It's like this, cat

by Emily Neville

  Ben and I both take biology, and the first weekend assignment we get,right after Rosh Hashanah, is to find and identify an animal native to NewYork City and look up its family and species and life cycle.

  "What's a species?" says Ben.

  "I don't know. What's a life cycle?"

  We both scratch our heads, and he says, "What animals do we know?"

  I say, "Cat. And dogs and pigeons and squirrels."

  "That's dull. I want to get some animal no one else knows about."

  "Hey, how about a praying mantis? I saw one once in Gramercy Park."

  Ben doesn't even know what it is, so I tell him about this one I saw. Foran insect, it looks almost like a dragon, about four or five inches longand pale green. When it flies, it looks like a baby helicopter in the sky.We go into Gramercy Park to see if we can find another, but we can't.

  Ben says, "Let's go up to the Bronx Zoo Saturday and see what we canfind."

  "Stupid, they don't mean you to do lions and tigers. They're not native."

  "Stupid, yourself. They got other animals that are. Besides, there's lotsof woods and ponds. I might find something."

  Well, it's as good an idea for Saturday as any, so I say O.K. On accountof both being pretty broke, we take lunch along in my old school lunchbox.Also six subway tokens--two extras for emergencies. Even I would be againstwalking home from the Bronx.

  Of course there are plenty of native New York City animals in thezoo--raccoons and woodchucks and moles and lots of birds--and I figure webetter start home not too late to get out the encyclopedias for speciesand life cycles. Ben still wants to catch something wild and wonderful.Like lots of city kids who haven't been in the country much, he's crazyabout nature.

  We head back to the subway, walking through the woods so he can hunt. Wego down alongside the pond and kick up rocks and dead trees to see ifanything is under them.

  It pays off. All of a sudden we see a tiny red tail disappearing under arotten log. I push the log again and Ben grabs. It's a tiny lizard, notmore than two or three inches long and brick red all over. Ben cups it inboth hands, and its throat pulses in and out, but it doesn't really try toget away.

  "Hey, I love this one!" Ben cries. "I'm going to take him home and keephim for a pet, as well as do a report on him. You can't keep cats and dogsin Peter Cooper, but there's nothing in the rules about lizards."

  "How are you going to get him home?"

  "Dump the lunch. I mean--we'll eat it, but I can stab a hole in the top ofthe box and keep Redskin in it. Come on, hurry! He's getting tired in myhand I think!"

  Ben is one of those guys who is very placid most of the time, but he getsexcitable all of a sudden when he runs into something brand-new to him,and I guess he never caught an animal to keep before. Some people'sparents are very stuffy about it.

  I dump the lunch out, and he puts the lizard in and selects someparticular leaves and bits of dead log to put in with him to make him feelat home. Without even asking me, he takes out his knife and makes holes inthe top of my lunchbox. I sit down and open up a sandwich, but Ben isstill dancing around.

  "What do you suppose he is? He might be something very rare! How'm I goingto find out? You think we ought to go back and ask one of the zoo men?"

  "Umm, nah," I say, chewing. "Probably find him in the encyclopedia."

  Ben squats on a log, and the log rolls. As he falls over backward I seetwo more lizards scuttle away. I grab one. "Hey, look! I got another. Thisone's bigger and browner."

  Ben is up and dancing again. "Oh, boy, oh, boy! Now I got two! Now they'llbe happy! Maybe they'll have babies, huh?"

  He overlooks the fact that _I_ caught this one. Oh, well, I don't want alizard, anyway. Cat'd probably eat it.

  Ben takes it from me and slips it in the lunchbox. "I'm going to call thisone Big Brownie."

  Finally he calms down enough to eat lunch, taking peeks at his catchbetween mouthfuls. As soon as he's finished eating, he starts hustling toget home so he can make a house for them. He really acts like a kid.

  We get on the subway. It's aboveground--elevated--up here in the Bronx.After a while I see Yankee Stadium off to one side, which is funny becauseI don't remember seeing it when we were coming up. Pretty soon the traingoes underground. I remember then. Coming up, we changed trains once. Benhas his eye glued to the edge of the lunchbox and he's talking to Redskin,so I figure there's no use consulting him. I'll just wait and see wherethis train seems to come out. It's got to go downtown. We go pastsomething called Lenox Avenue, which I think is in Harlem, thenNinety-sixth Street, and then we're at Columbus Circle.

  "Hey, Ben, we're on the West Side subway," I say.

  "Yeah?" He takes a bored look out the window.

  "We can just walk across town from Fourteenth Street."

  "With you I always end up walking. Hey, what about those extra tokens?"

  "Aw, it's only a few blocks. Let's walk."

  Ben grunts, and he goes along with me. As we get near Union Square, thereseem to be an awful lot of people around. In fact they're jamming thesidewalk and we can hardly move. Ben frowns at them and says, "Hey, whatgoes?"

  I ask a man, and he says, "Where you been, sonny? Don'tcha know there's aparade for General Sparks?"

  I remember reading about it now, so I poke Ben. "Hey, push along! We cansee Sparks go by!"

  "Quit pushing and don't try to be funny."

  "Stupid, he's a general. Test pilot, war hero, and stuff. Come on, push."

  "QUIT PUSHING! I got to watch out for these lizards!"

  So I go first and edge us through the crowd to the middle of the block,where there aren't so many people and we can get up next to the policebarrier. Cops on horseback are going back and forth, keeping the streetclear. No sign of any parade coming yet, but people are throwing rolls ofpaper tape and handfuls of confetti out of upper-story windows. The windcatches the paper tape and carries it up and around in all kinds offantastic snakes. Little kids keep scuttling under the barrier to grabhandfuls of ticker tape that blow to the ground. Ben keeps one eye on thestreet and one on Redskin and Brownie.

  "How soon you think they're coming?" he asks fretfully.

  People have packed in behind us, and we couldn't leave now if we wantedto. Pretty soon we can see a helicopter flying low just a little waysdowntown, and people all start yelling, "That's where they are! They'recoming!"

  Suddenly a bunch of motorcycle cops zoom past, and then a cop backing up apolice car at about thirty miles an hour, which is a verysurprising-looking thing. Before I've hardly got my eyes off that, theopen cars come by. This guy Sparks is sitting up on the back of the car,waving with both hands. By the time I see him, he's almost past.Nice-looking, though. Everyone yells like crazy and throws any kind ofpaper they've got. Two little nuts beside us have a box of Wheaties, sothey're busy throwing Breakfast of Champions. As soon as the motorcade ispast, people push through the barriers and run in the street.

  Ben hunches over to protect his precious animals and yells, "Come on!Let's get out of this!"

  We go into my house first because I'm pretty sure we've got a wooden box.We find it and take it down to my room, and Ben gets extra leaves andgrass and turns the lizards into it. He's sure they need lots of fresh airand exercise. Redskin scoots out of sight into a corner right away. BigBrownie sits by a leaf and looks around.

  "Let's go look up what they are," I say.

  The smallest lizard they show in the encyclopedia is about six incheslong, and it says lizards are reptiles and have scales and claws andshould not be confused with salamanders, which are amphibians and havethin moist skin and no claws. So we look up salamanders.

  This is it, all right. The first picture on the page looks just likeRedskin, and it says he's a Red Eft. The Latin name for his species is_Triturus viridescens_, or in English just a common newt.

  "Hey, talk about life cycles, listen to this," says Ben, reading. "'Ithatches from an egg in the water and stays there during its first summeras a dull-
green larva. Then its skin becomes a bright orange, it absorbsits gills, develops lungs and legs, and crawls out to live for about threeyears in the woods. When fully mature, its back turns dull again, and itreturns to the water to breed.'"

  Ben drops the book. "Brownie must be getting ready to breed! What'd I tellyou? We got to put him near water!" He rushes down to my room.

  We come to the door and stop short. There's Cat, poised on the edge of thebox.

  I grab, but no kid is as fast as a cat. Hearing me coming, he makes hisgrab for the salamander. Then he's out of the box and away, with BigBrownie's tail hanging out of his mouth. He goes under the bed.

  Ben screams, "Get him! Kill him! He's got my Brownie!" He's in a frenzy,and I don't blame him. It does make you mad to see your pet get hurt. Irun for a broom to try to poke Cat out, but it isn't any use. Meanwhile,Ben finds Redskin safe in the box, and he scoops him back into thelunchbox.

  Finally, we move the bed, and there is Cat poking daintily with his paw atBrownie. The salamander is dead. Ben grabs the broom and bashes Cat. Cathisses and skids down the hall. "That rotten cat! I wish I could kill him!What'd you ever have him for?"

  I tell Ben I'm sorry, and I get him a little box so he can bury Brownie.You can't really blame Cat too much--that's just the way a cat is made, tochase anything that wiggles and runs. Ben calms down after a while, and wego back to the encyclopedia to finish looking up about the Red Eft.

  "I don't think Brownie was really ready to lay eggs, or he would have beenin the pond already," I say. "Tell you what. We could go back some daywith a jar and try to catch one in the water."

  That cheers Ben up some. He finishes taking notes for his report andtracing a picture, and then he goes home with Redskin in the lunchbox. Ipull out the volume for C.

  Cat. Family, _Felidae_, including lions and tigers. Species, _Felisdomesticus_. I start taking notes: "'The first civilized people to keepcats were the Egyptians, thirteen centuries before Christ.... Fiftymillion years earlier the ancestor of the cat family roamed the earth, andhe is the ancestor of all present-day carnivores. The Oligocene cats,thirty million years ago, were already highly specialized, and the habitsand physical characteristics of cats have been fixed since then. This mayexplain why house cats remain the most independent of pets, with many ofthe instincts of their wild ancestors.'"

  I call Ben up to read him this, and he says, "You and your lousycarnivore! _My_ salamander is an amphibian, and amphibians are theancestors of _all_ the animals on earth, even you and your Cat, you sonsof toads!"

  13

  Dave and Mary in wind on boardwalk at beach.]

  THE LEFT BANK OF CONEY ISLAND