The Mostly True Story of Pudding Tat, Adventuring Cat Page 4

  There it was, alive in the porter’s arms.

  “George!” he roared out. “Unhand that cat!”

  Recognizing the voice, Pudding struggled to escape, but Asa held him tighter. The anger Asa felt a hundred times a day sparked up inside him. Not just for himself now, but for the poor mistreated animal in his arms.

  “It’s Asa,” he told Mr. Russell.

  “Unhand it, I said!”

  Asa obeyed, lifting the crying cat back into barrel and setting the lid on top. He noticed the writing again.

  Funny, he hadn’t seen any woman with Mr. Russell. Not at the station nor in his compartment.

  “Does Mrs. Taylor know her cat is crying?” he asked.

  Mr. Russell turned such a boiled shade of red at the mention of Mrs. Taylor that Asa knew something wasn’t right.

  Occasionally, he caught a supposedly fine gentleman filling his pockets with Pullman silverware. Whatever passengers stole, the porter had to pay for. So Asa, not able to accuse the fine gentleman directly, would instead say, “I’m afraid the Pullman Company doesn’t offer complimentary cutlery.” He’d stand firm until the man’s pockets were unloaded again. And then he wouldn’t get a tip.

  Now Mr. Russell smiled. It was the same horrible, yellow, moustachey smile he’d given the mirror in the gentlemen’s room.

  He reached into his jacket pocket.

  “Do we agree, George, that you’ve never seen this barrel or this cat?”

  “It’s Asa, sir.”

  “Pardon?”

  “My name is Asa.”

  The cat was yowling louder than ever. Mr. Russell took some bills from his wallet.

  “Here.” He fluttered the money.

  “Mr. Asa Philip, actually,” Asa said.

  “Here you are,” Mr. Russell said.

  Asa began to whistle. The cat stopped wailing.

  “Asa …” Mr. Russell’s face pinched up. “Philip.”

  “Mr.”

  “Mr.”

  Asa snatched the money and stepped past Mr. Russell so that he could open the door for him.

  “I never saw the barrel nor the cat. I’ll let you know when we reach Buffalo, sir.”

  Mr. Russell fumed out of the baggage car and back to his compartment, both relieved that he’d sorted out this glitch and peeved that it had cost him ten dollars.

  Well, he’d soon get the money back a thousand-fold.

  Once Mr. Russell was gone, Asa left, too. Best not to go back into the baggage car until they reached Buffalo. There were several curves coming up in the track, and Asa had only set the lid on the barrel, not fastened it. Quite often the bags were in disarray when they reached the station.

  He counted the money. Four times what he earned in a week.

  “George! You don’t even own my pants now!”

  Asa laughed and knocked a little tune on the baggage-car door to say thank you to the cat.

  * * *

  In Buffalo, another porter came to unload the baggage. Pudding had already climbed out of the toppled barrel and picked his way through the bags.

  The moment the door opened, Pudding, whose ears were still throbbing from the screech of the brakes, shut his eyes against the stronger light and ran. He landed on the crowded platform. Among the swishing skirts and striding legs, he was kicked along, right out of the station where the morning sun glared down.

  Now he had a destination — away from these feet and out of the light.

  He followed a wall until he reached the dim sanctuary of some bushes. Every inch of him felt bruised, but at least they were finally out of the barrel.

  But did his flea offer thanks? Had he helped Pudding find his way under the burning sun?

  No, but that’s how it is with parasites. Me, me, me.

  Under the bush, Pudding washed his aching self.

  “Yesterday, a silken bed. Today a crummy bush. What a come-down!” the flea moaned.

  Pudding was starting to be able to tune out the flea the way he used to tune out the whole party. He trained his ear beyond the hubbubbing station and listened hard.

  Soon, his whiskers began to tingle.

  Next to the bush was a high wall and, beyond that, the most intriguing assembly of sounds. They came from the Pan-American Exposition, the showcase for all the marvels of the new modern world.

  What did Pudding hear? The clicks and whirs and di-dah-dis from the Machinery and Transportation Building where the latest inventions were on display — the electrograph, the telautograph, the wireless telegraph. The wails of tiny babies kept alive in the Infant Incubators. The gasps of the fairgoers as they took these wonders in.

  “I wanna go back to the hotel,” the flea said. “If not that last one, something just as posh.”

  More sounds floated over the wall. Pudding picked out different languages now. Spanish, Hawaiian, Swahili. These came from the model villages. Then — oh joy! — he heard instruments. Marimbas, ukuleles, drums.

  A train chugged out, another chugged in, obliterating the music temporarily. Then the faint strains of an orchestra started up in one of the bandstands.

  Much closer, a tinny melody — part bird, part whistle, part bell.

  The melody stopped. Dragging steps approached and something heavy was plunked down, releasing a long reverberating note.

  A very dirty boy crawled under the bush and flopped onto his side. Pudding’s ears pricked up. There was something musical, too, in the boy’s sobs.

  Giancarlo Casali couldn’t help but cry beautifully. He came from a musical place, a town an ocean away, Laurenzana, in Italy. In his family — they numbered fifteen with Nonna — everybody sang. They ninna-nannaed the babies, warbled arias while they worked, and on Sundays fluted like angels in church.

  But Giancarlo was far from his family now. Though just one of the many leaving the old world for the new, he was younger than most.

  Curious, Pudding crept closer to the source of the sobs. He couldn’t see Giancarlo, but now Giancarlo saw Pudding. He sniffed until his tears dried up. Slowly, so not to startle the cat, he reached out.

  The flea took one look at the grubby hand coming down and shrieked in disgust. “Run!”

  Pudding didn’t. In fact, when Giancarlo sat up, Pudding climbed into his lap. Briefly, the boy’s tears resumed because this was the first kindness visited upon him since he had come to America a month ago. This cat was the first living thing to pay him any attention, not counting the scolding attention of his padrone.

  “Listen to him blubber,” the flea moaned.

  “Gatto, gatto,” Giancarlo murmured as he stroked Pudding the way the Willoughby boy had, and Mrs. Taylor, and Asa, too. “If you only knew how much trouble I’m in.”

  In a sing-song whisper, Giancarlo began to spill out everything that had happened to him. His trip across the pitching ocean. How for ten days he’d lain in a dark berth far below deck, groaning with seasickness. How he only stopped throwing up when he saw Signora Liberty standing in the harbor.

  Many years before, Giancarlo’s father had been sent to New York to sing and grind the organ in the street. When Giancarlo turned thirteen, the family arranged to send him, too. This was what was done in Laurenzana. The eldest boys were apprenticed to the padrone who came home every three years to sign new contracts.

  But there were laws against street musicians now. Instead, Giancarlo would work with the crew digging up roads for the subway, the railway they were building under the city.

  “Yes, a railway under the ground,” the padrone told them. Giancarlo would earn even more there.

  Already small for his age, Giancarlo arrived in New York weak from the voyage. He spent three days with the subway crew hauling the heavy buckets of dirt, or trying to.

  Then the padrone threw his hands in the air.

  “Useless!
Never mind the laws. I can see you’re good for nothing else. I’ll send you to the big fair in Buffalo.”

  He took the boy up to the attic of the tenement on Crosby Street where Giancarlo and five other boys slept on a straw mattress on the floor. Out of a dusty pile of junk, he pulled a carved wooden box with a leather strap and one leg.

  A barrel organ. The padrone stood Giancarlo behind the instrument and, slinging the strap around his neck, showed him how to balance the organ on its leg and turn the crank. Music poured out.

  “Sing,” the padrone said.

  “I don’t know this song,” Giancarlo answered.

  “Make up the words. Nobody can understand you anyway. Your father used to sing, ‘Fat lady your nose is so big. Give me all your money.’ They loved it! He earned the most of anybody.”

  Giancarlo didn’t think he could insult people to their faces like that. His father must have been very hungry to do it. Since arriving in America, Giancarlo’s stomach hadn’t stopped growling. Also, he didn’t feel like singing. At home he never stopped, but here in America he hadn’t so much as hummed.

  The padrone remembered something then. “No, the boy who earned the most was the boy with the monkey.” Grinders with animals were always the most popular.

  “Monkey?” Giancarlo asked.

  A very disobedient monkey whom the padrone had long since sold. But now he went out and bought it back. Then he put Giancarlo on the train with the furious monkey shrieking in a carpet bag.

  When he arrived in Buffalo, Giancarlo opened the bag with much trepidation. The monkey leapt out, baring her fierce yellow teeth. Somehow Giancarlo was supposed to dress her without letting those teeth sink into his flesh. He lifted out a frock and held it over her head.

  Before he realized that he’d dropped his end of the leash, she scampered off, straight over the wall, the leash snaking after her.

  “Gatto,” the boy told Pudding. “I’ve been turning the crank for two days, turning and turning. Because I owe the padrone my train fare and my food and lodging and the passage on the ship. I can’t go home until I pay him back. And now I owe for the monkey, too.”

  You can probably guess what kind of person this padrone was. Fifty percent of all creatures that live on this earth are parasites.

  Giancarlo told Pudding, “I have to get inside and find her. For that I need twenty-five cents. But no one is listening to me. Look. This is all I have.”

  He pulled a few grubby coins from his pocket. Pudding smelled the metal of the coins, the dirt and sweat on the boy’s hand, and his fear. He licked the hand.

  At that moment, Giancarlo got an idea. It was a terrible idea. As soon as he thought it, he began to mutter an apology over and over, “Mi dispiace, mi dispiace.”

  He crawled out from the bush with the cat under his arm.

  “Now, run for it,” said the flea. “Go!”

  Pudding might have, but the boy was holding him as though his life depended on him.

  Giancarlo went and stood by the station door. The arriving fairgoers streamed past. In Italian he called out, “Twenty-five cents! A beautiful cat! Just twenty-five cents!”

  Pudding tucked his face under the boy’s arm to shield his eyes. Several people stopped to pat him. One elderly man reached into his breast pocket and drew out a monocle on a string so he could get a better look.

  Something fell from his pocket. Quickly, Giancarlo covered it with his shoe. The man moved on.

  Giancarlo already knew that a cat who listened so attentively — as though he understood every word — was no ordinary creature. Here, under his scuffed shoe with his stockingless toe poking through, was proof of something else.

  A ticket.

  The white cat was bringing him luck.

  For two days Giancarlo had seen the ecstatic expressions of the departing fairgoers. Now, as he handed over the ticket and stepped inside the gates of the Exposition, he understood.

  He had entered a grander world. It spread before him like a dream. A vast plaza lined with ornate buildings. A sunken garden with a bandstand. A lacy tower so tall it scraped the sky.

  Beyond, as far as he could see, were spires and domes and colored flags.

  How wondrous it seemed to an undersized homesick boy. How much more so to a tiny full-of-himself flea. All this pomp and majesty spread out just for him! Every pavilion he saw as a hotel. A hotel with a huge soft bed. With room service.

  He could almost taste that roast-beefy blood again.

  “Yes! This is the place!” he crowed.

  But perhaps the most amazing thing about this vista was what they couldn’t see.

  It wasn’t real. Though the buildings were life-sized, though they appeared to be made of marble and stone, they were only plaster and chicken-wire constructions. By winter they would vanish. It would be as though the Pan-American Exposition had been a dream.

  Pudding heard the medley of invention, music and language more clearly now. Animal sounds, too. What could this be but one of the wide world’s corners?

  In fact, Pudding wasn’t far wrong. The Pan-American Exposition was the whole world squeezed into 350 acres. He squirmed to get down, eager to start exploring. But the boy was still gripping him. Instead Pudding made himself limp and hung over his arm, waiting for his chance to jump.

  Though Giancarlo was supposed to be searching for the runaway monkey, he’d already forgotten it. Swept along in the stream of Sunday-dressed toward the bustling Midway where the cries of the barkers overlapped, he fell into a trance of astonishment.

  “Step right up, step right up! Come see the Esquimaux Village!”

  “A Trip to the Moon!”

  “Living Esquimaux!”

  “A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!”

  “Ride the Aeriocycle! Ride it in the sky!”

  “Gatto, am I dreaming?” Giancarlo asked.

  He tilted back his head and watched the Aeriocycle turn its passengers like a whirligig. Before he managed to believe what he was seeing, the crowd pushed him toward another marvel — a woman’s sleeping face on a pillow three stories tall.

  This was Dreamland. You entered through a door in her neck and, Giancarlo presumed, dreamed the Exposition with her.

  Next he passed the Infant Incubators, where he could pay to see tiny living babies squirming in glass boxes. Before this invention, these babies, born too early to survive, would have died. Now their grateful mothers allowed them to be put on display.

  Next came the many-roofed pagoda of the Japanese Village. Then the Confectionery.

  He stopped to watch an apple-cheeked woman turning the crank on a machine. A broad pink skein of taffy stretched and spun.

  “Saltwater taffy! Straight from Atlantic City! Taste this famous treat!”

  Around and around the candy went, pink as the woman’s cheeks.

  It had been a long time since Giancarlo had tasted caramella mou or anything sweet. In his imagination he almost felt it sticking to his teeth.

  “Ragazzo!”

  Giancarlo swung around.

  “I knew it! I knew you were Italiano!”

  Giancarlo had already seen so many astonishing sights, but here was the most astonishing of all. An arcade like at home with a stripe-shirted gondolier standing under one of the arches smoking a cigarette. He waved Giancarlo over.

  “Welcome to Venice in America!”

  “They brought Venice here?” Giancarlo said. “The city of canals?”

  “Yes,” the man told him.

  “How?”

  “These days they can do anything. You’re a disgrace, ragazzo. Come. Wash that mug of yours.” He pulled Giancarlo through a disguised door in the wall.

  Now Giancarlo really did find himself in a dream. His dream of home. He descended the steps beside where the gondolas launched and, tucking the cat under one
arm, squatted to wash his face in the dream canal that was somehow filled with real water.

  This was Pudding’s first opportunity to jump. The flea urged him to. “Take me back to where we saw those hotels!”

  But Pudding smelled the water and was afraid of landing in it.

  A singing gondolier came along steering his boat with his long oar. “La Biondina in gondoleta. L’altra sera g’ho menà!”

  Under Giancarlo’s arm, Pudding perked up to listen.

  “What are you carrying?” the man asked. “A cat?”

  Giancarlo cupped some water in his hand for Pudding to drink. “Yes, he’s my lucky cat.”

  The man barked a laugh. Giancarlo climbed back up the steps, and the man promptly snatched the cap off his head and swatted him with it.

  “Listen, ragazzo. I’m going to tell you what will really bring you luck. Go to the Temple of Music at four o’clock today. The president is visiting.”

  “What president?”

  “McKinley, idiota. The President of the United States. In America, anything’s possible. Even an urchin like you can shake the president’s hand. Even your cat can. Then you’ll write home to your mother and boast. You’ve already succeeded so well in America that you’ve met the president. Go! Go!”

  Giancarlo turned, but the man said, “Ragazzo, wait. Shake my hand first. Because maybe you’ll grow up to be president. In America, you never can tell.”

  Giancarlo grinned. He held out his hand, clean now. Pudding, sensing a safe opportunity, leapt unseeingly into the air.

  He tumbled down the set of stairs and nearly did end up in the water. But he picked himself up and ran in the opposite direction until his whiskers brushed a wall.

  A corner? Not yet. He could hear Giancarlo far behind, calling, “Gatto! Gatto!”

  There was just enough space for a cat to squeeze between the two buildings, but not a boy.

  “Atta boy,” said the flea. “Give him the slip.”

  In the shadows between the Children’s Building and Venice in America, Pudding listened. The happy shouts of children filled his ears, but also unhappy sounds. Those of the animal captives in Bostock’s Zoological Arena, directly across from where he crouched.