In a matter of weeks he was completely healed. The last sign of any favoring of that front foot disappeared. He was as speedy as ever and, to all appearances, had forgiven me.
But for a full year, and this I swear is true, if I offended that cat by, for example, scooping him off some place where I wanted to sit and setting him down on the floor, that con artist would look at me with unmistakable scorn, and then slowly and sadly he would limp away.
There was one foolish trick I started doing with him that year. He hated it and yet it intrigued him. When he was stretched out on some slippery surface, like the waxed floor of the kitchen, I would bend over him and put one hand on one side of him and one on the other and spin him like a propeller and, with one finger on the nape of his neck, keep him going for a few moments. It gave him vertigo. He would get up and wobble around and look as if he was trying to gag. He would leave the room and, moments later, come right back and flop down on the floor in front of me and look up expectantly.
You could not do that sort of thing to Geoffrey. He would have endured it in good spirit as he endured everything the people did, but he would not have understood.
That spring I did well enough professionally so we began to think of having a Florida house. A few years of rentals can make you feel you are being nibbled to death. I told Dorothy to go house hunting for something we could hang onto for a few seasons, furnish cheaply, and then unload. She looked for days and found a new house on Siesta Key, the last house on a small peninsula called Point Crisp, which sticks out into little Sarasota Bay.
We bought it before we went north. We’ve been there ever since, adding first a guesthouse, then an extension to the main house. For those six years — 1952 through 1957 — the cats shared our follow-the-sun life, and the cat things which happened seem to belong to one familiar place or the other, rather than to a specific year. Both places were familiar to the cats, the windows and the kitchen corners and favorite places remembered in the first minutes of arrival.
Eleven
There was the memorable instance of the big wave. When weather and tides were opportune, I used to knock off work in the late afternoon, take some frozen fishing shrimp out of the deepfreeze and with rod and gear take the narrow path through the three hundred feet of mangrove out to the sand bar at the end of Point Crisp and fish the dredged channel near the Inland Waterway marker.
On one strange afternoon I caught sixteen fish, each of an entirely different species. The cats would invariably accompany me, walking along with me, tails pleasurably high. They liked it much better than the beach. They would sit behind me like a pair of dogs, and when the line tightened and the reel hummed they would stand up and move closer, as eager to see what would come out of the water as I. The people in small boats thoroughly enjoyed it. A lot of them snapped our picture. I wonder how many of those pictures are tucked away in drawers and albums in the north, showing “that fellow fishing with those two big gray cats.”
One afternoon the fishing was slow, and both cats lay on the shells a dozen feet behind me. I always wore old sneakers and pants so I could wade around on the submerged part of the bar. A cabin cruiser came up the channel from the south. It did not seem notably large or notably fast, but as it went by I noticed it was dragging a wake behind it worthy of a Great Lakes ore boat. It slapped me at about mid-thigh, and I turned, too late to scramble for my tackle box. Roger, for once, was more alert. He went scampering to high ground with the wave in close pursuit. Just as Geoff sprang up, the wave hit him and knocked him down and rolled him over. He came up sputtering, and as the wave drained off the shells, he headed miserably for home. He gave a tired whine of complaint about every twenty feet until I could no longer hear him.
Thereafter he did all his waiting up on the high ground. Roger braved the shell beach as before. When a fish was being caught, Geoff would come down to the edge of the water as before, but if while awaiting his share he happened to see a boat coming from any direction, even a skiff with a five-horse outboard, he would whirl and run to high ground, returning well after it had passed.
Actually, Geoffrey was bolder about the water than Roger. One year we began to find the tails and the bills of small needlefish by the cat dishes. It puzzled us. There were small needlefish, sometimes called ballyhoo, in the shallow bay waters on either side of the house. It was some time before we actually saw Geoff in the act of catching them. The shallows behind the house were flat calm. These small fish swim right on the surface. Geoff had waded out to his armpits and belly hair, and he stood absolutely motionless, ears cocked forward. As we watched him he gave a sudden snap at the water, and came out with a four- or five-inch needlefish in his jaws. He walked around the side of the house, came in his window with it, went directly to his dish, dropped it, put his foot on it when it flapped, and then neatly ate all of it but the bill and tail, and went back out and waded slowly into the bay.
Also, at Piseco, Geoff was the one who owned a frog. Every so often, all one summer, Geoff would go down to the lake shore and hop from rock to rock along the shore, pausing on each one to reach down into the water with one foot and feel all around the underside of the rock. Sooner or later he would find it, scoop it out, take it in his jaws and bring it up onto the terrace and put it down, and then purely hop the bejaysus out of it. We knew it was always the same frog, not only because of the markings but because, as the summer progressed, it became increasingly defeated and shopworn. He would give it gentle little taps on its rear end with one urging paw and admire the jumps until at last, when the frog was too dusty and dispirited to provide further entertainment, Geoffrey would walk away and one of us would take the frog down to the lake shore and drop it back into the water. If I remember correctly it was still in residence when we left, but one can imagine that it was terribly tired of cats. The next year Geoff spent quite a lot of time feeling around for it under the rocks before he gave up the search.
Once, at Point Crisp, Roger got very incensed at a large and scruffy-looking osprey. It was acting so strangely, I do not think it was well. Ospreys are of the hawk family, with a very cold eye, a big, wicked, tin-snip beak, and powerful, oversized talons designed to grab fish on the surface and fly off with them. The osprey landed on top of the telephone pole near our garage, and Roger spotted it. He yammered at it to come down and face the fierce cat, and when it ignored him, he managed to climb up onto the roof of the attached garage. This put him so close the bird got tired of listening to him and flew down to our back beach, Roger after him. By the time we got out there they were twenty feet apart. Roger was giving him that cat ballad generally reserved for night-calling cats, but he had no intention of getting any closer. The bird looked as if it wished he would get closer, just close enough. Thinking it might be ill, we immured Rog in the house, and I went to inspect the bird. I got to within ten feet and decided that was as near as I cared to get. It flapped off, flying not very well, but well enough to disappear over the key to the south.
During the evenings each spring, Roger and Geoffrey would go over to the house of Al and Connie Sheen, our nearest neighbors, to serenade Caffeine, their orange and white girl cat. It was ritual. They were both male neuters, and Caffeine was a spayed female, but cats seem to respond to some spring rhythm more persuasive than any specifics of ability. Caffeine, inside her screened cage, would respond with her own song. Geoff was the more loyal suitor. When, each year, their attentions ended, we would often see Caffeine by day, coming across the lot between our houses, apparently feeling that spring had not lasted long enough.