the old woman slowly smothers beneath its weight on her chest.
He was not an imaginative man, but Halston shivered a little.
'Drogan,' he said, continuing to stroke the purring cat. 'Why don't
you just have it put away? A vet would give it the gas for twenty
dollars.'
Drogan said, 'The funeral was on the first day of July, I had
Carolyn buried in our cemetery plot next to my sister. The way she
would have wanted it. On July third I called Gage to this room and
handed him a wicker basket.., a picnic hamper sort of thing. Do
you know what I mean?'
Halston nodded.
'I told him to put the cat in it and take it to a vet in Milford and
have it put to sleep. He said, 'Yes, sir,' took the basket, and went
out. Very like him. I never saw him alive again. There was an
accident on the turnpike. The Lincoln was driven into a bridge
abutment at better than sixty miles an hour. Dick Gage was killed
instantly. When they found him there were scratches on his face.'
Halston was silent as the picture of how it might have been formed
in his brain again. No sound in the room but the peaceful crackle of
the fire and the peaceful purr of the cat in his lap. He and the cat
together before the fire would make a good illustration for that
Edgar Guest poem, the one that goes: 'The cat on my lap, the
hearth's good fire/ ... A happy man, should you enquire.'
Dick Gage moving the Lincoln down the turnpike toward Milford,
beating the speed limit by maybe five miles an hour. The wicker
basket beside him - a picnic hamper sort of thing. The chauffeur is
watching traffic, maybe he's passing a big cab-over Jimmy and he
doesn't notice the peculiar black-on-one-side, white-on-the-other
face that pokes out of one side of the basket. Out of the driver's
side. He doesn't notice because he's passing the big trailer truck
and that's when the cat jumps onto his face, spitting and clawing,
its talons raking into one eye, puncturing it, deflating it, blinding it.
Sixty and the hum of the Lincoln's big motor and the other paw is
hooked over the bridge of the nose, digging in with exquisite,
damning pain - maybe the Lincoln starts to veer right, into the path
of the Jimmy, and its airhorn blares ear-shatteringly, but Gage can't
hear it because the cat is yowling, the cat is spread-eagled over his
face like some huge furry black spider, ears laid back, green eyes
glaring like spotlights from hell, back legs jittering and digging
into the soft flesh of the old man's neck. The car veers wildly back
the other way. The bridge abutment looms. The cat jumps down
and the Lincoln, a shiny black torpedo, hits the cement and goes up
like a bomb.
Halston swallowed hard and heard a dry click in his throat. 'And
the cat came back?'
Drogan nodded. 'A week later. On the day Dick Gage was buried,
as a matter of fact. Just like the old song says. The cat came back.'
'It survived a car crash at sixty? Hard to believe.'
'They say each one has nine lives. When it comes back ... that's
when I started to wonder if it might not be a...a...'
