The Cat's Job

Pinbeam Books

http://www.pinbeambooks.com

This is a work of fiction. All the
characters and events portrayed in this novel are fiction or are
used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2002, 2010,
2011 by
Sharon Lee
and
Steve Miller
. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.
Please remember that distributing an author's work without
permission or payment is theft; and that the authors whose works
sell best are those most likely to let us publish more of their
works. First published in 2002 by SRM, Publisher.

The Big Ice by Sharon Lee first
appeared in CatFantastic V

The Cat's Job by Steve Miller first
appeared in Chariot the Stars

Ginger and the Bully of Lowergate
Court © 1996, 2002 by Sharon Lee

King of the Cats ©2002 by Sharon Lee
and Steve Miller

Hexapuma and this edition © 2010 by
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

10th Life © 1979 by Steve
Miller

ISBN:

Kindle: 978-1-935224-33-4

Epub: 978-1-935224-34-1

PDF: 978-1-935224-35-8

Published April 2011 by

Pinbeam Books

PO Box 707

Waterville ME 04903

email [email protected]

Cover photograph Copyright © 2010
Steve Miller

THE CAT'S JOB

Smashwords
Edition

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Miller, and Sharon Lee and Steve Miller at Smashwords

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For all the cats who have made our
lives more livable,

for the vets and aides who have helped
keep our cats healthy and wise, if not wealthy,

and for our many friends who have acted
as guardians and supporters of our cats

while we lived the often roaming and
penny-pinched lives of writers.

For nine years Steve and I (with
Archie, Arwen, Brandee and Buzz-z) lived in an impossible little
townhouse on Lowergate Court in Owings Mills, Maryland. Lowergate
was one of five courts that comprised the stunningly misnamed
Bright Meadows, the entire campus of which was roughly
three-quarters of a mile around.

The best thing about Bright Meadows (besides that the rent
was
cheap
and the roof kept the rain off. Mostly.) was that there
were many dozens of cats in the neighborhood. Steve and I would go
for walks up and down and around the various courts and say hi to
Jazz and Mom, Sasquatch, Pirate, Taffy, Sandy, The Gentleman, Blue
and Ginger.

Ginger was the mayor.

I
didn't say he was the mayor -- anyone could see that he
was, just by looking at him. An orange striped cat of middle years
with a habitual demeanor of grave attentiveness, he made his rounds
every day, up, down and around the courts, across to World's End
and down the back woods. He would stop by our place mid-morning and
trade orange cat stories with Archie through the bottom screen in
the kitchen door. At least once I saw him at World's End with
Brandee, hunting moles. He cuffed Buzz-z once when they first met
and that took care of that -- deference to the mayor was Buzz-z's
rule, ever after.

Ginger was a non-partisan mayor. He was a cat, true enough,
but he held every resident of the courts to be
citizens
, equally subject to his authority -- and his
protection. Steve saw him run off a stray dog that had frightened
one of the toddlers in the playground. I saw him streaking to the
rescue, the day Pirate was treed by a couple of boys with too much
time on their hands.

The Gentleman, who was Brandee's
special friend, was a Cat of the World -- a wire-tough
black-and-white with gnawed-up ears and a limp off the back right
leg -- and even he accorded Ginger the respect of his rank,
whenever he found himself on Hizzoner's turf.

Not so, the Siamese.

I do not at this distance remember the
Siamese's name. Perhaps I never knew it. Steve claims some vague
recollection of having heard him called "Khan." I'm not so sure.
What I am sure of is that he arrived outside my kitchen door one
April morning, just before Ginger's daily visit, swearing and
cussing and hissing at Archie, who was standing up on his hind legs
and giving back as good as he got.

I threw a glass of water on him
through the screen and told him to get a life, which, as it
happens, was a mistake.

From that moment on, the Siamese
targeted our house. He would show up at all hours, bitching and
screaming. He would crouch under the bush by the door and leap on
Brandee, or Steve or me as we left.

But we weren't the only
ones.

He made Taffy's life a misery. He jumped The Gentleman so
many times that The Gentlemen went to visit friends in the country.
He clawed Jazz so badly the vet was afraid he wouldn't be able to
save the eye. S'quatch would scream when he saw the Siamese coming
his way and scramble up the drain pipe to sit wailing in the rain
gutter until his lady fetched him down. Brandee would flatten
herself to the ground and her ears to her head and
dare
him to try it, which was also Sandy's approach -- damages
there were minor, but the name-calling sessions were
deafening.

Ginger tried to reason with him, to no
avail. I tried to reason with his owner and was told to mind my own
business and "if that cat come missing," she'd know who to
blame.

This went on from April until
August.

And one hot August afternoon, with the
heat beating out of the sky colliding with the heat rising off the
tarmac at the level of your ears -- up at the top of Lowergate
Court, right next to the dumpster -- an amazing thing
occurred.

The Siamese was sitting in the parking
lot, swearing at Pirate, who was scrunched down under a starveling
cedar tree, pretending to be invisible. They had been doing this
for some time.

Suddenly, in other parts of the court,
there was -- movement.

From up-court came Mom and Sasquatch;
from down-court, Brandee and Sandy. Taffy and Jazz drifted down the
hill across and Blue pussyfooted in from somewhere and sat next to
the cedar tree, tail wrapped around his toes.

The Siamese cut off in mid-curse and looked around him. The
rest of the cats kept moving, slowly and purposefully, even
Snowball-called-Avalanche, who
never
left her patio, until they had made a
circle, with the Siamese in the center.

The Siamese yawned. He got up and
headed for the gap between Jazz and Taffy. The cats moved closer
together as he approached. Somebody growled. The Siamese backed
up.

After a minute, he chose another direction, this one toward
the cedar tree. He started to growl as he got closer and puffed
himself up. But Pirate screamed back and made
himself
even bigger and Blue said something that was
perhaps not quite polite.

The Siamese slunk back to the center
of the circle and sat, carefully, down.

Which was when Ginger left his place
in the ring and walked forward.

Immediately, the Siamese was on his
feet, fur every-which-way, swearing like a ship full of
sailors.

The circle of cats drew a little
closer together. Ginger kept moving forward.

The Siamese flattened his belly to the
tarmac and his ears to his head and swore he was the master of
every cat there and a black belt in seventeen secret martial arts,
besides.

Ginger kept coming.

The Siamese yelled for his
mommy.

Ginger reached out and smacked him
upside the head, none-too-gently. The Siamese babbled and
wailed.

Ginger smacked him again, a little
harder, but not nearly as hard as the Siamese had hit
Jazz.

The Siamese stopped screaming. V-e-r-y
slowly, he sat up. Even more slowly, he got his ears back into
position. He licked his lips. Ginger sat down, utterly at ease, and
began to bathe. All around, the cat circle waited.

They held that tableau for
half-an-hour, I guess, then, one-by-one, the cats in the circle
drifted away, back to their usual rounds. Ginger, spotlessly clean,
left last, saving only the Siamese, who waited another four or five
minutes, blue eyes darting this way and that. When he was certain
he was unobserved, he got up and headed for home.

I never heard another ill word out of
him, from that day until we moved.

The rain stopped.

Agnes Pelletier sat up in the feather
bed she and Jakey had shared for forty-two years before his dying,
startled wide awake by the absence of sound.

It'd been raining steady, the last
three days, the mercury sitting just above 32. The air was too warm
to freeze the water as it fell, according to the weather fella on
the radio. So they had rain instead of a regular Maine January
snowstorm. Some towns, there'd been floods. Up on the Interstate,
the radio told her, cars and trucks slid off a roadway sheeted in
ice, for the rain froze where it struck.

Down on the Wimsy Neck Road, at Pelletier's farm, Agnes
slipped and damn' near broke her leg walking down the drive to the
mailbox day before yesterday. Yesterday, there'd been a special
announcement on the radio: The Post Office had canceled rural route
delivery, due to conditions. Agnes had already decided not to risk
another walk to the mailbox.
Fine time to take a
fall
,
she'd told herself;
the way that rain's coming down, you'd be froze
flat to the drive in a second.

But the rain had stopped; and there
was a rosy glow showing around the edges of the shuttered window.
Agnes pushed back the quilts and eased out of the feather bed.
Sunshine! Now, there was a welcome difference.

#

In the kitchen, she added wood to the
stove, then hauled on a pair of heavy work boots and laced them up.
She squinted at the mercury reading as she zipped Jakey's old
barncoat over her sweaters. Thirty-two and windless -- she could do
without the watch cap. She pulled on the mittens she'd knitted for
herself and went over to unlatch the door.

She hesitated on the sill, looking up
at the big old oaks that shaded the dooryard, their January-bare
branches glittering like they'd been dipped in diamonds. They
stretched tall against the bright blue sky, and Agnes felt a little
dizzy, seeing something as familiar as the trees made strange and
discomfortable.

She moved her eyes, squinting against
the bright. Everything -- trees, truck, dooryard and barn -- was
covered in ice. Thick, shiny ice that the sun struck spark from,
like a hammer against steel. There wasn't a sound to be heard in
all the bright, frozen world. Agnes wondered if the birds were
frozen tight to their trees.

She took hold of the doorpost and
eased down the ice-encased steps, skidding off the bottom and
scrabbling to keep her feet when she struck the yard. Slowly,
half-skating in her work boots, she went across to the bird feeder.
Froze solid: she could see the seeds through the ice, double-sized,
like she was looking through a magnification glass. She had a
couple whacks at it with her mittened fist, holding onto the slick
pole with her other hand, but the ice didn't so much as take a
nick.