Continuing the cat theme, here is the opening of Disappearing Otis, a novel I put on Amazon ten years ago as print-on-demand, so very few have read it. It is a clever book that, sadly, will probably never find its way on to a bookshelf. Alas, a writer moves on, and I’ve written twenty novels every bit as clever since. But this cat story was fun to write—so enjoy:
They’re on their way back from visiting FayNell’s parents in Hartfoot when the car in front of them hits a cat. The girls, foothills to their brother in the back seat, witness it all—the orange cat racing up from the fire ditch at the side of the road; the Ford slamming on its brakes and swerving; the cat flying through the air. The Ford slows as if it might stop, but then continues on its way.
Maddie starts up pleading and crying and so does Essie, so what choice does Chris have except to go and check on the damn thing? He pulls over to the side of the road and they all pile out and scuff back to where the cat got hit and of course it’s dead and blood is oozing from its mouth.
“Daddy, we can’t just leave it here,” says Essie, her voice pitiful. “We can’t just let it stay here where all the other cars’ll run over it.”
“We’ll move it to the side of the road then,” he offers.
But no, this isn’t good enough.
“Please Daddy, please. The buzzards’ll get it.”
The girls are wrapped around FayNell, hugging on to her thighs—and FayNell, with tears sparkling in the corners of her eyes, has a desolate look on her face that hurts Chris’s heart because he knows what she’s really seeing when she looks at that dead cat. Gary stands by his mother’s side, looking at the cat and shaking his head sorrowfully.
It gets really hot in the panhandle of Texas in August. There are no clouds and there is no breeze to push the air around. The heat rising from every surface makes the atmosphere shimmery, and the five of them standing like that at the side of the road are dripping sweat and panting like dried‑out dogs from just the minute or so away from the car air conditioner. Already a fly is buzzing over the feline carcass.
The cat doesn’t have a collar and, scanning the area, Chris can see that its home could be any one of the houses in the new development off to the south—and he isn’t about to go knocking on doors telling somebody that their cat is dead. So what he does is, he gets the Neiman Marcus bag that’s left in the trunk from when FayNell took the girls shopping in Dallas in March, and he gets some newspaper that’s also in the trunk, and he scoops the dead cat into the gray paper bag with the string handles.
“There now,” he says. “We’ll give her a nice burial in the backyard when we get home.”
He puts the dead cat in the trunk and the girls seem satisfied with the solution of a funeral. They drive on.
When they’re almost home it suddenly hits them that they’re hungry so they decide to stop at Ben’s Country Kitchen for a meal. As soon as Chris parks the car and opens his door the heat hits him in the face, reminding him of the cat in the trunk. That dead cat baking in what’s basically an oven can’t be a good idea. So he takes the bag out of the trunk and sets it in the meager strip of shade beneath the rear fender with the intention of putting it back in when they return from their meal. They go into the restaurant and, as coincidence would have it, are seated at a table by the window that overlooks the parking lot and the back of their car and the dead cat bag.
They all look at their menus but the gazes of all five of them keep returning in the most morbid way to that Neiman Marcus bag. They give their orders to the waiter.
Next time Chris glances out the window a woman is hobbling through the parking lot, a black woman with a squashed‑up face carrying a heavy coat and a bulging roughed-up purse. Her shoes are worn-down pumps, and her feet puff up and over the sides of them like risen dough. And her dress—in this heat!—is high‑necked and long‑sleeved, burgundy knit of some kind and hanging unevenly all the way down to the middle of her calves.
“Oh the poor thing.” FayNell releases a compassionate sigh, causing the twins to also heave weighty sighs. “All her worldly possessions in that purse. And the heat of that dress!”
The woman—he can’t tell her age but her hair is gray—is trudging right along, a slow‑moving boat, aiming herself toward the park across the street, maybe planning to find a bench in the shade where she can rest. But when she catches sight of that Neiman Marcus bag she stops. She looks at it; and she looks all around. Then she limps on by it on her swollen feet. But she stops on the sidewalk before crossing the street and back she comes to the bag. And once more she stops and looks around. And once more she carries on shuffling, this time toward the back of the building—and there she stays for three minutes or so, until she emerges, a purpose this time to her walk; and she carries herself with confidence straight to the car, stops, stoops, slips her arm through the strings of the bag, takes it up to her bosom, and then walks on.
The food arrives, and its arrival is a nuisance to them.
“I don’t know what to think about this,” Essie says fretfully.
Maddie, equally confounded, echoes, “I don’t know what to think, either.”
The woman, bowed protectively over the bag, is moving off. This time she continues across the street—and her curiosity about her prize is too much for her because she stops at the first bench she comes to, opens the bag, and faints, collapsing forward and on to her side.
The family starts eating. Chris doesn’t really taste what’s on his plate, though ordinarily Ben’s is his favorite; nor does he meet the eyes of anyone else at the table, but views the floating of their forks between plates and mouths only peripherally.
Somebody inside the restaurant, or maybe someone driving by, must’ve taken notice of the woman hunched over there on the bench because within five minutes an ambulance drives up and two uniformed attendants jump out.
Movement at the table stops.
Together the EMS men move to check on her. One of them takes her pulse while the other bends low over her face. Then an attendant fetches the gurney and, in cooperation, one at her feet and the other supporting her head and shoulders, they scoop her aboard the white surface and roll her out to the ambulance. Then one of the attendants, looking around, spies her few articles—her bulging purse, her heavy coat, the Neiman Marcus bag—and going over, gathers these things and slides them into the back of the ambulance and closes the door. They drive away.
This last, this absurd gathering-up of the dead cat like it’s a prized possession, is too much for Chris—and for the kids. Just imagine the reaction in the emergency room! Four pairs of twinkling eyes find each other and laughter follows—a laughter that won’t cease, an embarrassingly loud laughter complete with spit and open mouths filled with half‑chewed food. Tears roll down Chris’s cheeks. The girls laugh so hard they can’t sit still in their chairs and Gary loses his breath so that he makes braying noises and that makes them laugh even louder. They laugh and laugh so that the other mid‑afternoon diners stare and the servers form themselves into a puzzled line over by the bar.
And through their laughter sits FayNell—erect, stern, and unmoving. Up until three years ago she would have laughed along with them over this string of outlandish events. But now instead of humor, horrified indignation is stamped upon her brow; priggish disapproval pinches her lips; and the haughty gleam of the fanatically empathetic glows from her eyes.
And upon whom is she focusing all this intolerance? Who is she blaming for this entire comical sequence?
Chris, that’s who. From the second the cat got hit by someone else’s car to the moment a poor woman was carried away in an ambulance, FayNell has been tallying and judging, and blaming her husband, a kind man who only wants what’s best for everybody.
There was a time when she hadn’t been so unbending. There was a time when she wasn’t so quick to assume wicked intentions behind every episode.
Chris can trace to the day the beginning of this change in her. It was the day of The Accident, three years ago. Somehow he’s been designated as the brunt bearer which is unfair because he wasn’t even there that day; he wasn’t involved in any way.
And that’s why the next evening, after he spends the afternoon brooding in front of the Ryder Cup, he packs his toothbrush, electric shaver, and a few articles of clothing, and leaves the house. He honestly has no intention of staying away from his home and family forever and FayNell knows this; and she knows also that the fault of his leaving is hers. He’s suffered long enough because of her sorrow. If she doesn’t find a way to put her anguish behind her the rest of their lives will be no more than haunted shadows cast by dead wishes and hopes gone sour.
Because the story calls for a picture of an orange cat.
