“Frank poked his head under the table a little farther, and Lucy batted at his nose the way she’d batted at Lulubelle’s—only when she batted at Frank, she did it without popping her claws. I had an idea Frank would go for her, but he didn’t. He just kind of whoofed and turned away. Not scared, more like he’s thinking, ‘Oh, okay, so that’s what that’s about.’ Went back into the living room and laid down in front of the TV.
“And that was all the confrontation there ever was between them.
They divvied up the territory pretty much the way that Lulu and I divvied it up that last year we spent together, when things were getting bad; the bedroom belonged to Frank and Lulu, the kitchen belonged to me and Lucy—only by Christmas, Lulubelle was calling her Screwlucy—and the living room was neutral territory. The four of us spent a lot of evenings there that last year, Screwlucy on my lap, Frank with his muzzle on Lulu’s shoe, us humans on the couch, Lulubelle reading a book and me watching Wheel of Fortune or Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which Lulubelle always called Lifestyles of the Rich and Topless.
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“The cat wouldn’t have a thing to do with her, not from day one.
Frank, every now and then you could get the idea Frank was at least trying to get along with me. His nature would always get the better of him in the end and he’d chew up one of my sneakers or take another leak on my underwear, but every now and then it did seem like he was putting forth an effort. Lap my hand, maybe give me a grin. Usually if I had a plate of something he wanted a bite of, though.
“Cats are different, though. A cat won’t curry favor even if it’s in their best interests to do so. A cat can’t be a hypocrite. If more preachers were like cats, this would be a religious country again. If a cat likes you, you know. If she doesn’t, you know that, too. Screwlucy never liked Lulu, not one whit, and she made it clear from the start.
If I was getting ready to feed her, Lucy’d rub around my legs, purring, while I spooned it up and dumped it in her dish. If Lulu fed her, Lucy’d sit all the way across the kitchen, in front of the fridge, watching her. And wouldn’t go to the dish until Lulu had cleared off.
It drove Lulu crazy. ‘That cat thinks she’s the Queen of Sheba,’ she’d say. By then she’d given up the baby-talk. Given up picking Lucy up, too. If she did, she’d get her wrist scratched, more often than not.
“Now, I tried to pretend I liked Frank and Lulu tried to pretend she liked Lucy, but Lulu gave up pretending a lot sooner than I did. I guess maybe neither one of them, the cat or the woman, could stand being a hypocrite. I don’t think Lucy was the only reason Lulu left—
hell, I know it wasn’t—but I’m sure Lucy helped Lulubelle make her final decision. Pets can live a long time, you know. So the present I got her for our second was really the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Tell that to “Dear Abby”!
“The cat’s talking was maybe the worst, as far as Lulu was concerned. She couldn’t stand it. One night Lulubelle says to me, ‘If that cat doesn’t stop yowling, L.T., I think I’m going to hit it with an encyclopedia.’
“ ‘That’s not yowling,’ I said, ‘that’s chatting.’
“ ‘Well,’ Lulu says, ‘I wish it would stop chatting.’
“And right about then, Lucy jumped up into my lap and she did 277
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shut up. She always did, except for a little low purring, way back in her throat. Purring that really was purring. I scratched her between her ears like she likes, and I happened to look up. Lulu turned her eyes back down on her book, but before she did, what I saw was real hate.
Not for me. For Screwlucy. Throw an encyclopedia at it? She looked like she’d like to stick the cat between two encyclopedias and just kind of clap it to death.
“Sometimes Lulu would come into the kitchen and catch the cat up on the table and swat it off. I asked her once if she’d ever seen me swat Frank off the bed that way—he’d get up on it, you know, always on her side, and leave these nasty tangles of white hair. When I said that, Lulu gave me a kind of grin. Her teeth were showing, anyway. ‘If you ever tried, you’d find yourself a finger or three shy, most likely,’ she says.
“Sometimes Lucy really was Screwlucy. Cats are moody, and sometimes they get manic; anyone who’s ever had one will tell you that.
Their eyes get big and kind of glarey, their tails bush out, they go racing around the house; sometimes they’ll rear right up on their back legs and prance, boxing at the air, like they’re fighting with something they can see but human beings can’t. Lucy got into a mood like that one night when she was about a year old—couldn’t have been more than three weeks before the day when I come home and found Lulubelle gone.
“Anyway, Lucy came racing in from the kitchen, did a kind of racing slide on the wood floor, jumped over Frank, and went skittering up the living room drapes, paw over paw. Left some pretty good holes in them, with threads hanging down. Then she just perched at the top of the rod, staring around the room with her blue eyes all big and wild and the tip of her tail snapping back and forth.
“Frank only jumped a little and then put his muzzle back on Lulubelle’s shoe, but the cat scared the hell out of Lulubelle, who was deep in her book, and when she looked up at the cat, I could see that outright hate in her eyes again.
“ ‘All right,’ she said, ‘that’s enough. Everybody out of the goddam pool. We’re going to find a good home for that little blue-eyed 278
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bitch, and if we’re not smart enough to find a home for a purebred Siamese, we’re going to take her to the animal shelter. I’ve had enough.’
“ ‘What do you mean?’ I ask her.
“ ‘Are you blind?’ she asks. ‘Look what she did to my drapes!
They’re full of holes!’
“ ‘You want to see drapes with holes in them,’ I say, ‘why don’t you go upstairs and look at the ones on my side of the bed. The bottoms are all ragged. Because he chews them.’
“ ‘That’s different,’ she says, glaring at me. ‘That’s different and you know it.’
“Well, I wasn’t going to let that lie. No way was I going to let that one lie. ‘The only reason you think it’s different is because you like the dog you gave me and you don’t like the cat I gave you,’ I says. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing, Mrs. DeWitt: you take the cat to the animal shelter for clawing the living room drapes on Tuesday, I guarantee you I’ll take the dog to the animal shelter for chewing the bedroom drapes on Wednesday. You got that?’
“She looked at me and started to cry. She threw her book at me and called me a bastard. A mean bastard. I tried to grab hold of her, make her stay long enough for me to at least try to make up—if there was a way to make up without backing down, which I didn’t mean to do that time—but she pulled her arm out of my hand and ran out of the room. Frank ran out after her. They went upstairs and the bedroom door slammed.
“I gave her half an hour or so to cool off; then I went upstairs myself. The bedroom door was still shut, and when I started to open it, I was pushing against Frank. I could move him, but it was slow work with him sliding across the floor, and also noisy work. He was growling. And I mean growling, my friends; that was no fucking purr.
If I’d gone in there, I believe he would have tried his solemn best to bite my manhood off. I slept on the couch that night. First time.
“A month later, give or take, she was gone.”
If L.T. had timed his story right (most times he did; practice makes perfect), the bell signalling back to work at the W. S. Hep-279
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perton Processed Meats Plant of Ames, Iowa, would ring just about then, sparing him any questions from the new men (the old hands knew . . . and knew better than to ask) about whether or not L.T. and Lulubelle had reconciled, or if he knew where she was today, or—the all-time sixty-four-thousand-dollar question—if she and Frank were still together. There’s nothing like the back-to-work bell to close off life’s more embarrassing questions.