Читать книгу The Third Cat Story Megapack - Damien Broderick - Страница 10

THE CAT-TRACKER LADY OF ASAD ALLEY, by A. R. Morlan

Because she had no human relatives, the Cat-Tracker Lady of Asad Alley had listed me as her “next of kin” on the tiny bi-fold business card from one of the local funeral homes, which she kept in her wallet next to her green Wisconsin Non-Driver ID, the one which firmly stated that she was not an organ donor, nor did she wish to make any sort of anatomical donation after her death.

By the time the hospital where she was taken after she was found lying face down near one of the Dumpsters which lined Asad Alley called me, the organ donor vultures had come and gone, sans their little foam coolers filled with dry ice and human carrion. The nurse-receptionist-whatever who called me actually managed to insert that into her conversation with me that morning, “—and what’s really sad is that Ms. Quies wasn’t an organ donor, what with her being found alive…she seemed healthy otherwise…just such a shame—”

“You don’t know who she was, do you?” I snapped, while trying to remove the snap-on plastic lid from my latté one-handed, and cradling the office phone against my ear with the other hand. Over four bucks for a cup of coffee, and they forget to put enough sweetener in there—even as the reality of Areille Quies’ death bloomed in my mind like a slow-spreading stain on a napkin placed over a spill of java on a countertop, I found myself stubbornly clinging to the personal, the mundane, the ever-so-slightly annoying problem of a latté that just wasn’t sweet enough…anything to make the news stay at bay, even for a few more seconds—

“Well, she only came in a couple of hours ago, and we just found the card with your contact info on it, but her name is on—”

“Areille Quies was the Cat-Tracker Lady…or didn’t anyone notice the cat fur all over her coat? Do you ever read the papers, check out the Internet? She was all over the news…she had Toxoplasma gondil in her system. That’s why she couldn’t donate her organs, or sell blood. Her blood was infected, and so were her organs—”

“She wasn’t wearing a Medic-Alert bracelet, so we didn’t—”

“I don’t think they sell them for toxo—besides, did you notice her age? She was a little past organ donating age—”

“Oh, we take organs from people older than she was…they’re considered high-risk, but some people are willing—”

The lid on my cup wasn’t budging, and that perky twerp on the other end of the phone wasn’t about to even consider the possibility that anyone who came into the hospital with a pulse but no brainwaves wasn’t prime organ procurement material. No wonder people got rabies and HIV from homeless donors. Taking a less-than-sweet sip, I mentally counted to five, and said, “Forget about the organ donation…do you know when I can collect her remains? Ms. Quies had very specific funeral arrangements planned in advance with us—”

“Oh she did?” I could picture the disappointed flap and downward flutter of the vulture’s wings as yet another chance at the dead body was denied. “Usually in a case like this, the body is donated to science, y’know, for dissection—”

“What-time-can-I-pick-her-up?”

“Oh, any time after the doctor signs off on her…we’ve been busy here, and—”

“I will be there—and she better be there, too. In one piece,” I snarled, before putting down the receiver with a hollow plastic clatter. Around me, the other volunteers at Friends of Feral Cats sat motionless behind their small desks, hands poised over keyboards, necks craned my way. Finally, that intern from the veterinary college, Ursula Something Or Other, said softly, “Don’t tell me that Areille’s—”

“I don’t have to tell you then,” I said through a sudden welling of phlegm and tears in my throat, before picking up my purse and slinging it over my shoulder, and exiting the Feral Cat Rescue and Rehabilitation Society’s headquarters, leaving my half-consumed latté on my desk. Behind me, I heard the others speaking softly and a couple of people started crying, but I couldn’t pay attention to them, not if I wanted to drive myself to the hospital a couple of miles away, in the downtown section of the city.

Areille had gone out that morning on the same mission which consumed her life for the past thirty-some years—to feed her feral cats, in that alleyway behind Asad Avenue, where all the Muslim shops and restaurants were located in the loosely-configured Middle Eastern conclave in the southeast part of the city. The businessmen there welcomed her presence; being part of a religion whose founder was an ardent cat-lover, they helped her buy the food she lugged to the alleyway each morning in two stained and slightly smelly cream-colored cloth shopping bags, and since she claimed that a well-fed cat was a better mouser/ratter than a starving animal, no one who frequented the numerous establishments fronting Asad Avenue ever had reason to complain about rodent droppings in their food, or heat-seeking rats rubbing against their legs while they waited for their ride at the open-fronted bus stop in front of The Emerald Crescent Bookstore.

And since all the restaurants donated their left-overs to either a homeless shelter or a farmer’s co-op (the latter took the scrappy-scraps, for animal feed for chickens and pigs, even though the latter was a forbidden food among devout Muslims—Areille once told me that she figured the restaurateurs got around this by rationalizing that their donations to the local porcine population was a way of “giving back” after all the bad feelings over 9-11; Areille was like that, making slightly paranoid remarks about just about everything…she was the one who used to call the organ procurement folks “vultures” toting “human carrion” in their little BioHazard foam coolers), that left nothing for the feral cats to eat besides the mice and rats which just might be contaminated with poison. Or so Areille often said, as she’d put out the fresh aluminum pie pans on the ground near the center-most cluster of Dumpsters, then wait for her feral friends to come running out of their hidey-holes all along the alley, before pouring her special mixture of dry cat food, chopped up hot dogs, and—once a month only—wormer paste mixed with people-tuna, onto the round pans. Working for an agency which supported the care and population control of feral cats throughout the Midwest, I was used to seeing people who fed alley cats, but there was something about Areille Quies which was just a bit different. No one else was able to make the cats literally dance for their dinner. That was what brought her to the attention of Friends of Feral Cats in the first place; some Dumpster diver looking for aluminum cans happened to catch the dinner matinée, and made a video of the event on his camera phone, which was seen by someone who had access to YouTube, and one it was downloaded onto the Internet, people started sharing it and, eventually, someone emailed me and said:

U—Must—check this out!!

Everyone in the office who saw the clip thought it had to be photo-shopped—there was this older woman in a dirty-looking red-and-black parka, standing there in an alley next to a chained-shut Dumpster, surrounded by cats…all of whom were standing on their hind legs, front paws paddling the air before them, like feline sleepwalkers, and one by one, she’d hold their paws and sway in place with them, in a lurching two-step, then another cat would gingerly trot forward, to repeat the pattern.

People started to leave messages on the boards when the clip was shown, and eventually someone wrote that this was “—NOT—a fake, I’ve seen this woman myself, BTW” and then another person left a message consisting of a time and a location, and the next morning, I was there, waiting in the chilly February slush of snow and tire-plowed grime at the mouth of the alley behind Asad Avenue. The woman in the grimy parka nodded at me as she shuffled into the alley, shoulders bent low as she lugged the cloth bags filled with something obviously heavy and round-shaped into the alley proper. Up close, I realized that she was at least in her fifties, perhaps older—it was hard to tell for certain, since she had a flushed-ruddy face with plump cheeks and a nose whose dark pores resembled the flesh of an unripe strawberry. Once she was in front of that same chained Dumpster from the YouTube video clip, she set down her bags, and extracted several pie pans, which she proceeded to place roughly ten feet apart, before starting at the far end, and hunkering down to examine the snowy asphalt, moving so quickly yet so clumsily, I couldn’t help but remember that scene in Fargo when the hugely pregnant Chief of Police Marge Gunderson suddenly squatted down near that overturned car on the frozen lake and announced “…I think I’m gonna barf!”

I wanted to laugh, but something warned me that doing so would somehow spoil what was about to happen next. Thirty feet away, the woman began craning her hooded head first in one direction, then in another, before saying softly, “There you are,” and after she spoke, the cats began to ooze from the alley, a wiggling ocean of low-slung bodies, their fur rippling wave-like as they moved in a huge phalanx of long, lean backs, lowered tails, and flattened-eared heads, coming closer and closer to the woman as she went from pan to pan, not leaving food, but merely indicating that the pans were, indeed, there. Realizing that she’d been looking for their tracks in the foot-print and truck-tire patterned alley-snow, I continued to watch quietly, my breath coming in short air-whitening hitches, as she returned to the central Dumpster, and said, “Who’s gonna dance with me?”

Then it began to happen—the cats rose up, tsunami-like, backs suddenly pitched upwards, front paws lifted, heads pointed chin-forward in her direction, tails out straight behind for balance, and one-by-one, they approached her, walking gingerly on their hind feet alone, as first a huge black male with dainty scallops of white on his front toes came toward her, and she took his paws in her leather-mittened hands, and they executed a lumbering, swaying dance, and once that big-headed tom was done, another cat—this one a black-and-white tuxedo—took his place, and so on, with orange and calico and tiger-stripe and solid gray partners taking turns with her, until all the cats had had their time on the dance floor with the woman…only then did she pick up the cloth bags, and extract big margarine tubs, each filled with food. Once she began feeding them, the cats acted like any other alley cat across America might act—they jostled each other for a better position by the pan, they hissed, they batted at each other with their paws, and finally, once all the food was devoured, they hurried off as one, an undulating retreating ebb-tide of cold-puffed furry bodies, going back to wherever it was they hid during the daytime.

I actually recognized a few of the cats, from some of our Trap & Spay Days promotions, when we passed out live traps to area businessmen, and fixed all the caught cats for free, just as long as the person who trapped them watched over them during the healing time after the animals were spayed or neutered. But there were always newcomers to the clutter of cats, abandoned or lost felines who somehow came to find outdoor life among their own kind preferable to life—and often certain death—in a shelter.

The woman started picking up the licked-clean pans, and while she was putting them in her bags, along with the empty margarine containers, I finally found myself asking her, “Do you do this every day?”

“Yeah…leap year day included. They expect it, and I like it, so…I come out here. The people who own the businesses here, they said I could—”

Obviously, someone had hassled her about her daily feeding in the past, probably those wonks down at City Hall. There wasn’t any ordinance on the books against feeding strays, but that usually didn’t stop the city workers from throwing their weight around, especially when it came to women. Being single myself, I’d had more than one run-in with those guys from City Hall over everything from pruning the trees which overhung my sidewalk to how much water I did (or didn’t) use each month, so I asked, “Anyone hassle you about this?” I pointed to the bags she carried. Stumbling in place slightly as she picked up the last of the pans, she said without turning to look my way, “Oh, the usual suspects…cops, city drones, tourists. The owners, they pay for what I feed them, so I keep coming. Gotta get my cat fix,” she added enigmatically, before heading for me, bags bouncing off her black jeans-covered thighs, her face ruddy from the cold and from the effort of breathing hard and shallow.

“‘Cat fix’—?”

“I suppose you could call me a crazy cat lady without the cats. I used to be able to have my own cats, but between the Toxo and the umpteen bouts of cellulitis, the doctors at the clinic said if I keep a cat and it bites me again, I could die. They said I have some sort of feline bacteria, something with a ‘c’, all through my blood, right down to the marrow. It flares up if I get a bite or bad scratch. Which is why I have to wear these—” She held up her hands, and showed me the thick leather mitts which extended down past her wrists, well into her elasticized jacket sleeves, adding matter-of-factly, almost by rote, “—just in case one of these kitties claws me or tries to bite. I have duct tape wrapped around my one pair of socks, around my ankles, in case I have to try to kick apart a cat fight. Last time one of my own cats bit me, it was on the front of my left foot. I had on two pairs of socks on account of it being cold in my apartment, but he still sunk in two fangs. Took a lot of iodine to get rid of that one, but it didn’t heal for weeks. I just couldn’t afford another visit to the hospital. So once the last of mine passed on…I started coming here. I saw their tracks, one morning. Too many for just one cat, so I left them some food…one of the shop owners saw me, and I thought he was going to hassle me, but he started in on some story about his prophet’s cat once falling asleep on his sleeve, and rather than wake the cat up he cut off the sleeve, and then I knew it was ok, that I could feed the cats. These people, they like cats. Not dogs, but cats…they don’t like worship them, the way the Egyptians used to, but they’re good about them, and me feeding them. Now they give me some money, to help feed them—”

She kept on talking, without ever asking my name that first day, and I realized that she had to be isolated, given her eagerness to overshare with a complete stranger. I didn’t get a chance to ask her her name that day, but I did learn it, when she paused in mid-ramble to pull a small Burberry plaid wallet out of one pocket, and slid out her non-driver ID, which had her name and really bad photo of her on it.

“—every time I go in they give me grief over not putting an organ donor sticker on my card, but that wasn’t as bad as the first time I went in for a card, and this guy at the DMV, some fat slob with a greasy black comb-over, asks me, ‘Are you a retard? You’re too young to be getting a non-driver ID, and the only people your age who get them are retarded, so what kind of retard are you?’ and I tell him ‘I’ve got a degree, but I’m also dyslexic, and I have no depth perception, so that’s what “kind of retard” I am’ and the guy shut up, but he kept giving me dirty looks anyway—”

I realized that dyslexia and stereo blindness weren’t Areille Quies’ only problem—it wasn’t until my fifth visit to the alley that she told me about the Toxoplasma gondil parasitic infection which she’d apparently caught while still in her teens or early twenties, when she was actually an honor student in high school and college (after the tenth visit, she let me follow her to her apartment, where I saw the framed High Honors high school diploma, and the Magna Cum Laude BS in English she’d received over thirty years before from local schools, which shared wall space with literally thousands of individual images of the hundreds of cats she’d had over the years, all grouped in multi-image-matted picture frames of a dozen different finishes and designs), but which didn’t fully manifest itself in the usual symptoms of slowed reflexes, immunity to the scent of cat urine, or the surreal attraction to all things feline until she was close to thirty. It was then that she kept on having so many car accidents that she lost her license for good, then began losing even the most menial of jobs, until disability kicked in around the time she reached Social Security age, and she was able to devote herself to her true life’s work—caring for the cats whose prints she’d been tracking down Asad Alley.

By the time I was able to enter her cave-like apartment, with its walls covered from ceiling level to about a foot off the floor with countless photo montages, interspaced with cheaply framed pictures of cats torn from old calendars, permanently closed drapes, and the legions of stuffed cats of both domestic and wild form, she had agreed to let me write an article about her, for the newsletter FoFC published every four months for those who donated money to the organization. And the city paper eventually reprinted that piece, along with some still pictures of the Feeding Dance, and single-frame images of the walking cats themselves. Donations for The Friends of Feral Cats went up after the original piece ran in the newsletter, and they poured in once the story was reprinted, then virtually threatened to clog our P. O. Box to the point where the Postmaster tried to make us rent a bigger box once one of the national news organizations picked up the story.

As I waited for a red light to change at an intersection two blocks away from the hospital where Areille’s body had been taken that morning, after she’d been found mugged and apparently whacked on the head with some blunt object—her empty bags gone, but her wallet untouched, which the organ-vulture at the hospital told me led the police to consider this some sort of anti-animal hate crime—I found myself remembering what Areille had said about all the attention my article had brought her.

“The money people give to the shop owners to give to me is fine, but you’d think they’d want to take the cats home, give them someplace good to live. In a garage, or a barn. Now if these guys were special, like that bald cat that was born at that farm, the one they bred into the Sphinx breed, or those mutant kitties with the short legs people breed on purpose now, people would be coming here in droves to trap them and take them home. But all they do is beg for their supper…and once one of them let me dance with him, the others just started to do it, too. Now if they did it for everyone, then they’d find homes—”

The light turned, and I finished the trek to the hospital. There was paperwork to sign, and luckily I didn’t have to talk to Organ Vulture Woman, but some male resident, and a beat cop who’d been one of the first to find Areille Quies’ body. Since she’d been getting on in years, Areille had been sure to mention FoFC in her will, even though she had next to nothing in terms of property to leave us, but her main reason for leaving that pittance to us was so that I’d be sure to carry out her final wishes…which I was careful not to spell out to the resident or the officer I spoke to that day. All they knew was that her body was to be taken to a local funeral home for cremation. It was something she was adamant about; she feared that her infected blood might somehow make its way into the groundwater, or the water supply itself, if she was to be embalmed, and given the toxic state of her tissues, a green, no-embalming burial was also out of the question for her. But cremation…that was thorough, and sanitary. Once she was ashes, her gradually-acquired fear of tainting other living beings was a moot point.

“I was wondering…when they’re developed, could I please see the photos of the crime scene? I knew Ms. Quies for a few years, and I’d just like to know what happened—”

The cop stopped to scratch his close-cropped head under his hat, and began shaking his head no, but did say, “We think it was a pipe, or maybe a bat which was used. But at least she wasn’t bloody…judging from the paw prints all around her, the cats must’ve licked off all the blood. Probably hungry, although why they didn’t bite her, I dunno—”

A small spidery shiver or remembrance, as ethereal as walking into a cobweb and feeling it lightly pull-then-release against my skin, rippled through me, as I recalled one of the many mostly one-sided conversations I’d had with Areille (her doing most of the talking, as was her wont—if it didn’t have to do with cats, she just zoned out), when she was telling me about her Toxo diagnosis, and what she found out about it on her own:

“I read in a newspaper, or maybe it was a magazine, about something the Center for Disease Control and Prevention said about people who contracted Toxo—we’re more likely to be eaten by cats than other people. The article or blurb or whatever it was I read said that over 60 million people have it, too…you’d need a lot of cats to get busy eating if what they said is true. The cat food companies would go out of business for sure. But I suppose they meant that we’re more likely to have a bunch of cats, so if we die in the house, and can’t feed them, well, they’ll take matters into their own paws. Or maybe we smell better to cats, on account of having the Toxo. They say that the lifespan of the Toxo parasite starts in the cat, then it makes its way to the human or animal, then it’s supposed to get back to the cat to survive, which means the parasite has to go to the brain, so that the cat can eat it…which sounds crazier than the crazy cat lady disease, but that’s what I read, anyhow. In some magazine or something.”

Wishing I’d known her before the Toxo began to erode her mind at the edges, leaving her thoughts as vaguely connected as strands of thread in a lace doily, I’d nodded, and started to try to change the subject when she’d added, while cutting up the kosher hot dogs one of the butchers on the avenue used to give to her into small bite-sized chunks on an old wooden cutting board shaped like a whale, “After I’m cremated, I don’t want my ashes put in an jar, or scattered in the wind…I want them mixed in with the cat’s food, for one last meal—a goodbye dinner, with me as the main course. Remember the end of that science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land? When that man who was raised on Mars dies, and they all eat his ashes in a meal? I read that in college. My professor, he was a Catholic and didn’t approve, but I thought it was so perfect. Beats getting flying ash in your eyes—remember The Big Lebowski? His friend Donny in the coffee can—”

Remembering that scene in the film Areille had spoken about that day, and visualizing Jeff Bridges’ The Dude covered in cremains out on that windswept ocean-side dune, I began giggling, but the cop and the doctor only took my reaction as a natural one to the horror of Areille’s last minutes in the alley, with her body covered with cats, all jockeying to get a taste of her blood, and nodded sympathetically at me, before patting me on the shoulder, and telling me how sorry they were for my loss.

I nodded without saying anything, all the while thinking that I’d need to go out really early in the morning after the cremation, just in case this same cop caught me feeding human cremains to the animals.…

* * * *

By the time I’d authorized the release of her remains to the designated funeral home for the prepaid cremation, the afternoon edition of the paper was out, and in the Local News section, there was a short piece about Areille’s death, which referenced my article for pull quotes. They used one of the archive images of her dancing with the cats, and the reporter who wrote the piece mentioned that the cats would go hungry until someone else took over for her, and finished with the line:

“Their dance cards no longer full, the feral cats of Asad Alley will be sitting out not only this dance, but all the dances to come.”

Not bad, given the short notice, but as I continued to read the rest of the paper, while waiting in the lobby of the funeral home, I told myself, I don’t know if they’ll like their new partner, but my dance card’s empty.…

* * * *

Once I was in the alley the next morning, having done a limbo duck-and-slide under the yellow crime scene tape still fluttering in the cold pre-dawn wind, I found myself doing what Areille had done each morning—dropping clean pie tins on the snowy ground, then peering for cat tracks along the walls of the alley. On the spot where she had been hit and injured, someone—one of the Muslims, perhaps?—had placed some cold-withered flowers wrapped in butcher paper. But there was no blood staining the snow…just an overlapping mash of cat and human footprints. Not expecting that the feral cats would come running out for me, I began scooping out huge globs of cat food mixed with cat lady ashes onto the plates—Areille wasn’t a very big woman, but there were still so many cremains that I ended up leaving about a dozen plates in that alley, each topped with a mound of canned cat food (which I’d bought the evening before) and Areille. Telling myself that it was what she specifically wanted, even if it was bizarre beyond even crazy cat-lady crazy, I hurried for the mouth of the alley, eager to quit that narrow dark space before the cats either attacked the food (something I really didn’t want to see or hear) or attacked me, but as I was bending over to slide under the flapping ribbon of yellow-and-black tape, I heard this odd sound—a rhythmic pad-pad-pad susurrus, of something hard and small hitting slightly yielding ground, and even though I didn’t want to, I found myself turning around to take a look.

First, all I could see were the luminous backs of the cats’ eyes, wavering yellow-green dots, small-veined and oddly high above the ground. Then, as they came closer, I realized why their street-lamp-reflected eyes were so oddly positioned.

They were walking. On their hind paws, front feet held up in the begging position in front of them, and slowly, quietly, they settled in groups before the pans of food I’d left, and before they hunkered down to eat, they danced around the tins, heads held up high, chins skyward. As if Areille was holding their paws in turn.…

Wishing I hadn’t left my cell phone at home (one look at the voice mail list of reporters who wanted quotes from me made me shut it off the night before), I could only watch, camera-less, as the cats did their dinner dance, backs arched proudly in the dim light, until the smell of the cat food came wafting down the alley, and I hurried away from there.…

Once I’d spoken to all the reporters who’d left messages, I felt as if I’d absorbed a part of Areille Quies as surely as if I’d been a cat partaking of that final meal with her. Eventually, interest in the murder (which was eventually solved; the cop at the hospital was right, it was a group of cat-haters who ironically also belonged to a local bird-watchers organization) died down, the Muslim business owners got together and fed the cats on their own, and gradually, the everyday business of getting back to my life as a Friends of Feral Cats worker took over my thoughts. I’d made Ursula What’s-Her-Face go through Areille’s apartment and photograph all her stuff for eBay, per Areille’s request (amazingly, everything, even her high school and college diplomas, sold, with the proceeds going to FoFC), and soon it was spring, then summer, and I was certain that the whole Areille-in-the-Alley part of my life was over, done with, a sad/funny/surreal interlude…until the day when Ursula came into the office and demanded that we all log onto YouTube, to see a specific video—

Déjà vu washed over all of us as we watched the action which took place in the alley behind Asad Avenue, obviously filmed with a cell phone camera, but this time, the only thing missing was Areille herself, as the cats danced and walked and stayed upright in that alley and gradually other people, the Muslim shop owners and their customers, entered the alley, too, but the cats kept on their feet, and danced willingly with whomever was brave enough to extend their hands…and while I recognized some of the cats from the time when their original partner was alive, many of the other cats were young, little more than kittens, and the people in the alley had to bend down quite low to dance with them, but all of them were smiling, and silently laughing and clapping their hands to some unheard song, as the cats kept on dancing, and I kept doing the feline math in my head, Nine weeks gestation, plus five months, maybe six equals whatever was in her blood that morning did get into the cats after all…but I don’t think it was just Toxo they ingested.

And when I saw one of the children pick up a kitten, and carry it away, I remembered what she had said, about the bald cat in that barn, and those mutant cats with the tiny legs, and for the first time since the cat tracker lady of Asad Alley died, I found myself wanting to get myself to that alley, and dance with the first cat who would walk up to me, and allow me to take his or her paw in mine.…

Inspired by the life of Joseph Zeman, “the pigeon man of Lincoln Square” (1931-2008), and the articles of Barbara Mahany.

With thanks to James B. Johnson, who suggested this story to me.

Dedicated to the memory of Grady, Quinn, Sheba, Trudy, Baby Biscuit, Max, Mongo, Ebony, Graykins, and Fluffer-Nutter.

And also The Dude, Harley, Inky, Bogie, and Chickpea.

—A. R. Morlan (and cats) 2013