And every visit she’d made to this place ended the same way—she would be petting her cat, and suddenly it would jump down, back onto the grass on the other side of that big, thick wall, and she’d try to hoist herself up but kept jackknifing her body against the hard sharp masonry side of the wall, until she’d plop down hard on her side of the wall, all the while looking at those cats—and then she’d wake up.
The Yoda dream was the last nocturnal visit she’d paid to the thick brick wall…a couple of years or so after that dream, she’d had the back-to-back identical dream of him living in New York City, and then, no more cat dreams.
But the night she bought herself the trash-bag filled with bits and scraps of the life of a cat named Mongo and his owner, she went back to the wall beyond the cat-place.
At first, all she did was look at the cats cavorting in the field. Too many of them to count, too many colors and shapes to categorize. Then, one of them broke free of the crowd, and came toward her—a dark shape, indistinct, but big, with curious small voids at the top of each ear, and the closer he came the less discernible he became, until the point where he jumped up on the wall, and all she saw was a black-and-white blur, as if she’d suddenly lost her close-up vision, and needed glasses—
Then she woke up, and the dream began to lose coherence, leaving only the memory of an approaching dark, leaping shape.
* * * *
As she left her apartment, she saw that it had snowed a bit more during the night; the tracks leading to and from the deck were definitely feline this time. Big prints, with a large inner pad surrounded by well-spaced toes. Probably a tom. She’d have to look for signs of spraying, come first light. She didn’t think the other tenants would like cat-piss on the sides of the building, especially come warm weather. The landlord never came around, but the others (a couple with a small child, a young man in his twenties who did all the lawn-mowing, and a middle-aged couple she hardly ever saw at all) might complain…but she didn’t smell anything, as she knelt down to sprinkle a small margarine tub’s worth of cat food into the half-empty bowl.
All during the day at work, her mind kept imposing the rhythm of what the previous owner of the contents of the trash-bag called “The Mongo Song” over every small, repetitious task she performed:
Counting out money to a customer—“Five (“M!”), ten (“O!”), fifteen (“N!”) and twenty (“GO!”), there you go, sir—”
Making copies at the machine—with each forward slide of the newly printed pages into the side chute, her mind merrily chanted, “—and Mongo was his name-o!!”
And even going to the bathroom on her break, mentally counting out four sheets of paper, each one accompanied by a silently shouted out letter or two.
And as she walked home, each step became part of “The Mongo Song,” left-M!, right-O!, Let-N!, right-GO!! It was so infectious, she almost didn’t notice that the glass door of the trash-bag machine was open when she approached the hardware store, but something external—a slippery patch of ice under the thin coating of snow on the sidewalk—did make her pause, and do a jiggly, Yoda-like back and forth shimmy, which caught the attention of the young man who was filling the trash-bag machine with several freshly packed bags of litter.
“Hey, you ok Ma’am? You hit a slippery spot? Man, I hate it when that happens to me—” He didn’t stop filling the machine from the front, but did turn his head to look her way as he spoke. He was a bit past college age, with a knit Packers cap pulled low over his head, just skimming the edges of his gold-hoop-adorned ears, and she thought he had a stud of some sort in his nostril and his left eyebrow, but didn’t want to stare too openly at either of them. He needed a shave, but otherwise looked to be clean. His jacket was old, and patched with duct tape along the elbows, but his jeans looked fairly new, as did his athletic shoes.
Realizing that she had to say something she nodded and said, “I bought one of your bags yesterday. The one with the crouching cat on it—”
“Oh yeah, the Mongo bag. That damn song in the notebook’s been running through my head ever since I folded the stuff in there. But the frame’s worth a few bucks, if you can clean it up—”
“I did. With toothpaste,” she found herself adding, but before she started a mindless jabbering conversation with a stranger (albeit a stranger she’d paid 50¢ to via his machine), she added, “You have a good idea, recycling like this. Good luck with it,” and started to walk past him, but the young man suddenly added, “I found all that stuff outside the old people’s apartment complex, across town. I get most of my merchandise from there—the person dies, the family only wants so much of their stuff, and the rest goes in the Dumpster out back. Good stuff, it’s a shame to let it go to the landfill. I almost didn’t put the parts of the old pictures in there, but I never saw prints with a spare attached like that—thought someone might enjoy seeing them. When did they used to print ’em like that, with a smaller one attached? I mean, I thought maybe you’d know,” he added with an embarrassed grin, once he realized the ageist implications of his remark.
“Back in the 1970s,” she smiled, and left with a small wave of her gloved hand in his direction.
Behind her, the young man yelled, “Thanks…and hope you enjoy the Mongo.”
Hearing him use the word like that, she remember that “Mongo” was also a term for things which were found and reused; she’d read a book review about the whole Mongo recycling phenomenon years ago in a New York Times Book Review at the library. What the snobby sorts in the Midwest sneeringly referred to as Dumpster-Diving, genuinely erudite types on the East Coast lovingly called ‘Mongo,” and pursued the gathering of cast-off treasures with total enthusiasm.
Yes, she mentally answered the young man, I am enjoying the Mongo…the cat and the “stuff.”
The little ditty Mongo’s owner had composed for him decades ago may have been an earworm, but it kept the drone of the bank’s annoying Muzak out of her head, even if the cat dream her small stash of Mongo goods had provoked had been a bit on the disturbing side.
She hadn’t seen the cat-wall-place in so long, she’d begun to think it didn’t exist anymore, even in dreams.
vii.
While her dinner was cooking in her small toaster oven, she sat at the counter, perched on one of the two mismatched bar stools she used for kitchen chairs, and began reading the small spiral-bound notebook from the trash-bag. There was no name in there, but the owner had to have been a woman; there was a reminder on one page to buy some sanitary napkins, and on another, she’d jotted down an appointment for a mammogram out at the clinic. Plus she’d put both dry and soft cat food on every list she made. Once, she added catnip, and another time, wormer pills. But among the lists and appointment reminders, she’d printed the word “BASTET” followed by this inscription:
“An Egyptian cat-god, with a human body and a feline head.”
The next page had a brief run-down of what ancient Egyptian families did when a cat passed on, including the fact that they shaved off their eyebrows in honor of the fallen feline. There was a crude drawing of a cat-shaped mummy, too.
She wondered if the long-departed Mongo was sick, or aging, when his owner wrote those things. Thinking of the unknown cat with the black ears (he’s big, really huge, and he was jumping up to greet me in that dream—) made her think of Yoda, who’d lived an amazing fifteen years despite his difficulty walking and jumping (he really couldn’t jump like a normal cat, but grabbed with his front paws and clawed his way onto the couch or the bed), and since that wasn’t something she liked to think about, she turned her attention back to the scribbling of Mongo’s owner.
Apparently Mongo had white paws; there was an aside about his “sock feet” and “strawberry pads,” something the woman found worthy of note in her little spiral-bound notebook. She found herself wondering if he was a Tuxedo cat, or a Harlequin, with the half-white/half-black center stripe up the middle of his face. She’d always been partial to Tuxedos herself, and sinc
e every Tuxedo she’d seen had white feet, she decided that the owner of the left-over ear-tips had to have been a Tuxedo. Not that it really matter-mattered, but it was a thought which pleased her as she ate her single-serving plate of spaghetti and meatballs.
He probably had big feet, she told herself, thinking of the paw prints outside the deck, and wondering if the bag of food she’d bought the day before would last out the rest of the winter, or if the cat even liked it, despite obviously eating it.
Looking out the window near her back door, after she’d finished her dinner, she thought she saw a dark shape dart under the deck, but didn’t want to turn on the light, lest it run off without eating. But it did look big, male-cat big. Mongo-big, like that huge galoot of a cowboy in that rather dated but still sort of funny movie from the seventies.
And when she went to bed, later that night, she told herself to dream that dream again, but forgot to remind herself to remember it, too.…
viii.
More paw prints, going to and from the deck; she saw them as she left the apartment for work the next morning. If she’d dreamed, she couldn’t recall it, but there was always that Mongo-song, echoing just under each and every thought, giving her steps an added bounce, and each thumbed-out bill slapped on the marble countertop at the bank an added flourish. Those five letters echoed behind every word she heard, and as she hurried home that evening, every step was in rhythm with the cadence of that long-forgotten/newly-remembered cat song, but as she neared her apartment, something else bounced along in her mind as she walked, something more than just a silly but catchy little jingle, an ode to a long-gone cat—she began to see images of Mongo, first the white middle of his Tuxedo face, then big green eyes, then the rest of him, all black save for his white feet, and as she crossed from the business section of town into the residential part of the same street, she found herself first silently, then not-so-silently mouthing the words of that nonsense song, her breath puffing out whitely before her lips:
“I had a cat and that was that,
And his name was Mon-go—
M!
O!
N!
GO!
And his name was Mong-o!”
She remembered that she used to sing to Yoda, too, just nonsense syllables, rhyming his name, anything to attract his attention. But she never wrote down any of the words, silly as they were, to the Yoda songs, so they seeped from her memory, until nothing was left but the faint memory of having sung them.
Yoda, who’d been so unique, so trying because of his walking problems, but so much a part of her life, that once he was gone, she was afraid to even try to replace him, because no other cat would be as perfectly unique as he was, due to his disability, yet also despite his imperfection, too.
“—And his name was Mong-oh!” she found herself panting as she approached her back-of-the-house entrance, and as she rounded the corner of the deck, she saw a dark shape dart under the silvery-faded wooden structure, but when she heard the sound of crunching, a noise she’d almost forgotten along with her Yoda-songs, something made her hunker down and whisper to the cat under deck, “I had a cat, and that…was that—”
The crunching stopped, and a head poked out from under the edge of the deck. It was still light enough out, despite the setting sun, to see that the cat was black, with a stripe of white down the middle of its face, and as it emerged from under the base of the deck, she saw that it was big, Mongo-big, with four white feet. It wasn’t afraid of her, so it wasn’t a feral, but it was slightly wary of her, not coming too close, but sitting just beyond arm’s reach on the snowy concrete leading up to the deck steps.
“And who are you? Do you belong to anyone? You don’t have a collar so I don’t think anyone owns you…do they?” She found herself automatically slipping into that affectionate sing-song voice she used to use with Yoda, and with all her other cats, and the cat watched her intently, but didn’t move forward, until she began to sing, “—and his name was Mongo…M!-O!-N-GO!…and Mongo was his name-o!” and when he heard the word “name-o” the cat came close, and began rubbing against her legs. And followed her up the steps and into the apartment, where he leaped up onto the counter and began dancing back and forth on the gold-dotted white formica, his sleek black-and-white body moving so quickly she didn’t notice until after she’d poured him some more cat food into a shallow bowl that he was beautiful, but just slightly flawed—either he’d been in a fight, or had been frostbitten, but the triangular tips of both black ears were missing. Not that it mattered though; she thought he was beautiful, just as he was.
ix.
Bastet smiled.
In memory of all the other cats of mine, on the other side of the great wall. Including Mongo, who left me after one year and three weeks, on 11-29-08.
AFTERWORD
There was once a Yoda, and a Mongo, and both are dead now. Yoda lived to be fifteen years old, despite a myriad of physical problems, and yes, I did have a dream (had it twice, something I otherwise don’t do) about him being reborn in New York City, as an orange tiger cat. Mongo…Mongo was a cat I had for a year and three weeks; he’d been a stray, but also a loving, friendly, beautiful homeless boy who shared his life with me for far too short a time. I took many pictures of him; he loved the camera and would start posing when I brought it out. He did look like the cat in this story, down to the missing tips of both ears (and no, he wasn’t a trap/fix/release cat; he wasn’t neutered, but apparently lost both ear tips to frostbite). And when he died of kidney failure, it just about killed me. My immune system took a nosedive and I had my first flares of gout in my hands the following spring, plus numerous other physical signs of deterioration. I still cry every time I think of him, over five years since he passed on. I keep wondering if I did the right thing, taking him in, if maybe he’d have lived longer if I never laid eyes on him. I don’t know why he became ill so suddenly, but his death still haunts me.
I wrote this before he died, back when I had hopes of him being with me for years; I divided it into nine sections, one for each of a cat’s lives. I had had the last line in mind for years, for a story I didn’t even have mapped out—I just thought it was the perfect coda for a cat story. But I don’t think Bastet, or any god for that matter, has ever smiled on me.
I also dreamed of the Great Brick Wall; others may believe in the Rainbow Bridge, but I have dreamt of the GBW several times, with different cats behind it. The GBW is exactly as I described it in my story; those dreams have one added dimension virtually none of my other dreams share—usually the only senses I “feel” in dreams are sight and sound. But I have felt the texture of the GBW, so I hope against hope that it might be out there…and beyond it, all my cats. Perhaps, when I die, I will be able to climb up over it at last.…
TOMMY’S CAT, by David C. Smith
1.
Where the cat had come from, no one ever knew. Tommy found it—or the cat found him—one warm afternoon in the tall weeds down by the pond where Tommy often went to fish and swim or sit and look at the water and wonder about things.
Wonder about everything, really. About his parents, and how his mom could ever have found anything to love in his dad. About his dad, who was angry all the time and kept things bottled up. Which is what his mom called it, “bottled up.” He wondered about whatever a ten-year-old boy could find to think about in the world beyond his parents’ farm, beyond the house and the barn and the field and the pond and the gravel road that led, after many miles, to town and to school and every other place there was. But Tommy especially wondered about his father and why his father didn’t love him the way his mom did.
And that was when he saw the cat. It appeared suddenly on the other side of the pond but was not moving at all. A small black cat, completely motionless, staring at something that Tommy couldn’t see.
Tommy rose to his feet and walked as carefully as his sneakers would let him through the grass and around the pond to where the cat was.
The cat
didn’t look at him. If it knew that Tommy was there, it didn’t care. It remained motionless and staring, Tommy now saw, at a garter snake stretched out on the gravel on the bank of the pond.
The snake wasn’t moving, either. Tommy wondered if it were dead. But if it were dead, then why would the cat stare at it?
Then he saw the snake try to move, but it couldn’t. It tried to wriggle away from the cat, but the cat continued to stare at it as though it were hypnotizing the snake. Then the cat jumped.
Tommy couldn’t believe it. The cat moved faster than anything he had ever seen in his life. One minute the cat was motionless; the next, it had the snake in its mouth, drooping down both sides like a piece of wet rope.
“Wow!”
When Tommy said that, the cat looked up at him, shook its head, and dropped the dead snake onto the gravel.
Tommy moved closer.
The cat was all black, with not a speck of white or gray on it, and it had yellow eyes, very bright. Tommy had never seen anything like those eyes. Maybe in comic books; monsters and zombies could have yellow eyes. If the dead snake had been looking at those eyes, then maybe that was why it couldn’t move. The eyes were very sharp, and Tommy smiled when he looked at them because they were so fantastic.
The Third Cat Story Megapack: 25 Frisky Feline Tales, Old and New Page 17