office (after the Century 21 Realty office came and went).
A fine mist settled on Arlene’s exposed face and forearms; she rolled down the plastic backed canvas sleeves on her outsized slicker and tried calling again. “C’mon, Kitty-kitty. It’s okay, I won’t hurt you.” She could hear the cat (kitten? It sounded young) crying, but the humidity in the sluggish July air made it difficult to pinpoint just where its cries originated.
Meeeaow!
Closer and louder now. Arlene walked forward slowly, heading toward the tiny diner that used-to-be-a-clothing-boutique to the north of her. In the distance she heard a truck’s many wide tires snick-splash along one of the side streets behind her. At this hour of the morning—just before four—the only things moving on the streets of Ewerton were out of state truckers, the last stragglers coming home after an all-night party held in one of those walk-up apartments nestled above the department stores, the occasional stray animal—and Arlene.
Plastic mesh shopping bags in hand, Arlene had Ewerton all to herself in the mornings. She was the Queen of Ewerton Avenue, the Owner of Wisconsin Street. And the Duchess of the Dumpsters, she often joked with herself as she leaned into the back-of-the-store Dumpsters, her fingers sensitive to the feel of aluminum cans, the odd piece of discarded merchandise, or even the past-its-due-date box or carton of food.
And stray animals. Often, she’d unintentionally scare a wild cat or something smaller and quicker that she wasn’t about to try to scrutinize in order to determine its species. And some mornings, she had footsore canine company for the length of a few blocks, until a slobbery tongue touched her hand in farewell and the empty streets rang with the sound of dog nails doing a chitinous tap-dance on the concrete.
But these had been animals, hungry, tired, or just plain lonely enough to allow Arlene to pick them up and scavenge them like an aluminum can, or an old box of breakfast cereal. Not that she thought of her pets as refuse, or cast-offs, though. Arlene treated all of her “finds” with respect, be they inanimate or animate. The aluminum cans were washed, then carefully crushed flat, prior to their storage in black plastic bags in the basement (and their subsequent return to the recycling truck come Thursday). The rust-dotted kitchen tools, chipped dishes, and one-left cards of kitchen magnets or corn-on-the-cob servers were diligently scrubbed, mended or matched with other odd-lot items waiting in Arlene’s already cluttered kitchen drawers.
As for the animals…Arlene was a couple years short of being able to collect her own Social Security, but what with her late husband’s SS checks, and the modest sum he’d left in the bank for her, she had just enough to pay her utility bills plus her considerable veterinarian bills. If a cat or dog needed food, she bought it name brands plus those expensive treats in the fancy little cans or boxes, while she ate weeks-old spareribs from the IGA dumpster. Should the animal need flea shampoo, she used only a half a tablet of denture cleaner in her chopper-hopper each day. When she wrote out the checks for her animals’ shots each year, she didn’t write out a check to cover the cost of her Ben-Gay and non-aspirin.
If you take it in, you take care of it. That thought alone was enough to banish any temptation to pamper herself. She had lived over sixty good years, years of plenty. And I still have plenty, she stubbornly told herself many a morning. Only difference is, I don’t have to pay for all of it. That some of her finds—the four-legged ones—ended up costing her money she really couldn’t afford to spend so freely never fazed Arlene, living alone as she did, with no children or grandchildren—or even many friends, for that matter—Arlene considered the love of her “babies” payment in full, thank you. While she knew that she’d have to make the little she had last until her own SS kicked in, Arlene had long ago decided that a life lived without giving, to someone, wasn’t a life.
Her years with Don had proved that to be a fact.
So there she was, an old woman with ridiculously thin ankles which vanished in a pair of velcro-strapped running shoes, walking briskly down the street, her good ear cocked and waiting for the next Meaow. She walked faster, both out of need and urgency. With the gradual lightening of the sky, it was urgent that she get home before the delivery trucks began to arrive at the stores, and the graveyard shifts at the sash and door and paper mill were let out. And she knew that that cat (kitten?) needed her.
Six years of combing the pre-dawn streets had taught Arlene that for a little animal, alone and scared, dawn is too late. With the coming of light come cars with drivers who speed up when they see something small and frantic trying to cross the street. Arlene had toed many a pulp-headed animal to the curb during her “normal” shopping hours.
But if she could find this cat before the coming of the light—
Meeeaow!
That was why it was hard to get a fix on its cries—they came from above Arlene. Looking up, she saw the kitten sitting on the high window ledge of the dentist’s office close to the intersection of Wisconsin Street and Fourth Avenue East. That window set in the gray stone facade was a good five feet off the ground, a small window with a deep ledge, recessed enough for a tiny kitten to hunker down close to the glass.
“Aw, c’mon, kitty, you can come closer, I won’t hurt you,” Arlene coaxed, as she stood on tiptoes and reached for the kitten. At five foot four, she was just tall enough to brush the animal’s silky coat with the tips of her blunt fingers. The kitten was warm, exceptionally so for an animal which had most likely been sitting on that ledge all night. Its fur was as fine-textured as washed silk; as the kitten breathed its fur undulated like wind-whipped draperies, a most peculiar sensation.
The kitten stopped crying, and edged closer to Arlene; two huge black ears surmounted a mottled white and black wedge of a face. It looked to be about three months old. In the spill of the street-lamp, Arlene noticed that the kitten’s eyes were tiny, baby-like. They glittered against the surrounding white fur like pebbles in the bottom of a fish tank, all watery and rounded.
Then, as if it had sized Arlene up and found her satisfactory, the kitten jumped off the ledge into her waiting arms. Upon impact, it began to purr, a loud rumble that radiated from its chest outward, making the ribs and skin vibrate. Arlene undid the top snap on her slicker and tucked the kitten inside; as she did so, her fingers brushed against the base of the kitten’s tail. Gonads the size of large peas filled the scrotum.
As she positioned her left arm under the kitten, Arlene thought, Awfully big down there for such a tiny baby boy…must be older than I thought. Arlene’s bag of cans clunked against her leg as she walked, but soon the kitten’s purr drowned out even that noise.
By the time she was halfway to her home on Polk Avenue, the kitten was kneading her stomach.
* * * *
Not only was the kitten older than Arlene had first guessed, he was…uglier than she’d realized. When she first brought him home, she hurried past the cats and dogs winding around her legs and shoved the wiggling kitten into the bathroom; she dreaded having to give all ten of her animals flea baths just in case the new arrival was crawling with the little brown varmints. After dumping some food into a saucer (also scavenged, a little white bowl with a childish picture of a spaceman on the moon in the bottom), she opened the bathroom door long enough to shove the food inside and slammed it before the kitten ran out. (There were litter pans positioned all over the house, including the bathroom, so she wasn’t worried about any accidents after the kitten ate.) But she didn’t get a good look at her newest find until after she’d fed her other friends, then brewed a cup of Earl Gray for herself.
While the other animals whined, scratched, hissed, and panted outside, Arlene quickly opened the door and slipped into the bathroom. The kitten was sitting on the toilet tank, in a
