It's Like This, Cat

by Emily Cheney Neville

  Nick is better at math than I am, so I agree.

  Saturday morning at ten o’clock Nick turns up at my house in a white shirt and slicked-down hair. Pop whistles. “On Saturday, yet! You got a girl or something?”

  “Yessir!” says Nick, and he gives my T-shirt a dirty look. I go put a sweater over it and run a comb through my hair, but I’m hanged if I’ll go out looking like this is a big deal.

  “We’re going to a movie down at the Academy,” I tell my family.

  “What’s there?” Pop asks.

  “A new horror show,” says Nick. “And an old Disney.”

  “Is it really a new horror show?” I ask Nick, because I think I’ve seen every one that’s been in town.

  “Yup. Just opened. The Gold Bug. Some guy wrote it—I mean in a book once—but it’s supposed to be great. Make the girls squeal anyway. I love that.”

  “Hmm.” I just like horror shows anyway, whether girls squeal or not.

  “You’ll be the life of the party with that ‘Hmm’ routine.”

  “It’s your party.” I shrug.

  “Well, you could at least try.”

  We hang around the subway kiosk on Fourteenth Street, where Nick said he’d meet them. After half an hour they finally show up.

  It’s nice and sunny, and we see a crowd bunched up over in Union Square, so we wander over. A shaggy-haired, bearded character is making a speech all about “They,” the bad guys. A lot of sleepy bums are sitting around letting the speech roll off their ears.

  “What is he, a nut or something?” the blonde asks.

  “A Commie, maybe,” I say. “They’re always giving speeches down here. Willie Sutton, the bank robber, used to sit down here and listen, too. That’s where somebody put the finger on him.”

  The girls look at each other and laugh like crazy, as if I’d said something real funny. I catch Nick’s eye and glare. O.K., I tried. After this I’ll stick to “Hmm.”

  A beard who is listening to the speech turns and glares at us and says, “Shush!”

  “Aw, go shave yourself!” says Nick, and the girls go off in more hoots. Nick starts herding them toward Fourteenth Street, and I follow along.

  At the Academy Nick goes up to the ticket window, and the girls immediately fade out to go read the posters and snicker together. I can see they’re not figuring to pay for any tickets, so I cough up for two.

  Nick and I try to saunter up to the balcony the way we always do, but the girls are giggling and dropping their popcorn, so the matron spots us and motions. “Down here!” She flashes her light in our eyes, and I feel like a convict while we get packed in with all the kids in the under-sixteen section.

  Nick goes in first, then the blonde, then the redhead and me. The minute things start getting scary, she tries to grab me, but I stick my hands in my pockets and say, “Aw, it’s just a picture.” She looks disgusted.

  The next scary bit, she tries to hang onto her girl friend, but the blonde is already glued onto Nick. Redhead lets out a loud sigh, and I wish I hadn’t ever got into this deal. I can’t even enjoy the picture.

  We suffer through the two pictures. The little kids make such a racket you can hardly hear, and the matron keeps shining the light in your eyes so you can’t see. She shines it on the blonde, who is practically sitting in Nick’s lap, and hisses at her to get back. I’m not going to do this again, ever.

  We go out and Nick says, “Let’s have a Coke.” He’s walking along with the blonde, and instead of walking beside me the redhead tries to catch hold of his other arm. This sort of burns me up. I mean, I don’t really like her, but I paid for her and everything.

  Nick shakes her off and calls over his shoulder to me, “Come on, chicken, pull your own weight!”

  The girls laugh, on cue as usual, and I begin getting really sore. Nick got me into this. The least he can do is shut up.

  We walk into a soda bar, and I slap down thirty cents and say, “Two Cokes, please.”

  “Hey, hey! The last of the big spenders!” says Nick. More laughter. I’d just as soon sock him right now, but I pick up my money and say, “O.K., wise guy, treat’s on you.” Nick shrugs and tosses down a buck as if he had hundreds of them.

  The two girls drink their Cokes and talk across Nick. I finish mine in two or three gulps, and finally we can walk them to the subway. Nick is gabbing away about how he’ll come out to Coney one weekend, and I’m standing there with my hands in my pockets.

  “Goo’bye, Bashful!” coos the redhead to me, and the two of them disappear, cackling, down the steps. I start across Fourteenth Street as soon as the light changes, without bothering to look if Nick is coming. He can go rot.

  Along Union Square he’s beside me, acting as if everything is peachy fine dandy. “That was a great show. Pretty good fun, huh?”

  I just keep walking.

  “You sore or something?” he asks, as if he didn’t know. I keep on walking.

  “O.K., be sore!” he snaps. Then he breaks into a falsetto: “Goo’bye, Bashful!”

  I let him have it before he’s hardly got his mouth closed. He hits me back in the stomach and hooks one of his ankles around mine so we both fall down. It goes from bad to worse. He gets me by the hair and bangs my head on the sidewalk, so I twist and bite his hand. We’re gouging and scratching and biting and kicking, because we’re both so mad we can hardly see, and anyway no one ever taught us those Queensberry rules. There’s no point in going into all the gory details. Finally two guys haul us apart. I have hold of Nick’s shirt and it rips. Good. He’s half crying, and he twists away from the guy that grabbed him and screams some things at me before darting across the avenue.

  I’m standing panting and sobbing, and the guy holding me says, “You oughta be ashamed. Now go on home.”

  “Aw, you and your big mouth,” I say, still mad enough to feel reckless. He throws a fake punch, but he’s not really interested. He goes his way, and I go mine.

  I must look pretty bad because a lot of people on the street shake their heads at me. I walk in the door at home, expecting the worst, but fortunately Mom is out. Pop just whistles through his teeth.

  “That must have been quite a horror picture!” he says.

  5

  Around Manhattan

  By the next weekend I no longer look like a fugitive from a riot. All week in school Nick and I get asked whether we got hit by a swinging door; then the fellows notice the two of us aren’t speaking to each other, and they sort of sheer off the subject. Come Saturday, I sit on the stoop and wonder, what now? There are plenty of other kids in school I like, but they mostly live over in the project—Stuyvesant Town, that is. I’ve never bothered to hunt them up weekends because Nick’s so much nearer.

  Summer is coming on, though, and I’ve got to have someone to hang around with. This is the last Saturday before Memorial Day. Getting time for beaches and stuff. I suppose Nick and I might get together again, but not if he’s going to be nuts about girls all the time.

  A guy stops in front of the stoop, and Cat half opens his eyes in the sun and squints at him. The guy says, “You Dave Mitchell?”

  “Huh? Yeah.” I look up, surprised. I don’t exactly recognize the guy, never having seen him in a clear light before. But from the voice I know it’s Tom.

  “Oh, hi!” I say. “Here’s Cat. He’s pretty handsome in daylight.”

  “Yeah, he looks all right, but what happened to you?”

  “Me and a friend of mine got in a fight.”

  “With some other guys or what?”

  “Nah. We had a fight with each other.”

  “Um, that’s bad.” Tom sits down and has sense enough to see there isn’t anymore to say on that subject. “I start work Memorial Day, when the beaches open. Working in a filling station on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn.”

  “Gee, that’s a long way off. You going to live over there?”

  “Yeah, they’re going to get me a room in a Y in Brooklyn.” Tom stretches restlessl
y and goes on: “I suppose you get sick of school and all, but it’s rotten having nothing to do. I’d be ready to go nuts if I didn’t get a job. I can’t wait to start.”

  I think of asking him doesn’t he have a home or something to go back to, but somehow I don’t like to.

  “Like today,” Tom says. “I’d like to go somewhere. Do something. Got any ideas?”

  “Um. I was sort of trying to think up something myself. Movies?”

  Tom shakes himself. “No. I want to walk, or run, or throw something.”

  “There’s a big park—sort of a woods—up near the Bronx. A kid told me about it. He said he found an Indian arrowhead there, but I bet he didn’t. Inwood Park, it’s called.”

  “How do you get there?”

  “Subway, I guess.”

  “Let’s go!” Tom stands up and wriggles his shoulders like he’s Superman ready to take off.

  “O.K. Wait a minute. I’ll go tell Mom. Should I get some sandwiches?”

  Tom looks surprised. “Sure, fine, if she doesn’t mind.”

  I’m not worried about getting Mom to make sandwiches because she always likes to fix a little food for me. The thing is, ever since my fight with Nick, she’s been clucking around me like the mother hen. Maybe she figures I got in some gang fight, so she keeps asking me where I’m going and who with. Also, I guess she noticed I don’t go to Nick’s after school anymore. I come right home. So she asks me do I feel all right. You can’t win. Right now, I can see she’s going to begin asking who is Tom and where did I meet him. It occurs to me there’s an easy way to take care of this.

  I turn around to Tom again. “Say, how about you come up and I’ll introduce you to Mom? Then she won’t start asking me a lot of questions.”

  “You mean I look respectable, at least?”

  “Sure.”

  We go up to the apartment, and Mom asks if we’d like some cold drinks or something. I tell her I ran into Tom when he helped me hunt for Cat around Gramercy Park, which is almost true, and that he sometimes plays stickball with us, which isn’t really true but it could be. Mom gets us some orangeade. She usually keeps something like that in the icebox in summer, because she thinks Cokes are bad for you.

  “Do you live around here?” she asks Tom.

  “No, ma’am,” says Tom firmly. “I live at the Y. I’ve got a summer job in a filling station over in Brooklyn, starting right after Memorial Day.”

  “That’s fine,” Mom says. “I wish Davey could get a job. He gets so restless with nothing to do in the summer.”

  “Aw, Mom, forget it! You got to fill in about six-hundred working papers if you’re under sixteen.

  “Listen, Mom, what I came up for—we thought we’d make some sandwiches and go up to Inwood Park.”

  “Inwood? Where’s that?” So I explain to her about the Indian arrowheads, and we get out the classified phone book and look at the subway map, which shows there’s an IND train that goes right to it.

  “I get sort of restless myself, with nothing to do,” says Tom. “We just figured we’d do a little exploring around in the woods and get some exercise.”

  “Why, yes, that seems like a good idea.” Mom looks at him and nods. She seems to have decided he’s reliable, as well as respectable.

  I see there’s some leftover cold spaghetti in the icebox, and I ask Mom to put it in sandwiches. She thinks I’m cracked, but I did this once before, and it’s good, ‘specially if there’s plenty of meat and sauce on the spaghetti. We take along a bag of cherries, too.

  “Thanks, Mom. Bye. I’ll be back before supper.”

  “Take care,” she says. “No fights.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll stay out of fights,” says Tom quite seriously.

  We go down the stairs, and Tom says, “Your mother is really nice.”

  I’m sort of surprised—kids don’t usually say much about each other’s parents. “Yeah, Mom’s O.K. I guess she worries about me and Pop a lot.”

  “It must be pretty nice to have your mother at home,” he says.

  That kind of jolts me, too. I wonder where his mother and father are, whether they’re dead or something; but again, I don’t quite want to ask. Tom isn’t an easy guy to ask questions. He’s sort of like an island, by himself in the ocean.

  We walk down to Fourteenth Street and over to Eighth Avenue, about twelve blocks; after all, exercise is what we want. The IND trains are fast, and it only takes about half an hour to get up to Inwood, at 206th Street. The park is right close, and it is real woods, although there are paved walks around through it. We push uphill and get in a grassy meadow, where you can see out over the Hudson River to the Palisades in Jersey. It’s good and hot, and we flop in the sun. There aren’t many other people around, which is rare in New York.

  “Let’s eat lunch,” says Tom. “Then we can go hunting arrowheads and not have to carry it.”

  He agrees the spaghetti sandwich is a great invention.

  I wish the weather would stay like this more of the year—good and sweaty hot in the middle of the day, so you feel like going swimming, but cool enough to sleep at night. We lie in the sun awhile after lunch and agree that it’s too bad there isn’t an ocean within jumping-in distance. But there isn’t, and flies are biting the backs of our necks, so we get up and start exploring.

  We find a few places that you might conceivably call caves, but they’ve been well picked over for arrowheads, if there ever were any. That’s the trouble in the city: anytime you have an idea, you find out a million other people had the same idea first. Along in mid-afternoon, we drift down toward the subway and get Cokes and ice cream before we start back.

  I don’t really feel like going home yet, so I think a minute and study the subway map inside the car. “Hey, as long as we’re on the subway anyway, we could go on down to Cortlandt Street to the Army-Navy surplus store. I got to get a knapsack before summer.”

  “O.K.” Tom shrugs. He’s staring out the window and doesn’t seem to care where he goes.

  “I got a great first-aid survival kit there. Disinfectant and burn ointment and bug dope and bandages, in a khaki metal box that’s waterproof, and it was only sixty-five cents.”

  “Hmm. Just what I need for survival on the sidewalks of New York,” says Tom. I guess he’s kidding, in a sour sort of way. If you haven’t got a family around, though, survival must take more than a sixty-five-cent kit.

  The store is a little way from the nearest subway stop, and we walk along not saying much. Tom looks alive when he gets into the store, though, because it really is a great place. They’ve got arctic explorers’ suits and old hand grenades and shells and all kinds of rifles, as well as some really cheap, useful clothing. They don’t mind how long you mosey around. In the end I buy a belt pack and canteen, and Tom picks up some skivvy shirts and socks that are only ten cents each. They’re secondhand, I guess, but they look all right.

  We walk over to the East Side subway, which is only a few blocks away down here because the island gets so narrow. Tom says he’s never seen Wall Street, where all the tycoons grind their money machines. The place is practically deserted now, being late Saturday afternoon, and it’s like walking through an empty cathedral. You can make echoes.

  We take the subway, and Tom walks along home with me. It seems too bad the day’s over. It was a pretty good day, after all.

  “So long, kid,” Tom says. “I’ll send you a card from Beautiful Brooklyn!”

  “So long.” I wave, and he starts off. I wish he didn’t have to go live in Brooklyn.

  6

  And Brooklyn

  You can’t really stay sore at a guy you’ve known all your life, especially if he lives right around the corner and goes to the same school. Anyhow, one hot Saturday morning Nick turns up at my house as if nothing had ever happened and says do I want to go swimming, because the Twenty-third Street pool’s open weekends now.

  After that we go back to playing ball on the street in the evenings and swimmin
g sometimes on weekends. One Saturday his mother tells me he went to Coney Island. He didn’t ask me to go along, which is just as well, because I wouldn’t have. I don’t hang around his house after school much anymore, either. School lets out, and there’s the Fourth of July weekend, when we go up to Connecticut, and pretty soon after that Nick goes off to a camp his church runs. Pop asks me if I want to go to a camp a few weeks, but I don’t. Life is pretty slow at home, but I don’t feel like all that organization.

  I think Tom must have forgotten about me and found a gang his own age when I get a postcard from him: “Dear Dave, The guy I work for is a creep, and all the guys who buy gas from him are creeps, so it’s great to be alive in Beautiful Brooklyn! Wish you were here, but you’re lucky you’re not. Best, Tom.”

  It’s hard to figure what he means when he says a thing. However, I got nothing to do, so I might as well go see. He said he was going to work in a filling station on the Belt Parkway, and there can’t be a million of them.

  I don’t say anything too exact to Mom about where I’m going, because she gets worried about me going too far, and besides I don’t really know where I’m going.

  Brooklyn, what a layout. It’s not like Manhattan, which runs pretty regularly north and south, with decent square blocks. You could lose a million friends in Brooklyn, with the streets all running in circles and angles, and the people all giving you cockeyed directions. What with no bikes allowed on parkways, and skirting around crumby looking neighborhoods, it takes me at least a week of expeditions to find the right part of the Belt Parkway to start checking the filling stations.

  I wheel my bike across the parkway, but even so some cop yells at me. You’d think a cop could find a crime to get busy with.

  On a real sticky day in July I wheel across to a station at Thirty-fourth Street, and nobody yells at me, and I go over to the air pump and fiddle with my tires. A car pulls out after it gets gas, and there’s Tom.

  “Hi!” I say.

  Tom half frowns and quick looks over his shoulder to see if his boss is around, I guess, and then comes over to the air pump.