Jack (Gilead #4)(52)

He sat down on the stoop of the rooming house, rolled back the lid of the tin, and put one little fish on his palm. The cat ate it, propping itself with its paws, and scrubbed Jack’s hand with its tongue. Another sardine. The third and fourth Jack put on a cracker for himself. Pleasant enough, a man and his cat. It leaped down into the bushes to do the meticulous business of scratching the ground and covering the place. Then it came back to him. He picked it up again, hand under its belly because he liked to feel its heart beating, and went inside.

The clerk said, “What do you think of the cat?”

“It seems decent enough.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I like it well enough.”

“All right. Five bucks.”

“What?”

“Three-fifty. I’ll put it on your tab.”

“You’re trying to sell me a cat? It’s just like every cat in every alley in St. Louis!”

“True. And there’s a rule against cats in this house, anyway. Dogs. And there’s nothing particular about it, so there’s no reason to pay me for it. That’s true.”

Jack had looked it over carefully. It had no distinguishing marks of any kind. It was too young to have any distinguishing behaviors. “This is ridiculous,” he said, and put it back in his pocket. But this time it jumped out and ran. The clerk caught it up in his hand and chucked it out the door. “There are a million more just like it,” he said. “Give me a few bucks every now and then to cover damages and I’ll look the other way. If you decide you want a cat.”

Jack stepped out the door. No cat in sight. He walked around a little, disgruntling pigeons, looking into garbage cans and around them with an interest that must have appeared fairly pitiful to passersby. Then he went to the shop where he had bought the sardines and got another tin. He was beginning to add up the expenses involving this cat. But he sat back down on the stoop with the open tin beside him. Two cats appeared, then a third, all gray with gray stripes, all half grown. Then a small, cautious fourth, gray with gray stripes. He held out a sardine to it on the fingers of one hand, grabbed it with the other, and left the oily tin on the stoop for the rest of them to fight over. As he walked in past the desk, the clerk looked up from his newspaper. He said, “That’s not the same cat.”

Jack said, “It’ll do,” feigning an indifference he could not actually feel. When he got to his room and closed the door, he examined the creature for any distinguishing features that would prove it was not his cat, but it had none, which proved absolutely nothing. How could this be? That part of his mind was off searching for equivalences again. Every defect is singular, but a perfect cat is indistinguishable from a million others, in theory, even though in fact there might be just one perfect cat. Well, he’d call this his cat and put a mark on it, a nick in an ear, a missing toe, so he would not be tricked into wasting sardines on a cat that had no claim on him. It disgusted him to think of marring the creature. So he patted aftershave on it, to distinguish it from the street cats if this was necessary again. It ran under the dresser and hissed at his shoe. He fetched it out and set it on the windowsill. It jumped down. He put it back again. It jumped down.

The clerk usually went wherever he went about nine o’clock and came back in forty minutes smelling of an unenviable supper. When Jack heard the front door close behind him, he reached under the dresser for the cat, doused it with aftershave, reasoning that it was very likely to attempt an escape, and bundled it into that brown V-neck sweater with the leather elbow patches and antique buttons Teddy had left for him, which was kindly intended certainly but which could only mean his earnest and loyal brother had, unbeknownst to himself, forgotten him. Through the loose fabric he felt the prickle of tiny fangs and still transparent claws far longer than he expected to, and then it fell asleep. He walked for miles. Never allowing himself a doubt about whether wisdom or decent manners should have intervened, he came to Della’s house and sat down on her stoop. To sit there in the dark was his whole intention. What the hell, anyway. It would be his adieu. She would know this somehow. A reeking stray might cross her path, and she would think of Jack, suddenly, unaccountably. He almost laughed.

The porch light flicked on, then off, and the door opened. Della stepped out. “I thought it was you,” she said, and she sat down beside him. Furry slippers, a puffy robe, hair in curlers tied up in a kerchief. Dear Lord, she was still warm from a bath. She said, “No one doesn’t make any noise like you don’t make any noise.”

Wonderful. The sound of her voice was more than a relief to him, quintessentially companionable, as if the two of them were together in the world, uniquely, like two strayed angels, despite anything and everything. He said, “I thought you might want a cat.” He caught it before it could escape the bundled sweater and handed it to her, hissing. Why did he do that? He knew in the dark it was making a fiend of itself, bared teeth, flattened ears, slitted eyes, hind legs digging at her hand. “My landlord doesn’t want me to keep it. Here, you’d better let me hold it.”

It bit and struggled against her hands and fetched up wailing growls from its tiny body, but she pulled the sleeves of her robe down over her hands and kept hold of it. She began to laugh. “It smells like Old Spice,” she said. “A lot of Old Spice.”

“I can explain that,” he said, though he’d rather die.