Cat Came Back and Other Stories

By Doug Downie

A collection of short, short stories and a novella about everyday life and the search for meaning. Influences are Charles Bukowski, John Fante, Knut Hamsun, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Ernest Hemingway.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781794745827

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Cat Came Back and Other Stories

CAT CAME BACK and Other Stories, by Doug Downie, Jazzman Publications, Sacramento, CA

Copyright © 1987, 1988, 2007, 2011, 2019 by Doug Downie, all rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-79474-582-7

Cover art by Claudie Hiles.

Some of these stories have previously been published in Art Matters and KVMR Air Notes (Nevada City, California, USA (1987, 1988), and The Fishing and Hunting Journal, Port Alfred, South Africa (2007), and Down in the Dirt (2009).

Preface

How arrogant for such an upstart to deem a preface necessary, but I feel it upon me. A few words about the novelette and stories that follows won’t burden you too much.

I wrote Cat Came Back a long time ago, as with the short stories. They sat in a worn-out old folder for some 20 years, with the dust of a dozen houses settling on them, cranky in the cupboards. Now I feel that they are worth dusting off, outside the musty drawers that held them. There are a few clear influences here, maybe four in particular, and perhaps I should confess to these.

But first, there’s a minor current running softly alongside more obvious riffles and that’s Dostoyevsky and Crime and Punishment. Jack Dugan is nowhere near a Raskolnikov but they would glance at each other more than once if they passed in the street.

One of the major influences was Celine, and especially Journey to End of the Night. The stream of consciousness, the urgency of the 3-dot attack, and the gritty dive into reality grabbed me. I thought of this as I wrote Cat Came Back.

Then there was Hamsun and Hunger. No, there’s nothing in CCB that comes anywhere near approaching Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. His protagonist’s experience was far more harrowing than anything Dugan endured. But I thought of this as I wrote CCB.

John Fante’s Ask the Dust is the third major influence. It is much like Hunger in being the story of a struggling writer and was inspired by it. But it’s different, distinctly American, and distinctly unique and permeated with a humor that Hunger lacks. I thought much of this as I wrote CCB.

Finally there’s Charles Bukowski. All of Charles Bukowski. Bukowski had the strength and the guts and the craziness to take literature and poetry out of the hands of the academics and politicians and put it back in the hands of the people, where it belongs.

It’s a forgone conclusion that I cannot now do the same, but I’ve written in a spirit that walks the same trail as these trailblazers. I thought about them all as I wrote CCB and these other stories, and I think about them as I write still.

SANCTUM

It had been a lousy day, but then, many days are. I got home from work, didn’t bother to shower, just packed what groceries I’d bought into the fridge, grabbed my rod and my few flies, and was off down the river road early on that summer evening. The spot I was headed for was maybe ten miles south of the little Delaware River town I was living in. It was a nice drive, no towns and few houses from Frenchtown to Stockton - just the green hills and the Delaware pumping along next to you. The low sun cast an orange stripe across the rippled water and the warm evening wind filled your nostrils with the smell of the grasses, the trees, and the pungent odor of river mud.

I knew of a place.

A little creek, barely more than a brook, cascading down the slopes into the Delaware through a lovely little canyon, a secret spot.

You couldn’t see much sign of a creek from the road. It disappeared in dense brush back from the road, then went under the road, and couldn’t be seen below the road as it made its final dive into the big river. A little trail, not much used, led up through little willows and berry bushes into a sudden silence, shade, and sanctum.

It always felt like a discovery.

The steep V-shaped walls blocked the sun out most of the day. Overhead I could see a patch of crimson gold sky. I was missing a beautiful sunset. Small maples grew by the banks, hanging out over the water.

There was silence. That shrouded, muffled silence that you find in tiny little life systems like this one. There were a few birds, not many, an occasional ruffle of leaves, a squirrel, and the water. The constant tumbling and dripping and popping and clunking and slurping of that little creek running down to the Delaware from the Lokatong, not more than a mile upstream.

You had to walk only a hundred yards before you came to the first and biggest pool; a deep oval cup of clear water, eight feet deep, with huge tumbled boulders holding the water.

There was always a trout in there, sometimes two, but always at least one. I had taken a few out of there to bring home for dinner and was always excited to see another one had taken its place.

It was tough fishing in there. It would probably be tough for someone who was good. I’m not that good and in those days I was less so. You had to be stealthy, cunning, and very quiet. You absolutely could not let that trout catch a glimpse of you or it was all over. You could try again on the way down. Casting was impossible with all the undergrowth, the canyon walls themselves right at your back. You didn’t backcast, but just kind of flung the fly out there, or went upstream and let it go down with the current to tumble into the big pool like so many real insects did. I usually caught that fish, and then sometimes I spooked his stubborn self and didn’t see it again, even an hour and a half later on the way down. Sometimes I killed the fish to enjoy with salsa soaked hash browns and beer, other times let it go, no doubt to get fat and ornery out there in the Delaware, if it could survive that river.

There was really only one other good pool in the entire creek but I always found fish in tiny little scoops and pockets, stops on their route down this ladder. I’d perch on a rock above a small pool and just watch the trout darting for its food, or lurking in the shadow of a rock, sometimes just patrolling its tiny realm. I’d catch these by dapping, just patting the fly (invariably an Adams) on top of the water, letting it eddy over to the trout’s rock. I could see every movement of the fish including that twitch of the tail that told me it would strike, almost like a cat.

Up at the top of the hill was another pool, not so deep as the lower one, but much wider across. There was a six or seven foot falls below it and when you got up on the lip you could look back down the creek and canyon and see the water jumping down through the cool, mossy stillness. I stood there awhile, catching my breath and enjoying the presence of this place.

I saw three trout in the pool, two holding under an overhanging rock across and to my left, one under a fallen snag, across and to my right.

I amazed myself by casting once, twice, three times without snagging on anything. The third cast caught one of the trout under the overhanging rock. It darted out from under the rock as the fly drifted past, and fought all over the pool to free itself. After five minutes I slid it out onto the burnished granite, unhooked the fly from its jaw, and decided that trout for dinner sounded good. I killed the fish and placed him off to the side. There was no sense in casting again so soon after all the ruckus so I contented myself by sitting still, listening to the few sounds, feeling the cooler but still warm evening’s air, feeling better and better every minute, tuning in to the lifeline.

Against my expectations I caught the trout holding under the snag on my first cast. It didn’t put up quite such a fight, and soon my meal was complete – minus the hash browns and beer.

It was getting dark as I made my way down, rock to rock, leapfrogging along the creek, exhilarated as I pushed through the brush back to my car.

A secret unknown place where I always caught fish, and I always caught peace. It felt like a wild place, though I knew there was a farm not one hundred yards from my second pool, the highway below, and I knew the trout were not native but planters who’d made their way down from the Lokatong.

I wheeled the car around and headed back home.

It had been a lousy day, but the future looked bright.

THE BULL

The woods lay behind the last street of the most recent housing development. It had been an ever-shrinking territory for fifteen or twenty years and now consisted of a quarter mile of mixed oak, maple, and birch stretching back to the creek, then another hundred yards to Tomahawk Rd. On the east side the march of houses had pinched it off into a narrow neck through which the creek flowed into Tomahawk Park. On the west side a barbed-wire fence tacked to the trees marked the interface where a pasture met the woods. Two or three years earlier the pasture was a cornfield, the rows extending all the way back to the creek. Now, around and above the rotting stalks, grew tall grasses mixed with tiny flowering plants like buttercups and the thistles beginning to creep in.

This was the place where The Bull lived. The Bull was a magnificent black beast, sweat glistening in the sun off its smooth hide, its muscles rolling down its flanks firm as a line of hills. Steam puffed from its nostrils as it pawed the earth with menacing grunts. Its horns were huge and curved toward the sky.

Two boys from the neighborhood rode their bikes to the edge of the woods where the power line cut through, hid their wheels in the undergrowth, and ran down the trail into that green world. This was deep forest for them, a place that still had spots to be explored, still had unknown vicinities where neither they nor anyone they knew had ever been. It was a courageous and exciting thing to follow one of the two trails they knew of all the way back to the creek. The creek was a rare and wonderful place where they found salamanders and occasionally saw a fish, once saw a snake, and once, even saw a muskrat slide beneath the surface and disappear into the bank. It was a whole different world from the gridlock of parallel streets and homogenized houses and manicured landscapes with their networks of wires and cables strung overhead.

Jack and Stew dove into the green canopy like escapees, like adventurers, like pioneers, like little men.

I wonder if anyone else is back here? Jack listened intently as he asked his question. Davey Green the bully, and his buddies from over on Oak Dr., sometimes came down there. Kids from different neighborhoods would build forts in the woods and take turns destroying what their counterparts had created.

Naw, I don’t think so. answered Stew. But let’s be quiet anyway. You heard about the mad axeman who escaped from Bellevue, didn’t you?

Naw, what axeman?

Some crazy guy who kills people with an ax. Chops ‘em up and buries ‘em all different places. Somebody saw him over in Cranberry the other day.

There ain’t no axeman down here.

There could be though. Someone could probably live down here and no one would know about it.

We’d probably know about it.

We’d be dead. All chopped up.

Shut up Stew. I like it down here, man. This is my most favorite place. It’s like nobody’s ever been here before. We can pretend that we’re the first ones. And we don’t have to worry about our parents watching us and tellin’ us not to do this, or that, or anyone else either. No teachers, no adults at all. We can just do whatever we want to do.

Well, what do you want to do?

I don’t know. You want to go down to the creek?

Naw, I gotta be home pretty early.

Let’s go see if we can see The Bull.

They followed a small side trail that led to the edge of the old cornfield. Crouching beneath the last trees they scanned the waving grasses for a glimpse of The Bull. Its existence was a part of the oral lore of their neighborhood, a story told by bigger boys who had confronted it. One had been chased through the field by the lumbering monster. It was his red shirt that had incensed The Bull, the story went, and he was forced to run for his life, leaping tussocks of grass and tripping through tangled mats of decaying cornstalks. Jack and Stew crept into the field cautiously, feeling the thrill of danger, the cockiness of the challenge. No one ever knew when Old Man Gunther let The Bull out into the field. He might be out there now, patrolling his realm, or he might be back in Old Man Gunther’s barn – the last barn in town.

See him? Stew asked from his crouch as Jack stood, gazing across an expanse of what seemed to him like a sea of green and brown.

Naw, I don’t see anything. Old Man Gunther must not have let him out.

Old Man Gunther sure is a weird old guy. Who ever heard of being a farmer around here?

I think it’s neat. He’s got all these fields and those woods on the other side of the tracks. It’d be neat if you were his kid so you could have it all to play in and explore and stuff.

I wouldn’t want to be his kid. He’s a grouchy old bastard.

"I don’t mean his kid. I mean if your parents had his place. You could have all sorts of secret places that only you knew about. Who knows what you might find? Hey! Is that him, way over there?" Jack pointed to a spot far away on the other side of the field, almost to where it met Tomahawk Rd. A dark and stolid object stood out against the rippling of the pasture.

Yeah, that’s him!

Hey! Hey, you old bull you! shouted Jack. C’mon and get us! He jumped up and down in an effort to provoke The Bull. Stew began jumping too, both of them leaping and shouting, ready to bolt into the woods and be gone if The Bull were to charge.

Hey, whispered Stew. guess what I got?  He pulled from his jacket pocket a long, red bandana and dangled it in front of Jack’s nose.

Stew began waving the red bandana around over his head, both of them yelling at The Bull, taunting him to charge them, two small but courageous warriors from the split-level territory of Macadam Dr.

Here he comes!

They turned tail and disappeared into the woods and within ten minutes were under the sycamore tree on Jack’s fresh-mown lawn as all the fathers of the neighborhood began pulling into the driveways, home from the offices.

Back in Old Man Gunther’s cornfield, now fallow for the last three years, an ancient heifer, brown and white-spotted with drooping folds of flesh and rheumy stupid eyes, chewed dumbly on tufts of grass. Across Tomahawk Rd. in the old man’s other five acres a bulldozer fired up and began to move the earth.

THE KILLERS

They were four adolescent boys and they were walking down the sidewalk of a suburban street on a gray overcast day. The rain had stopped some hour or two before and the shrubs and hedges drooped with their load of raindrops and the trees dripped with great plocks of water beneath them. Sometimes they walked four abreast with one walking over lawns and another in the street while the other two held the sidewalk, sometimes they walked two in front and two behind, sometimes one fell back, temporarily out of the group. They constantly jostled for position and they constantly goaded and taunted one another.

They were four friends and they knew each other well and this was a familiar journey, with familiar landmarks and familiar activities.

The one on the lawn side of the sidewalk was talking. The walkway cut through a small hill here and he had to walk along the side of the hill with a sort of independent suspension, one leg taking the high side and the other the low side.

The Dodgers are gonna go all the way! They can’t miss! Sandy Koufax! Drysdale! Maury Wills! Koufax is my man! Did you see him last night on TV? The batters looked like jerks!

His arms waved about as he talked, he pitched an imaginary ball as he spoke of Sandy Koufax, his hero.

Aw, they’ll never get by the Yankees! the tall lanky one said. Dark-haired, walking along the grassy strip between curb and sidewalk (dogshit territory), his bony hand waved off his friend.

The Yankees? Forget the Yankees!

Looks were being exchanged though. Up ahead a large and dense privet hugged the sidewalk, saturated with the day’s rain it stood directly in the path of the Dodger fan. The foursome shifted as they came up to it and the Dodger fan found himself on the sidewalk now with Billy in dogshit territory and Earle and Keith in the street. As if by telepathy and before he had a chance to realize his predicament, the other three joined in a robust block, like a 300 pound linebacker to a puny quarterback, sending Jack the Dodger fan sprawling into the dark, green soaking cavern of the privet. The others knew that clambering out of that cold and soggy jungle was even more uncomfortable than being thrown in.

This too was familiar, almost tradition, which made it all the more funny when someone could be caught with their guard down. The other three were falling out laughing all over the place.

Goddamnit! I forgot again! Jack bitched.

Hoo! Hoo! Billy had fallen onto the street and was rolling around, gripping his stomach with one hand and pointing at Jack with the other. Hoo! Got you again! Got you again!

Yeah, yeah...you’ll get yours Slade.

It was the mid ‘60’s in a fairly well-off bedroom community not too far from New York City. It was the definitive suburb: a place where people went to escape the crowds, the dirt, the noise, the crime, the general grime and grit of the big city. They went to get a little taste of the country, to have some trees about, and some green, and their little plot of land. But they didn’t want too strong a taste of the country. They wanted their conveniences. They didn’t want the feeling of being overrun by the country any more than they wanted the feeling of being overrun by the city. So they kept migrating and creating their dream homes. And what they got was not much; what they created was a people tied not to the land and not knowledgeable in its ways and lacking a deep reverence of its life. What they also created was a people isolated from the great cultural assets of the great cities of the world. They were an amorphous sort of people, neither here nor there.

But Jack Dugan, Billy Slade, Earle Twig, and Keith Herman knew nothing of this yet, at least not consciously.

Their path had intersected with the railroad tracks and they turned off the street and followed the tracks. Billy’s head was now as wet as Jack’s from the shower he’d gotten when Jack, full of grace, had jumped up and shaken the branch of a soaked sycamore. Keith and Earle walked the rails, seeing how far they could tight rope them. As usual Keith didn’t get very far. He’d teeter along, full of determination, careen forward and fall off the rail, tripping along the ties.

Stanky (his nickname), you’re so uncoordinated! Earle couldn’t quite believe this persistent lack of coordination.

Yeah...well...your mother! blurted Keith.

No one knew what this was supposed to mean but you used it when you were helpless and needed to be nasty.

On one side of the tracks was the newest housing development, on what had recently been a cornfield. On the other was an avenue of factories and warehouses. On that side of the tracks was a different town than theirs, which you knew if for no other reason than the fact that industry was not admitted into their town.

Up ahead was the overpass where Central Ave. sailed over the train tracks. You could see pigeons flying from under it and returning; the concrete pilings were pelted with their droppings.

Looks were being exchanged.

Let’s. said Billy.

Yeah. said Jack.

They moved quickly, but not loudly, taking up positions under the bridge, up the slope near the bottom of the roadway. Pigeons were perched all along the girders and cross-struts and posts of the bridge. Jack was the first to throw. He’d been studying Sandy Koufax and he demonstrated his best imitation of the master. His rock sailed straight and true, a fastball that knocked a pigeon off a guy-wire to fall splat on the tracks below.

Alright! shouted Billy.

Yeah, Jack! from Earle.

Good shot! now Keith.

Then Billy threw, with more a quarterback’s technique, trying to grace a stone onto a pigeon’s head. He missed.

Damn!

Earle threw side-armed and flattened a bird against the side of a huge I-beam.

Oooo.

Yeah!

Ah-ha, ha, ha!

Keith’s shot fell short, not even reaching within ten feet of the target.

Jesus, Stanky!

Pigeons were flying everywhere. Grey and white feathers fluttered to the ground, long stiff ones, small soft ones. The birds would disperse but always come back. The boys would wait.

Watch me get this one in mid-air! shouted Jack. Rearing back in full wind-up he threw and missed.

You’ll never get one on the fly. said Earle.

Yes I will.

Yaaah! Billy battle-shouted, pegging a pigeon with a sharp rock. The body fell onto a piling with a small exclamation of red trailing from its beak.

C’mon, let’s go. said Keith. They’d killed nine pigeons by this time. It was a record. Let’s go down to the Black Diamond.

Alright.

Yeah, let’s get something to eat.

Jack had one palm-sized stone in the heft of his hand and his eye on one bird about to alight from its perch. The bird flew, its wings outstretched, flying, really flying, defying gravity in an act that no human could match, and as the others climbed from under the bridge Jack threw his stone, leading the bird in flight, a beautiful thing, and the stone and the bird flew to meet at a certain point. With a thwick they met and the pigeon crumbled into a mass of bent wings and flying feathers and fell out of control directly toward Jack. The dead thing hit him on the side of the head with force and fell to the ground at his feet.

One red and malevolent eye looked up at Jack from the shit-strewn soil beneath the Central Ave. overpass. Something vile oozed out of the bird’s asshole. A trickle of blood coursed down Jack’s forehead.

Jack was frozen looking at that pigeon.

The pigeon twitched.

So did Jack.

C’mon Jack! What’re you doing?

He ran from under the bridge. They were all going to get hamburgers at the Black Diamond.

AN AUDITION

I pulled my car up into the parking area, rolled a joint, stuffed that and matches into my shirt-pocket, then yanked my guitar from my car and strode into the woods where I sat on a picnic table, pulled out the guitar, tuned up. In about an hour I was going to try my luck at a bar, see about getting some money and response for this activity. I’d come down to Tomahawk Park to loosen up a bit, practice.

This Tomahawk Park was my old stomping grounds. I’d done just about everything down there from the time I was a snot-nosed kid right on up. Gotten drunk, stoned, tripped, fucked, masturbated, played baseball, tennis, flown kites, bicycle riding, fought...you name it. These days I would come up from my little house in Pennsylvania visiting my parents and go to the park to play guitar, sing, hang-out. It was pleasant, one of those little moments of sanity.

Well, here I was again, it was still nice, but in an hour or so I’d be throwing myself to the dogs. That’s how it felt. Why was I doing it? I wondered. I was really happiest playing to the trees and sky, to myself, to anyone who chanced by, but the same old urges whistled around through my brain. You know the ones. Money, funnin’ with the pretty ladies, drinking free, having people tell me how good I was. And then there was the stirring of the humanitarian: spreading a little joy, entertainment, giving something to improve the quality of life. Somehow this seemed idealistic for a bar scene though. I wasn’t sure.

So, I was sitting there running along scales, noodlin’, when I heard leaves crunching, feet sloshing through them; it was two young girls.

Do you want an audience, or do you want to be alone?

I did feel a bit like being alone, to practice, but I nixed it.

Naw, sit down, sit down…

I kept playing and kept hearing more leaves sloshing…pretty soon I was surrounded by half a dozen, maybe eight lovely young girls. They broke out beers, gave me one, we smoked my joint then some of theirs.

How old were these girls?

We’re all still in high school. said one pretty blonde, thin, marvellous.

Ah, and you’re down here drinking and smoking on a school night? Tsk, tsk.  Tongue-in-cheek you understand.

They all laughed their laughs that said; Shit, homework? School? No thanks.

I stopped playing every so often to listen to their talk. Just like me and damn near everyone else they talked about leaving, going somewhere, doing something other than what they were doing now. We twentieth century people have very itchy drawers. Things feel like they’re coming down to the wire.

I really believe that you can make it just bumming around. I really believe that. one was saying.

It sounded funny, even corny, like a little echo of myself and I almost got into a little of the old advice-giving-from-the-elder-person but nixed it; let them find things out for themselves.

Instead I said; Mind if I have another beer? That Molson’s sure looks good. How’s life in Westfield High nowadays?

It’s too straight. said the cute blonde, nobody does anything crazy anymore."

Then others piped in with; Yeah, we’re the only ones who do anything crazy, that’s why we hang out together; everyone else is dead.

The blonde: Yeah, everyone’s really into learning. She handled the word learning carefully, like a piece of crap, didn’t want it to soil her.

So I had some spirited young delights here and I had to go to this audition. I couldn’t miss it. I was going to be a star. I packed it up, said goodbye to the lovely little nymphs and walked off, they wishing me luck, me thinking I should’ve stayed with them. Ah well…

I got to the Red Caboose, carried in my stuff, found four other guys setting up, two duos (a duo of