“Thanks.”
So that is how I come not to get no DSC in the late war. If I had of done what I was sent to do, maybe they would of give me one, because Shep, he got cited, and they sure needed me bad. But I never done it, and it ain’t no use blubbering over how things might be if only they was a little different.
The Baby in the Icebox
Of course there was plenty pieces in the paper about what happened out at the place last summer, but they got it all mixed up, so I will now put down how it really was, and ’specially the beginning of it, so you will see it is not no lies in it.
Because when a guy and his wife begin to play leapfrog with a tiger, like you might say, and the papers put in about that part and not none of the stuff that started it off, and then one day say X marks the spot and next day say it wasn’t really no murder but don’t tell you what it was, why, I don’t blame people if they figure there was something funny about it or maybe that somebody ought to be locked up in the booby hatch. But there wasn’t no booby hatch to this, nothing but plain onriness and a dirty rat getting it in the neck where he had it coming to him, as you will see when I get the first part explained right.
Things first begun to go sour between Duke and Lura when they put the cats in. They didn’t need no cats. They had a combination auto camp, filling station, and lunchroom out in the country a ways, and they got along all right. Duke run the filling station, and got me in to help him, and Lura took care of the lunchroom and shacks. But Duke wasn’t satisfied. Before he got this place he had raised rabbits, and one time he had bees, and another time canary birds, and nothing would suit him now but to put in some cats to draw trade. Maybe you think that’s funny, but out here in California they got every kind of a farm there is, from kangaroos to alligators, and it was just about the idea that a guy like Duke would think up. So he begun building a cage, and one day he showed up with a truckload of wildcats.
I wasn’t there when they unloaded them. It was two or three cars waiting and I had to gas them up. But soon as I got a chance I went back there to look things over. And believe me, they wasn’t pretty. The guy that sold Duke the cats had went away about five minutes before, and Duke was standing outside the cage and he had a stick of wood in his hand with blood on it. Inside was a dead cat. The rest of them was on a shelf, that had been built for them to jump on, and every one of them was snarling at Duke.
I don’t know if you ever saw a wildcat, but they are about twice as big as a house cat, brindle gray, with tufted ears and a bobbed tail. When they set and look at you they look like a owl, but they wasn’t setting and looking now. They was marching around, coughing and spitting, their eyes shooting red and green fire, and it was a ugly sight, ’specially with that bloody dead one down on the ground. Duke was pale, and the breath was whistling through his nose, and it didn’t take no doctor to see he was scared to death.
“You better bury that cat,” he says to me. “I’ll take care of the cars.”
I looked through the wire and he grabbed me. “Look out!” he says. “They’d kill you in a minute.”
“In that case,” I says, “how do I get the cat out?”
“You’ll have to get a stick,” he says, and shoves off.
I was pretty sore, but I begun looking around for a stick. I found one, but when I got back to the cage Lura was there. “How did that happen?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I says, “but I can tell you this much: If there’s any more of them to be buried around here, you can get somebody else to do it. My job is to fix flats, and I’m not going to be no cat undertaker.”
She didn’t have nothing to say to that. She just stood there while I was trying the stick, and I could hear her toe snapping up and down in the sand, and from that I knowed she was choking it back, what she really thought, and didn’t think no more of this here cat idea than I did.
The stick was too short. “My,” she says, pretty disagreeable, “that looks terrible. You can’t bring people out here with a thing like that in there.”
“All right,” I snapped back. “Find me a stick.”
She didn’t make no move to find no stick. She put her hand on the gate. “Hold on,” I says. “Them things are nothing to monkey with.”
“Huh,” she says. “All they look like to me is a bunch of cats.”
There was a kennel back of the cage, with a drop door on it, where they was supposed to go at night. How you got them back there was bait them with food, but I didn’t know that then. I yelled at them, to drive them back in there, but nothing happened. All they done was yell back. Lura listened to me awhile, and then she give a kind of gasp like she couldn’t stand it no longer, opened the gate, and went in.
Now believe me, that next was a bad five minutes, because she wasn’t hard to look at, and I hated to think of her getting mauled up by them babies. But a guy would of had to of been blind if it didn’t show him that she had a way with cats. First thing she done, when she got in, she stood still, didn’t make no sudden motions or nothing, and begun to talk to them. Not no special talk. Just “Pretty pussy, what’s the matter, what they been doing to you?” — like that. Then she went over to them.
They slid off, on their bellies, to another part of the shelf. But she kept after them, and got her hand on one, and stroked him on the back. Then she got ahold of another one, and pretty soon she had give them all a pat. Then she turned around, picked up the dead cat by one leg, and come out with him. I put him on the wheelbarrow and buried him.
Now, why was it that Lura kept it from Duke how easy she had got the cat out and even about being in the cage at all? I think it was just because she didn’t have the heart to show him up to hisself how silly he looked. Anyway, at supper that night, she never said a word. Duke, he was nervous and excited and told all about how the cats had jumped at him and how he had to bean one to save his life, and then he give a long spiel about cats and how fear is the only thing they understand, so you would of thought he was Martin Johnson just back from the jungle or something.
But it seemed to me the dishes was making quite a noise that night, clattering around on the table, and that was funny, because one thing you could say for Lura was: she was quiet and easy to be around. So when Duke, just like it was nothing at all, asks me by the way how did I get the cat out, I heared my mouth saying, “With a stick,” and not nothing more. A little bird flies around and tells you, at a time like that. Lura let it pass. Never said a word. And if you ask me, Duke never did find out how easy she could handle the cats, and that ain’t only guesswork, but on account of something that happened a little while afterward, when we got the mountain lion.
A mountain lion is a cougar, only out here they call them a mountain lion. Well, one afternoon about five o’clock this one of ours squat down on her hunkers and set up the worst squalling you ever listen to. She kept it up all night, so you wanted to go out and shoot her, and next morning at breakfast Duke come running in and says come on out and look what happened. So we went out there, and there in the cage with her was the prettiest he mountain lion you ever seen in your life. He was big, probably weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, and his coat was a pearl gray so glossy it looked like a pair of new gloves, and he had a spot of white on his throat. Sometimes they have white.
“He come down from the hills when he heard her call last night,” says Duke, “and he got in there somehow. Ain’t it funny? When they hear that note nothing can stop them.”
“Yeah,” I says. “It’s love.”
“That’s it,” says Duke. “Well, we’ll be having some little ones soon. Cheaper’n buying them.”