The House Guests by John D. MacDonald Page B

the purposeful porkiness of old. He found a good hunting area in an overgrown vacant lot nearby. He brought in a huge, indignant bluejay who, when released, spent a good part of the afternoon on a low limb screaming obscenities and evidently accusing Geoff of unfair tactics. Both cats filled the house with lizards. That was something Roger could catch, too, though not in the quantity Geoffrey achieved. Roger could never quite comprehend the standard tactic of the small green ones. When they would try to scurry away he would plant a foot on their tail. The lizard would keep on going and the little green tail would writhe for a little time and then grow still. He would stare at the tail, snuff at it, look at the lizard’s escape route, then cock his head to one side and then the other. Cats and dogs express bewildered curiosity in exactly the same manner.
    We learned that the housebound lizards could easily be induced to run into the open mouth of a brown paper bag after the cats had lost interest. We did miss some of the little green ones, and later we would find their bodies clinging to window screens in the high corners between screen and sash. Totally dried anddarkened, they looked far more prehistoric, savage little symbols of the frightful giants of the quaking earth an aeon ago. Johnny began saving the perfect ones, along with fishbones and bird skulls and the empty hulls of giant insects, shark teeth, oddly shaped stones. When, not too many years later, he began to draw with serious intent, began to show that almost ruthless unconcern toward other activities which is the plight and the strength of the artist, he turned to these things as models as he trained eye and hand.
    The cats brought in another kind of lizard, which none of us cared for and which even the cats seemed reluctant to fool with once they released them in the house. These were larger ones, fat, thick, black, damp, and short-legged. Their escape efforts on hardwood or linoleum were more snakelike than lizard-like, and when Geoff brought one in he would have his lips pulled high in his gesture of distaste.
    Having heard that some of the small Florida lizards were poisonous, having been told horrific tales of crazed and paralyzed cats, we were worried about what might happen. But they certainly had no inclination to eat the lizards. Roger, for several days, had a swelling and infection which could have come from a lizard bite, but we could not be certain that was the cause.
    At Piseco and at College Hill we had learned that our cats loved to accompany us on walks. Geoff was happy to plod along at our speed, staying several steps behind us like a small dog, pausing sometimes to investigate some interesting scent along the way, then hurrying to catch up to his self-assigned position. Roger made a vast, nutty game out of it, hiding until we had passed, then rocketing by us and hiding again to either pounce out as we passed, or to repeat the previous performance. If walks became too long itwas usually Roger who would lose interest first and go on about his own affairs.
    At Acacia Street this habit became a nuisance. After Geoff had recovered his morale, Dorothy and I fell into the habit of, after dinner, walking through the pleasant night to a little bar several blocks south and over on the other side of Mandalay Road, the main street on Clearwater Beach. The cats thought this was a splendid ceremony and tried to go along with us. But there was too good a chance of their getting run over on Mandalay either going over there with us or wandering around the area after we had gone inside. So we would close the cat window if they were in the house. If they weren’t, we would walk and keep an eye out for them and then con them into coming close enough for capture so we could take them home and shut them in.
    But you cannot safely con a cat very many times. They arrived at a catlike solution. When we were ready to leave for our pair of cold beers and game of table