Cat makes himself at home in my room pretty easily. Mostly he likes to be
up on top of something, so I put an old sweater on the bureau beside my
bed, and he sleeps up there. When he wants me to wake up in the morning,
he jumps and lands in the middle of my stomach. Believe me, cats don’t
always land lightly—only when they want to. Anything a cat does, he does
only when he wants to. I like that.
When I’m combing my hair in the morning, sometimes he sits up there and
looks down his nose at my reflection in the mirror. He appears to be
taking inventory: “Hmm, buckteeth; sandy hair, smooth in front, cowlick in
back; brown eyes, can’t see in the dark worth a nickel; hickeys on the
chin. Too bad.”
I look back at him in the mirror and say, “O.K., black face, yellow eyes,
and one white whisker. Where’d you get that one white whisker?”
He catches sight of himself in the mirror, and his tail twitches
momentarily. He seems to know it’s not really another cat, but his claws
come out and he taps the mirror softly, just to make sure.
When I’m lying on the bed reading, sometimes he will curl up between my
knees and the book. But after a few days I can see he’s getting more and
more restless. It gets so I can’t listen to a record, for the noise of him
scratching on the rug. I can’t let him loose in the apartment, at least
until we make sure Mom doesn’t get asthma, so I figure I better
reintroduce him to the great outdoors in the city. One nice Sunday morning
in April we go down and sit on the stoop.
Cat sits down, very tall and neat and pear-shaped, and closes his eyes
about halfway. He glances at the street like it isn’t good enough for him.
After a while, condescending, he eases down the steps and lies on a sunny,
dusty spot in the middle of the sidewalk. People walking have to step
around him, and he squints at them.
Then he gets up, quick, looks over his shoulder at nothing, and shoots
down the stairs to the cellar. I take a look to see where he’s going, and
he is pacing slowly toward the backyard, head down, a tiger on the prowl.
I figure I’ll sit in the sun and finish my science-fiction magazine before
I go after him.
When I do, he’s not in sight, and the janitor tells me he jumped up on the
wall and probably down into one of the other yards. I look around a while
and call, but he’s not in sight, and I go up to lunch. Along toward
evening Cat scratches at the door and comes in, as if he’d done it all his
life.
This gets to be a routine. Sometimes he doesn’t even come home at night,
and he’s sitting on the doormat when I get the milk in the morning,
looking offended.
“Is it my fault you stayed out all night?” I ask him.
He sticks his tail straight up and marches down the hall to the kitchen,
where he waits for me to open the milk and dish out the cat food. Then he
goes to bed.
One morning he’s not there when I open the door, and he still hasn’t
showed up when I get back from school. I get worried and go down to talk
to Butch.
“Wa-a-l,” says Butch, “sometimes that cat sit and talk to me a little, but
most times he go on over to Twenty-first Street, where he sit and talk to
his lady friend. Turned cold last night, lot of buildings put on heat and
closed up their basements. Maybe he got locked in somewheres.”
“Which building’s his friend live in?” I ask.
“Forty-six, the big one. His friend’s a little black-and-white cat, sort
of belongs to the night man over there. He feeds her.”
I go around to Twenty-first Street and case Forty-six, which is a pretty
fair-looking building with a striped awning and a doorman who saunters out
front and looks around every few minutes.
While I’m watching, a grocery boy comes along pushing his cart and goes
down some stairs into the basement with his carton of groceries. This
gives me an idea. I’ll give the boy time to get started up in the
elevator, and then I’ll go down in the basement and hunt for Cat. If
someone comes along and gets sore, I can always play dumb.
I go down, and the coast is clear. The elevator’s gone up, and I walk
softly past and through a big room where the tenants leave their baby
carriages and bicycles. After this the cellar stretches off into several
corridors, lit by twenty-watt bulbs dangling from the ceiling. You can
hardly see anything. The corridors go between wire storage cages, where
the tenants keep stuff like trunks and old cribs and parakeet cages.
They’re all locked.
“Me-ow, meow, me-ow!” Unmistakably Cat, and angry.
The sound comes from the end of one corridor, and I fumble along, peering
into each cage to try to see a tiger cat in a shadowy hole. Fortunately
his eyes glow and he opens his mouth for another meow, and I see him
locked inside one of the cages before I come to the end of the corridor. I
don’t know how he got in or how I’m going to get him out.
While I’m thinking, Cat’s eyes flick away from me to the right, then back
to me. Cat’s not making any noise, and neither am I, but something is.
It’s just a tiny rustle, or a breath, but I have a creepy feeling someone
is standing near us. Way down at the end of the cellar a shadow moves a
little, and I can see it has a white splotch—a face. It’s a man, and he
comes toward me.
I don’t know why any of the building men would be way back there, but
that’s who I figure it is, so I start explaining.
“I was just hunting for my cat ... I mean, he’s got locked in one of these
cages. I just want to get him out.”
The guy lets his breath out, slow, as if he’s been holding it quite a
while. I realize he doesn’t belong in that cellar either, and he’s been
scared of me.
He moves forward, saying “Sh-h-h” very quietly. He’s taller than I am, and
I can’t see what he really looks like, but I’m sure he’s sort of a kid,
maybe eighteen or so.
He looks at the padlock on the cage and says, “Huh, cheap!” He takes a
paper clip out of his pocket and opens it out, and I think maybe he has a
penknife, too, and next thing I know the padlock is open.
“Gee, how’d you do that?”
“Sh-h-h. A guy showed me how. You better get your cat and scram.”
Golly, I wonder, maybe the guy is a burglar, and that gives me another
creepy feeling. But would a burglar be taking time out to get a kid’s cat
free?
“Well, thanks for the cat. See you around,” I say.
“Sh-h-h. I don’t live around here. Hurry up, before we both get caught.”
Maybe he’s a real burglar with a gun, even, I think, and by the time I
dodge past the elevators and get out in the cold April wind, the sweat
down my back is freezing. I give Cat a long lecture on staying out of
basements. After all, I can’t count on having a burglar handy to get him
out every time.
Back home we put some nice jailhouse blues on the record player, and we
both stretch out on the bed to think. The guy didn’t really _look_ like a
burglar. And he didn’t talk “dese and dose.” Maybe real burglars don’t all
talk that way—only the ones on TV. Still, he sure picked that lock fast,
and he was sure down in that cellar for some reason of his own.
Maybe I ought to let someone know. I figure I’ll test Pop out, just casual
like. “Some queer-looking types hanging around this neighborhood,” I say
at dinner. “I saw a tough-looking guy hanging around Number Forty-six this
afternoon. Might have been a burglar, even.”
I figure Pop’ll at least ask me what he was doing, and maybe I’ll tell him
the whole thing—about Cat and the cage. But Pop says, “In case you didn’t
know it, burglars do not all look like Humphrey Bogart, and they don’t
wear signs.”
“Thanks for the news,” I say and go on eating my dinner. Even if Pop does
make me sore, I’m not going to pass up steak and onions, which we don’t
have very often.
However, the next day I’m walking along Twenty-first Street and I see the
super of Forty-six standing by the back entrance, so I figure I’ll try
again. I say to him, “Us kids were playing ball here yesterday, and we saw
a strange-looking guy sneak into your cellar. It wasn’t a delivery boy.”
“Yeah? You sure it wasn’t you or one of your juvenile pals trying to swipe
a bike? How come you have to play ball right here?”
“I don’t swipe bikes. I got one of my own. New. A Raleigh. Better than any
junk you got in there.”
“What d’you know about what I got in there, wise guy?”
“Aw, forget it.” I realize he’s just getting suspicious of me. That’s what
comes of trying to be a big public-spirited citizen. I decide my burglar,
whoever he is, is a lot nicer than the super, and I hope he got a fat
haul.
Next day it looks like maybe he did just that. The local paper, _Town and
Village_, has a headline: “Gramercy Park Cellar Robbed.” I read down the
article:
“The superintendent, Fred Snood, checked the cellar storage cages, after a
passing youth hinted to him that there had been a robbery. He found one
cage open and a suitcase missing. Police theorize that the youth may have
been the burglar, or an accomplice with a guilty conscience or a grudge,
and they are hunting him for questioning. Mr. Snood described him as about
sixteen years of age, medium height, with a long ‘ducktail’ haircut, and
wearing a heavy black sweater. They are also checking second-hand stores
for the stolen suitcase.”
The burglar stole a suitcase with valuable papers and some silver and
jewelry in it. But the guy they were hunting for—I read the paragraph over
and feel green. That’s me. I get up and look in the mirror. In other
circumstances I’d like being taken for sixteen instead of fourteen, which
I am. I smooth my hair and squint at the back of it. The ducktail is fine.
Slowly I peel off my black sweater, which I wear practically all the time,
and stuff it in my bottom drawer, under my bathing suit. But if I want to
walk around the street without worrying about every cop, I’ll have to do
more than that. I put on a shirt and necktie and suit jacket and stick a
cap on my head. I head uptown on the subway. At Sixty-eighth Street I get
off and find a barbershop.
“Butch cut,” I tell the guy.
“That’s right. I’ll trim you nice and neat. Get rid of all this stuff.”
And while he chatters on like an idiot, I have to watch three months’ work
go snip, snip on the floor. Then I have to pay for it. At home I get the
same routine. Pop looks at my Ivy-League disguise and says, “Why, you may
look positively human some day!”
Two days later I find out I could’ve kept my hair. _Town and Village_ has
a new story: “Nab Cellar Thief Returning Loot. ‘Just A Bet,’ He Says.”
The story is pretty interesting. The guy I met in the cellar is named Tom
Ransom, and he is nineteen and just sort of floating around in the city.
He doesn’t seem to have any family. The police kept a detective watching
Number Forty-six, and pretty soon they see Tom walking along with the
stolen suitcase. He drops it inside the delivery entrance and walks on,
but the cop collars him. I suppose if it hadn’t been for me shooting my
big mouth off to the super, the police wouldn’t have been watching the
neighborhood. I feel sort of responsible.
The story in the paper goes on to say this guy was broke and hunting for a
job, and some other guy dares him to snatch something out of a cellar and
finally bets him ten dollars, so he does it. He gets out and finds the
suitcase has a lot of stocks and legal papers and table silver in it, and
he’s scared stiff. So he figures to drop it back where it came from. The
paper says he’s held over to appear before some magistrate in Adolescent
Court.
I wonder, would they send a guy to jail for that? Or if they turn him
loose, what does he do? It must be lousy to be in this city without any
family or friends.
At that point I get the idea I’ll write him a letter. After all, Cat and I
sort of got him into the soup. So I look up the name of the magistrate and
spend about half an hour poring through the phone book, under “New York,
City of,” to get an address. I wonder whether to address him as “Tom” or
“Mr. Ransom.” Finally I write:
_Dear Tom Ransom:_
_I am the kid you met in the cellar at Number Forty-six Gramercy, and I
certainly thank you for unlocking that cage and getting my cat out. Cat is
fine. I am sorry you got in trouble with the police. It sounds to me like
you were only trying to return the stuff and do right. My father is a
lawyer, if you would like one. I guess he’s pretty good. Or if you would
like to write me anyway, here is my address: 150 East 22 St. I read in the
paper that your family don’t live in New York, which is why I thought you
might like someone to write to._
_Yours sincerely,_
_Dave Mitchell_
Now that I’m a free citizen again, I dig out my black sweater, look
disgustedly at the butch haircut, and go out to mail my letter.
Later on I get into a stickball game again on Twenty-first Street. Cat
comes along and sits up high on a stoop across the street, where he can
watch the ball game and the tame dogs being led by on their leashes. That
big brain, the super of Forty-six, is standing by the delivery entrance,
looking sour as usual.
“Got any burglars in your basement these days?” I yell to him while I’m
jogging around the bases on a long hit.
He looks at me and my short haircut and scratches his own bald egg.
“Where’d I see you?” he asks suspiciously.
“Oh—Cat and I, we get around,” I say.
3
[Illustration: Dave, Cat, and Nick running on the beach.]