And the cat said, “Yeah, as a matter of fact I do.”
Sensing trouble, the chaplain moved between them and held out his webbed hands. “All right, gentlemen,” he said, “let’s just take this down a notch.”
“I’ve got a problem with certain rodents,” the cat continued. “The kind who think that unless you’re as pompous as they are, you’re going to wind up on the trash heap.”
“Is that so?” the mouse said. “Well, I got a problem with cats who try to take someone else’s inventory before they’ve taken their own.”
He was a spunky little thing, you had to give him that. Here he was, no taller than a shot glass, yet he was more than willing to mix it up, and with a cat, no less. “Don’t think I’m going to forget this,” he said as the chaplain pulled him back.
And the cat said, “Oh, I’m so scared.”
When dinnertime came, the cat joined the mink for burgers and fries in the prison cafeteria. The mouse was on the opposite side of the room, sitting between a rabbit and a box turtle at the vegetarian table, and every few seconds he’d look up from his plate and glare in the cat’s direction.
“I don’t know what’s going on between you two,” the mink said, “but you’d better find some friendly way to straighten it out. I’m telling you, brother, you do not want that mouse as an enemy.”
“What’s he going to do,” the cat said, “steal the cheese off my hamburger patty?”
“I don’t know what he’s going to do, but I know what he did do,” the mink said, and he leaned his raw, seeping head across the table. “They say it was arson. Chewed through some wires and set a police building on fire. Four German shepherds killed on the spot, and two more so burnt their own mothers wouldn’t recognize them. Now, I don’t know what you’d call it, but in my book, brother, that’s cold.”
The cat dragged a fry through a puddle of ketchup. “Dogs, you say?”
The mink nodded. “One of the burnt ones was two weeks from retirement. Had him a party lined up and everything.”
“You’re breaking my heart,” the cat said.
The next AA meeting started like the rest of them. Not a decent story to be had. Someone said he was dying for a drink, and then someone else said the same thing. When that got repetitive, a member told the group why he wanted a drink. “Anyone else like to share?” the chaplain asked. “Any new voices we haven’t heard from?”
The cat closed his eyes. He usually drifted off to sleep and came to during the serenity prayer, but today he stayed awake, waiting for the mouse to pipe up and say something stupid like “Easy does it” or “Fake it till you make it”—aphorisms he couldn’t go two minutes without repeating. “Boys,” he’d say, “when things get tough, I just have to remind myself to let go and let God.”
Then everyone would act as if they hadn’t heard this five thousand times already. As if it weren’t printed on flea collars, for Christ’s sake.
Today, though, the mouse skipped the slogans and talked about a recent encounter that had tested his resolve. “I won’t name names, but this was between myself and the sort of individual I call a nosey parker, the kind who likes to creep around and listen to conversations that are none of his business. That’s how he gets his kicks, see.”
The cat said, “Why, I oughtta—,” and the chaplain pointed to a sign reading, NO CROSS TALK. Of all the rules, this was the lousiest, as it meant you couldn’t directly respond, even when someone was obviously trashing you.
“Now, I didn’t know this individual from Adam,” the mouse continued. “I’d seen him around, sure, but aside from his plug-ugliness, there was no reason to take much notice. He was clearly no smarter than this chair I’m sitting on, but that didn’t keep him from running his mouth—in fact, it was just the opposite. Pushed every button I have, he did, and just as I was about to rearrange his face, I remembered my fourth step and let it slide.”
There was a general murmur of congratulations, and the mouse acknowledged it. “I can’t say I’ll be so forgiving the next time, but I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
Then a goat raised his hand and recalled getting drunk at his nephew’s bar mitzvah. A guinea pig said some crap about insecurity, and a leech wondered if the Big Book came in an audio version. He’d just finished talking when the cat stuck his paw into the air, saying, “Hey, everybody, I got a little story to tell.”
“That’s not the way we do things here,” the chaplain said. “Before you speak, you have to introduce yourself.”
“Okay,” the cat said. “I’m a cat, and I got a little story to tell.”
“You know what I’m talking about,” the chaplain said. “Come on, now, it’s not going to kill you.”
The cat stared across the table at the mouse and saw the same expression he’d observed the night before in the cafeteria: smirky, defiant—the look of someone convinced that he had already won.
“All right,” the cat said. “I’m a cat and… aw, to hell with all of you.”
The mouse put his little hand over his heart as if to say, “You’re killing me,” and the cat pounded his paw on the tabletop. “I’m a cat, all right. I’m a cat and I’m a… I’m a goddamn alcoholic. You happy now?”
Then everyone said, “Hello, Cat,” and waited, their eyes politely downcast, as their fellow drunk, an official one now, struggled to regain his composure.
“… So that’s how I met my first sponsor,” the cat would later say—this at meetings in damp church basements and low-slung community centers, years after he was released from prison. “That little SOB saved my life, can you beat that? A murderer, an arsonist, and not a day goes by when I don’t think about him.”
It maybe wasn’t the best story in the world, but, as the mouse had told him on more than one occasion, it wasn’t the worst either.
The Grieving Owl
I was flying past a house the other evening, and because the lights were off and there were no curtains on the ground-floor windows, I stopped to take a peek inside—which I do sometimes, just to see how people decorate. This particular place was made of stone, not old, just made to look old, with a reproduction carriage lamp in the front yard and one of those roofs that appear to be slate but are actually made of recycled rubber. From the outside it screamed Wagon Wheel Coffee Table, but it turns out they had some pretty nice furniture, at least in the living room. A lot of painted pine—English, from the looks of it.
From there I peered into what’s called the den. That’s a room where people go to be themselves—or at least some idea of themselves. You see a lot of boats in dens, but in this one the theme was owls. Not real ones—I don’t think I could have handled that—but representations, both flat and three-dimensional: Screech-owl andirons, a candle in the likeness of a white barn owl. Above the mantel was a rather clumsy painting of a snowy owl hovering above a cross-eyed ferret, and on the desk, a small figurine of a great horned owl. Take away its glasses and the mortarboard cocked just so on his head, and it was me. Or perhaps I’m being too egotistical. It wasn’t just me. It was my mother, my brother, my sister and cousins. Everyone, basically, who I’m trying to get away from.
It’s not just that they’re stupid, my family—that, I could forgive. It’s that they’re actively against knowledge—opposed to it the way that cats, say, are opposed to swimming, or turtles have taken a stand against mountain climbing. All they talk about is food, food, food, which can be interesting but usually isn’t.
There are, of course, exceptions. I once had a fascinating conversation with a seagull who was quite the authority on the subject of the French-fried potato. I always thought they were all the same, but not so apparently. To hear her tell it, the taste varies according to what sort of oil is used.
I said, “What sort?” Who knew there was more than one kind of oil! Then there’s the question of texture, with crisp on one end and soggy on the other. The type of potato makes a difference as well, as does its age and exposure to the elements.
Following our talk, I went on a restaurant jag. Every night I’d pick a new one and look through the windows into their kitchens. What I saw, aside from the ovens and so forth, were a lot of mice. This kept me going back to restaurants and led to an encounter, the night before last, in the parking lot of a steak house. There I came upon a rat making his way toward the back door. “Not so fast, friend,” I said.
One of the things an owl learns early is never engage with the prey. It’s good advice if you want to eat and continue to feel good about yourself. Catch the thing and kill it immediately, and you can believe that it wanted to die, that the life it led—this mean little exercise in scratching the earth or collecting seeds from pods—was not a real life but just some pale imitation of it. The drawback is that you learn nothing new.
So this rat, it was as if he were following a script. “I just swallowed some poison,” he claimed. “Eat me, and you’re destined to die as well.”
It’s embarrassing to hear such lies, to think they think you’re dumb enough to believe them.
“Oh please,” I said.
The rat moved to plan B. “I have children, babies, and they’re counting on me to feed them.”
I said to the guy, “Listen. There’s not a male rat in the history of the world who’s given his child so much as a cigarette butt, and don’t try to tell me otherwise. In fact,” I went on, “from what I hear, any baby of yours has a better chance of being eaten by you than fed by you.”
“True enough,” the rat admitted. His body relaxed beneath my talons, and I felt his hope leak onto the asphalt, as surely as if it were blood or urine.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “Teach me something new, and I’ll let you go.”
“This is a joke, right?” the rat said.
“No,” I told him. “I mean it. You tell me something, and if I find it interesting, I’ll release you.” This was how I’d learned about dens and English furniture, about roof tiles and vegetable oil and reproduction carriage lamps.
“All right,” said the rat, and he paused, thinking. “Did you know that all this restaurant’s shrimp are frozen?”
“No, I didn’t, but that’s not really good enough,” I told him. “Nothing that goes on in a steak house would surprise me, especially if it’s a chain. You need to think farther afield.”
“Okay,” he said, and he told me about the time he tried to have sex with his mother.
“How is that supposed to help me be a more well-rounded individual?” I asked. “Don’t you know anything important?”
Then he told me that there’s a certain kind of leech that can only live in the anus of a hippopotamus.
“Get out of town,” I said.
“No, honest,” he swore. “I had an uncle who lived at the zoo, and he heard it firsthand from the hippo herself.”
It was one of those things so far-fetched it simply had to be true. “All right,” I said, and I lifted my foot off his back. “You are free to go.”
The rat took off across the parking lot, and just as he reached the restaurant’s back door, my pill of a brother swooped down and carried him away. It seemed he had been following me, just as, a week earlier, I’d been trailed by my older sister, who ate the kitten I had just interrogated, the one who taught me the difference between regular yarn and angora, which is reportedly just that much softer.
“Who’s the smart one now?” my brother hooted as he flew off over the steak house. I might have given chase, but the rat was already dead—done in, surely, by my brother’s talons the second he snatched him up. This has become a game for certain members of my family. Rather than hunt their own prey, they trail behind me and eat whoever it was I’d just been talking to. “It saves me time,” my sister explained after last week’s kitten episode.
With the few hours she saved, I imagine she sat on a branch and blinked, not a thought in her empty head.
After my brother took off with the rat, I flew to a telephone pole on the far end of the parking lot. A leech that lives in the anus of a hippopotamus. Talk about a closed society! What must it be like to live like that, your family within spitting distance your entire life?
My next stop was the city zoo. I’ve heard there are some that house the animals in actual landscapes, fields and jungles and the like. Ours, I discovered, is more old-fashioned, geared toward the viewer rather than the viewed. The panther’s cage is about the size of an eighteen-wheel truck. Our lions have it a little better, but then there are two of them. I don’t know how much territory a hippo might require in the wild, but here at the zoo her pen is on the small side, not even as big as a volleyball court. There’s a pool for her to submerge herself in, and the ground around it is paved in cement. A sign in front of her display reads, LOIS, but that, she explained, was just her slave name. “I don’t go by anything, not now, not ever,” she told me. “It’s just not the hippo way.”
What struck me right off was her warmth and accessibility. You expect this with miniature goats, but hippos, I’d heard, were notoriously grumpy.
“Oh, I have my moments,” this one said, and she started talking about her teeth. They looked like pegs hammered at random into her gums, and it seemed that one of them had been giving her trouble—which is not to make her sound like a complainer, far from it. “It’s not all bad, living in the zoo,” she told me. “True, I don’t have much space, but at least it’s all mine. For a while last year they brought in a male, trucked him over from some wildlife center in the hopes we’d get it on and have a baby, but the pregnancy didn’t happen, which was fine by me. It’s not that I don’t want kids, I just don’t want them now, if you get what I’m saying?”
“Sure.”
“So anyway, how about you?”
I told her that great horned owls hook up for life, a rarity in the bird world. My mate passed away before our first clutch of eggs could hatch, but I learned a while ago that it’s best to keep this to myself. “A mood killer” is what the seagull diplomatically called it. And it’s true. Someone tells you his mate died, was struck by an ambulance, no less, and of course it casts a pall. That’s why I didn’t mention it to the hippo—I wanted to spare her the awkwardness.
What else did we talk about the night we first met? I remember she asked what the land surrounding the zoo was like. She thought it was all trees and winding paths; little wooden huts selling balloons and cotton candy—that everything looked like what she saw from the bars of her pen. The hippo didn’t know about muffler shops and office-supply superstores, about restaurants and motels and apartment complexes with pools lit by underwater lamps.
What does the world look like? “Well,” I told her, “that’s going to take a while.”
“That’s what I was hoping,” she said.
On my way home that night, I picked up a rabbit. It was on the small side, and no sooner had I started eating than my mother appeared. “I’ll wait until you’re finished,” she said in that particular way that means What kind of son can’t offer his mother so much as an appendage? Sighing, I ripped off an ear and passed it over.
“You shouldn’t have,” she said. Then, her mouth full, she brought up one of my cousins who’s single and will soon reach breeding age. Despite my opposition, my mother is determined to find me a new mate. “There’s been talk,” she keeps saying. But what talk? From who?
My former mate had been dead for all of three days when my mother set me up with the daughter of one of her neighbors. We met at dawn, in a big oak overlooking a pasture. Below us on the grass, a white calf took her mother’s teat in her mouth, and my date shouted, “Faggot!”
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘lesbian,’ ” I said. “Though even that wouldn’t make sense. What they’re doing isn’t sexual—it’s called nursing. It’s the way mammals feed their young.”
She said, “Yeah, faggot mammals.”
When I told this to my mother, she looked at the bloody rabbit I was holding and said only “What about the
other ear?” Then she swore that this new female, my cousin, was different. “I told her you’d meet her tomorrow night, on top of the cross in front of God Saint Christ Jesus Lord.” This is her name for the Catholic church, which is actually—I’ve told her a thousand times—called Saint Timothy’s. Not that it mattered in this case. At eleven o’clock the following evening, I was back at the zoo, talking to the hippo.
We started that night by discussing the pigeons and sparrows who come in the day and defecate on the concrete surrounding her pool. “Disgusting,” she said. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a goddamn bir—” She caught herself. “Bir… thday.”
“You can’t stand birthdays?”
“It’s the fuss,” she said. “I mean, who needs it?”
“Listen,” I told her, “don’t worry about hurting my feelings. With one or two exceptions, I’m not much for birds either.” Then I told her about the seagull I’d met, the one who taught me about French-fried potatoes. “A while after her I ran into a rat, who said, and correct me if I’m wrong, that there’s a certain type of leech that can only live in your, uh, rectum.”
“I don’t know if that’s the only place they can live, but I know I’ve had them back there for a good nine months,” the hippo said. “Little sons of bitches is what they are. I think I picked them up from that two-bit Romeo they sent from the wildlife center.”
“Do they hurt?”
“Not so much,” she said. “It’s more the principle, if you know what I mean. The idea that they can just live inside me, rent free, like they own the place.” She looked behind her as far as she could. “Then too, they’re loud.”
“You can hear them talking?”
“Not the exact words,” she said. “It’s more of a constant, low-level murmur. It’s even more noticeable when I’m under water.”
“What do you think they talk about?” I asked.
“Oh, regular asshole things,” the hippo said. “I don’t mean things about my asshole but the sorts of things that low-life assholes are interested in—incest, maybe, or cards.”
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary Page 7