In a Cat’s Eye

“I’m going to find Nancy.”

“Very well, then. I’ll go with you.”

“Okay. Don’t let Mr. Winkley out.”

I ran down the stairs and asked Elsie if she’d seen Nancy.

“She hasn’t gone out,” Elsie said. “She must be in her room.”

“I don’t think so. She doesn’t answer her door, and it’s locked.”

“Did you say anything to upset her, Willy? Nancy might not want to see you.”

By then the Colonel had come down the stairs, and we went outside and looked up and down the street.

“Her window!” I said, and ran around the back of the hotel and up the fire escape.

When I got up to Nancy’s window I tried to open it but it was latched. I squatted down and looked in. I couldn’t see much at first, because the sun was bright and the light was off in her room.

Then I saw her lying on the bed, and I knew. When somebody looks right at you, and your eyes lock onto theirs; when neither one of you moves and time stops and the bottom falls out of your stomach, you just know right away. She didn’t move, and nobody could sleep with their arm twisted behind them like that and their eyes wide open. A needle and syringe hung from the crook of her other arm fallen off the side of the bed, and a rubber cord was tied above. You always know when somebody’s dead.

I was squatted there at the window, and I looked down at the ground through the grate, because I didn’t want to see Nancy like that. It felt like the fire escape was pulling away from the building, and I grabbed onto the window ledge to keep from falling. I tried to stand and I lost my balance and fell against the railing. By then the Colonel had come around to the back of the building and I saw him standing on the ground in the alley looking up at me and his mouth was moving and I could see that he was shouting something, but it was like they turned the sound off and I couldn’t hear anything.

He must have known from the way I looked, because he ran back around the corner.

I caught up with him inside the hotel as he and Elsie were going up the stairs.

Elsie wouldn’t call the police until she was sure, and she wouldn’t give me or the Colonel her key ring. We finally made it to Nancy’s room and waited while Elsie caught her breath and sorted through the keys, but she couldn’t open the door because the deadbolt was locked, and it was the kind that works only from the inside.

The police had to break in the door to get into the room. The hinges didn’t come off, and the keyed lock didn’t break because Elsie had unlocked it. The deadbolt and chain lock were ripped off the door frame, but still screwed to the door.

It was only a few seconds between the time the door swung open and the time the police moved us away, and I thought I didn’t see the statue. I didn’t exactly not see it, though, so I wasn’t sure.

“I think it was probably there last night because I didn’t see it missing then,” I told the cop. He had a small book he was writing my answers in. “It should be on her bureau.”

“Wait here,” he said. He went in the room and talked to the other cop, and came back.

“Okay, Willy,” he said. I wanted to ask about the statue but he went off to talk to Elsie.

Then the other cop came out of the room and went over to talk to the first cop, and I thought they were talking about me, because I was the last one to see Nancy alive. I went over and asked them about the statue.

“You seem very interested in that statue,” the first cop said. They wouldn’t tell me anything. I walked away and the cops were whispering something, but I couldn’t hear what it was.

They weren’t looking, and they hadn’t said to stay out of the room. I wanted to see if the statue was in there, and I turned the door knob.

“Hey!” The first cop ran over and threw me against the wall. My knees gave out and my back slid down the wall and I ended up sitting on the floor against it.

With all the commotion Elsie never heard Mr. Winkley meowing in the Colonel’s room, and she never saw his dish or his litter box in Nancy’s room.

A doctor came and then they took her away. They locked her door with Elsie’s key.

6 (#ulink_67ddc0b0-a4c0-55cc-a55f-a5ada45524d1)

Mr. Winkley moved in with me. Cats hunt at night, so their eyes don’t need much light to see, but as far as anyone can tell they don’t see very many colors. Even humans don’t see color except in bright light, but we don’t usually think about it. The Colonel told me. He said if you look outside early in the morning before it gets too light, you won’t see any colors, and I looked one morning and he was right. That’s probably how a cat sees, only they see better than we do. The Colonel knew all about it. He was a pretty smart old guy, that Colonel.

Anyway, I had a dream that night. I was thinking about Nancy’s Virgin Mary statue as I fell asleep. It had a lot of colors; red, blue, white, and gold, and she had on a thing like a sheet that covered the top of her head and most of her arms. She had her arms down, with her hands held open in front of her. She was looking at something behind or above you, but she was looking at you too. I don’t see how they could have made her that way on purpose. Maybe the person who painted her had to work fast and dabbed the dot of one of her eyes a bit off. She had a pretty face, though.

The dream began with a sound like a pop and a whoosh, like opening a can of soda, and the pupil of an eye shot wide open and became a dark room that glowed like a black and white TV when you woke up at two in the morning and they’d gone off the air.

A cat walked on linoleum. I don’t know if it was Mr. Winkley; it might have been. It jumped onto a chair, then from the chair onto a bureau. The statue was on the bureau.

The cat rubbed up against the statue and knocked it off the bureau, and then the cat jumped off and landed on the floor. It put its paws carefully, one after the other, on the linoleum as it walked to the bed, and jumped up on it. It walked on the person on the bed and rubbed its nose against the body. Then it knew that something was not the same as before, and it stopped. The statue, in color now, like it was lighted from inside, was still falling, glittering and twirling, with that funny look in her eyes, and almost smiling. I wanted to catch it but I couldn’t. The cat pushed its nose at the body on the bed, but didn’t get an answer, and the cat wondered what had changed and what it meant. The statue was falling and a train passed going rackety-rack rackety-rack. The cat was afraid, and kept still, waiting for the train to pass. Then there was a crashing sound and I woke up.

I reached for the lamp by my bed but it wasn’t there. Mr. Winkley had knocked it over, and that was the crash I heard in the dream. He jumped up on my chest and started walking in place, looking right at my eyes with his big black eye. He thought I was his mother and he was trying to get milk out of me.

“I’m not your mother,” I said, and put him on the floor. The train passed, and it blew its whistle.

“You don’t even have a mother.”

What Nancy had said the night before, when I was sitting at her table looking at Mr. Winkley’s eye, came back to me: “Help me, Willy.”

7 (#ulink_4f442317-243a-5321-8061-010041bf01dd)

A couple of days later I went out for a newspaper. The police hadn’t been back and nobody had gone into Nancy’s room. I walked down the hallway and stopped at her door. It was too quiet in the hotel with Nancy gone.

She didn’t have any relatives, not that anybody knew of. Gladys wrote a story about Nancy for the newspaper, and she ended up having to make up some of it, to fill in the blanks.

“She did have a life,” Gladys said. “She was somebody.”

The reason I was going out for a paper was that I thought maybe Gladys’s story would be in it. I took a canvas shopping bag with me but I didn’t really plan to do much shopping. It was a big bag and you could put a lot of stuff in it and nobody would ever know.

Mostly I just wanted to go out. It was a nice day, and I probably didn’t feel as sad as I was supposed to. Anyway, I was thinking that by the time I got back with the paper it would be time for lunch, and if I cleaned the bathroom and mopped the hallway for Elsie, then she might give me some of her soup.

I always skipped down the stairs because I liked to hear my shoes going kaboom kaboom kaboom. When I was passing Elsie’s parlor Stanley was in there. I stopped. He was sitting in my chair, watching the TV with the sound off and eating a sandwich. Elsie was stirring soup on the hot plate.

“Willy, I need to have a word with you,” she said. She didn’t even look up from her soup, and I couldn’t think how she knew it was me; but like I told you, nothing ever got by her.

“I didn’t do anything,” I said.

“Somebody—never mind who—told me they saw an alley cat hanging around the dumpster out back. Have you seen any cats?”

“I didn’t see any cat,” I said. “There’s no cat out there.”

“There are no pets in this hotel. If I hear any more reports I’m calling the exterminator. I don’t want to see any cats.”

“You won’t,” I said. “Maybe it was a skunk. I’m pretty sure I might have seen a skunk out there.”

“If you saw a skunk, why didn’t you tell me?”