“Walk Like a Panther”

by Jamie S. Rich

dedicated to The Stolen Sweets

He stood at the top of the stairs, wearing cat ears and a grin stained with Scotch. He had hoped to see her all night, and this was the third place he’d been. He was a little drunk and was losing faith when she appeared, walking up from the basement, where the bands stayed, where the liquor and food was probably housed. When she saw him, she smiled. He liked her smile. It looked a little wrinkled, and that was charming.

Remembering that he was wearing the ears--just a little band that went around his head, fuzzy and black--he played the part, clawing at the air, “Meow.” He wasn’t sure if she noticed, because she didn’t react.

When she reached the top of the stairs, she crossed to him. He couldn’t smell her, but he imagined she smelled like flowers, like soap, like the powders he always found in girls’ bathrooms. There was a desire in him to find out, to push his face into her skin, to bury himself in her and root out the scent. Instead, he stood with his back straight against the wall, like he was holding it up--or was it holding him?

As she got near, she reached out a hand and placed it on his upper arm. “Jean,” she said. “I can’t believe it’s you.”

“Why? Had you heard I’d gone completely feline?”

Jean reached up and stroked the ears with his fingers. They weren’t as soft as the fur on a real cat.

“No,” she said, “it’s just been so long.”

“I’m easy to find,” he told her. “You, on the other hand, are not.”

She pressed a finger into his chest. He didn’t really feel it, but he saw it, marked it with his eye, imagined a red spot there on his shirt. “Stay there,” she told him, pushing, making him sink into the wall, the plaster cracking behind his shoulder blades. “I’ll be right back.”

There was pleasure to be had in watching her walk away. It wasn’t as good as seeing her approach, when her arrival meant that she would land on him, but Jean liked looking at her even from behind, with the symmetry of her gait, the slight sway to her hips. His impulse was to chase, to pounce, not let her get away, but she had fixed him to his spot with the force of her touch.

In his breast pocket, he had a raggedy napkin from the last time he had seen her. One edge had gotten wet from the residue of the drinks that had been on the table, and where once it was moist and torn, the napkin was now dry and brittle.

But she had written on it, drawn a picture of a long-eared rabbit facing the blank horizon. She printed, “Hello, buy me a bunny rabbit” across it, directly in the hare’s line of sight. Was the rabbit reading her demand? He didn’t know, but he had actually checked at a pet store to see if they had any. Turns out they didn’t. It wasn’t rabbit season. He didn’t know how he would have smuggled it into the club, anyway. It wouldn’t have fit in any of his pockets.

He decided to move, to step off the wall and break her spell. She had told him to wait, but he didn’t want to wait. He didn’t want to appear as anxious as he was. Jean never liked a crowd.

In a corner across the room, there was a guy he knew who always wore leather pants. Jean had always wanted to ask him if he had just the one pair. The guy waved at him, so Jean walked over to where he was.

“Hello,” the guy said.

“Hello, Greg.”

“Did you see the start of the show?”

“No. I was seeing another show.”

“Well, at least you’ll catch the end.”

“Sure. Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you, is that your only pair of leather pants?”

“You’re a real son of a bitch, you know that?”

“What? Do you just wear them over and over? How do you wash them?”

“There’s a reason no one likes you.”

“What?”

Jean didn’t really understand, but it had pissed Greg off enough that he stormed away, looking over his shoulder once to shoot eye bullets at him.

Searching around, Jean saw her across the room by the bar. She was with a skinny guy in a green jacket. Even though he was looking at him from the front, Jean knew his hair was probably thinning in the back, but he also likely had better teeth. They were standing with two other girls. Jean couldn’t tell who was talking. They all looked like they were speaking at once.

He thought he could go over to her, but then he thought better of it. It was smarter to let her come to him.

Only she never did. The quartet streamed out, past the spot where he had been standing, where she told him to stay, and then down the stairs she had come up.

Jean stayed at the club a while more and then left.

#

The next morning, Jean had the epiphany that all of his memories were not his own. He was there, to be sure, when they happened, but they did not happen to him. The trigger was thinking of her, standing with those three others, then walking away. Yes, she had said hi to him before that, but the night only truly began after she departed, didn’t it?

It was the same of the night when she had drawn the napkin for him, given it to him. Once it was in his hands, she was not. He was sitting at a table, on a stool, but she had moved to a booth, sat beside another man. That man put his arm around her and showed her pictures on the small, glowing screen of a digital camera. They were pictures of the evening that had just happened, but he was not in any of them. He knew, because he saw them taken. He was always behind the flash. Was the guy with the camera the same guy from the show last night?

These events were for them, not for him.

The cat ears were on the floor by his bed. He put them on, even before he put on anything else.

#

It was obvious people looked at him when he walked down the street. You’d think they’d never seen a cat before!

Or maybe they were ears for a girl cat, and Jean didn’t know it.

A homeless man gave him a thumbs up. Such dubious validation. “Life can’t avoid me all the time,” the man said. “Evil must have its due.”

#

Jean had a friend named Grady who worked at a joke shop. His last name was Grady, actually, and no one ever asked him his first. The store was populated less by items for pranks than it was posters for cult movies and ironic T-shirts advertising products that hadn’t been made for three decades. “A lot of the kids that buy them,” Grady told him, “they aren’t old enough to know what they are. They have a nostalgia for something they never learned to remember.”

Jean had most of his early afternoons free. He worked the three o’clock shift doing janitor work at a small private school in his neighborhood. As the kids cleared out, he cleaned up. Days at the shop were generally slow for Grady, and obviously it was the same for Jean, so Jean would wander down and hang around.

“Do you ever get any different postcards with Cary Grant?” he asked. “I always see the same ones. Every place I go, they have the one from North by Northwest where he just got his picture taken. You know, with the murder weapon in his hand.”

“We once had a card from when he was getting old,” Grady said. “When he started to look like a tree with the super tan and the wrinkles.”

“Cary Grant never looked like a tree,” Jean said. “Bite your tongue. You know that when Cary Grant walked into a room, he totally owned. The guy was a jungle cat, and he ruled the pride, if you know what I mean.”

“Speaking of, nice ears.”

“You think? What with all the piercings and alterations people get, I wonder if I can make them permanent?”

Grady opened the cash register and pulled out a five-dollar bill. He folded it neatly and slid it in the pocket of his shirt. “You know, if they keep raising taxes on smokes, I’m going to have to steal a lot more.”

Jean wasn’t sure what to make of that. He was starting to wonder if Grady was the right friend for him, because he was starting to think he didn’t understand Grady and was reasonably sure Grady didn’t understand him.

“You really shouldn’t--” Jean started to say, but Grady was out from behind the cash register and moving across the store. He had a “Back After These Messages” sign with a picture of Rod Serling on it in his hand. He took the Huckleberry Hound “Open” sign down from the door and replaced it with the new one.

“Come with me to get cigarettes,” he said. “I have something you should see, what with the mood you’re in.”

Jean followed without thinking. He was more occupied with the fact that Grady was wearing leather pants. He hadn’t seen them when the counter was in front of him. When had Grady gotten them? Were they giving leather pants away somewhere?

When they went into the convenience store, Jean peeked to see if the clerk had a pair, as well, but he didn’t. He was wearing a long apron and what appeared to be boxer shorts. They had dark orange and red grapefruit bubbles on them. Jean bet he had a girlfriend and she bought the underpants for him. No guy would want to wear them on his own, but a woman would think he should. Jean’s most comfortable pair of boxers had little trumpets on them. If he ever wore them around a woman, he was all prepared to joke, “I like to toot my own horn.” He hoped after all this time he could make it sound spontaneous.

Once Grady had his cigarettes, he beckoned and Jean followed him out to the parking lot. Grady was beating the pack against the back of his hand. It was an annoying habit. They crossed the street and headed away from the shops and into the houses. “It’s just up the hill,” Grady said.

The concrete crested. Jean was feeling winded. Grady finally stopped beating the pack and cracked it. Jean thought of that word because the peeling of the cellophane sounded like an eggshell being broken. Grady hit it some more to make one white cigarette slide out. “A few more nails and this coffin will be paid for.”

The house they were looking for was two stories high with a pointed roof. The top of the house was painted brown, but it gradually faded and chipped away into white as it reached the ground. Jean heard some meowing, and he saw several cats wandering around the yard. An orange tabby was lazing in some overgrown grass, a Siamese yawned on the porch, a black-and-white one with ears that were yellow like a banana was wrenching its neck to lick its own back.

“It’s a cat house,” Grady explained. “The lady that lives here, she has, like, eighty of them.”

“No way. You’re exaggerating.”

“Maybe. I did say like.”

As they watched, more cats appeared. A white male with a grey top that had black stripes running through it leapt off a windowsill and attacked the happy Siamese. Jean was pretty sure he saw one of those hairless cats peering out from an open cellar window.

“It’s amazing,” Jean said.

“Told you.”

Jean watched the Siamese and the other feline wrestle. Maybe the attacker was the Top Cat.

“Hey, Grady.”

“Yeah?”

“You think a real cat has ever worn fake cat ears?”

Grady snorted. “I dunno. Think about it. Did you ever see a human wearing fake human ears?”

“What about rabbit ears? Could you put rabbit ears on a cat?”

Jean had a quick flash in his brain of himself in the dead of night, shoving the Top Cat in a pillowcase. He jumped in a cab, and there were bunny ears on the seat. “Step on it, driver!” And they were away.

The hairless cat retreated into the dark, as if he could sense Jean’s kidnapping plot.

“Hey, Grady.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you know that guy Greg?”

“No. Why?”

“No reason.”

Jean thought Grady sounded guilty, like maybe he’d been caught and was too shocked to do anything but opt for the simplest lie. Could Grady and Greg have formed their own pride? Jean thought he was Grady’s dominant male, but maybe another had usurped him. He knew he could probably handle things on his own, but is a lion ever a lone wolf?

#

Work that day began relatively normal. At least one kid vomited at the school each day, and Jean was always pointed in that direction first. The other janitor, Paul, gave him a funny look when he told Jean where to go, like he could still smell the puke even though it was on the other side of the building. As Paul walked away from him, though, he kept looking back over his shoulder, giving Jean the distinct impression that it was he who had the offensive odor. He put it out of his mind and stepped into his blue jumpsuit and grabbed his mop.

On his way to the mess, Jean passed the principal in the hall. Mr. Bernard (pronounced “Bur-nerd”) was nearly bald, and the oily strands of hair that remained made Jean uneasy, like they were infectious and his own mane would start to wither. He tried not to look when Mr. Bernard was near, and Jean put his head down when the man approached. He nearly jumped into the wall of lockers when the bald principal grabbed his shoulder. Mr. Bernard pointed at Jean’s head, zapping him with that finger. It, too, was greasy, and there was a dark comb-over on its joint.

“What’s that?” the principal asked.

Jean put his hands to his head. He was relieved that his hair was still there, but also surprised that so were the fuzzy ears. That must have been what Paul was reacting to.

“Oh, I forgot.”

“Did you also forget you can’t wear those?”

“Who said?”

“You have to wear the uniform.”

Jean motioned up and down his jumpsuit. “I am!’

“Kitty ears are not part of the uniform.”

“I can wear a hat.”

“Those aren’t a hat.”

“They’re like a hat.”

“Take the ears off.”

Jean considered this order. He considered taking the ears and putting them on Mr. Bernard’s head, to give the little man a little more dignity.

“No,” Jean said. He was firm.

“No?”

“In a word.”

The principal didn’t like this response, and his face turned a blazing red and the top of his scalp got shinier, as if the anger caused him to excrete more oil. He demanded that Jean leave the premises at once, which Jean thought was sort of an overreaction and a little bit out of range for a man of this character. It’s normally the mangy felines that are expelled into the wilderness. What kind of blackboard jungle was he in?

Jean threw down his mop, and it made a loud clack that echoed through the empty halls. He saw Paul again on his way out, and the man still gave him a queer eye. In his head, Jean roared.

#

The girl worked in an office building downtown selling ad space for animated displays they installed over urinals in public bathrooms. Jean had nowhere else to go, so he walked down there and staked out a spot across the street. She should be getting off soon, and she’d come out of those big double doors with the gold handles. But would she see him? A blue jumpsuit, his ears, were they enough? He wanted her to notice him. Then he could assert his will.

There was a bike shop a couple of doors down. He went in. “Do you have a green light?” he asked them.

“No,” they said. “We just have red.”

“Like for the back of a bike, so drivers can see you at night?”

“Yeah. Red.”

“You don’t have green?”

“Not unless they got here while you were asking me.”

Jean bought a small red light. It was plastic and battery powered and it had canvas straps with Velcro ends. He took it with him back to his spot and wrapped the signal around a lamppost before starting it up. The light blinked every couple of seconds.

He waited. Eventually, people began spilling out of the building. He looked for her, kept looking at the light to make sure it was on and then back to the crowd, still waiting for her. She should have been in with them, but if she was, she didn’t see him and he didn’t see her.

Eventually, he took the light off the post, threw it in the gutter, and stomped it with his foot.

#

On his walk home, Jean swung by the joke shop to see if Grady was there, but the owner was working the counter now. Jean thought it best not to go in and ask if he knew where Grady had gone, even though his cat ears didn’t look out of place inside that store.

Instead, Jean went across the street to get a slice of pizza. As he approached, he saw Grady through the window and thought his luck had improved. Only, Grady was sitting with someone, and that someone was Greg. He knew that bastard had been lying! Grady thought the leather would camouflage the scent, but the stink of the pants was its own admission of guilt.

#

Night fell. Coming down from where it had been waiting, it sat with Jean’s equally low spirits. How stranded he had become, how absent of purpose. He knew he could go home, but he couldn’t come up with a single reason why he would. It was an empty apartment, and it was him who bled it dry.

Instead, he wandered around the neighborhood, forming an ever-widening circle with the pizza parlor at its center. He would mark each street, leave his spoor in every crack in the sidewalk. After about four times around, he found himself at the top of a steep hill, looking down. He recognized the incline, but he knew it in reverse. He had walked up it only hours before.

The cat house, stage right.

The hairless cat was skulking through the grass, and it froze when Jean’s eyes landed on it, one paw off the ground, caught in mid-step. It watched Jean, as if it wanted to see what he would do next. Jean took a step forward, and the cat bolted, diving through the cellar window it had been spying from that afternoon. Once it had given itself to the darkness, Jean stepped into the yard. No sooner had he felt soil than the Top Cat emerged from the basement shadows, like Jean had accidentally tripped a wire that let him out of his cage. The Top Cat meowed and walked straight up to him, passing by his shins, running the length of his body against Jean’s pants. The Top Cat turned around and did it again in the other direction.

Jean sat down in the grass. He reached out and scratched the cat behind his ears. Top Cat leaned into it, a look of decadence on his face--eyes closed, chin up. He climbed onto Jean’s lap and sniffed at his cheeks, his eyebrows, his forehead. The cat’s nose was cold and wet, but his breath was warm and pleasantly fishy smelling. From that vantage point, Top Cat’s head looked huge. Surely this was a head suitable to wear the crown of the king of beasts!

Top Cat settled into Jean’s lap and submitted to a thorough petting, his engine revving like he was preparing for a drag race. As they sat together, more of the cats started to come out of hiding. The Siamese, the orange tabby, the one with yellow ears. Jean counted around ten. (He was a little confused about how many grays there actually were. They looked too much alike.) Even the hairless cat came back out, sitting at the edge of the yard by the house, watching everything from a safe distance.

Jean was growing relatively content with the new status quo when he noticed that all the felines’ ears had started to perk up and twitch. They were trying to dial in something, but Jean’s human ears could not work the same range and his kitty ones were sadly non-functional. Top Cat raised his head and looked down the hill, his ears following the direction of his gaze. He was using body language to report his reconnaissance to Jean.

The sound was faint at first, but it was getting clearer by the second. There was a rattling noise and an intermittent bleating. Then there was also the occasional flash of emerald light. It wasn’t particularly timed to anything; it didn’t work in conjunction with the noise or come in regular intervals. As the volume continued to turn up, Jean realized it was a shopping cart. He could see it now, coming up the hill. The rattling was because it was full of empty cans, the obnoxious bleating from the boot that had been put on one of its front wheels to keep people from taking it from the supermarket.

Pushing the cart was the homeless man Jean had run into that morning. He was singing to himself--no, more like humming, or maybe scat. Jean didn’t recognize the tune. There was another burst of emerald as a street lamp ricocheted off of a lemon-lime soda can.

Jean waved at the man. Top Cat stood up on Jean’s lap. He looked like he was ready to strike if needed. All the other cats were standing at attention, too, facing the hobo.

For his part, the man stopped and quietly leaned on the cart handle. He tossed Jean a big grin. “I told you that you couldn’t avoid me all the time,” he said, the cart beeping after him.

“I considered myself warned, too,” Jean said. When he spoke, Top Cat settled down a little. He was no longer standing, but he still kept a vigilant watch, quickly scrambling to his feet again when the homeless man started rooting around in his cart. Jean felt the beginning prick of claws in his calf.

The homeless man pulled out a bottle that was three-quarters full with a thick green syrup. “I got some Kiwi MD 20/20,” he croaked. “I won’t say what the MD stands for. I don’t want to frighten your minions.”

“Oh, you can’t scare these guys.”

“And you can’t scare me. Care to share some hair of the you-know-what that bit ya?”

“Sure.”

The man grabbed the lemon-lime can and brought it and the bottle over to Jean. He sat down next to him. He smelled like cream cheese. Jean scratched Top Cat’s ears, and the feline eased off again. The other cats were milling about, pacing the yard like prison guards. The hairless one even moved a couple of feet closer.

The homeless man took the can in his hand and began to twist it. The metal crinkled and made a sick sound before splitting in half. He took the bottom portion and pushed at the ends, trying to smooth them out. Jean could see his fingers were dry and calloused, the skin turned hard against the world. His digits were the color of beets, and had they not been in such rough shape, he surely would have cut himself on the sharp aluminum.

He filled the newly fashioned cup with the cheap kiwi liquor and handed it to Jean. He toasted him and then took a belt straight from the bottle.

Jean took a sip, gingerly lifting the cup to his lips so as not to slice them open. The drink tasted shocking, like he had bit into the fruit it had been named after only to discover it was really an onion--one that had been injected with the sterilizing liquid they use to clean combs in barber shops.

“The second drink tastes better,” the hobo said, “and by your fifth, it’s like you’re suckling Heaven’s teat.”

There was no denying the wisdom. The second sip was sweeter. Even if it did make Jean’s head feel like the Hindenburg at the moment of impact. When he finished the first cup, the homeless man refilled it, and the cart made one of its pained noises as the two men toasted again.

“Cheers.”

“Cheers,” Jean replied. “You’re better than the whole damn lot of them.”

“You’re a swear word waiting to be blotted out.”

Jean laughed and drained his lemon-lime cup. Top Cat sniffed at it, so Jean put a little of the booze on his finger and let his friend lick it off. The cat’s tongue was rough and hot.

“What’s going to happen to me?” Jean asked the homeless man.

“I don’t know. More of what’s already happened, probably.”

“I see.”

Jean looked in his empty cup. The metal inside was pristine silver. He held it out for more drink, and the man sitting next to him took it from his hand, instead handing him the bottle. The lemon-lime cup was put down in the grass, and the hairless cat inched over to it, crawling on its belly. The feline sniffed at the cup, and then licked at its edge. When the cat instantly recoiled, Jean had thought that it had hurt itself on the sharp edge of the cup, but when the cat sneezed, shaking jade drops of alcohol from its whiskers, he knew otherwise, and Jean laughed.

# # #