I'm Not Sam

immediately. As though it were simply another chapter in an ongoing tale. One blending into the other. Almost as though it were life, and not fiction. We’d like to ask you not to think of it that way.

We’d like to ask you to slow down. Take in the starts and stops.

To let SAM settle in a while.

A few minutes. A couple of hours. Maybe a day. Whatever.

We’d like to ask you to listen a while to the silence of the first tale before you draw open the curtain on the second. They’re playing quite separate tunes, I promise you.

Feel free to tell us to go to hell.

It’s your dime. You have every right.

But we’re trying to make a little music here, you know?

Couldn’t hurt to listen.

— April 27, 2012

I’M NOT SAM

I wake up in the morning to Zoey’s crying.

I’ve heard it before, many times. It’s familiar. It’s not the usual sounds cats make, it’s miles from a meeow. It’s more of a muted wail. As though she’s hurting. Though I know she’s not.

It sounds as though her heart is breaking.

I know what it is.

She’s got that toy again.

Zoey’s a tuxedo and so is her old stuffed toy. I don’t recall who gave it to her now, some friend of ours who likes cats I guess, but that was long, long ago — and though there’s a tiny patch of stuffing leaking out over the back of its left ear, it’s miraculously still intact, after years between my nineteen-year-old cat’s not-always-so- tender jaws.

She protects that toy. She gentles it.

And there’s that yowl again.

I glance over at Sam beside me and see that she’s awake too. She yawns.

“Again?” she says and smiles.

Zoey pre-dates Sam in my life by nearly nine years but she loves this cat as much as I do.

“Again,” I tell her.

I get up and shuffle across the chilly hardwood floor and there’s Zoey out in the hall looking at me with those big golden eyes, her toy face-up lying at her feet.

I lean down to stroke her and she raises her head to meet my hand. I use this opportunity, this distraction, to steal the toy with my free hand and tuck it back into the waistband of my pajamas.

I pet her head, her long bony back. She’s arthritic as hell so I’m very gentle with her. I know exactly how to touch her, the exact weight and pressure of my hands on her body that she likes.

I’ve always been able to do this. With animals and with people. I’ve always known how to touch.

And here comes the purr. Soft these days. When she was young you could hear it from rooms away.

“Hi, girl. Good morning, good girl. Hungry? Want some foodie?

Yes, foodie.

Cats respond to an i-e sound. Damned if I know why, they just do.

She trots ahead of me into the kitchen, a little wobbly on her feet but always game for breakfast.

I pull her toy out of my waistband and give it a good toss into the living room. She’ll find it sooner or later but for now there are other things on her mind.

That toy. That tuxedo with roughly her own markings. There’s a mystery to that little stuffed animal. One I know I’ll never penetrate.

It’s the only toy she ever cries over. All the rest are passing fancies. She bats them around awhile and then loses interest. I find them gathering dust beneath the sofa, in a corner under my desk in the study and once, on the grate in the fireplace. How it got beyond the screen only Zoey knows.

Zoey came scratching at my door one cold March Saturday evening. She wanted in. I was drawing in the study when I heard her. I opened the door and there was this scrawny cat, probably six months old at the time the vet said, with mites in both ears, a sweet disposition, and obviously starving.

I always wondered where she came from.

We’re pretty much out in the middle of nowhere here.

She came to me spayed. So she had people somewhere. Somebody had cared for her.

Were there others out there? I wondered. Her mother, maybe? Was she part of a litter?

And at some point I started to ask myself, could there be a connection between toy and cat? Could this small inanimate object possibly remind her of something? Family? Was that maybe why this ordinary, no-catnip stuffed tuxedo kitten seemed to resonate for her, to stir something long and deep inside? It seemed possible to me. It still does.

If you heard the yearning in this sound she makes, you’d understand why.

It was years ago I got to considering that. I remember feeling at the time that I’d stepped into mystery, into the realm of the inexplicable. Into enigma.

I’ve never shaken it. It gets me to this day, every time.

In the kitchen I pick up her water and food bowls and put them in the sink and while she sits waiting patiently I open up a can of Friskies tuna and egg and flake it into another, fresh bowl, pour her fresh water and put them on the floor and watch her set-to.

I hear water running in the bathroom. Sam’s up. I hope she gets out of there fast. I’ve got to pee. By the time I’ve got the coffee brewing she’s standing behind me with her hand on my shoulder and we’re both of us staring out the window over the sink out onto the river.

It’s a lovely spring morning. Hardly a breath of wind in the trees. There’s a bald eagle gliding thermals over the water. He hits its surface and veers away toward the pastureland beyond the far bank and he’s made a catch. We can see the gold glint of fish scales in the sun.

Hardly a day goes by when you don’t see some sort of wildlife out here. We’ve got foxes, coyotes, wild pigs. Zoey stays inside. She’d never have made it to twenty if she didn’t.

I turn around, give Sam a peck on the cheek and head for the bathroom. She smells like sleep and fresh soap.

On Sam, not bad at all.

I’m not much for breakfast — just a coffee and cigarette kind of guy. I figure food can wait on my break from the drafting table. But Sam is. The coffee’s ready and she’s already poured herself a cup with cream and sugar and I can smell the raisin bread in the toaster.

I pour a cup for myself and sit down at the big oak table. I like my table. Found it at an estate auction in Joplin. Hell, I like my entire house. We’re surrounded by five dense acres of woods and a river, like a surprise waiting to happen.

The living room is all stained wood with high oak hand-carved beams maybe a hundred years old. There’s an ancient stone fireplace. The room opens to the kitchen so I’m looking out at all this space in front of me.

It occurs to me — watching my wife of eight years slather her toast with butter and strawberry jam — that we’ve made love in practically every square inch of it. All over that hardwood floor. Couch and overstuffed chair.

Scorched her lovely ass one night on the fireplace. The memory of which makes me smile.

“What?” she says and swallows her toast.

“I was just thinking.”