Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

As a boy in Hapeville, the cat you like best is Thai Thai, a male Siamese that your mama and you inherit from the family moving out. His name isn’t Thai Thai before your mama starts calling him that, though. It’s something fake Chinese, like Lung Cee or Mouser Tung. The folks moving out don’t want to take him with them, their daddy’s got a job with Otero Steel in Pueblo, Colorado. Besides, Mouser Tung’s not likely to appreciate the ice and snow out there. He’s a Deep South cat, Dixie-born and -bred.

“You are who you are,” Mama tells the Siamese while he rubs her laddered nylons, “but from here on out your name is Thai Thai.”

“Why’re you calling him that?” you ask her.

“Because it fits a cracker Siamese,” she says.

It’s several years later before you realize that Thailand is Siam’s current name and that there’s a gnat-plagued town southeast of Albany called, yeah, Ty Ty.

Your mama’s a smart gal, with an agile mind and a quirky sense of humor. How Daddy ever got it into his head that she wasn’t good enough for him is a mystery.

It’s her agile mind and her quirky sense of humor that did her in, the Zoo Cop says, pinching back your eyelid.

Anyway, Daddy ran off to a Florida dog-track town with a chunky bottle-blonde ex-hairdresser who dropped a few pounds and started a mail-order weight-loss-tonic business. He’s been gone nine weeks and four days.

Thai Thai, when you notice him, is pretty decent company. He sheathes his claws when he’s in your lap. He purrs at a bearable register. He eats leftover vegetables—peas, lima beans, spinach—as readily as he does bacon rinds or chicken scraps. A doll, Mama calls him. A gentleman.

This ESB business distorts stuff. It flips events, attitudes, preferences upside-down. The last shall be first, the first shall be last. This focus on cats, for example, is a major distortion, a misleading reenvisioning of the life that you lived before getting trapped by Rockdale Biological Supply Company.

Can’t Penfield see this? Uh-uh, no way. He’s too hot to screw Rockdale Biological’s bigwigs. The guy may have right on his side, but to him—for the moment, anyway—you’re just another human oven-cake. If you crumble when the heat’s turned up, great, zip-a-dee-zoo-cop, pop me a cold one, justice is served.

Thing is, you prefer dogs. Even as a kid, you like them more. You bring home flea-bitten strays and beg to keep them. When you live in Alabama, you covet the liony chow, Simba, that waits every afternoon in the Notasulga schoolyard for Wesley Duplantier. Dogs, not cats. Until Mouser Tung—Thai Thai—all the cats you know prowl on the edges of your attention. Even Thai Thai comes to you and Mama, over here in Georgia, as a kind of offhand house-warming gift. Dogs, Mister Zoo Cop, not cats.

Actually, Penfield says, I’m getting the idea that what was in the forefront of your attention, Adolf, was women….

After puberty, your attention never has a forefront. You are divebombed by stimuli. Girls’ faces are billboards. Their bodies are bigger billboards. Jigsawed ad signs. A piece here. A piece there. It isn’t just girls. It’s everything. Cars, buildings, TV talking heads, mosquito swarms, jet contrails, interchangeable male callers at suppertime, battle scenes on the six o’clock news, rock idols infinitely glitterized, the whole schmear fragmenting as it feeds into you, Mr. Teen-age Black Hole of the Spirit. Except when romancing a sweet young gal, your head’s a magnet for all the flak generated by the media-crazed twentieth century.

“You’re tomcatting, aren’t you?” Mama says. “You’re tomcatting just like Webb did. God.”

It’s a way to stay focused. With their faces and bodies under you, they cease to be billboards. You’re a human being again, not a radio receiver or a gravity funnel. The act imposes a fleeting order on the ricocheting chaos working every instant to turn you, the mind cementing it all together, into a flimsy cardboard box of mismatched pieces.

Is that tomcatting? Resisting, by a tender union of bodies, the consequences of dumping a jigsaw puzzle of cats into a box of pieces that, assembled, would depict, say, a unit of embattled flak gunners on Corregidor?

Christ, the Zoo Cop says, a more highfalutin excuse for chasing tail I’ve never heard.

Your high school is crawling with cats. Cool cats, punk cats, stray cats, dead cats. Some are human, some aren’t.

You dissect a cat in biology lab. On a plaster-of-Paris base, guyed upright by wires, stands the bleached skeleton of a quadruped that Mr. Osteen—he’s also the track and girls’ softball coach—swears was a member of Felis catus, the common house cat.

With its underlying gauntness exposed and its skull gleaming brittle and grotesque, this skeleton resembles that of something prehistoric. Pamela van Rhyn and two or three other girls want to know where the cats in the lab came from.

“A scientific supply house,” Coach Osteen says. “Same place we get our bullfrogs, our microscope slides, the insects in that there display case.” He nods at it.

“Where does the supply house get them?” Pamela says.

“I don’t know, Pammie. Maybe they raise ’em. Maybe they round up strays. You missing a kitty?”

In fact, rumor holds that Mr. Osteen found the living source of his skeleton behind the track field’s south bleachers, chloroformed it, carried it home, and boiled the fur off it in a pot on an old stove in his basement. Because of the smell, his wife spent a week in Augusta with her mother. Rumor holds that cat lovers hereabouts would be wise to keep their pets indoors.

Slicing into the chest cavity of the specimen provided by the supply house, you find yourself losing it. You are the only boy in Coach Osteen’s lab to contract nausea and an overwhelming uprush of self-disgust; the only boy, clammy-palmed and light-headed, to have to leave the room. The ostensible shame of your departure is lost on Pamela, who agrees, in Nurse Mayhew’s office, to rendezvous with you later that afternoon at the Huddle House.

“This is the heart,” you can still hear Osteen saying. “Looks like a wet rubber strawberry, don’t it?”

As a seven-year-old, you wander into the grain crib of the barn on the Powell farm. A one-eyed mongrel queen named Sky has dropped a litter on the deer hides, today stiff and rat-eaten, that Gramby Powell stowed there twenty or more years ago. Sky one-eyes you with real suspicion, all set to bolt or hiss, as you lean over a rail to study the blind quintet of her kittening.

They’re not much, mere lumps. “Turds with fur,” Gramby called them last night, to Meemaw Anita’s scandalized dismay and the keen amusement of your daddy. They hardly move.

One kitten gleams white on the stiff hide, in the nervous curl of Sky’s furry belly. You spit at Sky, as another cat would spit, but louder— ssssphh! sssphh! —so that eventually, intimidated, she gets up, kittens falling from her like bombs from the open bay of a B-52, and slinks to the far wall of the crib.

You climb over the rail and pick up the white kitten, the Maybe Albino as Meemaw Anita dubbed it. “Won’t know for sure,” she said, “till its eyes’re open.”

You turn the kitten in your hands. Which end is which? It’s sort of hard to say. Okay, here’s the starchy white potato print of its smashed-in pug of a face: eyes shut, ears a pair of napkin folds, mouth a miniature crimson gap.

You rub the helpless critter on your cheek. Cat smells. Hay smells. Hide smells. It’s hard not to sneeze.