by Unknown
***
By the time we reached Alberta, I'd resigned myself to be rid of the cat. It had become painfully clear that he was a liability, and I had issues of my own. The problem, of course, was getting rid of him. I could not just throw him out. I knew how resourceful he was, and I did not want to incur his wrath.
So, I decided I would drive straight to the coast, nonstop. No more human contact, if it could be avoided. I would not let him out of my sight.
Soon we could see the foothills of the Rockies. They appeared so quickly, as if they'd simply jutted from the earth in an instant.
He was unimpressed. "I don't see things the way you do. It's just a blur of images and vague impressions. I have other senses of recognition."
It made me wonder how he would know he was home when he got there.
"I just will," he said.
"But where were you, that you have come so far to get back where you started?"
"I don't want to discuss it," he said.
"I'm only curious."
"Curious? Really? Trust me on this -- curiosity can kill."
I let it go for a long while, and just watched as the foothills became mountains and their majesty took over the road. He was brooding, though. I could tell.
"They left me there, alone," he finally said. "They didn't want me anymore. They wanted rid of me. They wanted me to be as far away as possible, so that they'd be free of me for good."
"That's very sad."
"I agree."
Our first consensus. It occurred to me that I related to him, and wondered if I would be able to let him go, after all.
***
The winding highway was treacherous. Every mile or so it seemed there was a warning of rock slides. We nearly hit a careless hitchhiker who was playing guitar dangerously close to the speeding traffic. Every other mile we slowed down to pass through summer road construction.
When the police car behind us threw on its lights and wailed its siren, I felt a surprising sense of adventure. I was the protagonist in a dirty little road movie, and my co-star was primed for action.
"May I see your license and registration, please?" the Mountie said.
"Of course. What seems to be the problem, officer?"
"You have no idea? Christ, you were speeding like a maniac. You're lucky you haven't killed someone."
When he left to run a check on my plates, Kitty and I looked at each other in wonder. "Was I really going that fast?"
"No faster than anyone else," Kitty said. "It must be the Quebec plates. They're not big on the French out here."
"Welcome to B.C.," I said under my breath, as the officer returned.
He poked his wide-brimmed hat and head into the car and took a quick inventory. "That your cat?" he asked.
"Yes, sir."
He held a pencil out, eraser first, toward Kitty's nose. I knew the cat's instinct was to rear back, hiss madly, and claw the fucker's hand to bits. But he played the part well. He made cute and touched the eraser with his nose, and gently lifted his paw to the officer's hand. He purred softly as the cop petted him and scratched behind his ears. This was an intimacy that I had not yet been allowed, and my heart filled with an awkward jealousy.
"Cute little fellah, isn't he?" he said.
"Yeah. He sure is."
"Well, sir, I'm writing you a ticket, cute cat or no. Take caution not to drive so recklessly while you're here. The mountains are dangerous. These aren't the Laurentians, if you know what I mean."
When his car pulled away I had mixed feelings. I thought they should be addressed, but Kitty looked victorious. Celebratory.
"We did it," he cheered. "We're a great team, you and me."
I have to admit, that took the edge off. I felt validated. It was all okay. We could go on. And we did.
***
To celebrate, we took an off ramp and pulled into Wendy's. As we stood in line, staring at the menu above, I held him. He felt cozy and soft, like a stuffed animal that you never wanted to part with. I could feel his little heart thumping with a rapid, thumping beat.
His paw rested on my forearm, with one sharp-tipped claw gently poking my skin, as if to say, "I'm lovely and sweet, but in an instant I could turn, and you would not stand a chance."
I'm frighted to admit that this is what attracted me to him the most. It was his hard edge that made him so lovable.
I could see the girl behind the counter filling someone's bag with food. She was wearing a short, black skirt beneath her uniform apron, and her fishnet stockings had a run up the back of her thigh. I was imagining her bending over, so that I could see up her skirt to the thong underwear she was probably wearing. I must have squeezed the cat while I was imagining this, because he let out a succinct, yet vicious growl.
"Can I help you?" the girl asked.
"Ah, I'm not sure. Can you recommend something?"
She looked at me like I was retarded. Her face showed a great disdain for people who didn't know instinctively what they wanted from Wendy's.
"No," she said. "I don't eat here."
"I see. Well, how about those Frosties?"
"What about them?"
"Well, what flavours do you have?"
"Chocolate."
"Just chocolate?"
"Just chocolate. It's a malt."
The way she said "It's a malt" was particularly offensive. I felt like the biggest idiot on the face of the earth.
"Yeah, well, two Frosties please. Chocolate."
When we finished eating, he had chocolate malt all over this whiskers. I told him I'd wait in the car. I was giving him license, conspiring with him, taking part in his sinister ways.
But he wasn't with me. "Let it go," he said.
"What? Why? You saw how she... I can't let it go. I don't see how you can, either."
"It's just not worth it."
"You can’t be serious."
"If you have a problem, you work it out."
I did not understand. Suddenly he was rationalizing morality in some sort of vaguely human way. It seemed almost personal, like he was letting me know that while we'd come together for this brief time, and that we would share this small portion of our lives with each other, but ultimately our journeys were our own. We would eventually have to go our separate ways.
"Fuck you," I said, mainly because I could think of nothing else.
"All right," he said. "Fine. You want me to do this for you; I'll do it. This one time, I'll do what you're incapable of."
I waited in the car. When it was over and we drove into the dead of night, it was a very long time before either of us spoke.
***
When the silence finally broke, there was a country and western tune playing on the radio. A sappy voice with a twangy quaver was singing:
Sometimes I'm the windshield
Sometimes I'm the bug.
It made us both laugh. The ice was broken and, given what we'd been through I felt more connected to him than ever before.
"She told me to go," I said, feeling ready to open my wounds. "You know what hurt the most about it? It was her cruelty. Not that she was cruel, but how desperately she wanted me to acknowledge it. As if she absolutely needed for me to understand how vicious she could be."
He looked at me. I knew, and I still know it now, that he understood. He said nothing -- but he understood.
We drove on toward the end of the earth.
***
We stood on the beach and watched the sunset. The ocean was serene, and we could have seen forever if it weren't for the enormous sign marked "ESSO" half a mile from the shore. The sky was orange and white. The sun was falling off the edge of the planet.
"Where will you go?" I asked him.
"Out there," he said, nudging his whiskers toward the horizon. In the far distance, Vancouver Island was waiting for him. When he got there, he told me he would have travelled from end to end, mile zero to mile zero. He looked tired and worn out.
"How?" I asked.
>
"Swim," he said sarcastically.
"Right. Sorry. So, you'll take the ferry, then?"
"Yeah. The old stray-cat trick. I'll have lots of mice to eat."
I looked into his eyes, searching for some sort of remorse, or at least a sign that I had made a difference to him, that I'd some how affected his life. His eyes were empty. There was nothing.
"How about you?" he asked with little interest.
"Unlike you, I don't have a home to go to. I'm free to do as I please. Maybe I'll head north. The tundra skies are gorgeous this time of year."
"Do you think you'll ever see her again?"
"Who?"
"The one you ran from. The one who told you to go."
"Oh, I don't know. I doubt it. She was pretty direct."
He turned and started to walk away, his tail waving a solemn good-bye. "Just don't fret," he called back to me. "It doesn't help."
I watched him saunter along the shore. At one point, some children ran over to him and he stood there patiently, allowing them to pet him. If you can imagine a cat rolling its eyes, that is the look I expect you'd have seen on his face.
He walked until I couldn't see him anymore. And, when he was gone, he was gone forever.
There was something about his leaving that felt good. It was a release. A black cloud sifted out of my body and soul. He must have known what he was doing, and that I'd be better off without him. He wasn't leaving me, he was letting me go.
I turned away to face my new freedom. Up ahead, the sandy beach turned to rocks and trees, but I could see that a stone wall ran along the ocean shore. I thought that, if I walked along it, it would eventually take me all the way to Yukon. A nice bleak place to build a new home and start a new life.
A pretty girl was sitting on the edge of the wall, letting her feet dangle, reading a book. She was wearing denim shorts and her legs were spread enough that I could see her underwear. I walked toward her, hoping to catch her glance and flash a smile. She didn't look up from her book until I spoke to her.
"Would you like to go for a drive?"
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
1. Fredric Brown (1906-1972) was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of a newspaperman. This is presumably why he became a newspaperman (for the Milwaukee Journal) in 1936, after brief stints as a busboy, a detective, a dishwasher, an insurance salesman, and a stock clerk. He became a member of Milwaukee’s early s-f fan club, The Fictioneers. His first published story was the mystery “The Moon for a Nickel” (Detective Story, March 1938); his first s-f was “Not Yet the End” (Captain Future, Winter [January] 1941. He quickly moved to New Mexico for his health and became a full-time author of mystery and science-fiction short stories, turning to novels in the late 1940s and, after a move to Hollywood, to TV scriptwriting in the late ‘50s and ‘60s. His health worsened and he developed a drinking problem; his last story was in 1965.
Brown won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award in 1947 for Best First Mystery for The Fabulous Clipjoint (Dutton, March 1947). Other still-remembered novels include mysteries The Screaming Mimi (Dutton, November 1949), Night of the Jabberwock (Dutton, December 1950), The Lenient Beast (Dutton, April 1956), and Knock Three-One-Two (Dutton, August 1959); and s-f What Mad Universe (Dutton, October 1949), The Lights in the Sky are Stars (Dutton, October 1953), Martians, Go Home (Dutton, November 1955), and The Mind Thing (Bantam, January 1961). He was better-known among s-f readers for his many collections of his s-f short stories, some of which were very succinct gems – under 1,000 words – than for his novels.
2. Cleve Cartmill (1908-1964) will probably always be best remembered for his short story “Deadline”, published in Astounding Science Fiction, March 1944. It got ASF’s editor John W. Campbell, Jr. a visit from the FBI, who wanted to know how his authors had learned about the government’s top-secret wartime research into atomic energy, and to tell Campbell to stop publishing stories with such classified information. Campbell pointed out that ASF and other science fiction magazines had been publishing stories that included the fictional use of atomic/nuclear engines and explosives for the past few years, and that to suddenly stop would be more revelatory than to continue.
Cartmill’s other notable story, “Age Cannot Wither”, has a more amusing history. Cartmill sold this story several times to s-f magazines, which all ceased publication just before printing it. This was a fantasy involving the Devil trying to prevent mankind from learning the secret of eternal youth, so Cartmill was inspired to write “Youth, Anybody?”, in which a hack s-f author accidentally writes a true story that the Devil supernaturally keeps from getting published. “Age Cannot Wither” was unexpectedly included in the belated final issue of the cancelled Beyond (January 1955), after “Youth, Anybody?” had been sold. (It appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1955.)
Cleve Cartmill was known for his many competent but undistinguished careers including as an accountant, a newspaperman, a radio operator, and a magazine writer. He became best-known as an author for his “dark fantasy” stories during the 1940s and ‘50s.
3. John Christopher was the best-known pen-name of British author Christopher Samuel Youd (born Sam Youd, 1922-2012). He was active in s-f fandom in his teens, publishing a fanzine, The Fantast; his first professional writing was a letter in Weird Tales, May 1939, and his first s-f sale was the poem “Dreamer” in Weird Tales, March 1941. He served in the Royal Corps of Signals from 1941 to 1946, and returned to writing soon afterward. His first novel was The Winter Swan, as Christopher Youd (Dennis Dobson, 1949); mainstream but written in such an unusual style that many reviewers described it as a fantasy.
Youd churned out “hack” fiction (mysteries, comedies, historical romances, sports, etc.) under the pseudonyms of Hilary Ford, William Godfrey, Peter Graaf, Peter Nichols, Anthony Rye, William Vine, and Stanley Winchester, reserving John Christopher for his science fiction. “Socrates” was his first serious s-f published as John Christopher. He wrote numerous short stories as John Christopher throughout the 1950s, switching primarily to novels from the mid-‘50s through the 1980s. His most famous novel was The Death of Grass (Michael Joseph, August 1956), published in America as No Blade of Grass (Simon & Schuster, April 1957), also serialized in the weekly The Saturday Evening Post (April 27 to June 8, 1957) and filmed as a major motion picture (MGM, October 1970). In the mid-1960s he began writing Young Adult trilogy novels; The Tripods (The White Mountains, Hamish Hamilton, 1967; The City of Gold and Lead, Hamish Hamilton, September 1967; and The Pool of Fire, Hamish Hamilton, July 1968), The Prince in Waiting (The Prince In Waiting, Hamish Hamilton, November 1970; Beyond the Burning Lands, Hamish Hamilton, June 1971; and The Sword of the Spirits, Hamish Hamilton, March 1972), and Fireball (Fireball, Gollancz, January 1981; New Found Land, Gollancz, January 1983; and Dragon Dance, Viking Kestrel, June 1986). Youd seldom wrote under any name after the mid-1980s.
4. William Morrison was a pen-name of Dr. Joseph Samachson (1906-1980), for his s-f stories. Samachson was a true “Renaissance man” in his writings from the 1930s onward. He wrote scientific research papers, principally in biochemistry, under his real name. He wrote mystery and s-f short stories and novels as William Morrison; some published by editors under the “house name” of Brett Sterling. In the 1940s and ‘50s as Joe Morrison he scripted comic books for DC Comics. He wrote stories (uncredited) of Aquaman, Batman and Robin, the Boy Commandos, the Crimson Avenger, Green Arrow, Liberty Belle, Robotman, Sandman, the Shining Knight, Superman, Vigilante, and many others; and he is credited as the co-creator of J’Onn J’Onzz, the Martian Manhunter and of the frontiersman Tomahawk. Wikipedia says, “With his wife Dorothy Samachson, he wrote about theater ("Let's Meet the Theatre" and "The Dramatic Story of the Theatre"), music ("Masters of Music" and The Fabulous World of Opera), ballet, archeology (Good Digging) and a number of other titles, including Rome, a Rand McNally "Cities of the World" title. In addition, Dr. Samachson was a frequent contributor to scientific
journals and the author of The Armor Within Us: The Story of Bone.”
5. Poul Anderson (1926-2001) and Gordon R. Dickson (1923-2001) were major s-f authors from the early 1950s for the next fifty years. Both met while students at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and became lifelong friends. Aside from collaborating on the Hoka stories, they led separate but similar careers as s-f novelists and short story writers, specializing in both humorous and dramatic adventure plots, in both futuristic interstellar settings and “high fantasy” worlds. Anderson’s notable heroes include the stargoing explorer-diplomat Dominic Flandry, and the trader-team of the flamboyant interstellar merchant-prince Nicholas van Rijn (loosely based upon Denmark’s King Christian IV, one of Anderson’s own role-models) and his agents, the human David Falkayn and his alien partners, the catlike Chee Lan and the huge dinosaurlike Adzel. Several of Anderson’s stories feature “normal” but intelligent animals, including his 1954 novel Brain Wave in which all animals’ intelligence is increased, and his “Operation” fantasies with the werewolf-witch detective team of Steve and Virginia Matuchek and Ginny’s smart-ass cat familiar Svartalf. Dickson’s notable series include the interstellar space-mercenary Dorsai dramatic stories, and the Dragon Knight fantasies featuring Jim Eckert, a modern American whose mind is trapped in the body of the fantasy-world dragon Gorbash, and has many adventures as a dragon-hero. (Nine novels; Dickson was writing a tenth when he died.)