It's like this, cat Read online

  Cat makes himself at home in my room pretty easily. Mostly he likes to beup on top of something, so I put an old sweater on the bureau beside mybed, and he sleeps up there. When he wants me to wake up in the morning,he jumps and lands in the middle of my stomach. Believe me, cats don'talways land lightly--only when they want to. Anything a cat does, he doesonly when he wants to. I like that.

  When I'm combing my hair in the morning, sometimes he sits up there andlooks down his nose at my reflection in the mirror. He appears to betaking inventory: "Hmm, buckteeth; sandy hair, smooth in front, cowlick inback; brown eyes, can't see in the dark worth a nickel; hickeys on thechin. Too bad."

  I look back at him in the mirror and say, "O.K., black face, yellow eyes,and one white whisker. Where'd you get that one white whisker?"

  He catches sight of himself in the mirror, and his tail twitchesmomentarily. He seems to know it's not really another cat, but his clawscome out and he taps the mirror softly, just to make sure.

  When I'm lying on the bed reading, sometimes he will curl up between myknees and the book. But after a few days I can see he's getting more andmore restless. It gets so I can't listen to a record, for the noise of himscratching on the rug. I can't let him loose in the apartment, at leastuntil we make sure Mom doesn't get asthma, so I figure I betterreintroduce him to the great outdoors in the city. One nice Sunday morningin April we go down and sit on the stoop.

  Cat sits down, very tall and neat and pear-shaped, and closes his eyesabout halfway. He glances at the street like it isn't good enough for him.After a while, condescending, he eases down the steps and lies on a sunny,dusty spot in the middle of the sidewalk. People walking have to steparound him, and he squints at them.

  Then he gets up, quick, looks over his shoulder at nothing, and shootsdown the stairs to the cellar. I take a look to see where he's going, andhe is pacing slowly toward the backyard, head down, a tiger on the prowl.I figure I'll sit in the sun and finish my science-fiction magazine beforeI go after him.

  When I do, he's not in sight, and the janitor tells me he jumped up on thewall and probably down into one of the other yards. I look around a whileand call, but he's not in sight, and I go up to lunch. Along towardevening Cat scratches at the door and comes in, as if he'd done it all hislife.

  This gets to be a routine. Sometimes he doesn't even come home at night,and he's sitting on the doormat when I get the milk in the morning,looking offended.

  "Is it my fault you stayed out all night?" I ask him.

  He sticks his tail straight up and marches down the hall to the kitchen,where he waits for me to open the milk and dish out the cat food. Then hegoes to bed.

  One morning he's not there when I open the door, and he still hasn'tshowed up when I get back from school. I get worried and go down to talkto Butch.

  "Wa-a-l," says Butch, "sometimes that cat sit and talk to me a little, butmost times he go on over to Twenty-first Street, where he sit and talk tohis lady friend. Turned cold last night, lot of buildings put on heat andclosed up their basements. Maybe he got locked in somewheres."

  "Which building's his friend live in?" I ask.

  "Forty-six, the big one. His friend's a little black-and-white cat, sortof belongs to the night man over there. He feeds her."

  I go around to Twenty-first Street and case Forty-six, which is a prettyfair-looking building with a striped awning and a doorman who saunters outfront and looks around every few minutes.

  While I'm watching, a grocery boy comes along pushing his cart and goesdown some stairs into the basement with his carton of groceries. Thisgives me an idea. I'll give the boy time to get started up in theelevator, and then I'll go down in the basement and hunt for Cat. Ifsomeone comes along and gets sore, I can always play dumb.

  I go down, and the coast is clear. The elevator's gone up, and I walksoftly past and through a big room where the tenants leave their babycarriages and bicycles. After this the cellar stretches off into severalcorridors, lit by twenty-watt bulbs dangling from the ceiling. You canhardly see anything. The corridors go between wire storage cages, wherethe tenants keep stuff like trunks and old cribs and parakeet cages.They're all locked.

  "Me-ow, meow, me-ow!" Unmistakably Cat, and angry.

  The sound comes from the end of one corridor, and I fumble along, peeringinto each cage to try to see a tiger cat in a shadowy hole. Fortunatelyhis eyes glow and he opens his mouth for another meow, and I see himlocked inside one of the cages before I come to the end of the corridor. Idon't know how he got in or how I'm going to get him out.

  While I'm thinking, Cat's eyes flick away from me to the right, then backto me. Cat's not making any noise, and neither am I, but something is.It's just a tiny rustle, or a breath, but I have a creepy feeling someoneis standing near us. Way down at the end of the cellar a shadow moves alittle, and I can see it has a white splotch--a face. It's a man, and hecomes toward me.

  I don't know why any of the building men would be way back there, butthat's who I figure it is, so I start explaining.

  "I was just hunting for my cat ... I mean, he's got locked in one of thesecages. I just want to get him out."

  The guy lets his breath out, slow, as if he's been holding it quite awhile. I realize he doesn't belong in that cellar either, and he's beenscared of me.

  He moves forward, saying "Sh-h-h" very quietly. He's taller than I am, andI can't see what he really looks like, but I'm sure he's sort of a kid,maybe eighteen or so.

  He looks at the padlock on the cage and says, "Huh, cheap!" He takes apaper clip out of his pocket and opens it out, and I think maybe he has apenknife, too, and next thing I know the padlock is open.

  "Gee, how'd you do that?"

  "Sh-h-h. A guy showed me how. You better get your cat and scram."

  Golly, I wonder, maybe the guy is a burglar, and that gives me anothercreepy feeling. But would a burglar be taking time out to get a kid's catfree?

  "Well, thanks for the cat. See you around," I say.

  "Sh-h-h. I don't live around here. Hurry up, before we both get caught."

  Maybe he's a real burglar with a gun, even, I think, and by the time Idodge past the elevators and get out in the cold April wind, the sweatdown my back is freezing. I give Cat a long lecture on staying out ofbasements. After all, I can't count on having a burglar handy to get himout every time.

  Back home we put some nice jailhouse blues on the record player, and weboth stretch out on the bed to think. The guy didn't really _look_ like aburglar. And he didn't talk "dese and dose." Maybe real burglars don't alltalk that way--only the ones on TV. Still, he sure picked that lock fast,and he was sure down in that cellar for some reason of his own.

  Maybe I ought to let someone know. I figure I'll test Pop out, just casuallike. "Some queer-looking types hanging around this neighborhood," I sayat dinner. "I saw a tough-looking guy hanging around Number Forty-six thisafternoon. Might have been a burglar, even."

  I figure Pop'll at least ask me what he was doing, and maybe I'll tell himthe whole thing--about Cat and the cage. But Pop says, "In case you didn'tknow it, burglars do not all look like Humphrey Bogart, and they don'twear signs."

  "Thanks for the news," I say and go on eating my dinner. Even if Pop doesmake me sore, I'm not going to pass up steak and onions, which we don'thave very often.

  However, the next day I'm walking along Twenty-first Street and I see thesuper of Forty-six standing by the back entrance, so I figure I'll tryagain. I say to him, "Us kids were playing ball here yesterday, and we sawa strange-looking guy sneak into your cellar. It wasn't a delivery boy."

  "Yeah? You sure it wasn't you or one of your juvenile pals trying to swipea bike? How come you have to play ball right here?"

  "I don't swipe bikes. I got one of my own. New. A Raleigh. Better than anyjunk you got in there."

  "What d'you know about what I got in there, wise guy?"

  "Aw, forget it." I realize he's just getting suspicious of me. That's whatcomes of trying to be a big pub
lic-spirited citizen. I decide my burglar,whoever he is, is a lot nicer than the super, and I hope he got a fathaul.

  Next day it looks like maybe he did just that. The local paper, _Town andVillage_, has a headline: "Gramercy Park Cellar Robbed." I read down thearticle:

  "The superintendent, Fred Snood, checked the cellar storage cages, after apassing youth hinted to him that there had been a robbery. He found onecage open and a suitcase missing. Police theorize that the youth may havebeen the burglar, or an accomplice with a guilty conscience or a grudge,and they are hunting him for questioning. Mr. Snood described him as aboutsixteen years of age, medium height, with a long 'ducktail' haircut, andwearing a heavy black sweater. They are also checking second-hand storesfor the stolen suitcase."

  The burglar stole a suitcase with valuable papers and some silver andjewelry in it. But the guy they were hunting for--I read the paragraph overand feel green. That's me. I get up and look in the mirror. In othercircumstances I'd like being taken for sixteen instead of fourteen, whichI am. I smooth my hair and squint at the back of it. The ducktail is fine.

  Slowly I peel off my black sweater, which I wear practically all the time,and stuff it in my bottom drawer, under my bathing suit. But if I want towalk around the street without worrying about every cop, I'll have to domore than that. I put on a shirt and necktie and suit jacket and stick acap on my head. I head uptown on the subway. At Sixty-eighth Street I getoff and find a barbershop.

  "Butch cut," I tell the guy.

  "That's right. I'll trim you nice and neat. Get rid of all this stuff."

  And while he chatters on like an idiot, I have to watch three months' workgo snip, snip on the floor. Then I have to pay for it. At home I get thesame routine. Pop looks at my Ivy-League disguise and says, "Why, you maylook positively human some day!"

  Two days later I find out I could've kept my hair. _Town and Village_ hasa new story: "Nab Cellar Thief Returning Loot. 'Just A Bet,' He Says."

  The story is pretty interesting. The guy I met in the cellar is named TomRansom, and he is nineteen and just sort of floating around in the city.He doesn't seem to have any family. The police kept a detective watchingNumber Forty-six, and pretty soon they see Tom walking along with thestolen suitcase. He drops it inside the delivery entrance and walks on,but the cop collars him. I suppose if it hadn't been for me shooting mybig mouth off to the super, the police wouldn't have been watching theneighborhood. I feel sort of responsible.

  The story in the paper goes on to say this guy was broke and hunting for ajob, and some other guy dares him to snatch something out of a cellar andfinally bets him ten dollars, so he does it. He gets out and finds thesuitcase has a lot of stocks and legal papers and table silver in it, andhe's scared stiff. So he figures to drop it back where it came from. Thepaper says he's held over to appear before some magistrate in AdolescentCourt.

  I wonder, would they send a guy to jail for that? Or if they turn himloose, what does he do? It must be lousy to be in this city without anyfamily or friends.

  At that point I get the idea I'll write him a letter. After all, Cat and Isort of got him into the soup. So I look up the name of the magistrate andspend about half an hour poring through the phone book, under "New York,City of," to get an address. I wonder whether to address him as "Tom" or"Mr. Ransom." Finally I write:

  _Dear Tom Ransom:_

  _I am the kid you met in the cellar at Number Forty-six Gramercy, and Icertainly thank you for unlocking that cage and getting my cat out. Cat isfine. I am sorry you got in trouble with the police. It sounds to me likeyou were only trying to return the stuff and do right. My father is alawyer, if you would like one. I guess he's pretty good. Or if you wouldlike to write me anyway, here is my address: 150 East 22 St. I read in thepaper that your family don't live in New York, which is why I thought youmight like someone to write to._

  _Yours sincerely,_ _Dave Mitchell_

  Now that I'm a free citizen again, I dig out my black sweater, lookdisgustedly at the butch haircut, and go out to mail my letter.

  Later on I get into a stickball game again on Twenty-first Street. Catcomes along and sits up high on a stoop across the street, where he canwatch the ball game and the tame dogs being led by on their leashes. Thatbig brain, the super of Forty-six, is standing by the delivery entrance,looking sour as usual.

  "Got any burglars in your basement these days?" I yell to him while I'mjogging around the bases on a long hit.

  He looks at me and my short haircut and scratches his own bald egg."Where'd I see you?" he asks suspiciously.

  "Oh--Cat and I, we get around," I say.

  3

  Dave, Cat, and Nick running on the beach.]

  CAT AND CONEY