Scottish Folds are medium-sized cats with soft chirpy voices and a curious tendency to sit in Buddha positions or flatten themselves on the floor like little bear rugs. They’re all born with straight ears, but when they’re about three weeks old their ear tips fold forward. A few kittens stay straight eared, but whether their ears are folded or not, they are incredibly sweet cats. Insisting that a Scottish Fold do something it doesn’t want to do is guaranteed to make anybody feel like a vicious ogre.
Ruthie was about a year old now, and she’d developed a nasty urinary tract infection. The vet had prescribed amoxicillin every twenty-four hours. Easy for the vet to say. Ruthie was mellow and affectionate, but she was still a cat, and trying to get a cat to swallow a pill can cause strong men to break down and weep.
Hide a pill in a cat’s food, and the cat will daintily pick up every crumb and leave the pill. Force a pill into a cat’s mouth and hold its jaws closed so it has to swallow, and it will shift the pill to its cheek and spit it out as soon as you take your hand away. Try to strong-arm a cat by swaddling it in a towel and poking a pill down its throat, and it will spit at you while it spits out the pill.
Max was a man of keen intellect, strong character, and the commanding presence of a man accustomed to having people jump when he gave an order. But when he’d tried to give Ruthie her pill, he’d ended up with a broken lamp, a scratched arm, several wet tablets that Ruthie had spit out, and a note of desperation in his voice when he called me for help.
When I rang his bell, he opened the door with Ruthie in one arm. Even in the uniform of a Florida retiree—shorts, knit shirt, and flip-flops—Max still managed to look like somebody who should be saluted. He gave me his best Sidney Poitier smile and said, “I knew it was about time for you to come, so I thought I’d make sure she didn’t hide.”
I would have spent all morning searching for Ruthie just to hear Max speak in that warm molasses voice. That man could stand in a supermarket aisle and read his shopping list out loud, and every woman in the store would offer to cook his dinner.
Feeling very white cracker, I followed him to the living room, where I sat down in one of Max’s big comfy chairs. The prescription bottle of amoxicillin was on a table beside the chair. Max gently deposited Ruthie in my lap, shook out an amoxicillin tablet that he laid on the table, recapped the bottle, and took a chair opposite me. He moved with the respectful care of a medical student in a surgical theater.
Ruthie looked up at me with the wide round eyes that give Scottish Folds such innocent expressions. Speaking softly to her, I maneuvered her into an upright position with my right hand supporting her chest and my left hand cupping the back of her head. Her hind feet were on my lap. Very gently, with my fingers under one side of her jaw and my thumb under the other, I lifted her from the head so her hind feet momentarily left my lap. She immediately went limp. At the same time, I reached for the pill with my right hand and pushed it into her open mouth—too far down to spit out. Then I lowered her so her hind feet were once again in contact with my lap. After she swallowed a couple of times, I lowered her front feet too. She gave me a look of sweet forgiveness and hopped to the floor.
Mother cats use that same back-of-the-neck lift when they move their kittens because it makes the kittens momentarily immobile. A grown cat shouldn’t be handled that way more than a second or two, and very large cats probably shouldn’t be lifted that way at all. But when there’s a need to get medication down a cat, it’s a better method than fighting with them.
As Ruthie leaped into Max’s lap for his masculine stroking, I got to my feet.
I said, “I’ll let myself out. See you tomorrow.”
Max was too preoccupied with telling Ruthie what a good girl she was to do more than give me a nod. Tough young men are pushovers when it comes to pretty girls. Tough old men are pushovers when it comes to their pets.
8
Before I went to Big Bubba’s house, I stopped by the Crescent Beach Grocery to get fresh bananas for him. Big Bubba liked his bananas a little greenish, so I got fresh ones every couple of days. He wasn’t so picky about other fruit, but he really hated a mushy banana.
I hurried to the 10 Items or Less lane, where a young man was paying for a single bunch of cilantro. The checker, a pretty young woman with dark curly hair, handed him change.
She said, “Weren’t you in here just a few minutes ago?”
He grinned. “Yeah, my girlfriend sent me to get stuff for a Mexican breakfast. You know, huevos rancheros and salsa. I got parsley instead of cilantro, so she made me come back.”
The checker said, “Oh, yeah, you have to use cilantro for salsa. I had to learn that when I came to this country.”
He said, “Where are you from?”
“I’m from Lima, Peru. Are you from Mexico?”
“No, I’m from Taiwan. We don’t eat huevos rancheros in Taiwan.”
She laughed. “We don’t eat it in Peru, either, but I love it.”
He hurried away with his cilantro and I took his place with my bananas, happily feeling like a grain in the leavening that keeps the world from being tediously dense.
As I drove down the tree-lined lanes to Big Bubba’s house, I kept a sharp eye out for a glimpse of Jaz. But the only person I saw was a suntanned man in a convertible with a kayak in the passenger seat. The man and the kayak looked equally carefree. I waved at the man and he waved back. The kayak just stared straight ahead.
When I removed the night cover from Big Bubba’s cage, he was so happy to see me that he almost fell off his perch.
He hollered, “Did you miss me? Get that man! Go Bucs!”
I laughed, which made him laugh too—a robotic heh heh heh sound—which made me laugh harder, so for a minute we sounded like a crew member of Starship Enterprise entertaining a wily Klingon.
I took him out of his cage and let him run around on the lanai while I cleaned his cage and put out fresh fruit, seed, and water for him. Ecstatic to see sky and treetops and hear his wild cousins calling, he flapped his wings and shouted like a kid at recess. After I had his cage nice and clean, I filled a spray bottle with water and gave Big Bubba a shower on the lanai. Big Bubba loved showers, and he fluttered his feathers so enthusiastically that I ended up almost as wet as he was.
After Big Bubba had run around on the lanai some more to dry, I put him back in his indoor cage. Under ordinary circumstances, since the red tide toxins had abated, I would have put him in his big cage on the lanai. But lanai screens are dead easy to cut, and I was afraid those young thugs might come back and steal him. We don’t usually have to worry about things like that on the key, and I resented having to think about it.
I turned on his TV and left him carefully pulling his feathers back into their zip-locked position, drawing each feather through his beak to oil and smooth it. He was so intent on making himself sleek again that he didn’t even say goodbye.
My cell rang as I was getting in the Bronco. With no preamble, Guidry said, “Where are you?”
I gave him Reba’s address, and he said, “Stay put. I’m in the area.”
Three minutes later, his Blazer pulled up at the curb. Except for a certain pink tinge to his eyes that said he’d also missed some sleep, he looked as calm and collected as always. Natural linen jacket, pale blue open-collared shirt, dark blue slacks, woven leather sandals, no socks. Guidry’s clothes are always wrinkled just enough to say they’re made of fine fabrics woven by indigenous artisans, and he wears them with the casual ease of one who’s never known the touch of chemically created threads.