Warm Nights in Magnolia Bay, Babette Jongh [book club books txt] 📗

“No, shoo, bad dog,” Adrian yelled. Why hadn’t he used the perfectly good fitted canvas cover that he’d left in the trunk of the car? “Get down, right now.” Why hadn’t he bothered to toss it over the car the second he got out? “Hush, dog.” He tried to push the dog away with his foot. “Get back. Go home.”

The cat leaped up to the car’s convertible top and hissed down at the dog, who barked even more ferociously, moving to scratch a different area on the side of Adrian’s poor car. He snatched the little troublemaker up before she could do it.

The little dog whined and squirmed, but couldn’t bark. The cat, frozen in a bowed-up caricature of a Halloween cat, stopped growling long enough to catch his breath. In the sudden cessation of noise, Adrian heard a sound behind him.

Reva rushed up, all flowing hair and patchwork fabric; a prematurely gray hippie gypsy. She snatched Georgia out of his arms. “I’ll put her up,” she said. “See if you can grab the cat and bring him inside. We’ve been trying to catch him for weeks.”

As Reva hurried back across the parking lot with her Birkenstocks scuffing along the gravel surface, Adrian took off his sunglasses and stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the damage. These scratches were not the sort that could just be buffed out with a good coat of Minwax. “Son of a bitch.”

But there was nothing he could do about it now. He heaved a sigh and plowed his hands through his hair, then applied his business-consultant problem-solving skills to the situation. “Okay.” First things first. “Come here, cat.”

He held his hands out to the cat and made kissy noises. The cat bowed up and backed away, growling low in his throat. “Naw, don’t be that way.” He softened his tone even further. “Come on, little man.” The cat was scrawny, but also a fully-grown tomcat with a big jug-head jaw. “Here, kitty, kitty.”

The cat glared at him, so he used one of the tricks he’d heard Reva mention when she was talking to the shelter girls about taming wild cats. He half-closed his eyes, looking sleepily at the cat and blinking slowly. The cat settled onto his haunches, his glowing amber eyes not as wide-open as before.

Well, fuck me, he thought. It worked.

He started humming, not a tune, just random low tones.

The damn cat started purring, and damn if he didn’t start doing that slow blinking thing, too.

Which Adrian realized he had forgotten to keep doing, so he started it up again. His humming resembled a tune he’d heard his grandmother sing, so he added words to the tune: “What’s up, stinky cat?” The cat did stink. He smelled like dirt, motor oil, and cat pee. “Whoa, whoa, whoa… Come here, stinky cat; whoa, whoa, whoa…”

The cat’s body tensed, raising up a fraction off his haunches as if preparing to run.

Yeah, that shit wasn’t working, so he went back to humming. The cat settled back down. He didn’t seem inclined to move toward Adrian’s outstretched hands, but at least he wasn’t running or hissing or growling. So Adrian eased forward, then gently touched the cat, spreading his fingers lightly over the cat’s bony ribs.

The cat’s purring stopped. Adrian kept his fingertips on the cat’s haunches, letting the skittish feline get used to him before he pushed the envelope any further. He did more of the blinking thing, still humming, and slowly began to stroke the cat’s scruffy, greasy, black-and-white fur. It seemed peppered with tiny scabs.

No question, this dude was a fighter.

Adrian eased his fingers farther along the cat’s back, then slowly, gently, dragged him forward. The cat resisted at first, but at some point in the process, he padded along the car’s hood toward Adrian, assisted by the gentle pressure Adrian kept applying. They seemed to have reached some sort of unspoken agreement. Making soothing sounds, not even a hum anymore, but a vibration in his throat that he could feel but barely hear, he gathered the reluctant cat into his arms.

* * *

Cat let the man hold him close, only because the hands that held Cat didn’t grab too tightly or try to force anything. Cat knew, somehow, that if he changed his mind about accepting help, the man would let him go.

Cat had never been given any other name, though he had been called many different versions of it. As he rode along in the man’s arms—carried toward the building into which he’d seen other cats come and go of their own free will—Cat thought of the many names he’d been called.

Damn Cat. Fucking Cat. Asshole Cat. Go Away Cat.

But this man called him by a new name, one which Cat much preferred because of the tone in which it had been uttered. Stinky Cat. He liked that one. He decided that would be the name by which he would refer to himself, whenever he wanted to think of himself as a cat with a name.

The closer they got to the building, the more tense Stinky Cat felt himself becoming. He wanted to believe. He wanted to be like those other cats who seemed so confident, so unafraid. They even sat with the dogs—napped with them on the building’s wide front porch!—and everyone seemed perfectly content. Even the bad little dog who’d come after him was nice to those other cats. She licked their ears the way mama cats licked their babies.

But Stinky Cat had a bad feeling that the dog he’d heard called Georgia wasn’t going to lick his ears. She might not have used her teeth on him as she’d threatened to do, but she made it clear she didn’t want him around. She had been ready to chase him right back over the fence he had climbed. He had wanted to see more of this strange place in which dogs and cats and people seemed to get along much better than