“Ginger ale makes me sick,” Thomas Hudson said. “Let me have one with mineral water.”
“It’s very good for me,” the fisherman said. “I like Canada Dry. Otherwise I don’t like the taste of the whisky. Listen, Tomás. This is a serious cat.”
“Papa,” the boy said, “before you and this gentleman start drinking, can we have this cat?”
He had tied a shrimp husk on the end of a piece of white cotton string and was playing with the kitten, who was standing on his hind legs, as a rampant lion does in heraldry, boxing with the lure the boy swung at him.
“Do you want him?”
“You know I want him.”
“You can have him.”
“Thank you very much, papa. I’m going to take him out to the car to gentle him.”
Thomas Hudson watched the boy cross the road with the kitten in his arms and get into the front seat with him. The top of the car was down and from the bar he watched the boy, his brown hair flattened by the wind, sitting in the convertible in the bright sunlight. He could not see the kitten because the boy was holding him on the seat, sitting low on the seat out of the wind, stroking the kitten.
Now the boy was gone and the kitten had grown into an old cat and had outlived the boy. The way he and Boise felt now, he thought, neither one wanted to outlive the other. I don’t know how many people and animals have been in love before, he thought. It probably is a very comic situation. But I don’t find it comic at all.
No, he thought, I do not find it comic any more than it is comic for a boy’s cat to outlive him. Many things about it are certainly ridiculous, as Boise was when he growled and then made that sudden tragic cry and stiffened his whole length against the man. Sometimes, the servants said, he would not eat for several days after the man was gone but his hunger always drove him to it. Although there were days when he tried to live by his hunting and would not come in with the other cats, he always came in finally and he would leap out of the room over the backs of the other crowding cats when the door was opened by the servant that brought the tray of ground meat and then leap back in over all the other cats as they milled around the boy who had brought the food. He always ate very quickly and then wanted to leave the cat room as soon as he had finished. There was no cat that he cared for in any way.
For a long time now the man thought that Boise had regarded himself as a human being. He did not drink with the man as a bear would but he ate everything the man ate especially all of those things cats would not touch. Thomas Hudson remembered the summer before when they had been eating breakfast together and he had offered Boise a slice of fresh, chilled mango. Boise had eaten it with delight and he had mango every morning as long as Thomas Hudson was ashore and the mango season lasted. He had to hold the slices for him so he could get them into his mouth since they were too slippery for the cat to pick off the plate and he thought he must rig some sort of a rack, like a toast rack, so the cat could take them without having to hurry.
Then when the alligator pear trees, the big, dark green aguacates with their fruit only a little darker and shinier than the foliage, had come into bearing this time when he had been ashore in September for overhaul, preparing to go down to Haiti, he had offered Boise a spoonful out of the shell, the hollow where the seed had been, filled with oil and vinegar dressing, and the cat had eaten it and then afterwards at each meal, he had eaten half an aguacate.
“Why don’t you climb up in the trees and get them for yourself?” Thomas Hudson had asked the cat as they walked together over the hills of the property. But Boise, of course, had not answered.