Sisypuss: Memoirs of a Vagabond Cat

by Patricia Halloff

  “Now what?” we asked each other glumly, watching the scavengers load their paraphernalia and hauls into junk trucks, then drive away in clouds of dust. “What’s that over there?” we’d asked each other about a dilapidated farmhouse across the way closed in by a cyclone fence. “What’s going on?” we’d asked each other about the hunched-over old men who shuffled from the back of the house to hobble in single file from one end of it to the other, pivoting at a certain point as if a barrier kept them from passing some boundary.

  “Let’s find out. C’mon, Fairbanks, let’s get the hell out of here. There’s a hole in that fence.” “Wait! What about those men? Something’s wrong with them,” I protested because I didn’t like the looks of their shaved heads and dropped jaws, I didn’t like the looks of that house with its sagging porch and steps and flaking paint. “Don’t start in, Fairbanks! Don’t exasperate me! They’re old, on their last legs, is all it is. Don’t start with the vibes crap. Whatever they are, they eat, right? There’s food over there!”

  Well, although I knew it’d be a waste of breath, I did my damndest to dissuade you, Bobby. I reminded you I was right about the chicken coops, remember, and that you’d paid no attention to me then. I said I had the same jittery feelings now about that house and those men, the whole scene was creepy and the whole area smelled to the high heavens, we’d be better off trying our luck again back in the woods. But you wouldn’t listen. “Good Cat Almighty!” you hissed. “I’m too hungry and tired and cold for this bullcrap, Fairbanks! The sand’s choking me. I can barely see. Nothing’s wrong over there. They’re old, the house is old, end of story. Let’s go!”

  He wriggled through the hole in the fence, leaving me no option but to follow. And as I’d feared the sight up close of those faces waxy and colorless as candles, those shaved and lumpy heads, those hollow eyes, made my fur stand on end. All skin and bones, bent against the whining wind, in clothes too large or too small the old men shambled back and forth like programmed zombies, mouthing at phantoms, pants legs billowing like sails in the wind. What was wrong with them? Were they mental? Why were they there? Who put that falling-down house, its flaking paint splotched with moss, across from a garbage dump where no house should be? Though dusk was quickly deepening, not one of its windows was lit. “C’mon, the fence backs up to woods, Bobby,” I begged him. “Let’s get back into the woods where at least we know what’s what.” But paying attention to his nose only, Bob trotted toward the back. “You smell what I smell, Fairbanks? Kidney! Keep low! Follow me!”

  You were always so damned sure of yourself, Bob, so certain about what was good for us and what wasn’t. And I followed you blindly because the few times I didn’t, I should’ve. When I lost you, I lost part of my own essence, substance, center. Knowing what I’m like (altered by disease, but still me, not you), I doubt my judgment, I question my courage. Vital force seeps from me like sap seeps from felled trees, and it would surely help to have you here now to calm my jitters, to give your take on what I ask myself over and over: To be or not to be? Should I close my eyes never to open them? Will myself out of life and suffering as many a cat has? Or hang in until FIV cuts me down? For me, unresolvable questions. Booley? Like all poets he’s illogical, addicted to suffering, inconsistent. While he runs around saying life’s a tale told by an idiot, he moves heaven and earth to keep me alive, rejects euthanasia—except on my bad days: Then his hazel eyes darken, and I know what he’s thinking.

  But you’d know how I should exit because you saw problems through eyes unclouded by emotion. To you, those men I’d perceived as deranged or possessed were just poor old geezers warehoused out of sight because they couldn’t live in a world which didn’t want to live with them. They drooled, their filmed eyes popped like blobs of suet from dark sockets, their pants were stained with pee and shit, they looked spooky and talked to themselves, howled and cackled, you said, because they were senile. You wouldn’t let curiosity or overheated imagination, the major curses afflicting most of us cats, influence your actions or fog your judgment.

  Wouldn’t let them, or never had them? Whichever. At the end of that ill-fated day, twilight darkening into night, I was right behind you heading toward the back of the house when one of them broke rank and lumbered toward us babbling, grimacing, beckoning. “Here, Kitty, Kitty,” he sputtered through a mouthful of spit. And when, spooked, we drew back cringing,“HERE, KITTY, KITTY, KITTY!” he screeched, drool streaming from his toothless mouth, tears running from bug eyes onto his twisted face. “I SAID COME HERE, DAMN YOU!” “RUN, FAIRBANKS!” you yowled, and terrified, we scrambled through a hole in the back fence.

  Well. That on top of everything else finally did me in: into my head flashed the dreaded jagged light and I fell, shuddering and vibrating and bouncing in my personal electric field like a snapped, shorted wire before everything turned black . . . .

  I awakened curled against your belly. At night. In woods once more. “That one wasn’t so bad, Fairbanks,” you said and proceeded to clean me up. “You’ve had worse. Go back to sleep now. I’ll keep watch. Tomorrow’s another day.” And irony of irony, but that’s me, before dozing off again I remember saying things were bound to get better. So much for optimism, right? And what about virtue being its own reward? For not a day goes by without me asking myself: If I hadn’t had the seizure, if you hadn’t stayed up to keep watch making yourself even more exhausted, would what happened have happened? Or, for that matter, if you hadn’t proposed we leave where we were to spare me Queen’s calls, would you be with me today?

  You’ll never hear it from me, Fairbanks. Cat proposes, but fate disposes.

  17

  Well, the time’s come to put words to the dirge playing in my head over and over and over like the skips in some of Booley’s old wax records. Too bad, I always think when with a sigh he shifts the needle, too bad I can’t do that. For what wouldn’t I give to stop the nagging replay of the worst days in my life? What does it boot to live with the dead? Why were cats cursed with memories?

  Never mind. No use putting it off. It’s got to be done, this digging into my wound which’ll never heal, so I’ll do it now. Time’s of the essence when you’re terminal, you’re running out of it, it’s about to march briskly on without you. The cat toy stocking Booley’ll be opening any day now and I won’t hang much longer.

  The morning of the accident I woke to a fiercely red horizon. Red in the morning, sailor take warning. I felt terrible. After seizures, I’m always drained, woozy, the world takes on a weird cast, reality’s unanchored, wobbly, veiled by cobwebs. Add to that aching hunger, bitter cold, whistling wind, unmelted snow under paw. A bad time. Having eaten only snow for days, weak and half-starved, we set out again to forage in a gloomy forest where the only signs of life were ravens cawing overhead and a crippled deer. Famished, we prowled, catching no scents, seeing no prints in the snow. Our perked ears picked up only the beating of wings, whining wind, and our own panting as we trudged onward, snowblinded by remnant drifts streaked by the shadows of spindly vegetation.

  As usual Bob led the way, his bearings being better than mine. So it was from a few feet behind I saw him fall and heard him scream that scream which turned my blood to ice. “WHAT? WHAT’S UP?” Although I reached him in a flash, in my panic I didn’t immediately see why he sprawled on the ground like something broken, screaming those terrified, terrifying screams. But then the blood trickling over the snow and his hind paw clamped in the trap’s rusty jaw slammed me between the eyes. What could I’ve done other than what I did? I keep asking myself. Shaking with terror, I fastened onto his leg with my teeth and tried to pull it free, and when that didn’t work I butted the paw hard as I could, trying to push it free while he screamed and his blood spurted and seeped into the snow . . .

  What should I do? I’d asked myself over and over. What should I do? Frantic, unable to think of anything better to do than what I was doing, doggedly, helplessly, ineffectually I pulled and pushed his bloody leg. We
ll. In the end he was the one who gasped between screams the only answer, the only option, the horrendous solution which had never entered my mind. “Chew—it—off. You’ve–-got–-to–-chew—it—off.” Ah, don’t ask me how I got myself to do that, how I did what he wanted, choking back my moans, swallowing my nausea and his wet fur and blood, until somehow . . . I did it: I gnawed my brother’s leg off the paw caught in the trap’s steel jaw. But despite all my efforts to save him, in three days he died. The first time I ever took care of him—he was the one who always took care of me—and he didn’t live. Who or what to blame? Fate? The Malevolent Force? Me? Not you, Fairbanks, whispers his voice in my head. C’mon, give yourself a break, get over it! You did everything you knew to do. Don’t I know you’d have given your life for me? All true in one way, Bobby, but in another . . . why didn’t I know more? Why didn’t I know whatever it would’ve taken to save your life and my soul from this guilt?

  Let it go, let it go. I did everything I knew, everything I could. Every fiber of my being trembling with anguished fear, I licked his stump right away and swallowed his blood until after an endless time it stopped flowing. Throughout the days of his dying, in a state of unspeakable dread and perpetual panic I kept cleaning, cleaning the wound, shutting my ears to his moans of protest; I shielded his body from the howling wind with mine; I whispered assurances that he’d get better, be almost as good as new; I reminded him of FDR who’d been in much worse shape than he’d be with just a missing paw.

  But I didn’t tell him the stump was getting discolored, taking on a darkness which at first I thought meant it was healing, that it would soon be scab over. Should I have told him? Would he have known what that actually meant? More important, would he’ve known what to do? Why oh why can’t I believe his voice in my head reassuring me that even if I’d told him, he wouldn’t have heard me? I was out of it, he whispers. Remember? I was burning with fever, tossing, turning, moaning. I couldn’t open my eyes. I couldn’t talk. I wouldn’t have heard. Let it go, Fairbanks! Stop gnawing the same old bone already.”

  When I left him once in order to try and find him food, the racket of ravens led me to the frozen carcase of a young deer they were picking over. I chased them away and tore off what I could carry back. This’ll do it, I told myself. This is what he needs to turn things around. I shredded the meat with my claws, put it in my mouth and tried to transfer it to his, but his clenched teeth wouldn’t open. So I ate it myself. I gobbled it down because I was famished. Sick with guilt and self-hate, I kept myself alive while the brother I loved with everything in me wasted away, dying. Yeah, he was dying. No longer could I believe the festering stump would heal. It was hot, smelled foul, had turned black. Pus formed fast as I could lick it away.

  On his last day a cold driving rain drenched us, turned the snow we lay in to slush. His starved body jerking and twitching against mine, he shivered without letup, lips drawn back from his clenched chattering teeth in a terrible grimace. No last words, too far gone for that, he died soon after the death rattle which shook my innermost core began. While like Elizabeth had begged Sean, I begged him not to die, not to die, not to die, until I had no voice left. And like Sean, he did.

  So. What had had to turn out right in the end didn’t. Despite all my care, my incantations of recovery, my willing him to live, he’d died, leaving me shattered in a state of wild grief and guilt from which I’ve never completely clawed myself free. Infinite grief because I loved him as much as it was possible to love. Agonizing guilt because though I’d done everything I knew to do, when I weighed myself in the balance I found myself wanting.

  For the fact is, had the situation been reversed, my brother would’ve saved me. He would’ve known how to heal the wound. There was and still is no doubt in my mind about that. As the result of having paid attention to something I hadn’t noticed or had let go in one ear and out the other, he would’ve been able to save my life. He was responsible. I was not. I am not. I coast on the winds of chance. Not troubling myself too much with practicality or possibility, to this day (that monumental betrayal aside), I trust Fate to keep me aloft—while he always pricked up his ears, kept his eyes open, had all fours firmly on the ground.

  Beside myself with grief I crouched beside him, mewling and shaking, hissing and howling at ravens who’d come circling, swooping, cawing in anticipation. How long I crouched there, who knows. An overwhelming sense of loss and rage over the betrayal by forces I’d always put my faith in alternated with a deadness of feeling—the mind’s defense against pain too overpowering to sustain, I guess. I spit and hissed and cursed the circling ravens. Grief-stricken, I whimpered until the shadows cast by trees widened and turned to dusk. Then after butting my forehead against his head and rubbing my cheek against his, I buried my head in his belly already cold with death, already stiffening, and let sleep blank out grim reality.

  Squawking ravens woke me at dawn. Just inches from me one was already pecking away at his head. Others flew low, preparing to land. “AWAY! AWAY! AWAY! AWAY!” Quaking inwardly and outwardly, claws and fangs bared, I sprang at the one on the ground; and if it hadn’t flown out of reach I’d have ripped it apart, left it eyeless, wingless, only alive enough to suffer the excruciating pain my brother had suffered before he died. Clearly I had to hide him, I had to hide him from the ravens. But how? Never had I felt so alone, and never had everything been up to me alone. I was lost in a hell on earth. It was as if a vital part of myself had died with him. For the first time in my life I was on my own without his guidance. And virtually all thought had been smothered under an avalanche of anguish as, bereft in that hellish forest, I looked wildly around for some way to keep him away from the ravens. Snow and slush everywhere. O the horror of that morning! Everything impossible, nothing acceptable! To dig a grave would’ve been best, but that was beyond me.

  Well, what I finally did was the only thing I could begin to bring myself to do to. I dragged his stiff body between two trees onto a bed of moldering leaves—the only spot I could see free from snow and slush. For the last time I kissed him goodbye. Then, screaming at the hovering birds, I gathered broken branches and twigs in my mouth and piled them on him, piled them one on top of another until you couldn’t see him anymore and my mouth was so sore and bloody I couldn’t pick up another twig. Was there anything better I could’ve done to keep him from those fucking birds? I don’t know. “FUCK YOU, FUCKING BIRDS!” I howled. “YOU’LL NEVER GET HIM NOW!”

  Then I ran—not knowing or caring where, telling myself it wasn’t Bob I left behind, Bob was no more; telling myself at least he was safe from birds now and that anything else living there wouldn’t sniff out a frozen body. “That’s right,” he’d have said, seeing me go. “You did all you could do, Fairbanks. Now take care of yourself, look before you leap.”

  “Life is shit and then you die,” Booley says. Which just about describes our lives, Bob’s and mine, together. Moreover, even if we’d had nine lives each in that time, we wouldn’t have come out ahead in the good vs bad department. Only once, with Elizabeth, did we find ourselves in the best of all possible worlds. Now I’ve got Booley—which is good, but I’ve also got FIV—which isn’t. All I hope is that that fucking sadist AC isn’t (as alleged) actually running a postmortem facility up there and getting His claws into Bobby. But if He is, my brother can handle it. A beautiful spirit, Bob, who briefly inhabited a body which let him down: Maybe after all it’d been put through it needed the rest.

  Don’t sweat it, Fairbanks. I’ve got everything up here under control.

  18

  “Merry Xmas Eve!” Booley’s unhooking the cat toy stocking, almost losing his balance. He’s bad tonight. The irritable bladder drug they’re testing on him makes him dizzy, nauseous, tired. Like me. “Why the hell do I do this?” he groans every time he’s in a trial when he’s not one of the lucky ones on placebos. “Because I want to stay home with my Sisypuss and scribble stuff nobody wants, is the answer to that, Sis mine. Because I’m a
fucking genius doomed to posthumous recognition only—the lot of all fucking geniuses. Because my people skills (hah hah) break down under prolonged people/workplace contact.” He lights a joint from the stub of the one he just finished and takes another swig of wine. I worry about him. He takes even worse care of himself than Elizabeth took care of herself. “Have another drink, Booley my boy,” he says. “Light up, you bad man. Only the good die young.” The trouble is he is good. I’m not bright-eyed and bushy-tailed myself tonight, I hunch on my bed breathing hard; sore sides sucking in and out, I dribble from a mouth like a sewer that’s been Roto-Rooted. I couldn’t eat at all today even though for his sake I really tried. “Here, Sisypuss, I’ll help. Just lick it off my finger, OK?” Not OK. Nothing’s OK anymore. The sand’s almost through the hourglass.

  Now he puts “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” by some jazz combo on his CD player. “For proper ambience. For holiday cheer.” He opens the stocking and proceeds to show me one toy after another. Rodents and balls. “Hey, check this one out!” He squeaks the rubber mouse. He wiggles the felt mouse stuffed with catnip under my nose. Well, even though catnip never did it for me—for a sniff I prefer the valerian he takes to sleep—I’d reach out and give it a swat to make him happy if I weren’t so weak and weary. “You’re a hard man to please, Sisypuss. OK, what about this one?” He winds up a fake fur mouse and lets it run across the windowsill, but I’m too miserable even to purr, I’m not up for games, what’s the point in chasing toy mice anyway?

  “So, mice don’t do it for you? What about the balls then?” A catnip ball waved under my nose makes me feel even sicker, I turn my head away. He takes a tissue from the box he keeps on the arm of his chair and gently, so gently, it doesn’t hurt much, wipes away my drool. I close my eyes. “C’mon, Sisypuss! Don’t crap out on me here! What about this?” I open my eyes. He’s on his hands and knees rolling a red ball across the floor. He mews, swats, making a bell inside it tinkle. I close my eyes again. I can’t help it. He knows I barely make it to the litter these days, so how can he expect me to chase a ball?