Smoke the Cat missed football practice on Wednesday. Normally, when I'm crossing balls in for my son to head, volley or bicycle kick into the goal (the space between two trees), Smoke is there. I know it's a combination of coincidence and confirmation-bias, but he always seems to trot over to the flowerbed to answer the call of nature immediately after I've made my worst pass of the afternoon, looking directly at me when squatting in the dirt, as if to say, "This is what I think of that kick". I don't mind. I can take criticism. Especially from the coolest cat I ever met.
Starting from age five, and discounting only the periods I've lived in apartments that banned pets, I've lived with cats. They're far more popular, as pets, in Trinidad and the Caribbean now, because so many more people live in apartments, but, when I was a teenager, cats were like pina coladas and nail polish: strictly for girls. Only my two closest male friends liked cats. It was one of the things that brought us together, like coming from emotionally challenged families; smoking cigarettes; and being Catholic. Cats were safe emotional outlets, furry little creatures who were comfortable with affection, unlike my parents.
My father was a tightly wound ball of emotional wool and dared not risk pulling at the slightest of loose threads; but at least he had emotions. Forging deeper adult relationships didn't mean turning my back on cats; indeed, all my wives have loved them, too. (Notice me not making cheap jokes about women and felines; cat clearly got my tongue.) Smoke's real name was Tobacco Road, after the old jazz/blues standard, but he was called that only on the vet's registration card. He was Smoke at home. He had selected himself, puppy-style, to be mine. Four years ago, around this time, the four of us-me, my wife, daughter and son-were in the RSPCA, a few weeks after moving to Barbados, to choose a cat for the household. (You got to keep your rodents-and your demons-in control. It doesn't matter how stressed or worried you are, you get more peace of mind from one kitten than 500mg of Prozac.)
Smoke belonged to the household, but he was my cat. He came across to me and crawled up into my lap and looked up at me like a puppy. It was the last time he was a lap cat: every cat you see in the movies, from Goldfinger's come forward, lies in someone's lap to be stroked; Smoke did it just the once. It was like he knew the old Trini catchphrase men employ to explain the change in their courting behaviour to their wives, their reversion to drinking, smoking and cussing, post-marriage: you run until you catch a bus; then you sit down.
Smoke alway sat next to me, though. The bond between humans and pets, I am told, is similar to that between parent and child, with the pet dependent on the human like a child. Small children will follow their mothers from room to room, just to be sure they're not being left alone, and pets do the same thing; and Smoke did it in spades. When I moved from my bedroom, after my coffee and crossword, to my office, to start the day's work, he trotted down the stairs with me to go to sleep on the window sill near my desk. He escorted me everywhere, to the front room to watch the midday news, to the kitchen to check on the rice, out into the back yard to hang or take in laundry. He was always there.
When he missed football practice, I was a little worried, but reminded myself he was, first and foremost, a cat, and, particularly in Smoke's case, subject to a powerful hunting imperative: he regularly left rat's head trophies strategically placed to remind us of his value as a defender of the homestead. When he failed to turn up on our bed the next morning, at the back of my mind, I started expecting the worst, the news of which came from the neighbour's housekeeper, who passed his cadaver on the main road.
He had been run over, killed instantly, by the look of it, though his body was unbroken as far as I could see. He was gone entirely, my friend Smoke, replaced by a dead cat. I buried him in Barbados' hard earth with great difficulty, breaking a running sweat at 7 am long before the hole was deep enough. My heart raced with the effort, sparing it at least the pain of separation. I laid him in the clay and said a small goodbye, with the promise of this larger one to come. I leaned on my pickaxe and looked into the future, to this day, when these words should appear, in a newspaper in a place that cares only about what can be bought and sold, and at how good a price.
And told myself there were enough people still touched by love who would value an appreciation of a loyal companion above another thousand words flung in pointless heckle after Mr Warner or Mrs Persad-Bissessar or Mr Rowley. It is my only hope for our small place: that we remember our tininess and our fleetingness, and value those small things that matter a great deal. And, finally, I told myself that, if they really wanted me to write yet another political picong putting down some politician they didn't like, well then Smoke pipe they crapaud this morning.
BC Pires is a cat lover.
E-mail your feline appreciations to him at bc@caribsurf.com
