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  To all strays, abandoned pets,

  and those who take pity on them

  CONTENTS

  ***

  PART ONE: The Old Cat

  PART TWO: Old Cat and the Kitten

  PART THREE: The Boy

  PART ONE

  The Old Cat

  Chapter One

  HE WAS VERY HUNGRY THE EVENING Joel found him on the garbage can behind the garage. The pickings were poor for strays, and there were too many strays to pick them.

  The old cat had long forgotten what it was like to live instead of just to stay alive. When he was a little kitten, he had been petted and played with and cared for from the time he was chosen out of a litter one spring day.

  “He’s the prettiest one,” the woman had said. “All black with just those little white hairs on his shoulder. Look at those great big yellow eyes! Isn’t he cute? Look at the way he grabs my finger! Look at him playing with your shoelace! Oh, he feels so soft against my neck. He’ll be company for me when you’re back in the city on business.”

  Until the autumn came and the man said, “We’re not taking that cat with us when we leave here. He’s old enough now to start spraying around the house.”

  “We can have him altered—”

  “Oh, no. No way! I’m not spending that kind of money on a cat. Besides, he’s hardly the pretty little bundle of fluff you picked out, not anymore.”

  At seven months he was all legs and tail—and appetite.

  “Don’t freak out so—he’ll be all right. Cats can take care of themselves. They’re hunters by nature—they can survive.”

  After they left him, he tried to find somebody else who would feed him and care for him, but he was shooed away, sometimes gently, most of the time not so gently. And if people already had a cat, he was in trouble. The big cats chased him out of their yards, and the small cats made such a fuss if he took their food that some person usually came running out yelling, “Scat!” and going after him with a broom.

  So, he had learned to fight the big cats and to keep his distance from people.

  As more and more people moved into the neighborhood, the small wildlife worth hunting thinned out and became nearly extinct in this area filled with people, dogs and motor vehicles.

  Yet he had survived for over five years—thirty-five in man years. Now he was worn and raggedy-coated, tired and comfortless. Hunger and fear were all he knew.

  When Joel came around the corner of the garage, the old cat leaped from the garbage can and fled halfway down the alley. He stopped ­halfway because the boy was speaking, and something in the tone of the boy’s voice held him.

  “Here, Old Cat,” Joel called, softly. “I ain’t gonna hurt you. Come on, old feller, come on. You sure look a mess, Old Cat. Come on—come on, let me look at your eye. Come on—come here, don’t run.”

  Joel moved toward the old cat very slowly, holding out his hand, speaking softly, continuously, in a gentle voice. When he was about ten feet away, the old cat snarled and hissed and ran the rest of the way down the alley.

  But he came back later that evening and prowled around the garbage can again. The lid was on tight, and powerful as he had become, he could not knock the heavy can over as some dogs are able to do; but he nosed around the bottom of the can, looking for a fallen scrap or two.

  When Joel came around the corner of the garage, the old cat ran again, but again at the sound of the boy’s voice he stopped and looked back. Joel was carrying a plate with food on it. He came up to the cat slowly, speaking softly, pleading with him.

  “Come on back, Old Cat. Come on—you look starved. Come on. Nobody’s gonna hurt you. Come on. Come get your dinner. Come on, Old Cat, come on.”

  The old cat snarled and hissed and ran again as the boy drew near. But once more he stopped and looked back. The smell of the food was an agony, but he’d had experiences with people, with boys and tin cans and rocks and bottles. The puffy scar across his eye and face was the result of a flying piece of glass from a bottle flung at him, that had burst at his running feet. He crouched and hissed and snarled again.

  “You sure can swear, can’t you, Old Cat. OK. I’ll put the plate down here, and you just come eat when you feel like it.”

  Joel set the plate down close to the fence and backed slowly away, always speaking to the cat. The cat did not move. The smell of the food made him drool, but he did not start toward the plate until the boy was all the way back, peeking around the corner of the garage. Then slowly, fearfully, never taking his eyes off the corner where Joel watched, the old cat crawled on his belly to the plate.

  Hunger overcame fear, and he fell on the food, gulping it down as no properly fed cat would ever do. He lifted his head now and then to look warily to each side, then gulped again.

  Although he was almost out of sight, Joel kept speaking softly to the cat while it ate.

  “Man, you really starving, ain’t you. I bet you ain’t had a meal like that since Christmas. You gotta come close and let me look at that cut. Your ears is as raggy as your tail. You really a sorry sight, you sure are.”

  Indeed, the old cat had not had a meal like that for more than a year. His Christmas dinner had been snatched from the edges of garbage cans too full to be tightly covered. The last meal put out for him—just for him—was almost two years ago when, for a few blissful months, an old lady had set a plate for him at her back door. She, too, had talked to him and he had talked back, but even then he had waited until she closed the screen door before he ate. He never let her touch him, but he went to her house every day without fail until one evening she didn’t come to the door at all. He went again, often, faithfully—and hungrily—but he never saw her again.

  After the old cat had licked the plate clean the boy, still calling softly, squatted down on his heels and put out his hand again, but even at that distance the movement startled the cat and he ran off down the alley.

  Every evening, for almost a week, when Joel came with a plate of food, the old cat jumped off the garbage can where he waited and ran halfway down the alley. Each time the boy set the plate down a little closer to the place where he watched by the corner of the garage, and the cat came and ate, still ravenously, still warily watching and distrustful, but a little nearer to the boy each time.

  “YOU SURE CAGEY, AIN’T YOU, OLD CAT,” THE boy crooned. “Guess you had a rough time. Come on, come on, man—don’t be scared. Come on—smell my hand. It’s a petting hand, see? It’s a feeding hand, not a hitting hand. Come on.” But the cat would not come to the boy, though he no longer ran away. He raised his head and hissed, then finished his meal.

  “You the swearingest cat I ever did see. My mom won’t let me swear, not now. She says I gotta be thirteen before I can say damn or hell—that’s almost a year off. All I can say now is darn or heck or—aw, come on! Don’t go away.”

  The old cat licked the last bit of food off the plate, then turned his back on the boy. He did not run, but walked steadily away a few paces; then he sat down, and eyeing the boy once more, he began to wash himself.

  Joel grinned and slowly sat down on the ground where he’d been squatting.

  “That’s more
like it, Old Cat,” he said. “You gonna come to me one of these days. You gonna let me pet you and fix you up. You and me, we gonna be friends.”

  “Who you talking to? So that’s where all that good hamburger’s been going!”

  As the boy’s mother pulled him to his feet, the cat ran off down the alley and disappeared.

  “Hey, Mom—please! Look what ya done! You really scared him away! Now I’ll have to start all over again, just when he was beginning to listen to me!”

  “You listen to me! For the last time: no more animals, you understand? No more!”

  “But, Mom—”

  “After what I went through with you when your dog got killed? No—no more pets!”

  “Mom, listen—”

  “You listen! I come home all done in from work, on my feet all day at the beauty shop, and what do I find? The Fiends mauling each other and you outside here feeding my hard-earned food to a filthy stray cat!”

  “But Mom, if I take care of him a little, he’ll—”

  “Cats can take care of themselves. Now get in there.”

  “But he’s starving and hurt. He needs help.”

  “I need help—and you got a little brother and sister in the house needs help. Now move. Get those kids washed and put to bed while I fix me something to eat—if there’s any food left!”

  Chapter Two

  THE TOWN LAY IN A VALLEY NEAR A LAKE that was bordered by summer cottages, some of which were owned by the wealthier townsfolk. Others served as vacation homes for summer visitors. On one side of the town an old, unused railway station was edged by rows of small, identical houses, each with its narrow driveway and a single-car garage on the alley behind it. It was in one of these houses that Joel lived with his mother and little stepbrother and sister. His stepfather had left them there a year ago to look for work in the city some hundred or so miles away. Joel could not really remember his own father, but he cherished a snapshot of him in his army sergeant’s uniform, sent home shortly before his death in Vietnam.

  It was not easy for a boy to find a money-­earning job in this town. People did what they could for themselves in the way of chores, and what jobs there were went to teenagers and adults. Joel received a small weekly allowance from his mother, but it didn’t stretch very far and he had been saving all he could spare for a microscope, not one of those toy things but a real microscope that would last him through high school—maybe even college if he could ever get that far. His friend Wayne had told Joel he’d seen a good second-hand one in the city for eighty dollars. That was a lot of money, but he’d managed to save almost eighteen dollars since Christmas.

  Now that he’d made a deal with his mother about the old cat, he’d have to earn some money, because part of the deal was that he’d have to feed the cat on his own—from his own plate or out of his own pocket. After a bang-up row the night before, he and his mother had come to terms: she promised to let him fix a shelter for the old cat in the garage. The spring rains were not over and the winds off the lake could be very cold. She seldom promised him anything; but when she did, she kept her promise, he could say that for her. But she knew how to drive a hard bargain. He had also to baby-sit, without complaining, from the time the Fiends were brought home from nursery school by another mother, until she got home from work.

  The next morning she gave him a piece of old blanket.

  “You can make a bed for that old cat back there on the floor in the corner of the garage.”

  “Not on the floor, Mom. Cats like little boxes or high places.”

  “Then hang him on the chandelier—and provide your own chandelier. Just keep him out of the house. I’m warning you, don’t you ever let me catch that animal in the house.”

  She got into the car, where the Fiends were already roughhousing in the back seat, and put her key in the ignition.

  “I got to get these Fiends to nursery school before they pull each other’s clothes off. Don’t you be late to school, now, fooling around over that old cat.”

  She started to back out of the driveway, then rolled her window down for a last word.

  “I just don’t understand. You always so particular. What you want, anyway, with a beat-up old specimen like that? Now if it was a pretty, clean little kitten . . .”

  Joel folded the piece of blanket and laid it on the tool shelf, then he came up to the driver’s side of the car.

  “He was a pretty, clean little kitten once, Mom,” he said. “Ain’t his fault nobody gave him a home. I wonder . . . I wonder if he ever had a home at all. Maybe somebody, summer visitors maybe, took care of him when he was little and cute and then when he got to be big and kinda awkward they banded him—”

  “Abandoned, stupid. When you gonna begin to talk like you had some education? Abandoned, not banded.”

  She backed the rest of the way out of the driveway.

  “Behave yourself—have a good day,” she called.

  “You too, Mom,” he answered.

  As soon as she had turned and pulled off down the street, he hurried to the back of the garage, picking up a hammer and chisel from the tool shelf on the way.

  Only when a big storm was forecast was the car ever put in the garage. Like most of the others in this block, the car stayed closed and locked in the driveway, and the garage was used as a place to store things for which there was no room in the house. Most of the things lined around the sides and back of the garage belonged to Joel, who had no room of his own. He had found sharing a small bedroom with the Fiends a greater trial than sleeping on the living room sofa and keeping his belongings in the garage. At the back stood an old dining room sideboard, part of which could be locked, and only he had the key for it. Above this was a tiny window, which, on the alley side, was just over the big garbage can.

  This little window was so covered with dirt and cobwebs that no one ever noticed that it had been broken and part of the pane was missing; no one except Joel, who now stood up on top of the sideboard and began to hammer out the rest of the glass. He made a neat job of it, then he took a brush and dust pan and cleared away all the broken glass in the garage and in the alley.

  If only he could encourage Old Cat to use this for a cat hole, then he’d buy a piece of plexiglass and tape it at the top so that it could swing both ways, and Old Cat could come and go from the alley as he pleased.

  Joel quickly tidied up, grabbed his lunch off the kitchen counter, straddled his bicycle and pedaled away with joyful speed to school.

  HE WORKED VERY HARD THAT AFTERNOON AT baby-sitting the Fiends. He read them a story and then made them some creepy-crawlies. He didn’t even slip out once while they were watching television. He cooked their hamburger very carefully. He heated a can of mixed vegetables, poured their milk and tried to keep three-year-old Bitsy from knocking hers over. He failed, cleaned up the mess and poured out more. ­Four-year-old Seth had, as usual, picked all the carrots out of his vegetables and didn’t want to eat the rest. But after a tiresome game of counting the pieces left over—until there were none—Joel gave them their chocolate pudding, and they were being bathed when their mother came home. She took over, and he was free at last to seek out the old cat.

  He was glad he had spent twenty-nine cents for a can of cat food. He’d had no idea that cat food cost so much, and he hoped he could get a job before he used up all his money. He hated the thought of chipping away at his microscope money.

  His mother objected to his feeding the cat off a plate, so he emptied the cat food onto the lid of a plastic cottage cheese container and set off for the alley.

  Remembering the disaster of the night before, he wondered if the cat would come back. He approached the corner of the garage quietly and began to speak slowly, softly.

  “Come on, Old Cat. I can take care of you now, Old Cat. Come on, be my cat, Old Cat. Come on, we gonna be friends like I said. Come . . .”

&n
bsp; Old Cat was lying across the top of the garbage can, staring at the corner of the garage, waiting. When Joel appeared there, the cat drew himself into a crouch, still watching, ready to spring. But he did not spring.

  There was a moment of total silence, of complete stillness, as boy and cat looked at each other.

  It was Old Cat who broke the silence, with his usual hiss.

  “Man! Am I glad to see you,” Joel crooned. The cat answered with a low growl, eyes still fixed on the boy.

  “Look here, Old Cat. I brought your dinner—something special just for cats. Costs twenty-nine cents so it ought to be good.”

  The cat answered. Joel found it wholly delightful that every time he spoke, the cat answered.

  “Man! If only you could speak English,” he said. “I’d sure like to know what you’re saying. I’d sure like to know what’s that swear-word you start out with. Sounds like ‘hell’ to me, but you probably got a better one, even.”

  He kept all his movements slow and his voice soft and crooning. He held out the plate toward Old Cat. The cat would not come, but continued to “talk.”

  “OK. I read you.” Joel put the plate on the ground and stepped back a few paces, then sat down, knees drawn up. Old Cat jumped down from the garbage can and began to eat hungrily; no more talking on his part.

  “That’s a nasty-looking scar you got, Old Cat. Sure is ugly—makes you look like a real hood. You no beauty to begin with, and that puffy scar makes you look downright evilish. You’d scare the pants off an angel.”

  Old Cat licked the plate clean, then sat where he was and washed himself. When Joel slowly reached out a hand to try to touch him, the cat shrank away from it and got to his feet. He turned his back and walked calmly, tail up, away down the alley.

  Chapter Three

  EVERY EVENING JOEL FOUND OLD CAT waiting on the garbage can. When it rained, he put down a large brown carton and set the plate of food inside it so that cat and food were sheltered during the meal.