Kat Whisperer
Pat Dixon
Karl Gutmann is an educated ignoramus—a seven-fingered clueless holder of a useless master’s degree in violin playing and a useless doctorate in medieval Dutch philosophy. And, true to form, he has no idea the intermittent pain in his abdomen is peritonitis.
It’s been four days since Karl’s had “a movement,” and he’s out mowing his lawn, thinking to himself: Need t’ get another bottle of prune juice when I get done feedin’ the kitties. Maybe do another—ho, boy!—ow! ow! ow!—another thirty sit-ups to pass this freakin’ goddamn gas!
Karl raises his blue Yankees cap over his blotchy balding head with his good hand and wipes his sweaty forehead with the thumb of his bad one, the one mutilated in ‘Nam the morning he earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star and nearly died. He pulls his cap back down, wipes his thumb on the thigh of his khaki work pants, then absently rubs the seat of his pants, gently scratching the area where a third of his right buttock had been shot off that same morning.
As he is about to push his mower forward again, it stalls out. Three times he tries to restart it without success. Sighing with mild irritation, Karl pulls the mower a few feet closer to the gas can on his front walk, gives his mower the finger, and reaches for his car keys.
Maybe Tommy’ll let me pet ‘im THIS time, he thinks.
Half a mile from his little split-level house, Karl smiles as fifteen feral cats of all colors and sizes bound out of the tall brush into the street as his dirty gray car approaches. Twelve of them mill about with tails erect like a little troop of ring-tailed lemurs—accompanied by a large black and an old one-eyed brown tabby with broken tails and a small red tabby with a five-inch stump. Six of the pack engage in sudden, brief scuffles, some playful, others to establish or contest their relative status.
“Ho there, pretty guys and dolls! Time for chow! Got to keep your strength up, little sweeties!” he says with a soft chuckle as he stops his car short of them. With eight large cans of wet food and three quarts of dry, he fills the half dozen aluminum pie pans between a fire hydrant and a huge sycamore tree.
“Ho-kay, Tommy, maybe today? Billy, you aren’t a coy boy, are you? Nor you, little Bright-Eyes! Head-Bumper! Captain Flint! Zorro! Sounds like you got a bit of a summer cold—or are you allergic to tree pollen? Ah! There we go, Tommy! Took long enough! Felt good, didn’t it. Was it a good touch, little boy?”
The muscular brown tabby with three white “socks” and a huge head looks up at Karl questioningly. When Karl’s hand had rubbed the back of his neck for the first time, he had just leaped four feet away. Warily, looking up with huge unblinking yellow eyes, the cat he named Tommy approaches the dish nearest Karl. The man holds out an open hand with only a thumb and pinkie extended. Tommy stops just beyond his reach and lies down.
“Maybe again on Tuesday, then, little guy?” says Karl, wincing from another jab of pain and standing up. “Till next Tuesday, then, all you pretties—” and he croons in a cracked baritone voice as he climbs into his car, “‘We’ll meet again . . . .’”
At the nearby supermarket, Karl is counting his money to pay the cashier when the woman in line behind him speaks.
“So how many cats do you have?”
She points to the register belt which contains two bottles of prune juice and thirty large cans of cat food.
Karl looks at her thinking, Why would you ask a man a personal question like that? and then answers, “What makes you think I’m not on a fixed income and am buying cat food for myself?”
The woman’s jaw drops open but no answer comes out.
The cashier laughs and says, “Karl, don’t pull her leg that way. People can’t tell when you’re spoofing ‘em.” Then, turning to the woman, she adds, “Karl here is the famous Kat Whisperer of Koastal Konnecticut!”
The woman’s frozen face melts, and she gives Karl a timid grin. “So how many cats do you really have, Mr. Cat Whisperer?”
“That’s Kat Whisperer, with a capital K,” replies Karl, wincing from a new jab of abdominal pain. “I have nine in my home—all of ‘em former strays I’ve tamed—an’ I feed twelve to twenty others twice a week at a vacant lot near here.”
“I’m basically a dog person, myself,” says the woman. “Aren’t you just keeping them going so they can make more and more strays? And what do they eat the other five days a week?”
Karl glances past her to make sure no one is waiting for them to get done with their purchasing. “Me an’ three ol’ ladies in the neighborhood trapped ‘em all an’ had a vet neuter ‘em an’ check ‘em for kitty AIDS an’ stuff—got a special group rate. Then we released ‘em—back into the wild where they’re happy for now.”
Karl winces again, then adds, “I’m the only guy in the group. They made me an Honorary Krazy Kat Lady—an’ even made up a funny certificate for me, spelling it with K’s.”
The woman’s grin fades—This ol’ fart is dissing women, she thinks. She heaves a dramatic sigh and tells the cashier, “Well, let’s get this show back on the road—Shirley. I’ve got to get these things home to the fridge.” And to Karl: “Glad to hear you get them spaded or whatever—we don’t need a hundred million cats overrunning the town.”
Back home, Karl sits on his toilet for twenty unproductive minutes. Chills are making him shiver even though the temperature of his house is in the low eighties. Mus’ be some kind o’ fever, he thinks fuzzily. Two empty plastic enema bottles on the rim of the bath tub hold his attention for three minutes. Snap out of it, Karl, he thinks. Got to feed the children.
In the living room, six male and three female cats mill around his feet with their tails, like little masts, all erect. Shuffling through them on slippered feet, Karl leads the way to his small kitchen. A chorus of voices, each of them distinctive to his accustomed ears, begins as he fills nine bowls with a quarter cup of dry food and then lays little strips of chicken breast on the top of each. He grips the edge of the counter and swears aloud as the worst spasm yet runs through him. “Got to have a couple aspirins,” he says in a soft voice. He sets the nine bowls down on the tiled floor, refills three large bowls of water, and shuffles back to the bathroom for the pills that will reduce his pain and lower his fever.
At 12:17 a.m., Karl is awakened by his full bladder. Turning on the light beside his bed, he shuffles bare-foot out into the hallway. At the top of the short flight of stairs, he steps on a soggy, slippery hairball. Turning on the hall light, he raises his foot to inspect the sole of it—and loses his balance.
At the bottom of the stairs, Karl comes to a stop with a broken shoulder and broken hip. He is lying on his side, his head at the bottom and his feet resting on the second step. His chills come back, and he wishes vaguely that he has a blanket—or an overcoat. He feels bloated and needs to urinate—and then he does, and he feels even more chilly than he had. Dimly he thinks about Duns Scotus’s distinctions between form and matter and how useless this knowledge has been to him. With G.I. Bill, I earn a freakin’ Ph.D. an’ then can’t get a job teachin’ any place, he thinks—as he has done three thousand times before. And so he learned to fix radios, TVs, and VCRs for a living. About his career as a pianist before being drafted, he hasn’t thought in more than thirty years.
Lying on his side, aching, with Danny Boy bumping him and purring loudly, Karl wonders whether the cats view him as their slave or their god. Probably a mix of the two—they probably think I’m a bit slow witted in answering their prayers. Susie joins Danny Boy and begins licking his left cheek. Three others hover nearby.
Around half past noon Karl dies, never knowing that he had diverticulitis and that one of his fifteen diverticula had burst, spilling “stool” into his abdominal cavity five days before—“left-side appendicitis” probably caused by the processed low-fiber diet his parents’ high income had permitted during his “wonder years.”
Three days later, around half past noon two policemen enter through Karl’s unlocked garage. Neighbors have wondered about the lights that have been on all night long and the mower next to his front walk, but, after seven unreturned phone calls, it was the leader of the Krazy Kat Ladies who finally called 911 to report a missing person.
“Pee-yew!” says Officer Ross, the senior of the pair, opening the doorway to the stairwell. A large gray tabby formerly known as Sneaky backs away from the doorway and hisses at the policemen.
“Oh cripes, Jim! Tell them we’ve got a dead one here, an’ it’s”—he pauses to retch for a couple seconds. “It’s pretty ***in’ disgusting! I don’t think you want t’ see this.”
Jim Kantor, curious as always, glances around the corner and up the stairs to the first-floor landing.
Karl is lying there, parts of his ears, nostrils, lips, and eyelids chewed off his face. Half an hour later, the team that retrieves his body will notice that his genitals and the webbing between his finger stumps have been gnawed away.
The M.E., Amélie Wells, following an examination of Karl Gutmann’s body, completes her report and submits a summary to the national data base. Wrinkling her nose and pursing her lips with mild interest, she notes that forty similar cases have occurred this week across the nation—single people dying with pets in their houses or apartments. Nearly six thousand of them last year were partly devoured before they were found. And already over three and a quarter thousand this year. Y’ can learn something new every day, she thinks.
For a moment Dr. Wells wonders what becomes of the thousands of pets whose single owners die of heart attacks or whatever away from home, or whose married owners die together, say, in car wrecks or other accidents. No way to get any figures on that kind of thing. She shakes her head sadly with a rapid sigh and a quick shrug.
The S.O.P., she was told by a police lieutenant an hour ago, is to keep all mention of the post-mortem petit déjeuner ˆ la fourchette—little meat breakfast—out of all the reports released to the press and to family members (if any). That makes a kind of sense, she thinks, gazing towards the ceiling without focusing her eyes.
The officers have told her that Karl’s nine cats have been divided equally among three crazy cat collectors—elderly neighbors of Karl. I wonder how they would react if they knew what these kitties have been eating for three days. Dr. Wells smiles to herself as she glances over at Karl Gutmann’s corpse.
