Cat On The Edge Read online

  He ran the last two blocks caught in a distressing tangle of fears and wanting nothing more complicated than his warm, safe bed, wanted to curl up safe on the blanket next to Clyde, protected by his human housemate.

  2

  The gray cat woke suddenly from deep sleep, curled on his master's bed. Something had waked him, a noise foreign to the usual house noises. He twitched an ear, trying to come alert.

  The violent screeching came again, jerking him up to full attention, propelling him to his feet, his claws digging into the blanket, his senses slapped into high gear by the splintering, wrenching sound. What the hell is going on? Ears flattened, his stub tail tucked low, he stared around the dim bedroom, a growl rumbling deep in his throat. The splintering cacophony had driven every hair along his spine straight up, stiff as the bristles on a hairbrush. Standing rigid on the double bed next to his human companion, he tried to get a fix on the sound.

  Beside him, Clyde turned over, heat radiating from his body like a furnace. His snores rose a decibel, to effectively drown the next scraping of metal on wood.

  That's what the sound was, metal on wood. As if a window were being pried open. Joe sniffed the chill air, trying to scent the intruder, but Clyde's breath was such a powerful decoction of red wine and raw onions that he couldn't have smelled a convention of sweaty joggers if they had crowded into the bedroom. He moved away from Clyde's warm shoulder, listening intently. He wasn't sure whether the noise had come from right there in the room or from another part of the house.

  He felt outrage that a burglar would bother them. This was a small, peaceful village, and a quiet street. They had never had a break-in, not since they'd moved there. This wasn't, after all, the mean streets of south San Francisco. But at contemplation of an invader in the house, a cold fear held him, far more chilling than wariness of a normal burglar.

  Shivering and puzzled, he studied the dim bedroom, the hulking shapes of dresser, of the TV, of Clyde's clothes flung over the chair limp as a used Halloween costume discarded after the big event. Clyde's shoes protruded from the shadow beneath the chair, and beside them one smelly sock.

  Nothing seemed unfamiliar in the bedroom. Warily Joe crept across the covers and hunched over the side of the bed, staring under.

  The shadows beneath the bedsprings were empty, nothing there but a few dust balls like the ghosts of long-deceased mice. He backed up onto the bed again and licked a paw, scanning the room's corners, its darkest reaches, staring into the open closet, at the dim tangle of Clyde's clothes.

  No shadow seemed unaccounted for. On the dark bedroom walls, three pale rectangles shone, the mirror gleaming silver, the two window shades gathering artificial light from without, from the streetlamp up at the corner. And the dim glow of the shades was struck across with the shadows of twisted branches, from the oak tree that sheltered the bedroom. Suddenly, within the tree, a mockingbird began to babble, its tuneless gurgles blending with Clyde's snores.

  He could hear nothing, now, but snores and the damned bird. What was it with mockingbirds? What went through their tiny minds? The creature was as tuneless as a baboon practicing the violin.

  But the mockingbird wouldn't be sitting in that tree trying to sing, if someone were out there under the bedroom windows.

  Maybe the scraping noise had come from the backyard. Or maybe from the front of the house; maybe up beyond the front porch a stranger hugged the perimeter of the house, trying to force his way in, to pry open a living room window, or the front door.

  Joe leaped to the floor, the shock of his weight keening through his soft pads and up his legs, jolting the muscles of his shoulders.

  He was a big cat, heavy, his silver-gray coat gleaming dense and short, sleek as gray velvet over hard muscle. Tense, flattening his ears and whiskers tight to his head, he prowled the room, listening through the walls. Moving through the dark room, his gray parts blended into the shadows so the white marks on his chest and paws and the white triangle on his nose seemed to move disconnected.

  He was not a handsome cat. The strip of white down his nose made his yellow eyes seem too close together, gave him a permanent frown.

  The splintering, wrenching noise did not come again. Could he have dreamed that sound, only imagined it?

  Certainly he had imagined some strange things lately, so strange that he had begun to think some feline disease was slowly rotting his brain.

  Maybe he'd had a nightmare caused by bad food. That had happened once when he got hold of a sick gopher; he'd had wild, impossible dreams.

  He tried to remember what he had eaten yesterday. He'd had a hasty mouse after supper, but that shouldn't do it, he'd eaten it an hour after his usual cat food. If it was going to make him sick, it would have done so long before now. Anyway, the mouse had gone down delightfully. He'd killed a starling around noon yesterday, but he'd spit out the beak and feet. Starlings never made him sick. Preoccupied with his physical assessment, he didn't realize he was keening deep in his throat until Clyde woke, swearing.

  "For Christ sake, Joe, stop it! It's too damned early to be horny! Go back to sleep!" Only then was Joe aware of his own harsh, rough-edged crying.

  Silenced, he listened again for the dry, quick report of breaking wood. He really should check the house. The dogs couldn't do it, they were shut in the kitchen. The two old dogs had spent their nights in the kitchen ever since Barney started peeing on the front door. And both dogs slept like rocks, lifeless as the products of a taxidermist's art. Someone was breaking into the house and the damned dogs hadn't the presence of mind to wake up and bark. Both were big dogs, a scruffy golden and an overweight Lab, both could have routed a prowler with their barking alone if they'd made half an effort.

  Absently he licked a whisker. He considered himself the epitome of tough tomcats, yet now he felt strangely reluctant to leave the safety of the bedroom. Shivers of fear coursed up his rigid back, and his paws had begun to sweat.

  Trying to get hold of himself, he cocked an ear toward the closed door. Hearing no creak in the hall, he approached the door warily, and pawed it open. Crouching, he slunk down the dark hall, his whiskers tingling with apprehension.

  He stared into the bathroom, looking nervously past the shower door into the tiled cubicle. When he found it empty, he slipped on down the hall along the dog-scented carpet toward the spare bedroom.

  That room was at the back, without the streetlight to brighten its interior. The shades were up. He could see no movement beyond the black glass. He jumped on the desk, pressed his face against a cold pane of glass, and looked out.

  He could see no one in the backyard. He could hear no sound, now, from anywhere in the house. Yet still he could not stop his skin from rippling in long, chilling shivers.

  Terror had plagued him ever since that night in the alley when he saw Samuel Beckwhite murdered. He could not escape these constant replays of that bright arc swinging up, the dull thud of shattering bone. That moment of violence had altered his every thought, his every reaction. Sometimes he wondered if he was going bonkers, tipping over the edge. And it was far more than his witness to Beckwhite's death, and his subsequent pursuit, that had transformed him.

  The weirdness started before that. He was, and had been for some weeks, experiencing a strange identity change. He was totally out of touch with the normal cat world. His initial amazement when he realized he could understand human speech had been almost more than he could handle.

  Nothing that life could serve up could equal the shock of that first moment when human speech became clear. When Clyde said in a low, controlled voice, "If you don't take that mouse outside, Joe, you are going to find yourself warming a cat coffin with the lid nailed down."

  He had understood each individual word. He had taken the mouse outdoors, so upset at his sudden cognitive ability that he turned the squirming morsel loose, let it go free to scamper away.

  He had stood on the porch shivering with astonishment at his sudden understanding of human spe
ech.

  A normal, ordinary cat knows the call to meals, he knows and tolerates his master's sharp commands such as Get off the table! and Stop that damned clawing! Any cat with a home knows the love words, the baby talk. But words such as those are recognized partly through tone of voice, partly through frequent repetition. No cat is able to decode every human word, or to comprehend abstract human meaning.

  But he, Joe Grey, was able to do exactly that. Was suddenly able to absorb each subtle implication, to sort out all the intricacies of human innuendo. From that moment, when Clyde shouted at him about the mouse, he had understood every word between Clyde and his poker-playing buddies or his girlfriends; he was highly amused by Clyde's tangled telephone conversations when he tried to keep each woman ignorant of his involvement with the others. Though he didn't know what women saw in Clyde.

  Clyde Damen was thirty-eight, of medium height, with straight black hair and thick shoulders. He had been married once, but he didn't talk about it. Joe hadn't known him then. Clyde had no great beauty or charm that Joe could see, yet there were always women cooking dinner for him, bringing over steaks or casseroles, snuggling up on the couch with the lights low and a CD playing something soft and throbbing.

  Since Joe began to understand every intimate word between Clyde and his lady friends, their visits had been both embarrassing and boring. Usually, he left the house.

  Human speech would be fine if it did not run to such crass inanities. For instance, he understood the TV news, knew the economy was in bad shape, knew that the president had recalled his ambassadors to half a dozen Eastern countries, but why all the fuss? The basic moves were little different than the eternal manipulations of two tomcats, or of cat and mouse. So what was the big deal? Did they have to go on about it? Well, maybe he didn't have the right frame of reference.

  And in the daytime, prowling the bushes or sleeping in the neighbors' flower beds, every pair of gossiping housewives pelted his brain with unwanted gossip and inane opinions. And the neighborhood men, working on their cars or digging crabgrass were just as annoying. These conversations were no longer just noise; now he was a suddenly a captive audience, drawn to paying unwilling attention. The human world had, in short, intruded into his world, distracting him from hunting and frustrating his leisure hours with trivia.

  Face it, he was no longer a normal cat, his time divided between satisfying bouts of fighting, mating, eating, sleeping, and bullying his housemates, both feline and canine, and bullying Clyde. He was jumpy and off his feed; he had lost all heart for bullying and almost for lovemaking.

  Beyond the spare room windows, out in the dark backyard, nothing moved. And the room itself could conceal no one-it held only the seldom-used guest bed with boxes of canned dog food underneath, and Clyde's weight lifting equipment and his messy desk.

  He moved away from the distressing scene of Clyde's bachelor decor and crept on down the hall to the dining alcove, passing the kitchen door. Surely the dogs would wake if someone were breaking into the kitchen. Or at least the three other cats would wake and make a fuss, subsequently waking the dogs. Then, heading for the living room, he heard the scraping again.

  It was coming from the front windows. Someone was outside the windows trying to get inside. Enraged, forgetting fear, he crept across the worn faux-Persian rug, keeping low, stalking the sound. The shades were up, the draperies open-Clyde seldom bothered to pull them unless he had female guests.

  Beyond the windows, dawn was beginning to touch the night sky, its first thin light seeping down between pale clouds. He leaped to the sill, to look out.

  A face looked back. A human face, inches from his face. He was so startled he backed away and fell off the narrow ledge.

  Landing clumsily, he looked up at the glass. The thin, pale face remained, grinning with high amusement. Joe stood staring, his whiskers trembling, his paws growing slick with sweat. It was the man, the same man. Beckwhite's killer.

  He could smell freshly cut wood; and beneath the window shone a raw scar where a screwdriver, or a hand drill, perhaps, had pierced through.

  Realizing the man would soon have the window open, he spun around and made for the kitchen. Leaping at the closed door he yowled and scratched until Barney, the golden, woke bellowing, then Rube began to boom. Their combined warning shook the house.

  But there was no sound from the bedroom; likely Clyde hadn't even stopped snoring.

  And then, at a break in the dogs' barking he heard a car start. He raced to the front window, and leaped up.

  A dark car was pulling away without lights. It spun a U, slowed going past the house, then moved out fast, and was gone. Far down the block it switched on its headlights, flashing suddenly onto the tree trunks and bushes as it swept past.

  The street lay quiet. The killer was gone.

  Up and down the street, the neighbors' windows were all dark. The oak trees stood black against the slowly fading sky. Joe sat down in the middle of the worn rug, where the threads were showing, and licked at an imagined flea.

  But it wasn't a flea, it was an involuntary twitch generated by fear. He was nervous as a mouse in a tin pail.

  This was just too much. This attempted break-in was the last dog hair in the milk bowl. His digression from normal cat had left him a bundle of raw feelings anyway. Now, this confrontation was more than he wanted to deal with. More than he knew how to deal with.

  Needing human company, he jumped down from the sill and returned to the bedroom, to Clyde.

  And, of course, Clyde had slept through it all. He was still snoring, relentless and loud as a chain saw. Joe wanted to crawl under the covers and snuggle in safety next to Clyde's warm, bare shoulder.

  But he couldn't cower in bed, protected by his master. That was the behavior of a scared kitten, not of a grown tomcat. Tomcats in their prime were not supposed to be afraid. He hunched down on the Sarouk rug beside the bed.

  This rug was the real thing. Small, hand-knotted, and expensive. It had been a gift from one of Clyde's more serious lady friends. It offered a most satisfying texture in which to knead his claws.

  He kneaded with a vengeance, working off fear and frustration, digging and pulling, trying to think what to do.

  Beckwhite's killer had taken the trouble to find him, either by driving the village streets until he spotted him, or maybe checking with the local vet to see who owned a gray cat. Why? Did he think a cat was going to testify in court? His interest paralyzed Joe.

  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, and Supper'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.