The Mostly True Story of Pudding Tat, Adventuring Cat Page 5

  “Go back to where we started,” the flea said again.

  Instead Pudding ran straight into the parade of feet. Like in the train station, he was kicked all the way to the other side.

  Behind the false front of Bostock’s Arena was an enormous circus tent. Pudding slipped under the canvas and found himself in a place dim enough that he could open his eyes. In cages lining the outside of the arena, animals panted in the heat. Visitors moved around them as at a zoo, gawking through the bars.

  “Hey, lazy! Move it,” a boy said. He took his mother’s parasol and inserted it through the bars to goad a dispirited zebra.

  The zebra huffed. A hyena whined. An incensed monkey shrieked.

  Then Pudding heard a sound that made his fur stand up.

  It was the roar that lived in his blood, a roar from the past, long before there were Felis domesticus, before there were any Tats to count.

  He crept along the circular enclosure, past the camel, the peccary and the emu, until he came to the half dozen cages that housed Bostock’s pride of twenty-four lions.

  The old king, still lushly maned, had long ago been subdued by the whip. He rested his dejected head along his paws, too depressed even to wash himself. To anyone with a heart, this was a sad sight. To a cat it was a horrifying.

  “This place stinks,” the flea said. “Get me out of here.”

  Pudding retraced his steps out of Bostock’s Arena, walking as though in his sleep. But the Exposition was no dream to Pudding. To be caged and humiliated was a nightmare. Worse than being trapped in a barrel. Worse even than the scythe, the hungry fox or the drowning sack.

  The first safe place he came to was the lily garden. He crawled deep into the foliage, becoming a patch of white indistinguishable from the flowers.

  In this sweet-smelling sanctuary, he set to dreaming away what he had seen.

  * * *

  After hours of searching, Giancarlo sank onto a bench next to a fountain. The Exposition was a crowded maze. He’d never find his lucky cat again, let alone the monkey. Two creatures lost! In despair, he buried his face in his hands.

  With his eyes covered, Giancarlo experienced the exposition the way Pudding did. He heard it. The distant barkers, the laughter, the competing strands of music from every pavilion and attraction.

  And from somewhere close by, the deep, sonorous notes of an organ.

  He lifted his gaze. Opposite where he sat was a blue-domed building with a long line of people stretched before it.

  The Temple of Music? It had to be!

  Giancarlo washed again in the fountain, more thoroughly this time, to make himself presentable to a president. Face, neck, behind his ears. He combed his wet fingers through his hair, then hurried over and got in line.

  By then, Pudding had woken from his nap and was washing, too, among the lilies. He heard the same irresistible strains from the organ.

  “Wrong direction,” the flea said when Pudding set out to follow the music. “Hello? Are you even listening? The hotels are thataway.”

  So beautiful and complicated! The organ was a tapestry of sound. The flea kept harping, working himself up to a conniption, until he saw the Temple of Music with its fluttering flags and its blue dome encrusted in gold.

  The most majestic hotel so far.

  “Yes, here!” he shouted. “I’m home!”

  Inside, President McKinley had just welcomed the two thousand seated spectators. Now he turned to greet the hundreds of people who had lined up to shake his hand.

  He was a portly man dressed in a long coat, his trademark red carnation pinned to his lapel. The president had practically been elected on his hand shaking. He could grip and squeeze fifty hands a minute and leave everyone feeling special.

  Squeeze, shake, how d’ee do? They flowed past, the beautiful American people. All colors, sizes and shapes.

  Behind him the organist, dwarfed by the gleaming pipes rising all the way to the ceiling, swayed and pounded.

  Unseeing and unseen, the small white cat came padding toward the music. It was cascading now. Yes, it was like a waterfall, but one he wanted to be near. A waterfall of sound.

  The next person in the reception line was a young crumpled-looking man with flitting blue eyes. His hand was in his pocket. Only when the president extended his hand did the young man reciprocate and draw his out.

  A handkerchief was wrapped around it. He must have been injured, or perhaps maimed and ashamed, President McKinley thought just before the shots rang out.

  The organ stopped. The president’s face drained of blood as he blinked in incomprehension.

  He took one step back, then crumpled to the ground.

  * * *

  After the shooting, the Pan-American Exposition closed for several days. Where before it had been wondrously illuminated by two hundred and forty thousand electric lights powered by Niagara Falls, now tragedy veiled it in darkness.

  During this time Giancarlo lingered in his hiding place in the bushes. He’d heard the shots and seen the stampede of terrified spectators fleeing the Temple of Music. He’d watched the assassin led away by the police, and the president carried out on a stretcher.

  When the crowd at last dispersed, Giancarlo stepped inside the empty building, trying to understand what had happened. That was when he noticed something lying near the organ. A trampled white handkerchief, he thought.

  No. It was the cat. Giancarlo gathered him up — alive! Then a man in a uniform appeared and began to shout. Giancarlo fled.

  What kind of place was this America, he had to wonder now. To a frightened, hungry boy, it seemed hard and cruel.

  Pudding was feeling something similar. The day he walked out of the barn, he’d been so eager to experience the wide world. He’d survived a plunge down Niagara Falls and a dunking in the river. And now he’d been trampled by a stampeding crowd. He could still hear the deafening shots and smell their bitter, powdery odor.

  But worst of all was the sight of the old lion in the cage. All the animals — unfree. The opposite of adventuring.

  Mother Tat had tried to warn him that the wide world was a dangerous place. “Be careful,” she used to whisper to him.

  Now he believed her.

  The trampling left him with a gash on his back that he couldn’t reach to wash and a rear leg too sore to bear weight. Giancarlo nursed him as best he could. He scavenged scraps to eat from the now quiet train station, fair food discarded in a rush when the exposition closed. Half-eaten frankfurters, whole peanuts among the discarded shells.

  Though he was hungry himself, he sucked on a sandwich crust to soften it and offered it to the injured cat.

  “A crust now?” the flea said with disgust. “I want roast beef. I want it in bed. A soft bed. I want a view out the window. And carpets. Electric lights, too.”

  He crossed two legs over his hard brown chest and stamped the other four.

  “I can’t walk,” Pudding said.

  The flea heaved a sigh. “I really should have picked the tabby.”

  In the mildest of tones, Pudding replied, “Hop off if you like.”

  “Hop off?” the flea screamed. “What do you mean? You’re my host. You’re responsible for my health and happiness!”

  What a patient and kind-hearted cat Pudding was! Only now did he do what you or I would have done ages ago.

  He stuck his unhurt rear paw in his ear and scratched.

  “Ahhhh!!!!”

  The surprised parasite went flying through the air and landed a yard away. He picked himself up, brushed himself off with four of his six legs and bounded right back.

  “What did you do that for?”

  “I thought you wanted another host.”

  “Do you see another cat around here? Believe me, as soon as one shows up, I’m hopping off this bus.”

  He w
as so mad that he squatted in Pudding’s ear and refused to speak.

  Bliss.

  4. New York City, 1901

  The day the Exposition reopened, Giancarlo woke cold and sore. Now he would have to stand at the gate grinding the organ again. Like before, no one would even look at a filthy, monkeyless boy.

  The monkey! He burst into sobs. He would never earn enough to pay for the monkey and get back to New York, let alone home to Laurenzana.

  Then he looked at the white creature in his arms. The cat was lucky. Lucky and gentle, too. Unlike the monkey.

  He stopped crying. The clothes! The cat was almost the same size as the monkey.

  “I can’t see a thing!” the flea complained as Gian­carlo tied the bonnet strings under Pudding’s chin.

  Pudding didn’t mind the hat, for its broad brim shielded his eyes. It was the dress he didn’t care for.

  The cat under one arm, Giancarlo dragged the barrel organ out from under the bush and closer to the gate. He set Pudding on it and held him there by the collar.

  “Who turned out the lights?” the flea hollered. “What’s going on?

  Now, for the first time in this new country, Gian­carlo sang. He turned the crank on the organ and threw back his head. The trip across the ocean, his failure as an organ grinder, how he’d stood in line to meet the president only to see him shot.

  He belted out his whole sad story.

  “Listen to him blubber,” the flea said in disgust.

  More and more people stopped to listen. Some were moved by the boy’s beautiful voice and the suffering they heard there, some by the sight of a child alone and obviously faring badly. So dirty! Holes bigger than his shoes!

  Some were delighted by the frocked cat who sat atop the organ, eyes closed and bonnet tilted, listening so intently.

  Their hearts opened and so did their purses.

  Soon Giancarlo realized that he didn’t need to hold onto Pudding. All the better to receive the pennies that fell into his open palm.

  Three hours later he was on the train bound for New York with Pudding in the carpet bag in his lap. He’d bought a fresh roll in the station to share with the cat, but it did little to quiet the grumbling in his belly.

  “In Laurenzana,” he told Pudding, “we’re poor, but we always have enough to eat. On feast days they move the long tables into the square and pile the platters high. Sausages and calzone, gnocchi with turnip. Pastries. Gatto, I’m going home and I’m going to take you with me.”

  He made this promise to the cat knowing in his heart and in his noisy stomach that he would be serving three years in America the way his father had.

  Inside the dark carpet bag Pudding drowsed, still savoring the boy’s singing. Yes, the wide world could be cruel. It was full of peril. He understood this now. But there was music in it!

  “From barrel to bush to bag,” the flea said. “Cripes!”

  The train screeched into Grand Central Station and Giancarlo clumsily disembarked with the organ and the cat-filled bag. He began his long, burdened trudge back to the tenement on Crosby Street, filled with dread as each step took him closer to the padrone.

  * * *

  At the same time Giancarlo was struggling along, Vincent Bryan was traveling down Third Avenue toward him in the most astonishing contraption. An “automobile.” It looked like a regular carriage, but somehow it moved “auto” — on its own. Without a horse! Instead of reins, you steered it with a rod mounted with a shiny brass horn.

  Vincent had seen a few automobiles on the road, but he never imagined that one day he would ride in one. Yet this was what his crazy friend Gus Edwards had shown up in. He called it an Oldsmobile.

  As if driving such a thing didn’t attract enough attention, Gus kept honking the horn. It made an odd blat-blat sound that spooked the horse trotting alongside them.

  As the animal surged ahead, the driver shouted over his shoulder at Gus, “Get that newfangled menace off the road!”

  Vincent shrank down in the seat, but Gus just laughed.

  They passed a knickerbockered newsboy on the corner with his stack of papers under his arm. For a whole block the boy ran beside them, calling, “Gimme a ride, eh, mister? Would you? Pretty please!”

  A young lady in a plumed hat stopped to watch them pass. Gus honked at her, too.

  What a guy! Gus was only a year older than Vincent, twenty-two, but he had three times the confidence. He’d grown up in New York and had been singing in saloons and clubs since he was a kid. A natty dresser, too. He oiled his black hair until it gleamed. Putt-putting the autumn streets of Manhattan, the subject of astonished stares and delighted gapes, flirting with women. That was Gus.

  Vincent had arrived the year before from that far-off pile of rocks, Newfoundland. He, too, was on the move. One of the dreamers, dreaming big of a vaudeville career. But so far it hadn’t happened. He couldn’t even get the look right. He couldn’t afford the high shirt collars Gus wore. And, no matter how much hair oil Vincent applied, his curls wouldn’t lie down.

  “You’re going to see more of these,” Gus said. He squeezed the horn — blat! “The streets are going to be full of them.”

  “Automobiles?” Vincent said. “I can’t see it. I mean, what do you feed it?”

  “Gasoline.”

  A dog darted across the road.

  “Watch it,” Vincent said, and Gus jerked the steering rod. They swerved down a street near Union Square, half torn up for the new subway. A long trench ran the whole length of the block. Vincent could see the workers deep inside sledgehammering and shoveling.

  Gus pointed to the trench. “Nobody believed in the subway either. By the way, I have a title for our song.”

  “We’re writing a song?” Vincent asked.

  “‘In My Merry Oldsmobile.’ What do you think?”

  “A song about driving?”

  “A song that everybody’ll be singing when they get themselves one of these.” Blat-blat! “We’ll make a fortune! I’ve even got a bit of the tune.” He whistled it.

  Vincent looked around for inspiration. A streetcar ahead. Horse and cart congestion. Subway workers tipping rubble into a cart. As they turned to stare, the whites of their astonished eyes glowed in their dirt-blackened faces. It was miserable work. How long before Vincent would be working alongside them?

  He closed his eyes and imagined someone besides him in the Oldsmobile. Not a nervous newcomer from Newfoundland worried about his future, but a bold young man called …

  “Young Johnny has an Oldsmobile,” Vincent sang to Gus’s tune.

  “Vincie! You are good! I could tell when I heard you playing at the Black Cat.”

  Just as Gus said this, a real boy came into view. He was the ragged kind Vincent saw everywhere in New York. This one was lugging a carpet bag in one hand and dragging a wooden box. How could someone so small carry so much?

  As they got closer, he saw the strap around his neck. A barrel organ.

  “Watch out!” Vincent yelled.

  The Oldsmobile sideswiped the boy and sent him toppling into the gutter. Gus braked. He and Vincent jumped out and joined the concerned passersby gathering around the boy. He seemed unhurt, but he was hysterical over the bag.

  “What’s he got in there?” someone asked.

  “Gatto, gatto,” the boy wailed, clutching the bag.

  A stout woman in a kerchief pried away his fingers. They got the briefest glimpse inside before the boy snatched the bag back.

  Stained white fur.

  Gus groaned. “I killed his cat.” He took off his hat. “I’m sorry about your gatto, kid. Honest.”

  “It would’ve been the kid if he wasn’t carrying the bag!” said a brawny unshaven man in shirtsleeves. He towered over Gus.

  Gus tapped the crying boy’s shoulder and pointed to the Oldsmobile in the mid
dle of the road. Then he nodded to Vincent, who took the organ and slung it on the platform behind the seat. The stout woman nudged the boy.

  At last he picked himself up and followed, sniffing and smearing tears and snot around his face, leaving muddy streaks. He seemed afraid to get into the automobile.

  Gus gave him a boost. When they were all seated, he asked, “Where to?”

  The boy pointed straight ahead. As soon as they began to move, his face bloomed with wonderment. He peered at the steering rod, then down at the pedals Gus was working with his feet. Reaching out a filthy hand, he touched the dashboard. Every time they turned a corner, he smiled. Then he would look down at the bag in his lap and well up again with tears.

  Down to the Lower East Side they drove, to the dark rows of tenements, the grimy shops with their soiled awnings, the tattery sails of laundry flying from the fire escapes. The boy seemed oblivious to the stares of the people they passed — untamed children like him, a ragged peddler, his cart clinking with pots.

  Finally, he gestured to a building fronted by a pair of smoking ash cans. Gus stopped, and Vincent stepped down onto the cobbles to let the boy out.

  “Take the bag,” Gus told Vincent. “We’ll throw it in the river for him.”

  When Vincent reached for the carpet bag, the boy renewed his wails. Gus jumped out and opened his wallet. What he offered was more than the boy had ever seen in his life. Vincent knew this because it was more than he had ever seen.

  The boy glanced at the building and, shuddering, took the money. Off he staggered, dragging the organ and bawling like an opera singer.

  * * *

  And what about poor Pudding Tat?

  Don’t worry. When the Oldsmobile passed Gian­carlo, the engine crank snagged the carpet bag and sent him spinning. The stain they’d glimpsed when the bag was opened was from his trampling in the Temple of Music, the gash on his back he’d been unable to reach with his tongue.