We learned that the housebound lizards could easily be induced to run into the open mouth of a brown paper bag after the cats had lost interest. We did miss some of the little green ones, and later we would find their bodies clinging to window screens in the high corners between screen and sash. Totally dried and darkened, they looked far more prehistoric, savage little symbols of the frightful giants of the quaking earth an aeon ago. Johnny began saving the perfect ones, along with fishbones and bird skulls and the empty hulls of giant insects, shark teeth, oddly shaped stones. When, not too many years later, he began to draw with serious intent, began to show that almost ruthless unconcern toward other activities which is the plight and the strength of the artist, he turned to these things as models as he trained eye and hand.
The cats brought in another kind of lizard, which none of us cared for and which even the cats seemed reluctant to fool with once they released them in the house. These were larger ones, fat, thick, black, damp, and short-legged. Their escape efforts on hardwood or linoleum were more snakelike than lizard-like, and when Geoff brought one in he would have his lips pulled high in his gesture of distaste.
Having heard that some of the small Florida lizards were poisonous, having been told horrific tales of crazed and paralyzed cats, we were worried about what might happen. But they certainly had no inclination to eat the lizards. Roger, for several days, had a swelling and infection which could have come from a lizard bite, but we could not be certain that was the cause.
At Piseco and at College Hill we had learned that our cats loved to accompany us on walks. Geoff was happy to plod along at our speed, staying several steps behind us like a small dog, pausing sometimes to investigate some interesting scent along the way, then hurrying to catch up to his self-assigned position. Roger made a vast, nutty game out of it, hiding until we had passed, then rocketing by us and hiding again to either pounce out as we passed, or to repeat the previous performance. If walks became too long it was usually Roger who would lose interest first and go on about his own affairs.
At Acacia Street this habit became a nuisance. After Geoff had recovered his morale, Dorothy and I fell into the habit of, after dinner, walking through the pleasant night to a little bar several blocks south and over on the other side of Mandalay Road, the main street on Clearwater Beach. The cats thought this was a splendid ceremony and tried to go along with us. But there was too good a chance of their getting run over on Mandalay either going over there with us or wandering around the area after we had gone inside. So we would close the cat window if they were in the house. If they weren’t, we would walk and keep an eye out for them and then con them into coming close enough for capture so we could take them home and shut them in.
But you cannot safely con a cat very many times. They arrived at a catlike solution. When we were ready to leave for our pair of cold beers and game of table shuffleboard, the cats would be outside. Calling them was useless. They were invisible. So we would start out and look back and see the pair of them, night after night, walking together along the sidewalk following us, a half a block away. We would see those two conspirators under the street lights, and if we called, they would stay just a half block behind. If we went back, they would melt into the darkness to reappear again, a half block behind us after we gave up the hunt. When we started home, after a half block or a block, both cats would suddenly be underfoot, perfectly willing to be picked up and carried across Mandalay and set down again, and they gamboled and horsed around all the way home.
Roger chilled us to the bone one night on the way home. At a cross street near the house we stopped on the corner to let a slow-moving car go by. Just as it was reaching the corner, Roger pulled his idiot trick of rocketing past us. It was under a street light. He cut it so fine he actually had to add a little extra curve to get around the far front wheel of the car. We yelled at him, I think after he was out of danger, it happened so fast. When we crossed with Geoff, he was waiting over there with that cat grin of high spirits, fun and games, prancings in the night.
In the spring at Acacia Street, mockingbirds nested all over that area. At another time and another place I had acquired considerable respect for one mockingbird talent. We had stopped on a Saturday night at a motel in southern Texas near Harlingen. There was a navigable stream behind it. At dawn Sunday morning some jackass began cutting hardwood boards with a power saw. I complained at the office when we checked out. The man at the desk said it was a mockingbird, who had learned the noise from a small boat yard nearby. I did not really believe it until finally I tracked the sound down and located the creature in a treetop being a power saw.
Just last fall at Point Crisp there was another startling example of the mockingbird art. Roger had a hairball he had been trying to get rid of for several days. In his attempt to disgorge it, he would crouch and make an unmistakable gasping, wheezing, creaking sound of nausea that would go on and on without satisfactory result It was a rhythmic, repetitious noise. He didn’t seem very well last fall, and the effort would leave the old boy shaky. It was warm and the doors onto the screened terrace were open. I had come downstairs from my office, and as I walked through Dorothy’s studio I heard him straining away out on the terrace, so I went out there to check on him. I didn’t see him anywhere. I went into the living room and saw him asleep on the couch and thought I had imagined it all. Then, behind me out on the terrace the sound started again. I looked out and saw a large mockingbird sitting on a low limb of a bush just outside the screening and perhaps three feet above ground level, being a sick cat. Roger would often go out there to be sick, and the bird was as close as he could get to the place Rog usually went. As he made the noise he was cocking his head this way and that, peering in through the screen, quite obviously looking for the cat. I called Dorothy, and she listened to him, to the uncanny precision of the imitation, and we decided that the bird was, in what he construed as an accurate manner, calling the cat.
In the warm spring nights on Acacia Street the mockingbirds sang all night long, repeating their improvisations in series of four, adding fragments of cardinal, bluejay, mourning dove, gull, heron, red-winged blackbird. It could get to be compulsive, counting the series of four and listening for an eventual repetition. I managed to teach one of them a wolf whistle and, sooner or later, that would also crop up in that interminable serenade of nesting time.
The cats learned respect for an entirely different attribute of the nesting mockingbird. Jays would make an endless squawking fuss at such piercing volume that often they could drive a cat back indoors by getting on his nerves. Other types of birds would, like the jays, make tentative passes at the cats, staying at a safe distance. But those mockingbirds, during the nesting season, actually pecked hell out of both cats. When either cat crossed an open space by daylight, a mockingbird would take a bomb run from behind the target, come in low and hard and fast, administer one good knock on the skull, and zoom straight back up out of reach. The experience was not only painful, but it was a horrid indignity. Both cats had three and four little peck holes on top of the head centered in little bald, gray, circular patches half-dime size where hair stopped growing. Both of them learned defensive tactics, though it seemed to pain them. In daylight they would walk under the protection of hedges and bushes or walk very close to the side of the house. When one of them came to the end of his protection of the moment, he would stop, select the next shelter, look around with obvious anxiety, then run across the open space. The holes healed, and the hair grew back, and in time they learned how to take advantage of all shelter without looking so nervous about it — in fact, giving the impression the entire procedure was entirely accidental.