The Barker Street Regulars

bad. It was short-haired, and its body was uniformly black. Its face, however, was disfigured by an irregular white splotch that might have been cute, I guess, except for the presence of a squiggly pink and brown birthmark that meandered down the splotch and spilled all over the cat’s nose. One of its ears was intact. The other was badly ripped and looked infected. From its eyes oozed a greenish-yellow discharge. When I eased open the door of the crate and reached in for the pillowcase, the cat suddenly lashed out with one paw and gave me a deep scratch. “Damn it! Ouch!” I screeched. But I managed to shut and latch the crate. “Rowdy, no more noise! Enough! And you, cat, no more noise from you, either.” I slammed the tailgate shut, thus giving myself about three seconds of silence. Alaskan malamutes don’t exactly bark. Rather, they express themselves. Rowdy’s self-expression took the form of eager, high-pitched whining interspersed with deep rumbling and percussive body slams against the sides of his crate. Meanwhile, the cat, instead of meowing in some species-appropriate fashion, bawled and wailed like a human infant. In desperation, I popped the first tape that came to hand into the tape deck, turned up the volume, and blasted the animals with Hank Williams’s classic rendering of “You Win Again.”
    According to the clock on the dashboard, the trip home took twelve minutes. That’s impossible. It took at least twenty-four hours. Furthermore, once I got home, it took what felt like another full day to settle the animals. I started by taking Rowdy into the house. Then I dragged two big dog crates from the cellar, set them up in what is supposed to be my guest room, and incarcerated the dogs. “You,” I said sweetly to Kimi, “I trust even less around this poor cat than I trust Rowdy, and that’s saying something. This cat is a temporary visitor in our home, it has just survived a terrible trauma, and] we are going to be kind and gentle and considerate to it until we can find somewhere else for it to go. UNDERSTOOD?”
    Congratulating myself on my wisdom in occupying the ground floor of the house instead of installing myself in the second-floor or third-floor apartment, I made another trip to the cellar, rummaged around, and finally found a puppy crate that would do for the cat. It was an old airline-approved carrier that had been sitting disassembled in the basement for so many years that I had to carry it up, put it in the bathtub, scrub it, and then fasten it together before I could use it for any animal, even a scraggly, ugly, and probably diseased cat that had given me a scratch that was still bleeding. I will skip over the experience of transferring the cat from Kimi’s crate in the car to the puppy crate to my kitchen except to state the obvious, namely that cat scratches really, really sting and that even the world’s most hideous and ungrateful cat deserves to be rescued from drowning. “Now,” I murmured gently to the cat as I deposited the carrier on the kitchen table, “I’m going to fix you a lovely dish of tuna, and we’re going to get you out and take a good look at you.” Muttering soothing remarks about poor, hungry little kitties and the evils of cruelty to animals, I opened a can of tuna. The sound of the electric can opener and the smell of raw protein got the dogs going, but I promised them lots of attention later, reminded them that they’d both get to go to a show tomorrow, avoided the subject of baths, and shut the guest-room door. Returning to the kitchen, I dished out the tuna and placed a nice smelly bowl of it on the table in front of the puppy crate. Slowly, calmly, and quietly, I opened the crate. Through its door whizzed a streak of black that sent the Pyrex bowl flying to my new quarry tile floor. Shards of glass lay in a pile of tuna. The cat had vanished. Until I found it, I couldn’t let the dogs loose.
    It was now three-thirty in the afternoon. I hadn’t eaten lunch, hadn’t had any caffeine since breakfast, hadn’t written a word. Nancy was dead at ninety-three. Althea was ninety. Some vicious s.o.b. had put this poor cat in a weighted pillowcase and tried to drown the animal in the river. And I hadn’t even gotten the number of his license plate. My hands were bleeding. The dogs were fussing. The cat was hiding somewhere. Where? No matter where, Rowdy and Kimi would sniff it out. I still had both dogs to bathe and groom, and in a few hours,