By then we had become friendly with Van and Scottie MacNair, who lived one diagonal long block away in a little house called La Casita, just off the main highway. Their boys, younger than Johnny, were in the same school. Van was also free-lancing in magazine fiction. We became close, and despite subsequent geographical dislocations, have remained close. Van is now Director of Public Relations for the Los Angeles County Museum.
Their boys wanted a cat, and in due time we gave them Brujo. Van had a studied and skeptical indifference to the whole idea, an attitude which reminded me strongly of my own back on State Street.
It was not long before Scottie reported that Brujo had become Van’s cat, accustomed to staying with Van in the room where he worked and watching him companionably from the couch. Van maintained his amused tolerance for a respectable amount of time, and then at last admitted that it was one hell of a fine cat, and he had never known a cat intimately before, and they were splendid animals indeed.
One evening after Brujo was almost full-grown, Van came wandering dejectedly over in the early evening to tell us that Brujo had been missing and they had all gone calling for him, hunting for him, searching the highway ditches and the fields, and had at last found him fifty yards or so behind the house, tom to pieces by dogs. The whole MacNair family was crushed.
Bruja fared better. We found her a home with an acquaintance, a lady who lived alone in a large house with swimming pool and staff of servants. We learned later that Bruja was living on tinned chicken breast and cream and wore a little collar with her name on it.
We received a letter from our tenants saying they had found a house they wanted to buy. They gave us notice and asked what they should do with the cats. We wrote them to take them to Dr. Sellman in Utica, and we wrote him to expect them. That was in the spring of 1949.
In the summer we gave Pancha to the MacNairs and headed home. Later we heard that Pancha’s fertility served to quench Van’s new enthusiasm for cats and, indeed, even made Scottie look slightly grim. In a very short time La Casita was bulging with cats, Pancha producing them faster than the MacNairs could place them.
We stayed at the Clinton house just long enough to sort all our possessions, dispose of a lot of items, and put the rest in storage. Whenever we started to fill an empty box, we would find Geoffrey in it. The cats showed no effects from being deserted so long. They did a lot of looking for a dog who no longer lived there. Johnny toted Geoff around by the hour during the first days of reunion.
There was one change in Roger which requires explanation. As a very young cat he had picked up a strange habit. He would bite. But certainly not out of malice or bad temper. I believe it was originally related to his habit of washing brother cat and, in the midst of that ceremony, taking a tentative nip. Roger’s bite was an expression of pleasure and affection. Dorothy had always gotten the worst of it, as she is barelegged more often than I am. Roger would wind around your ankles, purring, nudging his head against you, and all of a sudden he would bite. Riding your shoulder he would take a nip at the side of your face. He bit legs because they were handiest. He would not bite through cloth. He had to have a little bare skin handy. We were members of his community, and by God, anybody was entitled to bite anybody in that same spirit of affectionate fun. The difficulty was that Roger would bite anybody, anyone, that is, who was in his house. If they were there it meant we all accepted him or her, and they were biteable.
I contributed to this strange social habit by, when Roger was purring and nudging me, hoisting a pant leg to give him a target area. We remember the time a young doctor paid a house call on State Street to look at Johnny. Roger rubbed against his leg and was ignored. Then, standing with his front feet to one side of the doctor’s shoe and his hind feet over on the other side, he curled his neck around, gently hoisted the doctor’s pant cuff with his muzzle, and bit him just above his short sock.
In chopping at people’s knees with his little red rubber hammer, the doctor never achieved a reflex action as good as the one Roger gave him. Roger sailed all the way across the room. We tried to explain. The doctor said it was perfectly all right, hadn’t broken the skin. But he kept a wary eye on the cat the rest of the time he was there.
We believe that as he grew older, Roger developed into a connoisseur of the reactions of strangers to an unexpected cat bite. He stopped giving the advance warning of the nudging and leg-twining and began to favor the back of the leg a few inches above the ankle. A sudden leap, a hearty yelp, a spin, and a stare of disbelief seemed the most satisfying.
When we brought the cats home from Dr. Sellman’s we discovered that Roger still bit. However, the procedure was changed. Whereas before he would bite and then stand in calm friendly appraisal, now he would bite, leap three feet away, bend all his four knees, lay his ears back, and obviously wait for the expected whack. Evidently our tenants had thought they could cure him by returning a whack for every bite. But Roger had driven his own bargain. Bite away, and endure the whack, and bite again another day.
Though over the years this conditioned reflex has almost disappeared, there is still a slight suggestion of it left. After the bite there is the slightest crouch, a faint flattening of the ears, a moment of watchful waiting for what might come next.
Also, after almost a year, he remembered the sock game. This originally came under the heading of tormenting the cat. Some mornings he would be so interested in giving me a friendly nip as I was getting up, before I could get my trousers on, that in self-defense I quickly shoved a sock over his head. In horror he tried to back out of the darkness, the foot part dangling and swinging like the misshapen trunk of some strange little hairy elephant. He backed into a corner and then clawed the sock off, gave me that cat look, and walked out of the bedroom.
On subsequent mornings I did the same thing. It depressed him less each time, though he continued to make a great effort to avoid it. In time he learned that he could see through the weave of the sock, and then he became intrigued. He would walk around, looking through the sock, and when he tired of it, he had only to step on the foot end and pull his head free. Thus it became ritual, and when I picked up a sock he would stand still and wait for me to put it on his fool head.
He remembered this game and still does, though now it is a very seldom thing. He is rarely up before we are, and when there is a chance for the sock game it is a kind of ancient reassurance, though as he stands wearing it, purring audibly, I wonder just who is humoring whom. These days I pull the sock off, and that is the only variation.
That summer of 1949 we took our short turn at Wanahoo. Dorothy had drawn the plans for the house. We went over them with Floyd Abrams, the local builder, and told him to get started whenever he could. We boarded the cats with Dr. Sellman and told him that when we had found a place to spend the school year, we would send him word to send the cats to us by Railway Express.
Once again we set out for New Mexico. We decided to follow the coast and dip down into Florida and back out again. We crossed over through Orlando and through Tampa, and on a bright, hot September day came across the Courtney Campbell Causeway and into Clearwater.
What’s so wrong with this? we asked each other.
By the next day we had located and rented a little frame house on Acacia Street on Clearwater Beach, two blocks from the Gulf, owned by a friendly and generous lady named Mrs. Payne. By the following day we were reasonably well settled in, and Johnny had started school. We sent for the cats. On the third day an officer of the law arrived with a warrant for a traffic violation. Under nature of violation was written: Child in school. You have to wear Florida plates to enjoy that privilege.