by Gabriel King
New Orleans! She drew in a deep breath and looked around. Crescent City, City of Cats: City of Food. She had set out from here to eat the world. If she was returning with a little less appetite, well, that might be corrected, as soon as she had found her kittens.
In a manner of speaking, they had already found her. She had spent the Atlantic crossing imagining that they were close, but unseen – trapped in the overhead lockers, zipped into walk-on bags, mewling from under every tourist-class seat. They were behind every closed door. Thirty thousand feet up and two hundred miles out from Gatwick, the cabin crew had found her scrabbling at a pressurized exit door under the impression that she heard kittens crying in the whistling blue emptiness outside the plane.
‘But how’d she get here?’ they’d asked each other, answering, ‘Just swanned right in before takeoff. A proper English lady.’ And, when Sealink wriggled out of their arms and applied herself to the door again, ‘She’s cute, but a real nervous flyer.’
She was a hit with the passengers.
‘Guess you can’t throw her off now,’ they told the cabin crew. ‘Guess she got her free ride.’ They said, ‘Just make sure she doesn’t open that damn door!’ That had them all laughing.
Sealink, meanwhile, worked obsessively at the door, even though another voice in her head urged, ‘Get a grip, hon.’ She shredded the airline carpet. All the way over the grey ocean, she was a haunted cat: but, curiously enough, the sense of her kittens faded directly the airplane touched its wheels to the Moisant Field airstrip. Was that a good sign? Was it a bad one? She had no idea. She was on brand-new territory here, with nothing to go on but instinct. Ghost kittens, memories of kittens. They frazzled her when they were there; she missed them when they weren’t. She wasn’t used to this. What if none of it worked out?
‘You’ll find ’em.’
And, setting her chin high, she resolutely made her way across the tarmac, ignoring the trucks and carts, the aircraft groaning and complaining as they taxied from place to place, the human beings distracted and panicky as they dragged their baggage about. She was careful never to run. A running cat catches the eye was a saying she recalled from her own kittenhood, though since she had no more recollection of her mother than her name – Leonora Whitstand Merril – she guessed the advice came from one of the many scarred old tomcats she had once hung out with on the Moonwalk, the wooden boardwalk that ran along the banks of the great Mississippi river.
The Moonwalk! That promenade of soft airs and gently-riven dreams, whose denizens, though luckless and self-defeatingly individual, had always known how to live – how to eat, how to love, how to improve the midnight hour!
‘I’m back,’ she told them in her heart, as she skirted the glass-walled buildings of the terminal.
‘I’m back.’
*
If you are a cat, travel in New Orleans begins with the Grand Highway, which issues from a huge cemetery in the lakeside area of the city, and sweeps down from there to the levee on which Sealink had been raised. If you are looking for something, there is no better place to start.
From the Grand Highway, paths branch then branch again in all directions, to Greenwood and West End Park, Audubon and Armstrong, through the grounds of the Loyola University, into the elegant, sunlit courtyards of the Garden District and out to the Fairgrounds Racetrack. The wild roads, busiest wherever human inhabitation is at its most dense, yet always beyond human view, run through the river to the suburbs of Jefferson and Gretna and Algiers; and out into the bayou wilderness. Around Metairie they run in localized tangles branching off the greater highways; but, south and west, towards the Garden District and the Vieux Carré, they are as bunched and knotted as rats’ tails, mapped onto the city by cats heading en masse for their favourite haunts, where they will cool themselves in shady courtyards or beneath the camellias of an elegant townhouse; or beg for scraps from the tourists at the markets, the street cafés and hot-dog stands around Jackson Square. They cross and recross the Pontchartrain Expressway, occupying the same space in a manner no human being can possibly comprehend (though some have tried). Glimpsed through the swirling, dense light of the highways, car headlamps on the interstate flash past in a blurry streak, occupying another dimension entirely. Centuries before men built their raw, literalistic imitations, the wild roads were here, laid down as patiently as a geological sediment by the Louisiana panther, the bobcats and swampcats. When the humans have gone and their poor artefacts have fallen into decay, the cat-roads will remain. They are less a road than a way: a way of life. Give yourself to the highways and they return your investment a thousandfold.
They give you back a larger self.
Thus Sealink as a kitten, years before. Jazzed, jangled and pixilated, banded-up with other runny-eyed disobedient brats – driven by the same mix of hormones and nosiness, all zest and gall and natural bristle, elated to find themselves out there unsupervised among all the scary grown-up cats – she had tumbled hourly down the curves and re-entrants to burst out at some unplanned destination with a puzzled ‘Wha—?’ and a prompt collapse into group hysteria, playfighting and general bad behaviour.
‘How’d we get here?’
‘This here is a church. Octave! You brung us here to pray?’
‘No, I brung you here to prey.’
Young queens, propelled into the flux by drives they barely comprehend, glory in its sustaining power, which – comprising partly as it does the souls of a million queens down the ages, all enjoying their new-found power – is primal and shared. To begin with, it had delighted Sealink to make the gift of her own individuality. It was fine to be feline! To walk out, tail up and boardwalk-bold, a cat among other cats, was enough. It had filled her with pride. Later she was not so sure. As her sense of self developed, her enjoyment of shared experience had declined. Was she some ordinary cat? Honey, she was not! She was the Delta Queen, good-looking, strong, daring, and – above all – unmistakable. Tomcats pursued her. Other queens were jealous, their eyes hardened when she hove into view, hips rolling like a whole shipful of sex. She laughed in their faces and passed on by.
That was how she had made an adventure of travel on the more visible surfaces of the world. Cars, boats and planes, invited or not; on her own four feet if she had to, grinding out the miles to the next ride. How many human drivers, tired at the end of a long day, had rubbed their eyes at that ostrich feather of a tail and motored on, dismissing it as a hallucination? How many more, by truckstop and diner, not having an atom of shared language had understood its message nevertheless – ‘Say, babe, you goin’ to Topeka?’ Crushed-shell lots, juke joints, sleep snatched in the back of some redneck pick-up rusted out to orange lace, so you woke up two hundred miles away from where you started, puzzled and hungry: it was a hard, slow road.
But what freedom! To be a cat, and live in the human world! (It went without saying that human beings loved her too.)
After that, what could it have been but goodbye to the Moonwalk, goodbye to the Delta? That was the paradox of Sealink’s early life, she guessed. Easy travel had kept her tied to the Deep South; hard travel had made the world her oyster. Dizzy with a sense of her own self, she had gulped it down, juice and all, the whole delicious salty works of it.
But such freedom can be illusory. The wild roads wait, patient and real, like parents, for you to return. ‘Still travel them suckers when you need ’em,’ thought Sealink, sniffing around behind the Moriarty tomb. ‘Now let me see. I recall a entryway not too far from here—’
Grand white mausoleums towered up amongst grass passages, luxuriant trees and shrubs. Above her the statues known as Faith, Hope and Charity guarded the base of a sixty-foot tunnel. Faith, Hope and Charity sinking down into a long, dark hole in the ground. Sealink tilted her head consideringly.
‘Seems kinda apt,’ she had to concede.
She pushed her face into the highway. She was tempted to withdraw, but it was too late. Her will to remain separate collapsed into itself.
Her senses were engulfed. The world rushed away in a grey blur. As soon as she entered the flux again, she saw how damaged it was, how things had deteriorated even as she crossed the Atlantic. ‘This ain’t good,’ she told herself. The roads were cold and wrong, difficult to navigate. Her kittens began to call out for her again, loud and accusing down the years. ‘I’m coming,’ she told them. ‘Momma’s coming.’ She shivered and pushed on.
*
An unknowable time later, she was back in the Old Square. The highway debouched behind the Farmer’s Market, amid a chaos of boxes and crates, corn husks and garbage bags. As the buzz of the old road faded, Sealink’s nose was assailed by a thousand different smells: liquefying produce, fish in various stages of decay; the dry, musty scent of diseased pigeons; engine oil, human sweat, roasting pecans. Somewhere close by, someone was deep-frying shrimp popcorn. Oddly disoriented, Sealink closed her eyes, inhaling deeply. It smelled as much like home as anything could. And yet—
Familiar ground, brand-new territory.
There was a sudden eruption amongst the crates. A bit white cat, his face marked by long, gummy runnels down the nose, burst from the debris, scattering chewed corn husks, sad crusts of bread and bits of rotting tomato. His shoulders were wide and muscled, his haunches bunched ready to spring. A new pink scar showed raw against the fur of his lower belly. An onion skin hung out of his mouth. Why was he eating this crap? Sealink stared at him with a kind of puzzled distaste. On the other hand, you had to begin somewhere.
‘I was looking for some kittens,’ she said.
She might not have spoken. The white cat hissed. His ears – such as they were – went flat against his skull. Unsavoury curses spilled out of his mouth.
‘This is my food,’ he said.
Sealink was disgusted. It was not what she had expected. It was not your hometown welcome-back. It was not the voice of the Big Easy. ‘This ain’t food,’ she said, treating their surroundings to a look of contempt. ‘It ain’t even consumer-quality garbage.’ She decided on a change of tack. ‘Look, babe,’ she went on, in the drawling contralto which had served her well in fourteen countries – a voice which had charmed camels, let alone tomcats (whose knees it had been known to turn to jelly) – ‘let’s take it easy here—’
‘This is all mine,’ said the white cat. He put his head down and began to advance on her.
‘OK,’ she told herself. ‘So the voice didn’t work.’
She thought, ‘Time for plan B.’
Unsheathing her claws, which she kept impeccably honed, she hurled herself at the white cat. He was some pounds heavier, and his muzzle was scarred with the marks of many previous encounters. But, as he lunged to meet her, Sealink leapt high in the air. With an acrobatic twist surprising to see in a cat of her size, she turned herself through a hundred and eighty degrees and landed on top of him. The white cat looked appalled. His eyes rolled up in his head, trying to pinpoint this unconventional aggressor. Sealink seized the initiative. Opening her jaws as wide as they would part, she sank her teeth into the thick skin at the back of his neck. Curiously, for all his bulk, it felt flabby and wasted. Suddenly she found herself swinging around in front of him, still with his flesh clamped firmly in her mouth. Alarmed at this unexpectedly close head-on view, Sealink let go. The white cat stared at her, sparks flaring in his puzzled blue eyes. Then he turned tail and bolted.
Sealink sat down heavily, gazing after him.
Some homecoming.
‘T’es culloté. You sure got a nerve. You done dusted Blanco bien.’
A neat little tortoiseshell-and-white had appeared as if from nowhere. Now she seated herself carefully amongst the rotting greens and, balancing with precision, began to clean between the spread toes of an elegantly extended hind leg.
Sealink turned in surprise.
‘You a stranger around here, cher.’
‘Kind of beginning to feel that way.’ Sealink fluffed out her not inconsiderable coat. She was already three times the size of the little tortie, yet the smaller cat appeared unperturbed.
‘I ain’t seen y’all before.’
‘I ain’t seen you, neither.’
The little tortoiseshell cat narrowed its eyes. Its tail flicked on the ground once, twice, with irritation.
‘Kiki know you here, cher ami?’
So Kiki La Doucette still maintained her position as high queen of the boardwalk cats. Sealink did not have fond memories of that yellow-coated madame, with her cold stare and seraglio of attendant males. She’d been less than tolerant of other females, especially uppity young calico queens with a roving eye. Constantly on heat, Kiki had mothered litter after litter of scrawny kittens, extending her court from the Riverwalk to Esplanade. When the moon was high over the Mississippi, the levee had echoed to her ear-splitting yowls. Toms had traipsed from far and wide to visit the famous Kiki, then left the next day, scratched and sore, with a tale to tell of a wild Creole queen with a misleading name and insatiable appetite.
This was probably yet another of her myriad offspring.
‘Since when does any cat need Kiki La Doucette’s permission to come down the Grand Highway?’
‘You not bowed your head to La Mere, you better vamos.’
Sealink was infuriated. So much for shared heritage! She’d travelled half the world for this? To be set upon by a flea-bitten tom with the manners of a hound dog was bad enough; but to be expected to pander to some raddled old yellow queen who’d once tried to scratch her eyes out? Not likely. She turned her back with calculated disdain upon the tortie-and-white, stuck her tail straight up in the air like a standard-bearer marching to war, and sway-hipped it down the alley. Without looking back, she called, ‘I don’t bow my head to anyone, sweetie; you go tell your mama her old friend the Delta Queen is back in town.’
*
The little tortoiseshell cat watched Sealink turn the corner left towards the streetcar tracks and the river. There was a strange light in her eye. When the calico had disappeared from view she stood up, shook out each leg in turn, muttered something in a singsong voice and slipped into a tributary highway. Three or four large blue flies rose as if out of the ground to buzz lazily around the fruit crates.
*
Everybody who is looking for something in New Orleans is bound to end up on the boardwalk. Down there, at least, everything was much as Sealink remembered. The Mississippi stretched away grey and leaden to the distant greenery on the opposite bank. Over at the Algiers docks, cranes towered above the water like huge predatory birds. She crossed the wooden planking and jumped down onto the beach, hoping to meet a cat she knew, someone whose unbroken link to the past would enable her to start the search in earnest. All she found was a rocky shoreline littered with driftwood and indefinable bits of plastic. Mooching along this murderous strand, she passed the hollow where she had once dallied with a salty ginger-and-white fresh off a foreign cargo ship. He spoke oddly and his fur had smelled of oil and spice. It had been her first time. He had bitten her hard in the back of her neck, and, being a feisty youngster as yet unaware of the appropriate etiquette, she had bitten him in return. He had leapt up in affront and rushed off down the boardwalk to groom himself obsessively and attempt to regain his composure. And then there had been Ambroise and Zephirain, Bill and Trophy and Spider. Sealink smiled to herself in recollection.
*
So many since then. All gone and all (but one) forgotten, cast aside with the brutal negligence of youth: always somewhere new to move along to, some new temptation. And if they didn’t want to come down that road with her? Well, hell, she was Sealink, and the journey was the life. Except that the road had led her back to its beginning, another spin on the great big wheel of the world.
Everything seemed so much smaller now.
And so quiet.
Where was everybody?
There wasn’t a cat in sight. And, curiously, no humans either. In her youth it had been a wonderful place to cadge titbits off tourists: a slice of s
ausage here, some little delicacy from a bursting po’boy sandwich there; maybe even a piece of soft-shell crab (if you hooked a real sucker).
But best of all was the old wooden bench, third from the steps. For the cats of the Moonwalk it was a favourite gathering-spot. Every evening just as the light began to fade from the sky, as constant and inexorable as the Mississippi tide, the old man known as Henry had come down to the boardwalk. He moved slowly and stiffly, and his face was seamed with lines; but every night he would miraculously produce bags full of food: fish-heads and chicken skins, shrimp and crab and mudbugs. As if from nowhere cats would appear in droves, a purring, mewing entourage who would wind themselves adoringly around his feet until all the food was gone, when they would slip away in selfish bliss amongst the shadows, or drift along the weedy shoreline to groom and doze. To Sealink, Henry had seemed perfect. He smelled wonderful – fishy and catty and hardly human at all. Other people avoided him. He never tried to pick cats up, never forced his will upon them, but arrived, uncomplaining and punctual, every night to smile upon their impersonal and mercenary greed.
She rubbed her cheek against the bench. It smelled disused. There were crumbs under the seat, gone hard and stale.
Not even the pigeons were hanging out here any more.
*
She moved south towards the Toulouse Street Wharf, still on the lookout for the denizens of the levee, until struck by a scent that made her nose twitch. The further down the boardwalk, the stronger the smell became. Sealink sniffed appreciatively. An enormous sense of well-being swept over her. There is little in life quite so fine as those moments a hungry cat experiences immediately in advance of satisfying its appetite. Her nose led her to a trash can at the end of the boardwalk. It was an undignified squeeze for a cat of her size, but was dignity at issue? It was not. Sealink squirmed her way into the trash like a furry bulldozer and emerged some seconds later with her jaws clamped around a chicken carcass which was still transmitting its irresistible signals into the humid Louisiana air. To Sealink, these were signals of love. She slipped with a grace born of many years of patient scavenging back onto the boardwalk. There, she wedged the deceased fowl against a fence-post and, after some awkward manoeuvring, managed to insert her entire head inside it. There were bits of gizzard left!