, as if she was the cat, purring and
smiling for the first time since losing Bitzy.
“Which one do you want?” I asked.
“I can’t make up my mind, I love them all.”
“Well, you have to,” I said.
“Why can’t we take all three?”
“Three?” I said, squirming at the cat with the white paw
climbed up onto my shoulder, and perched there, as much a bird as a cat.
“Why not?”
“That’s a lot of cats,” I said.
But Louise looked at me, her eyes still full of hurt, the
last cat clinging to her chest like a child.
“All right,” I said.
I didn’t like this; it felt like more of the same ill wind
that had plagued us since the man with the poll had come to our house, a new
albatross I felt would hang around our necks as we sailed into new and
uncharted seas.
Louise seemed untouched by any of my fears as rattled on as
we made our way back towards our apartment, down Fountain and through the maze
of streets that had become too familiar in our daily treks to and from
Hollywood Boulevard.
“We’ll name the one with the white paw White Paw,” she
announced. “And the gray one, Smoky, and the other…” she paused, thought for a
moment as she stared into the box she carried. “… the other we’ll call Tammy.”
“I wish you would be reasonable,” I said, but knew I could
no more talk her out of taking three than I could have talked her out of
leaving Bitzy behind in Boulder. She had a huge hole in her heart from her lost
cat, and now it would take three kittens to fill it. “What are we going to do
with three cats? What will our landlord say?”
I pictured the faces of the man and woman from the first
floor who had complained to the police about our party, and who clearly no
longer liked us, and would use any excuse to be rid of us, and here we seemed
to be giving them exactly what they needed, if they ever found out.
“Don’t worry,” Louise assured me. “They’ll be fun. They’ll
liven up the apartment.”
“You mean they’ll drive us crazy,” I said, again unable to
put off the strange omens I felt, not so much about the kittens, but about how
life was steering off into an unexpected direction, one that I could not
predict and was scared to discover where we might end up.
“No, they won’t,” Louise said. “Besides, you wouldn’t want
to break up a family. Look how attached they are to each other.”
“It’s done all the time,” I said. “If they’re as cute as you
think they are, someone else might one or even two of them.”
“We can’t be sure of that, and we wouldn’t want the ones
left behind to feel alone,” Louise said. “I hate for things to be alone.”
By that time, we’d reached the driveway, and needed to be
careful so that the landlord didn’t spot what we carried in the box.
The two story box like buildings stood to either side of us,
small porches overhanging filled with bits of people’s lives, planters and
such, lounge chairs, towels draped like flags, our landlord’s apartment to the
left half way up with their front door facing towards the back, with our stairs
climbing up to the landing and rail above, all too visible to any random glance
out the window.
We climbed these like thieves and found comfort only when
the landing blocked all view from below, and yet, still, we did not make too
much noise, drawing the key out, unlocking the door with care, and then closing
it as if we had just gotten away with something and we had.
Louise took the cats out of the box and put them down in the
middle of the big room, the three of them looking confused, strangers in a
strange carpeted world. All three cried, and I tried to hush them, not sure
whether or not their voices could carry beyond these walls, they sounding more
like children than kittens, lost souls we’d rescued only to bring them into a
completely alien place that was our home, but not yet theirs.
“They must be hungry,” Louise said.
This was among one of her answers for many problems, mood
shifts or even the onset of a cold.
She vanished into the narrow kitchen, leaving me to face the
three crying upturned faces, each clearly missing their mother, though they
seemed to know the sound of a refrigerator door opening then closing and
charged in that direction to meet Louise returning with a carton of milk and a
bowl, three stumbling and bumbling stooges nearly tripping her as she tried to
put the bowl down and fill it with liquid.
“Come and get it,” she said, but the three delinquents
needed no urging, plunging their faces into the cool white as if to drown.
Louise stared down at them with the same satisfied look of a
mother. Then, she frowned.
“We should get them some real food,” she said.
“Real food?” I asked, relieved that the cries had ceased.
“Cat food. I should have thought to get some when we were
still at the market. We should go get some now.”
“And leave the kittens here alone?” I asked, glancing back
at the three little bandits, whose faces were fully engulfed in bowl, each
lapping up the white liquid as if their first or last meal.
“What are they going to hurt?”
“They might start crying and attract the landlord.”
“I think they’ll be too tired for that. They’ll go to sleep
once they’ve finished.”
“I suppose so,” I said, but still had my doubts.
Louise smiled and squeezed my arm. “Tell me you don’t like
them now?” she dared.
I said nothing, but it felt wrong, and not just because I
was scared of the landlord. These were intruders just as the men the other
night have been, invaders in our lives without any history. Bitzy had made
sense. She connected this place with Colorado, and made me feel as if we still
could go back if we had to, a life line to our old lives. She like the money I’d
stolen was a firm connection to the past.
But these three
seemed to lead to a new place, to something unknown, and now the only
connection I had to the past was the money, and I felt terribly guilty about
that.
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