Editor’s note: Walt Amses is a educator and writer who lives in North Calais.
The plump mouse skittered between the frayed edge of the Persian rug that’s not from Persia and the China cabinet that doesn’t contain anything from China and headed — without hesitation or stealth — toward the kitchen. There was a perceptible confidence in his stride as though someone set a little table with Cabot cheddar and tinkled a dinner bell at the top of the basement stairs. The Cat wouldn’t have stood for this.
My disorientation was compounded by the fact it had been years since I’d seen a whole mouse, never mind a live one. Generally I’d encounter what was left, splayed ritualistically about the house, legs, head and tail in tact, torso filleted, consumed and later disgorged after dark in the general vicinity of my shoeless route between bed and bathroom.
When The Cat walked down the driveway for the final time, it was without a backward glance, as though he had every intention of returning at 3 a.m., waking me out of what passes for a sound sleep these days and casually assuming his place near my pillow, shedding microscopic black hairs into my nostrils.
Although he seemed to enjoy canned food with gravy that consistently touched me in those difficult to reach spots – like my gag reflex – he preferred his meals freshly captured and sufficiently tortured. Our lawn was frequently so riddled with corpses that the riding mower sometimes emitted a pinkish fog reminiscent of the wood chipper scene in “Fargo.”
When The Cat walked down the driveway for the final time, it was without a backward glance, as though he had every intention of returning at 3 a.m., waking me out of what passes for a sound sleep these days and casually assuming his place near my pillow, shedding microscopic black hairs into my nostrils. He was an allergist’s dream pet.
Me and The Cat went way back – to the middle of the Clinton administration in real life. If you count that in equivalent people years it’s like maintaining a friendship with someone you met wandering through the rubble of the San Francisco earthquake. I’ve lived with cats much of the last 40 years but never 15 with the same one.
Initially, walking down the pet food aisle after his departure was borderline traumatic. Enduring salmon giblets in gravy suddenly seemed not too large a price for his condescending companionship coupled with his stellar credentials as exterminator in chief.
The Cat had an aversion to intimacy, avoiding any commitment other than providing the illusion of cuddling to any human being in the vicinity gullible enough to allow the heat to be sucked out of his torso. When you started enjoying it too much, he would get up an leave, lest you begin taking him for granted.
The Cat was a stone killer into his golden years, enthusiastically savaging not only the usual rodents and songbirds, but fully grown rabbits and a corpulent partridge or two. Coldly efficient, he was a little like a button man for the mob: “Tell the blue jay I always liked him as a bird, it was strictly business.”
I reluctantly set a half dozen mouse traps to nip the rodent proliferation in the bud as it were … The Cat would have simply placed himself strategically in the confluence of the their thoroughfares, quietly waiting, tail twitching like an abstract expressionist’s brush, meditatively awaiting the precise inspiration necessary to get on with a canvas. Mouse as muse.
In the morning, like a grizzled, old guy in a red and black Johnson Woolen Mills jacket looking for muskrat pelts, I inspect my trapline. I should have a Marlboro hanging on my lip and a Styrofoam container of black coffee as I take a couple of deep breaths preparing for the inevitable carnage a metal bar can visit upon a tiny, cartoon vermin.
But as my pace quickens from loft to basement to kitchen to behind the sofa … it’s all the same; none of the traps has been sprung … as I turn away from the last, puzzled, I see something else and quickly make the circuit again … every piece of delicious, imported, aged (for the bouquet) chunk of parmesan is – like The Cat – AWOL. They’d had their last meal without having the decency to be subsequently executed.
This set off an initially troubling series of murderous events that eventually became comforting in one respect. I was no longer wondering how I could honor The Cat’s memory. Instead, like a latter day Bela Lugosi, I was slowly becoming The Cat.
