The essential peter s be.., p.9
The Essential Peter S. Beagle, Volume 1, page 9
“For God’s sake, don’t let him!” the same woman called from the shelter of a doorway. But two men made shushing gestures at her, saying, “It’s all right, he knows how to use that thing. Go ahead, buddy.”
The shots had at last frightened the little dogs away from Lila. She crouched among the twitching splotches of fur, with her muzzle wrinkled back and her eyes more black than green. Farrell saw a plaid rag that had been a dog jacket protruding from under her body. The superintendent stooped and squinted over the gun barrel, aiming with grotesque care, while the men cried to him to shoot. He was too far from the werewolf for her to reach him before he fired the last silver bullet, though he would surely die before she died. His lips were moving as he took aim.
Two long steps would have brought Farrell up behind the superintendent. Later he told himself that he had been afraid of the pistol, because that was easier than remembering how he had felt when he looked at Lila. Her tongue never stopped lapping around her dark jaws; and even as she set herself to spring, she lifted a bloody paw to her mouth. Farrell thought of her padding in the bedroom, breathing on his face. The superintendent grunted and Farrell closed his eyes. Yet even then he expected to find himself doing something.
Then he heard Mrs. Braun’s unmistakable voice. “Don’t you dare!”
She was standing between Lila and the superintendent: one shoe gone, and the heel off the other one, her knit dress torn at the shoulder, and her face tired and smudgy. But she pointed a finger at the startled superintendent, and he stepped quickly back, as though she had a pistol, too.
“Lady, that’s a wolf,” he protested nervously. “Lady, you please get, get out of the way. That’s a wolf, I go shoot her now.”
“I want to see your license for that gun.” Mrs. Braun held out her hand. The superintendent blinked at her, muttering in despair. She said, “Do you know that you can be sent to prison for twenty years for carrying a concealed weapon in this state? Do you know what the fine is for having a gun without a license? The fine is Five. Thousand. Dollars.”
The men down the street were shouting at her, but she swung around to face the creature snarling among the little dead dogs.
“Come on, Lila,” she said. “Come on home with Bernice. I’ll make tea and we’ll talk. It’s been a long time since we’ve really talked, you know? We used to have nice long talks when you were little, but we don’t anymore.” The wolf had stopped growling, but she was crouching even lower, and her ears were still flat against her head. Mrs. Braun said, “Come on, baby. Listen, I know what—you’ll call in sick at the office and stay for a few days. You’ll get a good rest, and maybe we’ll even look around a little for a new doctor, what do you say? Schechtman hasn’t done a thing for you, I never liked him. Come on home, honey. Momma’s here, Bernice knows.” She took a step towards the silent wolf, holding out her hand.
The superintendent gave a desperate, wordless cry and pumped forward, clumsily shoving Mrs. Braun to one side. He leveled the pistol point-blank, wailing, “My dog, my dog!” Lila was in the air when the gun went off, and her shadow sprang after her, for the sun had risen. She crumpled down across a couple of dead Pekes. Their blood dabbled her breasts and her pale throat.
Mrs. Braun screamed like a lunch whistle. She knocked the superintendent into the street and sprawled over Lila, hiding her completely from Farrell’s sight. “Lila, Lila,” she keened to her daughter, “poor baby, you never had a chance. He killed you because you were different, the way they kill everything different.” Farrell approached her and stooped down, but she pushed him against a wall without looking up. “Lila, Lila, poor baby, poor darling, maybe it’s better, maybe you’re happy now. You never had a chance, poor Lila.”
The dog owners were edging slowly back and the surviving dogs were running to them. The superintendent squatted on the curb with his head in his arms. A wary, muffled voice said, “For God’s sake, Bernice, would you get up off me? You don’t have to stop yelling, just get off.”
When she stood up, the cars began to stop in the street again. It made it very difficult for the police to get through. Nobody pressed charges, because there was no one to lodge them against. The killer dog—or wolf, as some insisted—was gone; and if she had an owner, he could not be found. As for the people who had actually seen the wolf turn into a young girl when the sunlight touched her, most of them managed not to have seen it, though they never really forgot. There were a few who knew quite well what they had seen, and never forgot it either, but they never said anything. They did, however, chip in to pay the superintendent’s fine for possessing an unlicensed handgun. Farrell gave what he could.
Lila vanished out of Farrell’s life before sunset. She did not go uptown with her mother, but packed her things and went to stay with friends in the Village. Later he heard that she was living on Christopher Street, and later still, that she had moved to Berkeley and gone back to school. He never saw her again.
“It had to be like that,” he told Ben once. “We got to know too much about each other. See, there’s another side to knowing. She couldn’t look at me.”
“You mean because you saw her with all those dogs? Or because she knew you’d have let that little nut shoot her?” Farrell shook his head.
“It was that, I guess, but it was more something else, something I know. When she sprang, just as he shot at her that last time, she wasn’t leaping at him. She was going straight for her mother. She’d have got her too, if it hadn’t been sunrise.”
Ben whistled softly. “I wonder if her old lady knows.”
“Bernice knows everything about Lila,” Farrell said.
Mrs. Braun called him nearly two years later to tell him that Lila was getting married. It must have cost her a good deal of money and ingenuity to find him (where Farrell was living then, the telephone line was open for four hours a day), but he knew by the spitefulness in the static that she considered it money well spent.
“He’s at Stanford,” she crackled. “A research psychologist. They’re going to Japan for their honeymoon.”
“That’s fine,” Farrell said. “I’m really happy for her, Bernice.” He hesitated before he asked, “Does he know about Lila? I mean, about what happens—?”
“Does he know?” she cried. “He’s proud of it—he thinks it’s wonderful! It’s his field!”
“That’s great. That’s fine. Goodbye, Bernice. I really am glad.”
And he was glad, and a little wistful, thinking about it. The girl he was living with here had a really strange hang-up.
The first draft of “Gordon, The Self-Made Cat” was written more than forty years ago, when I was living on nine wild acres in the hills north of Santa Cruz, California, with my young family. We had an unguessable number of cats in those days, if you count not only the indoor and outdoor residents, but also the visitors who treated our peeling red shack as a sort of bed-and-breakfast establishment. What we definitely didn’t have was a mouse problem (gophers were another matter). I made up the valiant Gordon to amuse the children, sent his story off to an animation company that had requested ideas for a feature film, shrugged at their almost immediate rejection, then buried the piece in my battered filing cabinet and completely forgot about it. It didn’t surface again until 2001, when some friends stumbled across it while helping me move.
I’m currently working on expanding it, adding new characters and more adventures, for eventual book publication. I’ve always loved Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little; the longer version of Gordon will be my own small nod in that very challenging direction.
Gordon, The Self-Made Cat
Once upon a time to a family of house mice there was born a son named Gordon. He looked very much like his father and mother and all his brothers and sisters, who were gray and had bright, twitchy, black eyes, but what went on inside Gordon was very different from what went on inside the rest of his family. He was forever asking why everything had to be the way it was, and never satisfied with the answer. Why did mice eat cheese? Why did they live in the dark and only go out when it was dark? Where did mice come from, anyway? What were people? Why did people smell so funny? Suppose mice were big and people were tiny? Suppose mice could fly? Most mice don’t ask many questions, but Gordon never stopped.
One evening, when Gordon was only a few weeks old, his next-to-eldest sister was sent out to see if anything interesting had been left open in the pantry. She never returned. Gordon’s father shrugged sadly and spread his front paws, and said, “The cat.”
“What’s a cat?” Gordon asked.
His mother and father looked at one another and sighed. “They have to know sometime,” his father said. “Better he learns it at home than on the streets.”
His mother sniffled a little and said, “But he’s so young,” and his father answered, “Cats don’t care.” So they told Gordon about cats right then, expecting him to start crying and saying that there weren’t any such things. It’s a hard idea to get used to. But Gordon only asked, “Why do cats eat mice?”
“I guess we taste very good,” his father said.
Gordon said, “But cats don’t have to eat mice. They get plenty of other food that probably tastes as good. Why should anybody eat anybody if he doesn’t have to?”
“Gordon,” said his father. “Listen to me. There are two kinds of creatures in the world. There are animals that hunt, and animals that are hunted. We mice just happen to be the kind of animal that gets hunted, and it doesn’t really matter if the cat is hungry or not. It’s the way life is. It’s really a great honor to be the hunted, if you just look at it the right way.”
“Phooey on that,” said Gordon. “Where do I go to learn to be a cat?”
They thought he was joking, but as soon as Gordon was old enough to go places by himself, he packed a clean shirt and some peanut butter, and started off for cat school. “I love you very much,” he said to his parents before he left, “but this business of being hunted for the rest of my life just because I happened to be born a mouse is not for me.” And off he went, all by himself.
All cats go to school, you know, whether you ever see them going or not. Dogs don’t, but cats always have and always will. There are a great many cat schools, so Gordon found one easily enough, and he walked bravely up the front steps and knocked at the door. He said that he wanted to speak to the Principal.
He almost expected to be eaten right there, but the cats—students and teachers alike—were so astonished that they let him pass through, and one of the teachers took him to the Principal’s office. Gordon could feel the cats looking at him, and hear the sounds their noses made as they smelled how good he was, but he held on tight to the suitcase with his shirt and the peanut butter, and he never looked back.
The Principal was a fat old tiger cat who chewed on his tail all the time he was talking to Gordon. “You must be out of your mind,” he said when Gordon told him he wanted to be a cat. “I’d smack you up this minute, but it’s bad luck to eat crazies. Get out of here! The day mice go to cat school . . .”
“Why not?” said Gordon. “Is it in writing? Where does it say that I can’t go to school here if I want?”
Well, of course there’s nothing in the rules of cat schools that says mice can’t enroll. Nobody ever thought of putting it in.
The Principal folded his paws and said, “Gordon, look at it this way—”
“You look at it my way,” said Gordon. “I want to be a cat, and I bet I’d make a better one than the dopey-looking animals I’ve seen in this school. Most of them look as if they wouldn’t even make good mice! So let’s make a deal. You let me come to school here and study for one term, and if at the end of that time I’m not doing better than any cat in the school—if even one cat has better grades than I have—then you can eat me and that’ll be the end of it. Is that fair?”
No cat can resist a challenge like that. But before agreeing, the Principal insisted on one small change: at the end of the term, if Gordon didn’t have the very best marks in the school, then the privilege of eating him would go to the cat that did.
“Ought to encourage some of those louts to work harder,” the Principal said to himself, as Gordon left his office. “He’s crazy, but he’s right—most of them wouldn’t even make good mice. I almost hope he does it.”
So Gordon went to cat school. Every day he sat at his special little desk, surrounded by a hundred kittens and half-grown cats who would have liked nothing better than to leap on him and play games with him for a while before they gobbled him. He learned how to wash himself, and what to do to keep his claws sharp, and how to watch everything in the room while pretending to be asleep. There was a class on Dealing with Dogs, and another on Getting Down from Trees, which is much harder than climbing up, and also a particularly scholarly seminar on the various meanings of “Bad Kitty!” Gordon’s personal favorite was the Visions class, which had to do with the enchanting things all cats can see that no one else ever does—the great, gliding ancestors, and faraway castles, and mysterious forests full of monsters to chase. The Professor of Visions told his colleagues that he had never had such a brilliant student. “It would be a crime to eat such a mouse!” he proclaimed everywhere. “An absolute, shameful, yummy crime.”
The class in Mouse-Hunting was a bit awkward at first, because usually the teacher asks one of the students to be the mouse, and in Gordon’s case the Principal felt that would be too risky. But Gordon insisted on being chased like everyone else, and not only was he never caught (well, almost never; there was one blue Persian who could turn on a dime), but when he took his own turn at chasing, he proved to be a natural expert. In fact his instant mastery of the Flying Pounce caused his teacher and the entire class to sit up and applaud. Gordon took three bows and an encore.
There was also a class where the cats learned the necessities of getting along with people: how to lie in laps, how to keep from scratching furniture even when you feel you have to, what to do when children pick you up, and how to ask for food or affection in such a sweet manner that people call other people to look at you. These classes always made Gordon a little sad. He didn’t suppose that he would ever be a real “people” cat, for who would want to hold a mouse on his lap, or scratch it behind the ears while it purred? Still, he paid strict attention in People Class, as he did in all the others, for all the cats knew that whoever did best in school that term would be the one who ate him, and they worked harder than they ever had in their lives. The Principal said that they were becoming the best students in the school’s history, and he talked openly about making this a regular thing, one mouse to a term.cdf
When all the marks were in, and all the grades added up, two students led the rankings: Gordon and the blue Persian. Their scores weren’t even a whisker’s thickness apart. In the really important classes, like Running and Pouncing, Climbing, Stalking, and Waiting for the Prey to Forget You’re Still There; and in matters of feline manners such as Washing, Tail Etiquette, The Elegant Yawn, Sleeping in Undignified Positions, and Making Sure You Get Enough Food Without Looking Greedy (101 and 102)—in all of these Gordon and the blue Persian were first, and the rest nowhere. Besides that, both could meow in five different dialects: Persian, Abyssinian, Siamese, Burmese (which almost no cat who isn’t Burmese ever learns), and basic tiger.
But there can only be one Top Cat to a term; no ties allowed. In order to decide the matter once and for all between them, the Principal announced that Gordon and the blue Persian would have to face one another in a competitive mouse roundup.
The Persian and Gordon got along quite well, all things considered, so they shook paws—carefully—and the Persian purred, “No hard feelings.”
“None at all,” Gordon answered. “If anyone here got to eat me, I’d much rather it was you.”
“Very sporting of you,” the Persian said. “I hope so too.”
“But it won’t happen,” Gordon said.
The blue Persian never had a chance. Once he and Gordon were set on their marks in a populous mouse neighborhood, Gordon ambushed and outsmarted and cornered all but a handful of the very quickest mice, and did it in a style so smooth, so effortlessly elegant—so catlike—that the Persian finally threw up his paws and surrendered. In front of the entire faculty and student body of the cat school, he announced, “I yield to Gordon. He’s a better cat than I am, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. If all mice were like him, we cats would be vegetarians.” (Persians are very dramatic.)
The cheering was so wild and thunderous that no one objected in the least when Gordon freed all the mice he had captured. Cats can appreciate a grand gesture, and everyone had already had lunch.
Gordon had won his bet, and, like the blue Persian, the Principal was cat enough to accept it graciously. He scheduled a celebration, which the whole school attended, and at the end of the party he announced that Gordon was now to be considered as much a cat as any student in the school, if not more so. He gave Gordon a little card to show that he was a cat in good standing, and all the students cheered, and Gordon made another speech that began, “Fellow cats . . .” As he spoke, he wished very much that his parents could be there to see what he had accomplished, and just how different things could be if you just asked questions and weren’t afraid of new ideas.
Being acknowledged the best cat in the school didn’t make Gordon let up in his studies. Instead, he worked even harder, and did so well that he graduated with the special degree of felis maximus, which is Latin for some cat! He stayed on at the school to teach a seminar in Evasive Maneuvers, which proved very popular, and a course in the Standing Jump (for a bird that comes flying over when you weren’t looking).
The story of his new life spread everywhere among all mice, and grew very quickly into a myth more terrifying than any cat could have been. They whispered of “Gordon the Terrible,” “Gordon, the Self-Made Cat,” and, simply, “The Unspeakable,” and told midnight tales of a gigantic mouse who lashed his tail and sprang at them with his razor claws out and his savage yellow eyes blazing; a mouse without pity who hunted them out in their deepest hiding places, walking without a sound. They believed unquestioningly that he ate mice like gingersnaps, and laughingly handed over to his cat friends those he was too full to devour. There was even a dreadful legend that Gordon had eaten his own family, and that he frequently took kittens from the school on field trips in order to teach them personally the secret mouse ways that no mere cat could ever have known.
