The Best of Me(52)
“Something,” the cat sighed. “I just don’t know what.”
“ ’Course it’s hard,” the baboon said. “Everybody eating different things. You got one who likes leaves and another who can’t stand the sight of them. Folks have gotten so picky nowadays, I just lay out some peanuts and figure they either eat them or they don’t.”
“Now, I wouldn’t like a peanut,” the cat said. “Not at all.”
“Well, I guess you’d just have drinks, then. The trick is knowing when to stop.”
“That’s never been a problem for me,” the cat boasted. “I drink until I’m full, and then I push myself away from the table. Always have.”
“Well, you’ve got sense, then. Not like some of them around here.” The baboon picked a flea from the cat’s head and stuck it gingerly between her teeth. “Take this wedding I went to—last Saturday, I think it was. Couple of marsh rabbits got married—you probably heard about it.”
The cat nodded.
“Now, I like a church service, but this was one of those write-your-own-vows sorts of things. Neither of them had ever picked up a pen in their life, but all of a sudden they’re poets, right, like that’s all it takes—being in love.”
“My husband and I wrote our own vows,” the cat said defensively.
“Sure you did,” countered the baboon, “but you probably had something to say, not like these marsh rabbits, carrying on that their love was like a tender sapling or some damn thing. And all the while they had this squirrel off to the side, plucking at a harp, I think it was.”
“I had a harp player at my wedding,” the cat said, “and it was lovely.”
“I bet it was, but you probably hired a professional, someone who could really play. This squirrel, I don’t think she’d taken a lesson in her life. Just clawed at those strings, almost like she was mad at them.”
“Well, I’m sure she tried her best,” the cat said.
The baboon nodded and smiled, the way one must in the service industry. She’d planned to tell a story about a drunken marsh rabbit, the brother of the groom at last week’s wedding, but there was no point in it now, not with this client anyway. Whatever she said, the cat disagreed with, and unless she found a patch of common ground she was sure to lose her tip. “You know,” she said, cleaning a scab off the cat’s neck, “I hate dogs. Simply cannot stand them.”
“What makes you bring that up?” the cat asked.
“Just thinking,” the baboon said. “Some kind of spaniel mix walked in yesterday, asking for a shampoo, and I sent him packing, said, ‘I don’t care how much money you have, I’m not making conversation with anyone who licks his own ass.’” And the moment she said it, she realized her mistake.
“Now, what’s wrong with that?” the cat protested. “It’s good to have a clean anus. Why, I lick mine at least five times a day.”
“And I admire you for it,” the baboon said, “but you’re not a dog.”
“Meaning?”
“On a cat it’s…classy,” the baboon said. “There’s a grace to it, but a dog, you know the way they hunker over, legs going every which way.”
“Well, yes,” the cat said. “I suppose you have a point.”
“Then they slobber and drool all over everything, and what they don’t get wet, they chew to pieces.”
“That they do.” The cat chuckled, and the baboon relaxed and searched her memory for a slanderous dog story. The collie, the German shepherd, the spaniel mix she claimed to have turned away: they were all good friends of hers, and faithful clients, but what would it hurt to pretend otherwise and cross that fine line between licking ass and simply kissing it?
The Motherless Bear
In the three hours before her death, the bear’s mother unearthed some acorns buried months earlier by a squirrel. They were damp and worm-eaten, as unappetizing as turds, and, sighing at her rotten luck, she kicked them back into their hole. At around ten she stopped to pull a burr from her left haunch, and then, her daughter would report, “Then she just…died.”
The first few times she said these words, the bear could not believe them. Her mother gone—how could it be! After a day, though, the shock wore off, and she tried to recapture it with an artfully placed pause and an array of amateur theatrical gestures. The faraway look was effective, and eventually she came to master it. “And then,” she would say, her eyes fixed on the distant horizon, “then she just…died.”
Seven times she cried, but as the weeks passed this became more difficult, and so she took to covering her face with her paws and doing a jerky thing with her shoulders. “There, there,” friends would say, and she would imagine them returning to their families. “I saw that poor motherless bear today, and if she doesn’t just break your heart, well, I don’t know what will.”
Her neighbors brought food, more than enough to get her through the winter, so she stayed awake that year and got very fat. In the spring the others awoke from their hibernations and found her finishing the first of the chokecherries. “Eating helps ease the pain,” she explained, the bright juice dripping from her chin. And when they turned away she followed behind them. “Did I mention to you that my mother died? We’d just spent a beautiful morning together, and the next thing I knew—”