Cats

"Yes sir, I'm on my way sir. No sir, no conflict sir." Henry Elmers set the phone delicately in the cradle, sincerely afraid his superior officer would hear it slam. Then, he ripped off his pager and slammed it instead, several times and hard against the counter.

It did not break.

"Damn," said Henry. "Tuna Casserole's going to have to be another night guys. I'm on call."

Ten faces watched him lump canned food onto plates. Twenty eyes pled with him to stay. Forty paws scratched across the floor to glare him silently out the door.

As soon as Henry left, Rumple The Hairball King symbolically flipped over all ten dishes. Mistress Tail let herself in the closet and climbed up on a shelf to rub back and forth against Henry's newly pressed uniform. Since Harvey moped away to the living room (too stricken even to punish Henry for letting them down again), Queen Eleanor had to do double duty. She scratched most of the dirt out of the hapless flowerpot (Mince had already eaten the flower) and flipped an ugly vase over onto the carpet. Being plastic, it did not break, but it spilled with a satisfying whoosh and left a nicely mysterious wet spot when Orange Tom and Tabby Tom together batted it away under the couch. The Three Mouser-teers got down to the business of hunting, and poor hungry Leech sat caterwauling at the front door.

The business of training Henry got harder every week.

He felt very guilty leaving his cats, but the pressures of police life drove him constantly out of his comfortable little house and into the hectic jostle of the city. The cats came and went largely as they pleased, since Henry was gracious enough to have a pet door in the basement, and every year or two, they invited a new member into the fold. The vet, who was a country man transplanted downtown, had granted the Elmers cats "herd" status, and he came to the house twice a year to give leukemia and rabies shots respectively.

The other cops laughed at Henry, openly and behind closed doors. At least once a week, the captain said, "Hey Elmers, whose cats is it I see running in and out your front door?"

Henry, who had almost no sense of humor, never spoke, but sat stiff behind his desk stewing over the answers he'd like to give.

Rumor said he'd once been married but his cats drove his wife insane. It was also spoken that he never invited visitors for a meal because the cats ate on the table out of his plate. He walked into the office in a cloud of dust and fur, and his quarterly performance reviews were always low in the "appearance" category, because he was constantly picking hair off his sleeves and cap.

He drove a boring little beat with a woman named Jan who was his antithesis in every way. Where Henry was sloppy and furry, Jan was meticulous. Where Henry sat stewing and glowering to the captain's sarcastic remarks, Jan lurked prepared with witty comebacks. Where Henry was trailed by rumors of a failed marriage, Jan was surrounded by gossip of her engagement to a portrait artist. Where Henry was lonely and withdrawn, Jan was outgoing and gregarious.

"Henry," she told him, "You've got to get a life pal. See the world, meet the girls. Join the bowling league for Christ sake! You can't just sit around your house all the time moping with those cats."

"Bowling league," said Henry. "Now there's a thought. What the hell's so great about bowling anyway? Who wants to spend every Thursday night knocking down plastic sticks with a big heavy ball?"

"Henry, Henry!" Jan scolded. "We don't just knock down plastic sticks with heavy balls. Some nights, I throw straight for the gutter. And we drink beer, Henry. Lots of beer. Now come on, we lost Johnson when he retired. We gotta have somebody take his place."

"No, Jan," said Henry, and they drove their beat.

It seemed inevitable that one person or another would get sick or hurt when Henry was on call. His cats had missed Tuna Casserole night for nearly a month now, and he felt terribly guilty. Tonight, he was replacing one of two colleagues wounded investigating a domestic violence call.

Jan stood beside him in the December snow. "Did you see Thomas or Algerson?" she asked.

Henry nodded. He said, "Thomas got a broken arm, and it looks like Algerson took a hit to the hip."

"Jesus!" Jan stamped her feet and blew warm air into her gloves. "And I guess they came out on the lucky end of it. I thought they kept the fools with guns up there in New York and Pittsburgh. What the hell business have a couple a folks got shooting each other to death in Cincinnati?"

"Beats me," said Henry. "What I want to know is what business the press has got taking so many pictures of it."

"Shit," said Jan, and she stamped her feet some more.

Beyond the yellow crime tape, news vans from channels 5, 9, and 12 were fighting for position, each wanting the others distant as possible for good satellite reception. Reporters geared up for questions, and Henry and Jan settled in for a long night of guarding the door.

It was well after visiting hours when they got off duty, but officer Algerson was awake and cussing, and the hospital felt flexible under the circumstances. "Shit. One of three damned women on the force, and I've got to have reconstructive surgery," Algerson swore.

"Now that's not true," said Henry.

He started to quote the exact ratio of male to female police, but Algerson said, "Ahh, shutup Elmers. Twelve people already told me that tonight, and I don't give a damn. I don't know what they're giving me for pain, but it sure as hell ain't working. About the only thing that would work right now is a good shot of whiskey, and the doctor don't allow that. I think it's a conspiracy. You know that? I really do. Thomas, what's he get? A broken arm. Heh. Broken arm. Treated and released. And me? I'm sitting here all night to get surgery in the morning. Shit."

Henry and Jan left after a suitable interval, and Henry went home to his cats. He cleaned up the overturned dishes, but was too tired to deal with the scattered dirt or the mysterious wet spot. He fed poor hungry Leech and collapsed into bed curled around the still moping Harvey.

He awoke to the thunderous sound of pounding at his door. Peering out the peephole, he could just make out Jan's tight red perm. "Fuckin' A, I understand," she said when he opened the door. "I understand exactly why that couple shot each other to death. Just exactly!"

"Do you know what time it is?" asked Henry.

"It's four o'clock in the morning," said Jan. "And I don't care. The bastard! The bastard!" And she began slamming through Henry's kitchen looking for coffee. Only when she had started a pot brewing would she sit down and explain. "How long were we gone Henry? Six hours? Eight? How long did we stand out there in the snow checking press cards and keeping people out of the scene?"

"I'd say six hours. About."

"Six hours!" said Jan. "Six hours, and when I come home, he's got another woman in my bed. Six hours he couldn't wait. I was going to marry him in June, and he's got another woman in my apartment, in my bed."

The cats liked Jan, once they adjusted to her periodic outbursts. She would rant a while, and slam her cup on the table, then offer bites of the meal Henry was trying to feed her to whichever paw happened to be handy. "Some artist!" she said, "Some fucking artist. He takes me bowling and paints her nude. In my bed. In my apartment." Jan would yell and sob and point across the street to the apartment building, then get up and pace around the room without seeing the greedy tongues licking her dish clean. Henry would get her a new plate and more food (because certainly he didn't know what else to offer her), and she'd feed it all to the cats again. This went on for some four hours, and as far as the cats were concerned, it more than made up for missing Tuna Casserole night.

Finally, around eight, when dawn was gray and the snow still painful white, Henry said, "Come on, Jan, I want to show you something."

"What?" she said.

"Just come on."

He took her to the Walnut Hill cemetery, to a small plot with a headstone covered in snow. When he dusted it off, it read:

Dorothy Elmers

1945-1989

A little uncertainly, Jan said, "Was she your wife?"

"Yeah," said Henry.

"I'm sorry," said Jan.

Henry said, "She was a lunatic. Total nutcase. Used to, she'd wake up screaming at night, and she'd stand in the kitchen with a knife shouting obscenities. She was schizophrenic and I felt too guilty to leave her. She spent half of every year in the hospital, and when she was home I never knew what to expect. She dragged in stray cats from all over the place, and by the time she died the cats meant more to me than she did."

"And here I come banging down the door and barging in at 4 AM. I'm sorry," said Jan.

"No, that's not the point," Henry said. "She eventually stole my car and drove off a boat ramp into the Ohio River and killed herself, and my point, Jan, is at least you found out in time. At least you found out before you wasted your whole life on somebody who isn't worth one tube of his own paints."

Jan shrugged.

Henry said, "Can I do something for you? Besides coffee?"

"No," said Jan. "Yes."

"Which is it?"

"Will you help me clean out my apartment? I want him gone. I want every tube of paint, every canvas, every stitch of his clothing out of my apartment by midday. I want to be rid of his bowling ball, and I don't ever want to have to listen to his fucking Billy Idol tapes again."

"No problem, partner," said Henry. "Glad to help."

Really, there was no crime scene. Certainly, there wasn't a body. When Anthony Carson came to collect his things from Jan's apartment that evening, he found them strewn around in the snow like so much garbage. His bowling ball was conspicuously absent, but his tubes of paint lay open and oozing, and it seemed like every canvas surface had been brushed by the whirlwind of fur that stirred up with the breeze. The stench of ammonia was so strong that he couldn't stand long in one place without gagging. And everywhere, all over the clothing, tracked through the paints, and plastered into the canvases, were the paw prints of cats. As if every feline in Cincinnati had come to pay vengeful tribute to the artist.

And if Jan used her week's vacation to help fill Henry's freezer with Tuna Casserole; if she bought an entire aisle of the squeaky toys favored by Queen Eleanor and Rumple the Hairball King; who could blame her? If Henry said to the captain one day, "They're my cats sir, and by God I'm proud of them"; and if he sometimes forgot his pager in his desk, well, really, who could blame him? Who could blame either of them? They were human weren't they? And Henry wasn't such a bad person once you got to know him. Everyone on the bowling league agreed: Henry Elmers was an Okay kind of guy.