Sisypuss: Memoirs of a Vagabond Cat

by Patricia Halloff

  If that’s what she liked, I’d tell her, I could mount her and bite her neck as well as the next tom, the only thing I couldn’t do was have sex. But no big deal, I’d say: She wouldn’t know the difference because everything else would be the same—plus it’d be all to the mustard because she couldn’t get pregnant. Hearing that, I’d asked myself, how could she not come to live with me and Bob? The trouble was . . . that night when she saw me coming she ran into the woods, and search though I did, following the trail of her paw prints in the snow, she was a cat determined not to be found.

  As it turned out, though, I was able to make my proposal the very next morning. To begin with, a beautiful springlike day which like my hopes later turned grim. Early on the sun was out melting the snow, scattering it with pinpoints of sparkle, dazzling puddles and treetops. Wandering disconsolately about by myself (Bob wanted no part of me that day), I came on her unexpectedly. She lay in a patch of sunlight penetrating a dense grove. She was grooming her silky black fur, her slinky body poured on the forest floor like water, and when she looked up at the sound of my step, her yellow eyes blazed in the sunlight. “You again!” she said, sweeping me with an unnerving stare, one long leg with its velvety pink paw poised so she could tend to her bottom, pink tongue partway out. “Why’re you hounding me?”

  For a minute the cat had my tongue, my gift of gab muzzled by the combination of her perfection and the murky stirrings which I knew now to be the suppressed sexual feelings of the neutered. Not, as it turned out, that momentary muteness mattered: Cyrano’s silver tongue wouldn’t have saved the day. For when I finally lined up the words to state my case, they didn’t fly, they bombed totally, I wasted my breath.

  Go chase your tail, she told me again. She mewed she wasn’t interested in kinky propositions from punctured perverts with stubbles for whiskers. “In case you don’t know it, you’re not the cat’s pajamas,” she said. Plus she didn’t give a shit about the future, she said, she lived now in what her owner had called Zen time, life was short, whatever happens, happens. And unfortunately, except for the pervert part, everything she said about me was true—so how could I argue?

  Not that I didn’t resent her nasty putdown or that it didn’t hurt my pride to disregard rejection, but crushed though I was, I had the sense to play it cool and devise an alternate strategy. With the idea of getting into her good graces I edged closer and cautiously began grooming her. After all, it was her heart not her body I wanted, and as any cat’ll tell you, the end always justifies the means. If by swallowing a little pride I could maybe become a harbor in her storm-tossed existence, I’d choke down a little crow. If by biding my time and being patient I could become an indispensable friend, she’d want to be with me always. Already, to my joy, my expert tongue had her purring dreamily and stretching languidly.

  I lay down beside her on pine needles sparkling with melted snow. Percolating through the trees sun bathed us in its brightness and unseasonal warmth, making us both a little drowsy, making it easy to talk. She told me she’d been named Queen after the queen of hearts because of the white heart at her throat. She’d been thrown out of their car too far away to find her way back home a few days ago because her calling kept them up nights and she’d get pregnant if they let her out. “See?” I said, grabbing the chance to point out the advantages of unsexuality, “If they’d’ve had you neutered like me, they wouldn’t have kicked you out. But even if you were spayed and dumped here for some other reason, you’d come with me and be my love.” “Drop it! Holy cow, you’re dogged as a dog!” she snorted, but had I detected a little wistfulness in that snort?

  I proceeded, hoping to detect signs of disenchantment with her way of life, hoping to kindle nostalgia for the stable existence she’d briefly known. I talked bout how much I’d loved Elizabeth, how comfortable and safe I’d felt then. And yes, for a flicker sadness definitely shadowed her wild yellow eyes before she yawned as if beyond bored with talk of homes—and me. “Been there, done that till they dumped me. This is better, I’m happy as a lark. Live fast, die young, screw till I drop. That’s me,” she said, nervously thumping her tail. Then, “Go,” she said, closing her eyes. “I need my beauty sleep.”

  I left with mixed feelings. On the one hand I’d tasted the bittersweetness of having made some headway with her; on the other I knew in my heart that though we might become closer for a little while, the odds were that elemental forces, drives beyond her control, would eventually and forever separate us.

  Still, what you know in your heart doesn’t cause your head to give up its fixations. Thus, that very night upon hearing her call, driven by compulsion, back I went, turning a deaf ear to Bob grumbling I was crazy, climbing up the wrong tree, watching an empty mole hole, chasing butterflies I’d never catch. “At least do me a favor and hide if she’s—busy. Puleez don’t get yourself beat up again. I’ve had it with this! Bats in the belfry! Go make an ass of yourself!”

  Well, I did, but for the last time. Calling, calling, she rolled on her back between two toms with arched backs, distended tails and flattened ears screaming and springing at each other. Snow had begun falling again, the temperature had dropped sharply, the wind moaned. From behind a tree hard as it was for me to stay put, I watched them fight it out until the loser slunk away and the muzzle-bloodied winner claimed his reward. She howled in what (to my sorrow) I now realized was pleasure till, union consummated, he bounded off, tail high.

  I came out. We faced each other through a gauze of snow. Her wild eyes glittered with anger. “Get lost. You’re not what I need,” she hissed. “I’ve got no use for capons.” And to my despair I had to face the fact (better late than never) that the closeness I’d hoped to create between us would happen only in my dreams.

  A.H. Euwer: “Some Cats is blind, and stone-deaf some,/but ain’t no Cat was ever dumb.” Right. Credit Booley for reading me that. And ain’t no cat abject neither. Enough was enough. Though normally cat pride won’t tolerate even a whiff of insult or rejection, shamefully that’s what I’d done with the pipe dream of winning her heart and saving her from herself. No more! Calling me a capon? The end! With a disdainful flick of tail I sauntered away, and though with hammering heart I heard her call for many nights thereafter, I never went back. Would she have loved me, I often ask myself, if she hadn’t been a victim of instinct committed to the survival of our species?

  Who can say? I loved you and of course still do.

  Who needs them? Booley keeps asking me about females now that Molly’s gone. Well, thanks to surgery, I never did in the way he does. My brief brush with romantic love consisted of an abstract enchantment with beauty mixed with messianic intentions. And since according to him, females aren’t salvageable because they live in perpetual heat and enjoy sinning, my stab at rescue was misguided at best. Be that as it may, sexual satisfaction’s a joy of life I missed out on, my interlude with Queen having been in the tradition of courtly love, a platonic wooing done in adherence (how else?) to the code of chivalrous conduct.

  Any cat who looks at a queen should let it go at that.

  16

  Last night’s snow, the night of Molly’s last appearance in our lives, continues this morning, sticking to my window like clabbered milk. To yawn hurts like hell, stomatitis bad today, very bad; I paw away drool and wipe my watery eyes. A day, healthwise, that shouldn’t happen to a dog. Two seizures before dawn. I put my mucous-smeared paw on the cold window glass. One of AC’s worst curses on the homeless— snow. Everything wet’s anathema to cats, but who among the displaced wouldn’t agree snow’s its worst form? How many have you done in with your snow, AC? How many?

  “Coming on C day,” mutters morose Booley, petting me distractedly with a shaky hand as we watch the stuff tumble down like shredded shroud. “What’ll Claus bring, Sisypuss, besides a bad hangover?” Dear Booley. Sad Booley. He misses Molly. Losers in love, we two bachelors. Also, he’s driving himself crazy about me, having just got off the phone—again—with the vet. “
Hey Doc, suppose we try (whatever)? Suppose we give him (whichever)?”

  Because he won’t accept there’s nothing anyone but a miracle worker can do for me. Which that ferret-faced ex-vivisectionist vet we use and despise because of his tainted background is not! But that’s what makes him our best bet, says Booley, who’d work with the Devil to save me. “Everyone’s good for something,” sighs my guardian who knows all about vivisection because it precedes the clinical trials which sustain us. No one had to tell him the story behind my holes, my lidlessness, my seizures, even if someone had been around who could do so. “What the hell,” he says about our unholy alliance with the former vivisectionist. “Whatever it takes.”

  Except when applied to the writing of poetry, he has no use for principles. He’s a poet, and poets like cats are ruled by internal forces, don’t give a shit about what’s expected of them, have their own ideas. Poets and cats do what they please, they’re inscrutable. What they have in mind at any given time is ambiguous at best. They’re self-sufficient, independent, hubris-driven, irresponsible. Neither are useful. They tend to be bipolar. In love they suffer and mope about.

  On the road again. “OK, Fairbanks,” Bob had said. “Congrats, you’ve seen the light! So enough with the moping. You tried the impossible, naturally it didn’t work, what else is new? Me say I told you so? What for? C’mon, let’s get away from here, go somewhere she isn’t so you won’t have to hear her.” A suggestion I accepted as happily as the jilted can accept anything.

  You always knew what to do, Bob. While I wallowed in the darkness of heartache and rejection you shone a light on the road away from at least part of my misery: the siren yowls at night and the scent of rut I kept picking up during the day. You were the cat’s meow, my brother—except, I’ve gotta tell you, you were dead wrong about time healing all wounds. Despite all the time Time’s had to work on it, losing you remains a wound which doesn’t heal. You’re always in my thoughts. Brooding with Booley at the window this snowy morning, I ask myself what you’d say to take my mind off how rotten I feel.

  Well, that’s a tough one—even for me. Gotta give that one some thought.

  On the road again. All omens bad from the beginning. We trekked through all too familiar territory full of the usual depressing sights. Weather foul. Wind howled and whistled without letup, butchered trees froze our paws and muzzles. The snow we’d started out in changed to freezing rain turning the ground icy, so that we slipped and slid all over the place. After a time we came into deciduous territory where, unlike the fallen needled branches of evergreens, the spindly fallen branches of swamp maples gave no protection from the wind. A vacated woodchuck hole we stumbled on and squeezed into with thanks to AC proved to be a cruel disappointment: the stink of woodchuck drove us back into the wind and arctic air. Prey was almost nonexistent because of the cold and hibernation. We went hungry for days on end.

  Misery and/or menace everywhere. We saw an unsheltered pony more bone than flesh shivering with cold, his soaked mane covering his eyes so he couldn’t see, his hooves so overgrown he couldn’t walk, his pitiful neighs barely audible in the wind. “Terrible,” said Bob, his breath steaming like dry ice. “But what can you do about it? Keep going.” And because I too was shivering, unsheltered, starving, I didn’t argue. We came across stones piled into a makeshift altar and blighted branches tied together to make an upside-down cross. Ashes, bones, feathers, a rust stain in the snow. The bones spoke to my bones. I heard frantic squawks and frenzied wings flapping in the wind. I smelled evil on the frigid air.

  And that’s when, shivering, drenched, and exhausted, we looked at each other through sore and tearing eyes, through a sheet of icy rain, and admitted that, for all our adaptation and acclimation, we weren’t truly feral and never would be, that homelessness in winter was not for us. “This is hell, let’s try to get back to civilization.” I said, and fangs chattering, Bob agreed. “My thoughts exactly, Fairbanks. Where there’s people there’s food and visa versa.”

  Unfortunately, unlike cats you hear about who trudge cross-country to reunite with their owners, neither of us possessed a sense of direction—maybe Hudak’s work on our heads killed it—whatever, it wasn’t there. Our only guide was the idea we should go straight as the crow flies. Behind us was nothing good while ahead lay the chance of better foraging, and if we made it back to civilization, possible rescue. “Our luck’s gotta change,” I told Bob. “Hopefully not for the worse,” he told me.

  But after a few more rough days on the march, change for the worse was what it did. On the first day it didn’t rain or snow since my sun-kissed morning with Queen, a tan expanse gleamed through the trees. “You see what I see? We’re out of the woods!” I cried, elatedly assuming our luck had turned the corner. “What’d I tell you?” I cried, trotting eagerly toward what had to a sign of civilization. “Not so fast! Creep up on it, Fairbanks! See what it is first!”

  A major letdown was what: the landscape of a hostile planet. In weak morning light, the forest at our backs, we gazed upon a wasteland of yellowish-brown sand undulating with hillocks and hollows pocked with iced-over puddles stretching far as the eye could see. Gritty sand whirled about by the wind stung our muzzles and eyes. Shrieking gulls soared and swooped overhead. “Pugh! Awful!” gasped Bob about the sand and stench of garbage and chemicals clogging our noses and throats.

  Too disheartened to even curse the fate which had turned what at first glance had looked so promising into another dead end, we hunkered down in a relatively dry hollow. The only thing better about where we were than where we’d been, Bob commented sourly, was the reek of garbage. “Maybe something’s around that isn’t too rotten to eat—though from the smell of things I don’t count on it.”

  We hauled our aching bones up as soon as they hurt less than our bellies and nosed forward, the gnaw of hunger stronger than our aversion to the putridness. The ungodly racket of wheeling gulls hammering our reeling heads, we plodded through sand and pockets of snow up to our ankles. Partly-buried things rose up around us like heavings from a shallow grave: rusted-out oil drums, road rubble, a stone gargoyle, plastic chairs, dried-out orange rinds and banana peels, a chicken wing gnawed clean. Everything but food. “Still, something’s gotta be here,” Bob, panted. Dog-tired, sniffing, sniffing, we prowled up and down the stinking mounds of crap. No luck.

  Worried about possible threats when we began hearing human voices above the wind and gulls, we stopped in our tracks on the top of a hillock and tried to pin down their location. Which is when we saw the yellow dog in the hollow just below us. A tumor the size of a softball bulged on her neck. Inflamed teats hanging from her bloated belly almost touched the mound of sand she’d flung under her digging out whatever it was she was wolfing down. “Perfect! People! Dogs!” Bob hissed. “Let’s get the hell out of here before it sees us. Stay low.” Like he had to tell me? By that stage in our homelessness, I harbored no illusions about humans and other animals. Most of them were no friends of animals other than their own kind and often not even them. In our odyssey through the yards of backwoods shacks resident dogs and cats had chased us with snarls and yowls. Their owners threw boiling water and stones. We’d quickly learned it was better to make a preemptive run for it than stick around to see whether you confronted friend or foe. We’d regressed to square one—B.E.E. (Before Elizabeth Era) and trusted only each other.

  So wasting no time, we slid down the back of the hillock—seconds before a guy with a rake on his shoulder carrying a garbage can appeared, shouting at top volume that the dog was a mangy bitch that better get lost if it didn’t want to get brained because he didn’t let no dogs go in his area. And when she momentarily stood her ground, baring fangs and growling, he started toward her with raised rake until she backed away on her haunches whimpering and trailing pee. “Don’t mess with me, dog!” the scavenger hollered after her, setting his garbage can down and getting to work, screwing us out of the food she’d been forced to give up.

 
And soon other garbage pickers were showing up with rakes and metal detectors as, keeping low, we sniffed our way across sand barren of everything but junk and garbage too foul to eat. Faces red and stiff with cold, in grimy jackets out at the elbows, knit caps pulled down to bloodshot eyes, gloves without fingers the better to pick up small stuff, they poked at mounds with promising outcrops and shoveled out things they threw in their cans: a ragtag army of the unwashed shouting curses at one another and at the gulls for having shat on things suitable for resale or personal use. As the morning wore on they kept coming with their rakes and shovels, cans and bags, getting in one another’s way, stirring up the garbage’s vile vapors. Our sole concern being to keep out of their sight, we slunk along the periphery of the dump where nothing much projected from the shallow sand, nosing for something, anything, which hadn’t rotted beyond the marginally edible.

  Our tails drooped with exhaustion and extreme hunger. Not since we’d learned to hunt had we been so hungry. If there was a bright side to that episode for me as I trudged across the endless sands so tired I barely knew I trudged, it was that the grinding emptiness of my gut and the ache of my frozen paws had finished off all thoughts of Queen. Fearful of the junk mongers, we dared to stop and rest only when taking another step seemed impossible. It was as if I was on the treadmill again, afraid to sleep and fall into metallic water. We walked all day. Dusk brought a livid sky shot with eerie green light and swollen clouds threatening more snow. The scavengers began leaving. Gusting wind churned up a minor sandstorm. With maniacal cries gulls and crows swooped upon garbage we’d passed on: slimy scraps no cat would eat no matter how hungry. We crossed the entire landfill up to where it ended in a gravel road without finding one edible scrap.