Tomcat in Love by Tim O’Brien

wounded of late: a felon for a husband, a marriage gone stale. Her libido, like her spouse, had been locked away behind steel bars, and I dare say that in different ways, to different degrees, we shared a common hurt.
    “Give it a chance,” I said quietly. “The snake connects to the rats, the rats connect to the mattress.”
    “Rats?”
    “Of course.”
    Mrs. Kooshof sighed. “Well, for Pete’s sake. I thought you said
cat.
”
    “And so I did. I was just about to—”
    “Christ help me,” said Mrs. Kooshof.
    What happened, I told her, was that on a sunny morning in 1952—in June, to be exact, barely a week before Herbie and I constructed our plywood airplane—an event occurred that created a chain reaction leading to marital cataclysm half a lifetime later. Innocently enough, this disastrous sequence began with our usual feeding program: the purchase of a fresh rat, the hike back to Herbie’s house, the climb up to the attic. All perfectly routine, I explained. Herbie went through his standard pre-feeding ritual, dangling the rat by its tail over Sebastian’s cage, chanting “Dinner, dinner,” partly teasing, partly whetting Sebastian’s appetite. On this occasion, however, the rodent was a particularly lively specimen, large and black and brawny, and with a great squeak it suddenly jerked free and dropped to the windowsill behind Sebastian’s cage. Instantly, it darted outside and scrambled down to a narrow ledge four or five feet below the window. It crouched there, just out of reach.
    Herbie’s face creased up. The rat had cost him seventy-five cents—a fortune back then.
    Anyone but Herbie, I believe, would have given up. The ledge was at most ten inches wide—thirty or forty feet above a cementdriveway—but after a second he made a decisive grunting sound and said, “Stay here. I’ll be right back.” He disappeared down the attic stairs, returning after a few minutes with a length of rope and a large gray cat.
    He grinned and flicked his eyebrows and marched over to the open window. Almost immediately, I recognized the logic at work.
    Herbie secured one end of his rope to the cat’s hind paws, lifted the animal to the sill, grasped the rope, and began lowering the cat head down toward the half-crazed, half-paralyzed rat. Here, I thought, was genius. Insensitive, yes, but Herbie Zylstra had a firm understanding of the laws of nature: Ours is essentially a cat-eat-rat world.
    Mrs. Kooshof blanched. “You mean …?”
    “I do, indeed. A fishing expedition. Live bait.”
    “You’re
both
sick.”
    I leaned back in the tub, polished off my wine, rearranged my feet against their fleshy cushions.
    “Sickness,” I said gravely, “is beside the point.”
    “There isn’t any point!” she snapped. “And get those
feet
off me.”
    I responded as a gentleman, with a tolerant, forgiving, wholly benevolent smile. My feet, however, remained in place.
    “All in good time,” I said briskly, then reviewed the circumstances for her: how Herbie had tied the cat to a rope—a fairly
large
cat, I added—and began lowering it toward the trembling rat. (This dizzying operation, I will admit, soon nauseated me.) And the cat, too, seemed out of sorts—eyes glazed, hissing, pawing at the air with its front legs. “Hey, be careful,” Lorna Sue murmured, “you’ll hurt my
cat
,” but Herbie shook his head and told her it was like a carnival ride, lots of fun.
    Lorna Sue frowned. “Well, it doesn’t
look
like fun,” she said. “Topsy-turvy and upside down and everything.”
    Herbie paid no attention.
    Carefully, muttering to himself, he kept inching his baited rope down toward the cornered rat. The idea, of course, was for the cat to seize the rat in its mouth, at which point Herbie would instantly yank both creatures back into the attic. An elegant concept, but one complicated by issues of geometry and discomfort. Three stories high, suspended by its hind paws, the terror-crazed feline had no stomach