Midas Crakenberry was the kind of man who gave curmudgeons a bad name. In all his 74 years, he had never spoken a kind word to, or about, anyone. He was, quite simply, the archetype of the proverbial mean old man.
Retired, he sat day after day on his front porch, drinking warm Jim Beam from the same filthy tumbler, the one with the chip on the rim. The only times he spoke were when grumbling to himself or shouting obscenities to any passersby who so much as glanced in his direction. Compared to Midas, Ebenezer Scrooge was the poster boy for cheerfulness. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, his life was not a pleasant one. Midas Crakenberry was, in short, waiting to die and his wait might have been short indeed, were it not for the unwelcome intervention. And that intrusion into the miserable life of one Midas Q. Crakenberry is the subject of our story.
It was July 23rd in the year of their Lord (as Midas insisted on referring to it) AD 1933. Midas was sitting, as usual, on the front porch of the ramshackle hovel he called home. The sun poured down like burning dust. Only the shade of the porch roof protected him from the worst of the heat. When he had finished his third glass of Jim Beam, he rose slowly and waddled into the house to get a refill. “Damnation!” he hissed to himself. “Should have brought the bottle out this morning. I hate this traipsing in and out.” He sounded like Yosemite Sam with an R-rated vocabulary.
Reaching the kitchen table, he grabbed the whiskey bottle, turned, and shuffled back out to the porch to resume his vigil. As soon as he sat down, he refilled his glass–well almost–the bottle was empty before the glass was half full. “Damnation!” he growled. “Now I’ll have to go get another bottle. I hate all these extra steps.”
He took a big slug of the vile liquid which left his face twisted even more sourly than usual, if that was possible. Smacking his lips, he look down the dirt road that ran past his house toward town. He saw two small boys walking slowly in his direction. His eyes squinted till they were little more than narrow slits. Sure enough, the boys were on his side of the road. He’d have some fun with them if they had the audacity to invade his domain. He surely would. Maybe this day wouldn’t be a total loss after all.
Midas had never married. The truth was that he couldn’t get a girl to go out with him twice. For that matter, most of them wouldn’t go out with him the first time. Needless to say, he was also childless. Never having spent any time at all around children, he saw them as little beasties, good for nothing at all, save providing him with objects for his harassment. Scaring children was one of the few activities that brought Midas what passed in his life for pleasure.
Much to his disappointment, the boys were onto him. (His reputation had long ago spread far and wide.) Fully 50 yards before the came to his property line, they crossed the road and worked their way back into the heavy underbrush on the other side until they were well out of Midas’s range.
“Damnation!” cursed Midas. “The little beggars got away.” He finished off the last of the whiskey in the glass. “I hate those stinkin’ kids,” he grumbled. “Hate them one and all.” He had only two choices now: stop drinking, or go in and open another bottle. It should come as no surprise that he chose the latter.
When he had returned to his porch perch and refilled his glass, he took a long swig. Just as he started to swallow the firewater, he heard a most unusual and startling sound. He nearly choked as his head jerked instinctively in the direction of the sound. At first he neither recognized the sound nor saw its source. Again it came, this time somewhat louder. His gaze was close enough now that it took him only a second to locate the offending object. But what was it? l He squinted then rubbed his eyes trying to focus. At last he saw, though with disbelief, the sorriest looking example of feline dissipation he had l ever seen. Low and behold, right there at the foot of his front porch steps, staring directly into his bleary eyes, sat a cat!
Again the cat made the noise. Now that he knew it was a cat, Midas realized that the sound bore some slight resemblance to the traditional “meow” that cats made. But this cat had apparently flunked out of meow school. The sound that it made was less like that of a cat than it was the horrible screeching of fingernails on window glass. It gave Midas goose bumps every time he heard it.
Now that he had things figured out–well, a little at least–he became angry. No one was allowed on his property, particularly not some mangy varmint that made such a godawful noise. “Git outta here, you mangy little shit!” yelled Midas, gesturing wildly with his free hand, the one without the whiskey glass in it. “If I have to come down there, you’ll wish I didn’t.” The cat made its now familiar sound. Nothing more.
Midas was becoming increasingly angry. Who did this disgusting creature think it was to defy him. He’d teach that damned cat not to mess around with Midas Crakenberry. He stood up and stomped his foot on the porch for emphasis as he shouted, “I said git! And I meant it!” Finally the cat, ambled slowly around the corner of the house and out of sight.
Midas sat back down and took a swig of Beam. “Guess I told him,” he muttered to himself with satisfaction. “Don’t expect I’ll see him around again.” He was so pleased with himself, he nearly smiled.
By the time the bottle was a third gone, Midas had dozed off right there in his porch chair. When he woke up, it was already dark and he pulled himself up, still quite drunk, and dragged himself into the house where he collapsed on his bed. There he stayed until the next morning.
After heating and consuming a can of beans that morning, Midas poured himself a glass of whiskey and ambled out to resume his vigil on the porch. To his surprise and disappointment, the first sound that greeted his ears was the awful screeching of the cat. “Damnation!” gnarled Midas. “You again? I thought I was rid of the likes of you.” There on the bottom-most porch step was the ragged cat, just sitting and staring at him.
Midas wasn’t going to take this insult sitting down. He rose to his feet again, but not before he grabbed hold of the empty whiskey bottle he’d finished off the day before. With great effort, he reared back and hurled it in the general direction of the offending feline. He really would have liked to have hit it squarely on its ugly head, and he tried his best to do so. However, considering that his eyes weren’t as good as they once were, he had a not inconsiderable hangover, and never was much of an athlete, he was lucky to send the bottle anywhere on the same continent as his intended target. Actually, he got an assist from a wind gust and only missed the cat by a few feet
The resulting crash of the impact and the tinkle of shards of glass splaying all over was sufficient to send the cat scurrying off again. Where it went was a mystery to Midas, but that was fine as long as the blamed thing was gone. “The nerve of some critters,” he grumbled as he stumbled back to his chair.
The remainder of the day Midas spent drinking, griping to himself about the unfairness of life, and giving a tongue-lashing to a couple of kids that had the temerity to walk past his house (they must have been new in town). By mid-afternoon he had again drunk himself into a stupor.
This time he managed to drag himself to bed before passing out. Midas crawled out of bed just after the crack of noon the following day and was at his post on the front porch shortly before one o’clock. He was slightly more hungover than usual and the effect on his mood was predictably negative. By the time he had consumed a substantial dose of the hair of the dog, he was almost back to his normal cantankerous self.
The sun was now high in me sky and the heat was more than enough to cause Midas to sweat profusely. He mopped his dripping brow often as he patrolled the horizon in search of targets for his wrath. Between the heat, the hangover and dog hair, he was on the verge of unconsciousness, but managed to stay barely awake lest he miss an opportunity to take pot shots at some hapless passers-by.
He was jerked out of his dazed semi-consciousness by a familiar howl. Even before he opened and focused his eyes (as best he could) he knew that the cat was back. When his eyes and brain finally reached agreement on how to work together, he saw that this time the cat sitting not on the steps, but right there on the porch at the top of the stairs! Crakenberry was furious. “Damnation!” he shouted quite out loud. “Get the hell off my porch you blasted varmint!” The cat didn’t so much as flinch. He jumped out of his chair and stomped his feet (which nearly caused him to fall over due to the disastrous state of his equilibrium). The cat stood his ground. Next, he tried to kick the cat but found that difficult to do since to do so required him to perform the delicate athletic maneuver of standing on one foot, an action of which he was incapable at the moment.
Not to be denied, Midas seized on the perfect solution. He staggered with all possible urgency into the house and reappeared moments later with the .45 caliber pistol he had brought back from the war.
“You get off my porch right now,” he said in a most serious way, “or I swear I’ll blow you right into the next county!” The cat just looked at him for a few moments, then opened its mouth and uttered that awful sound.
That was all Midas needed to push him over the edge into a murderous rage. He raised the pistol and brought it to bear on the blur that he was pretty sure was the cat. As the barrel wandered to and fro, at and around the target, Midas squinted, blinked and eventually, quite by accident, got off a shot. When the smoke cleared and the silence of the summer afternoon returned, the cat was nowhere to be found. All that was left was a small pool of blood on the porch and a few more drops trailing down the steps.
It was then that Midas experienced a strange emotion, one he couldn’t remember ever having felt before. It was not at all pleasant. In fact, it was one of the most unbearable feelings he had ever experienced. Had he lived a life that was within sub-light travel of normality, he would have recognized it as a heady mixture of guilt and remorse. Such not being the case, however, he just flopped down in his chair and took a long pull right from the bottle of Jim Beam.
For over an hour he sat and drank, drank and sat, and all the time he couldn’t quite shake that terrible feeling. In fact, he was pretty sure it was actually getting worse. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he couldn’t seem to get his mind off that damned cat. The worse he felt, the more he thought about the cat, and the more he thought about the cat, the worse he felt.
By mid-afternoon he had worried himself nearly sober. Finally, in an act of monumental desperation, he dragged himself out of the chair and staggered down the steps. He followed the thin trail of blood around the corner of the house and finally to the back. There in the shade of the back stoop he saw the cat. He froze in his tracks and suddenly he felt cooler than he had since January.
Had he killed it? What if he had, the damned thing had been asking for it. Hadn’t he? Well if that was true, then why on earth was he standing there holding his breath, hoping to see it move? For the first time in his life, he was actually sorry he had never learned to pray.
After several minutes of paralyzed staring, he moved slowly to the place where the fallen feline lay. As he approached, he could see a large flap of skin just over the right eye laying wide open. Crouching down, with trembling fingers (not entirely from alcohol narcosis), he reached out and touched the top of the cat’s head. When the cat twitched in response to his touch, he jerked his hand away so fast that he fell right over backward. Was it just a nervous reflex, or was it still alive? He didn’t know.
When he had regained what little was left of his composure, he reached out again and poked the cat’s belly. This time he clearly saw a leg move. It didn’t look like a reflex. Moments later there was more movement without his doing anything to evoke it. The cat was definitely alive.
Another new emotion surged through Midas. Had he ever experienced it before, he would have immediately recognized it as relief followed by elation. He gently slid his hands under the wounded cat, carefully cradling its bleeding head and lifted it off the ground. As quickly as he safely could, Midas carried the cat into the house and lay it down on a folded towel on the kitchen table. With a tenderness he didn’t know he possessed, he delicately washed the wound and, after folding the flap of skin and fur back in place, put a makeshift bandage over the wound. For his part, the cat lay very quietly and, though conscious, offered no resistance. He was a good little patient.
Once the operation had been completed, the cat opened its eyes and looked at Midas. Its lips parted slightly and to Midas’s utter amazement, he felt a damp and scratchy tongue rake across his finger. Suddenly, with neither warning nor prelude, mean old Midas Crakenberry, curmudgeon extraordinaire, started crying. It began with the unfamiliar sensation of a single tear working its way down his left cheek. Within seconds that single tear had lots of company. Before he knew what was happening to him, Midas was sobbing and wailing so loudly that he wondered if people on the road outside might hear him. But he didn’t care. It felt so good to be crying. How could anything feel that good to him? Nothing had felt good to Midas Crakenberry since…he had no idea.
The more he cried, the better it felt and the better it felt, the more he cried. Decades of fear, anger, frustration, disappointment, loneliness and lovelessness gushed out of him like a tsunami, and he reveled in it. He picked the cat up and cradled it in his arms and hugged it, careful not to squeeze it too tight. He raised it high against his chest so that he could rub his cheek against its fur. Again the cat licked him, this time on his still teary cheek. And it kept licking his tears away until they stopped coming quite a long time later.
There’s no point in saying that Midas Crakenberry was a new man after that. In some ways, he didn’t change at all. He still spent most of his time glued to his chair on the front porch, though the inflow of Jim Beam slowed markedly. He still kept pretty much to himself. He still bathed slightly less often than most people paint their houses.
On the other hand, it could be said that nothing in himself or his life was ever quite the same again. He never again shouted obscenities at passersby. Never again did he lay in wait to ambush innocent children. In fact, there are unconfirmed rumors that he was actually caught smiling and waving to one child who walked by one windy autumn morning. But the boy was alone and no one else can corroborate his story.
The cat knows, though. The cat (whom Midas named Phoenix for reasons too obvious to mention) knows more than he tells and we can only suspect that he always did. He knew how to turn Midas Crakenberry inside out. He knew they needed each other. He knew that from that day forward they would make Siamese twins look like total strangers. And he knew that they would one day be found laying frozen side by each on Midas’s rumpled bed, cuddled like sleeping children, smiling through catty lips. Yes indeed, Midas Crakenberry had himself quite a cat. And vice versa.
