There’s a man in my neighborhood who regularly walks his cat with a long, scraggly leash of string. I see them when I’m out walking, too. Sometimes we give each other a small, shy salute, sometimes he adds, “Great day,” or “Good to be outside,” or, noting my slight limp and slow gait, “Gotta keep walking!” He limps, too. Well, lurches quite a bit from side to side. The man doesn’t ask me how I’m feeling, and I don’t tell him. We’re probably about the same age. Baggy shorts and a wide tee shirt only accentuate the fact that the he is heavyset and sloppy. His long gray hair hangs in dirty streaks down to his shoulders and his smile reveals a missing tooth. By contrast, the orange tabby cat is perfectly groomed, well fed and silky. She trots daintily out in front, and when she stops, he lets out the leash and leans on the nearest car to smoke a cigarette until she tires of sniffing grass.
How silly to walk a cat, I often think as I pass them, how superfluous the leash. Cats are meant to skulk through neighborhoods alone, crunching on mice and examining the underside of every porch.
Yesterday, I heard some one calling over and over a name I couldn’t catch. Nor did I recognize the voice until the man passed next to my open window – three feet from where I sat. He crashed through my backyard, beating my hosta with his stick and alternating the cat’s name with “fuck,” a word I understood more clearly. He didn’t look as friendly as I remembered – old and boozy and maybe a little mean. Or crazy.
“First time I took off the leash,” he exclaimed when I went to the porch to investigate. He held up the ratty twine and shook his head. “I thought it’d be okay, but then she saw a rabbit. She’s here somewhere,” he said and crouched awkwardly down to look under where I stood. It’s the man who walks his cat, I thought, and immediately felt less afraid.
“She’ll come home when she’s tired,” I assured him.
“Sure she will, but I just don’t like leaving her alone like this.”
For a good half hour I heard him calling near and far. Three times he came back to search my yard to no avail, each time sounding a little more desperate and hitting my plants just a little bit harder. A few kind-hearted neighbors began to gather in the street. Nobody knew what to do. “Found her!” he shouted triumphantly from the corner, and the ladies went back inside.
This morning I saw the pair of them come toward me, the cat strutting daintily, not even pulling at the leash. From half a block away, the man smiled and lifted his hand in a little greeting and then followed the cat’s lead into the alley where she’d found a garbage can intriguing. It’s a beautiful morning. The air is fresh, the sky is clear. How funny to walk a cat, I catch myself musing as always. But then I think, if you want to hang out with your best friend on a day like this, I guess a leash will sometimes do.