The Mind Thing

The cat stretched languorously and then curled up again and closed its eyes.

“Cat.” Doc said it sharply and the cat opened its eyes again and stared at him.

“Cat, don’t go to sleep on me. I’m talking to you, and sleeping isn’t polite when you’re being spoken to. Cat, you used to live on the farm next to the Grosses. Did you know their cat? The one that committed suicide the night Gross did? Don’t tell me it wasn’t suicide, that cat jumping right into the jaws of a vicious dog it must have known was there. If it was suicide, why? And if it wasn’t, what was it?”

The cat’s eyes had closed, but somehow Doc felt that it wasn’t asleep.

“And an owl killed itself that same night. What do you know about that? And before that, along with Tommy Hoffman’s death we had a field mouse that got itself killed, seemingly deliberately. And a dog. Do you know that I was the one who ran over the dog? And that it had been hiding beside the road until my car got just the right distance away—only a few yards—and then ran right under my wheels? I’ll swear that one was deliberate—especially since they tell me that dog was car-shy.

“Two human beings, four animals—that we know of. Of course any other human suicides we’d know about, but how many more animals, especially ones out in the woods and not under observation, might have brought about their own deaths recently after— After what? After they’d served the purpose of whoever, or whatever, was using them?”

Outside, crickets were chirping, thousands of crickets. Doc’s mind wandered and he thought how strange it was that one could tell the temperature, almost exactly, by timing the interval between the chirps of a cricket. A cricket was a thermometer, and probably as accurate as the average household thermometer. There were many strange things in nature. Lemmings, with their periodical suicidal migrations to and into the sea. Group insanity? Or do the lemmings know something that we don’t know?

He heard the crickets, watched the black night press against the window pane. He turned back to the cat.

“Cat,” he said, “why did those other animals kill themselves? If you’re like them, why don’t you? Is the only reason you’re alive the fact that there isn’t any way of killing yourself shut up here? Wait a minute, I’ll find out.”

He left the living room and went across the hall and into the third downstairs room, a small room that was only partly furnished and used mostly for storage. Except for items that were already there, Doc used it only to store his fishing tackle and boots, his guns and ammunition. Although he knew there was open season on nothing worth hunting in Wisconsin in summer, he’d brought a pistol and a rifle for target practice and a shotgun mostly because it was a brand new one and he wanted a chance to try it out. All these things he’d had shipped ahead of him before his flight to Green Bay; he’d picked them up there after he’d bought the used station wagon which he’d sell before flying back at the end of the summer.

He took the pistol, a .38-caliber S. & W. Special and took a cardboard rifle target from a package of them. In the doorway between the hall and the living room he put the square of cardboard down on the floor and went back to the chair he’d been sitting in. He cocked the gun and saw the cat raise its head at the sudden click.

“Listen, Cat,” he said, “let’s try this for size. If you’re only wanting out of here so you can find a way to kill yourself, I’ll save you the trouble. If you understand what I’m saying and want me to shoot you, prove it by going to the doorway there. Sit down on that target, that’s all you have to do.”

For a moment the cat blinked at him sleepily and then it put its head down again and went back to sleep—or pretended to. If it understood his offer, it wasn’t having any.

Doc sighed; he hadn’t really expected the cat to go and sit on the target. If it was—well, if it wasn’t altogether a cat, it would be giving itself away by doing that. And shooting it would have been the last thing he’d have done under those circumstances. Especially with a gun he hadn’t bothered to load.

He put the pistol and the target back where he’d taken them from and went into the kitchen. He’d have a final can of beer and a snack, if something in the refrigerator looked good to him, and then go to bed.

The sound of the refrigerator door brought the cat from the sofa into the kitchen. It paid no attention to anything he said but it had come to recognize that sound—or more likely was familiar with it from having been in the Kramers’ kitchen—and he couldn’t get anything from the refrigerator without the cat being there watching him. It didn’t beg, but it was on the spot and ready for any handouts he might give it.

He found a few slices of liverwurst, dropped one into the cat’s dish, and made himself a sandwich with the rest of it. He opened a can of beer and went over to the table. The cat finished its share of the liverwurst and went back to the living room, presumably to lie on the sofa again. Doc had managed to convince it that once he’d taken his own food to the table, further begging was useless. Besides, the cat couldn’t be really hungry. It came to him when he went to the refrigerator only because it wanted a snack of something different from its staple diet of cat food and milk.

Doc got the flashlight before he turned off the lights; he still used one to light himself up to the bedroom as he had the first night the cat had been in the house, but not for quite the same reason. Now he simply didn’t want to step on or fall over the cat in darkness. Since it could see in the dark itself, it couldn’t realize that he couldn’t.

The next day, Friday, nothing special happened. He made his usual trip into town but found no mail waiting for him, and didn’t have to do any shopping. He dropped in at the newspaper office on the excuse of canceling his ad about having found a cat, but mostly just to talk to Ed Hollis a while to make sure nothing unusual had happened since the day before. Nothing had, except that the Garners had found a buyer for their farm and were planning to move west, possibly to the Ozarks, possibly on to California. And Gus Hoffman, Tommy’s father, was putting an ad in the Bartlesville paper offering his farm for sale, and was planning to run one in the Green Bay paper too.

“My guess,” Hollis said, “is that that means Charlotte’s pregnant. The Garners moving, I mean.”

“You’d better not put a guess like that in your paper, Ed.”

Hollis looked at Doc so resentfully that Doc apologized.

“But why,” Hollis wondered aloud, “would that make Gus Hoffman decide to move too? I mean, with Tommy dead, a scandal—not that there’d be much of one anyway—wouldn’t hurt Gus.”

“You’re a damn fool, Ed. Hoffman will stick close to the Garners from here on in. He hasn’t a wife or a child —but he’s got a grandson or granddaughter on the way. Illegitimate or not, he’ll be crazy about that kid.”

“Hell, yes. Why didn’t I think of that? Probably, wherever they go, he’ll talk the Garners into letting him come in with them on a farm big enough for him too. And Charlotte will be a very young widow named Mrs. Hoffman and Gus will be her father-in-law. So the kid will even have Gus’s name, and Gus will again have something to live for.”

Doc had so few errands to do in town that day that he got back quite early and decided he might as well spend the rest of the afternoon fishing. It would be his first time fishing since he’d run over the dog and had through that episode become interested in the strange details surrounding the death of Tommy Hoffman.

He was glad to notice that the cat had apparently reconciled itself to staying in his house; at least—although he took precautions both times—it made no effort to get past him when he let himself in to get his fishing equipment or let himself out after he had gathered what he needed. It was becoming acclimated.

Or was it because it understood everything he’d told it and knew that he’d promised it its freedom on Monday anyway? He put that thought out of his mind and decided to concentrate on the pleasure of his hike to the nearest trout stream and his fishing when he reached it.

The fishing was quite good, considering that it was the wrong time of day for it. Within an hour he had five medium-sized trout in his creel. Enjoyable as the fishing was in itself, that satisfied him. It was more than he could eat today, possibly even tomorrow, even with the help of a cat. And fresh trout were infinitely more tasty than ones that had been in the refrigerator for more than a day or so.

After his return he cleaned the fish and cooked three of them. He ate two and the cat had no trouble disposing of the third, so avidly that Doc was amused. He said, “All right, Cat, consider that a bribe if you want. But over all, if you decide to stay with me, I’ll promise you a trout about every third day. Not every day, though.”

At breakfast Monday morning he gave thought to his decision to release the cat about mid-morning, then see whether, after five or six hours of freedom, it would return at the usual feeding time he had established for it. Oh, he’d do it; he couldn’t keep, didn’t want to keep, a cat shut up any longer than the few days he’d decided to keep it. He’d let it out; it would be a free agent as to whether it returned to him or not. But there was one little thing he