He watched an anemic dawn creep across the closed blinds, turning them the color of a brown paper bag; then suddenly the clouds parted, the sun’s first rays burned against the shades, their golden blaze spilling underneath, picking out Clyde’s jeans and sweatshirt, turning the worn Sarouk rug as red as the bloody entrails of a jackrabbit. The mockingbird tried again to sing, all grating sharps and flats.
He had told Clyde nothing of his problems. His housemate had no hint of his amazing verbal skills. So Clyde could know nothing about his witnessing the murder. And Clyde, preoccupied with that same murder, distressed by the loss of his business associate, had hardly noticed Joe’s confusion.
When Joe had first realized he could understand human speech, he convinced himself that all cats had the same talent. That the ability was simply unused, that cats ignored human speech as too distracting.
But he knew better.
And then, when he realized that he could speak as well, he was so unnerved that he hid in a hole in the basement wall, cowering within the cold, hard concrete concavity, shivering with alarm.
He did not come out in answer to Clyde’s shouts from upstairs, not even to Clyde’s supper call. When Clyde found him and tried to haul him out, he lacerated Clyde’s hand.
Afterward, he was ashamed. But he hadn’t come out. He remained in the hole in the concrete for a full night and day. Clyde, always considerate, had left food and water for him on the floor below, but Joe didn’t touch it.
When at last he did come out, and slaked his thirst before going upstairs, he had convinced himself this was a good thing, that he would be the envy of all other cats. A veritable feline king. He had talked himself from a gripping horror into a huge ego trip.
He immediately sought out his feline housemates, and tried his new talent, speaking to the other cats in human words, keeping his voice soft and his phrases tender.
“Come on, Snow Ball, come give us a little snuggle. Come on, Fluffy, come share the kibble, come have a little snack with a friend.”
They were not amused. Their eyes grew huge and horrified; their hair stood up, their tails stiffened with alarm, and they hissed and ran from him.
When he tried talking to his current lady love, the results were disastrous. She slashed his nose, ran up a tree onto a roof, and had not come near him since.
She had taken up with an unspeakably scruffy orange tomcat.
No cat he encountered could comprehend the simplest sentence of human speech. Other cats knew only,Come, Kitty,andSupper’s On.They understood human tone-anger, love, human voice inflection, human body language. Nothing more. When he spoke to them they responded either by running away or attacking. After several fights, he gave up.
And, of course, he didn’t try talking to the household dogs. What would a dog know? Then last Sunday he discovered that not only could he understand and speak the language, he could read.
All his life he had been staring at cat food cans, pacing around them waiting for someone to fetch a can opener. But on Sunday morning, as he clawed open the cupboard and knocked a can out and watched it fall to the floor, then jumped down and stood over it yowling for Clyde, the words on the label began to make sense.
St. Martin’s fresh ocean salmon,he had read.This product prepared especially for the household cat.
Clyde was incredibly slow on Sunday mornings, lingering over the papers unwashed and unshaven. Joe had waited impatiently, mewling and reading the recipe for his breakfast,Fish parts, wheat flour, sardine oil,and so on. Nothing wrong with fish innards.
Realizing that he was reading, alarmed and shaken with delayed shock, he had raised his voice louder in a panic of demand until Clyde came to open the can.
In a frenzy of hunger, needing sustenance for spirit and soul, he had devoured the contents in three huge gulps. Afterward, as Clyde held him, not knowing what was wrong but stroking him, trying to calm him, he had belched fish redolently into Clyde’s face but he had not, definitely not, spoken any human word of apology.
Then soon after breakfast he had begun to experiment, stalking the newspaper and reading at random. The political columns didn’t interest him much, but the advice column was a laugh. Who, except humans, could drum up such complicated intrigue over the simple question of sex? He had glanced over the obituaries and society page without interest, then abandoned the newspaper as unworthy of a feline.
On the couch he found the program from a play, and this was mildly interesting. Then in the bedroom he discovered a collection of steamy personal letters tucked into a half-open drawer. This was more like it. He clawed them out and spent a good hour poring over the contents, grinning.
Now in the brightening bedroom he watched intently the swiftly flitting shadows of birds in the tree outside, leaping from branch to branch. So simple to think only like a cat hungering after bird flesh, and not one beset with human complications.
But that simple distraction no longer worked. The birds seemed distant and frivolous. As frivolous as he had once thought words printed on paper were, silly and pointless. When he was a kitten, seeing Clyde stare at a printed page, he had felt ignored and indignant. Clyde’s inattention had made him crazy.
Though, of course, that view had changed quickly enough when he realized there was something magic in those little marks, something that would cause Clyde to talk endlessly to him, supplying long, comforting intervals of soothing human voice.
He paced the bedroom thinking about the hours he had spent curled up beside Clyde as Clyde read aloud from a great variety of novels.
How amusing that neither he nor Clyde had understood that, as Joe listened and stared down at those little black marks, he was learning things no cat ought to know.
But though he considered his sudden ability to read a feline breakthrough, even that was not the most alarming aspect of this new and puzzling life. The distressing part was, he not only had talents like a human, he was thinking like a human.
For several mornings he had awakened planning his day, wondering if it would rain and spoil the bird hunting but drive the moles out into the open, wondering whether the blackbirds were still feeding on the pyracanthas behind the house. Blackbirds got rolling drunk on the fermented pyracantha berries and were ridiculously easy marks. He would wake wondering if the cute little Abyssinian female down the street was in season yet and if her owners would let her out.
Cats didn’t plan their day. Cats just went out and did cat things. But not him. He woke in the big double bed beside Clyde carefully laying out his day like some grotty old banker marking his office calendar.
Take, for instance, this very moment. Any normal cat would be caught up in the immediacy of winging bird shadows, clawing open the door to get out. Instead he was crouched on the bed analyzing his thoughts in a manner abhorrent to feline nature.
He wondered what would happen if he spoke to Clyde about this. What would Clyde do? Could Clyde help? Maybe try to explain the phenomenon?
Sure. In a pig’s eye.
If Clyde knew he was sharing his house with a talking cat, he’d likely throw him out, tell him that if he could talk, it was time he quit freeloading. Tell him to go join a circus.
He had lived with Clyde for four years, since Clyde found and rescued him when he was lying fevered and sick in a rain gutter.
Clyde Damen was an auto mechanic, he had the most prestigious shop in Molena Point, working exclusively on foreign cars, ministering to Molena Point’s BMWs and Rollses. He rented his huge shop space from the Beckwhite Foreign Car Agency. He liked rodeos, football, baseball, and liked to watch newsclips of long-ago boxing events; Joe Louis was his hero-he collected Louis memorabilia. On the nights he didn’t date or play poker, he read: thrillers, mysteries, and some remarkable books that didn’t seem to fit his character. He told his girlfriends that he could write a really clever mystery if only he had the time. Joe’s opinion was that Clyde didn’t have the discipline for writing, that he had the curiosity and the wild twist of mind, but not the patience. Being a writer seemed to Joe a matter of taking things apart and putting them back together in new ways. Any cat could understand that kind of thinking. Clyde had the talent; but he just couldn’t sit still long enough to be a writer. If you wanted mouse for supper, you had to stick to the mouse hole.