of an unripe strawberry. Once she was in front of that same chained Dumpster from the YouTube video clip, she set down her bags, and extracted several pie pans, which she proceeded to place roughly ten feet apart, before starting at the far end, and hunkering down to examine the snowy asphalt, moving so quickly yet so clumsily, I couldn’t help but remember that scene in Fargo when the hugely pregnant Chief of Police Marge Gunderson suddenly squatted down near that overturned car on the frozen lake and announced “…I think I’m gonna barf!”
I wanted to laugh, but something warned me that doing so would somehow spoil what was about to happen next. Thirty feet away, the woman began craning her hooded head first in one direction, then in another, before saying softly, “There you are,” and after she spoke, the cats began to ooze from the alley, a wiggling ocean of low-slung bodies, their fur rippling wave-like as they moved in a huge phalanx of long, lean backs, lowered tails, and flattened-eared heads, coming closer and closer to the woman as she went from pan to pan, not leaving food, but merely indicating that the pans were, indeed, there. Realizing that she’d been looking for their tracks in the foot-print and truck-tire patterned alley-snow, I continued to watch quietly, my breath coming in short air-whitening hitches, as she returned to the central Dumpster, and said, “Who’s gonna dance with me?”
Then it began to happen—the cats rose up, tsunami-like, backs suddenly pitched upwards, front paws lifted, heads pointed chin-forward in her direction, tails out straight behind for balance, and one-by-one, they approached her, walking gingerly on their hind feet alone, as first a huge black male with dainty scallops of white on his front toes came toward her, and she took his paws in her leather-mittened hands, and they executed a lumbering, swaying dance, and once that big-headed tom was done, another cat—this one a black-and-white tuxedo—took his place, and so on, with orange and calico and tiger-stripe and solid gray partners taking turns with her, until all the cats had had their time on the dance floor with the woman…only then did she pick up the cloth bags, and extract big margarine tubs, each filled with food. Once she began feeding them, the cats acted like any other alley cat across America might act—they jostled each other for a better position by the pan, they hissed, they batted at each other with their paws, and finally, once all the food was devoured, they hurried off as one, an undulating retreating ebb-tide of cold-puffed furry bodies, going back to wherever it was they hid during the daytime.
I actually recognized a few of the cats, from some of our Trap & Spay Days promotions, when we passed out live traps to area businessmen, and fixed all the caught cats for free, just as long as the person who trapped them watched over them during the healing time after the animals were spayed or neutered. But there were always newcomers to the clutter of cats, abandoned or lost felines who somehow came to find outdoor life among their own kind preferable to life—and often certain death—in a shelter.
The woman started picking up the licked-clean pans, and while she was putting them in her bags, along with the empty margarine containers, I finally found myself asking her, “Do you do this every day?”
“Yeah…leap year day included. They expect it, and I like it, so…I come out here. The people who own the businesses here, they said I could—”
Obviously, someone had hassled her about her daily feeding in the past, probably those wonks down at City Hall. There wasn’t any ordinance on the books against feeding strays, but that usually didn’t stop the city workers from throwing their weight around, especially when it came to women. Being single myself, I’d had more than one run-in with those guys from City Hall over everything from pruning the trees which overhung my sidewalk to how much water I did (or didn’t) use each month, so I asked, “Anyone hassle you about this?” I pointed to the bags she carried. Stumbling in place slightly as she picked up the last of the pans, she said without turning to look my way, “Oh, the usual suspects…cops, city drones, tourists. The owners, they pay for what I feed them, so I keep coming. Gotta get my cat fix,” she added enigmatically, before heading for me, bags bouncing off her black jeans-covered thighs, her face ruddy from the cold and from the effort of breathing hard and shallow.
“‘Cat fix’—?”
“I suppose you could call me a crazy cat lady without the cats. I used to be able to have my own cats, but between the Toxo and the umpteen bouts of cellulitis, the doctors at the clinic said if I keep a cat and it bites me again, I could die. They said I have some sort of feline bacteria, something with a ‘c’, all through my blood, right down to the marrow. It flares up if I get a bite or bad scratch. Which is why I have to wear these—” She held up her hands, and showed me the thick leather mitts which extended down past her wrists, well into her elasticized jacket sleeves, adding matter-of-factly, almost by rote, “—just in case one of these kitties claws me or tries to bite. I have duct tape wrapped around my one pair of socks, around my ankles, in case I have to try to kick apart a cat fight. Last time one of my own cats bit me, it was on the front of my left foot. I had on two pairs of socks on account of it being cold in my apartment, but he still sunk in two fangs. Took a lot of iodine to get rid of that one, but it didn’t heal for weeks. I just couldn’t afford another visit to the hospital. So once the last of mine passed on…I started coming here. I saw their tracks, one morning. Too many for just one cat, so I left them some food…one of the shop owners saw me, and I thought he was going to hassle me, but he started in on some story about his prophet’s cat once falling asleep on his sleeve, and rather than wake the cat up he cut off the sleeve, and then I knew it was ok, that I could feed the cats. These people, they like cats. Not dogs, but cats…they don’t like worship them, the way the Egyptians used to, but they’re good about them, and me feeding them. Now they give me some money, to help feed them—”
She kept on talking, without ever asking my name that first day, and I realized that she had to be isolated, given her eagerness to overshare with a complete stranger. I didn’t get a chance to ask her her name that day, but I did learn it, when she paused in mid-ramble to pull a small Burberry plaid wallet out of one pocket, and slid out her non-driver ID, which had her name and really bad photo of her on it.
“—every time I go in they give me grief over not putting an organ donor sticker on my card, but that wasn’t as bad as the first time I went in for a card, and this guy at the DMV, some fat slob with a greasy black comb-over, asks me, ‘Are you a retard? You’re too young to be getting a non-driver ID, and the only people your age who get them are retarded, so what kind of retard are you?’ and I tell him ‘I’ve got a degree, but I’m also dyslexic, and I have no depth perception, so that’s what “kind of retard” I am’ and the guy shut up, but he kept giving me dirty looks anyway—”
I realized that dyslexia and stereo blindness weren’t Areille Quies’ only problem—it wasn’t until my fifth visit to the alley that she told me about the Toxoplasma gondil parasitic infection which she’d apparently caught while still in her teens or early twenties, when she was actually an honor student in high school and college (after the tenth visit, she let me follow her to her apartment, where I saw the framed High Honors high school diploma, and the Magna Cum Laude BS in English she’d received over thirty years before from local schools, which shared wall space with literally thousands of individual images of the hundreds of cats she’d had over the years, all grouped in multi-image-matted picture frames of a dozen different finishes and designs), but which didn’t fully manifest itself in the usual symptoms of slowed reflexes, immunity to the scent of cat urine, or the surreal attraction to all things feline until she was close to thirty. It was then that she kept on having so many car accidents that she lost her license for good, then began losing even the most menial of jobs, until disability kicked in around the time she reached Social Security age, and she was able to devote herself to her true life’s work—caring for the cats whose prints she’d been tracking down Asad Alley.
By the time I was able to enter her cave-like apartment, with its walls covered from ceiling level to about a foot off the floor with countless photo montages, interspaced with cheaply framed pictures of cats torn from old calendars, permanently closed drapes, and
