by James Howard Kunstler
On fall days after the ordeal of school, when he felt jaded by all the other fabled attractions of Manhattan–the Planetarium, the gun department of Abercrombie & Fitch, the shrunken head gallery at the Museum of Natural History, the ski-ball emporiums of Time’s Square, and with the boats all pulled up for the winter along Central Park’s Lake–Jeff Greenaway, age eleven and a quarter, liked nothing better than to go over to his friend Bobby Schindler’s place and throw things off the roof.
Bobby’s apartment was far superior for this pastime than Jeff’s, since the Greenaways lived on the seventh floor of their building at 79th Street and Lexington, with all but the living room windows facing the rear of the building, where nobody ever went but the superintendent and his dour minions; whereas the Schindler’s inhabited a 15th floor penthouse in their building on 74th Street, overlooking Fifth Avenue with its buses and mobs of schoolchildren and elderly pedestrians and occasional horse-drawn carriages.
This particular gloomy-gray November afternoon, while President Kennedy entertained the now-forgotten head-of-state of a nation that no longer exists, and all else was well with the world, Bobby issued the invitation to Jeff as Mrs. Snipes’s class lined up in formation to debouch from Public School Number Six at the three o’clock bell.
“It’ll be great,” Bobby whispered over his shoulder while holding hands with the bovine Esther Grubka, his perennial partner in line, who was exactly his height. “We’ll have the whole place to ourselves. My mom’s having root canals at four o’clock.”
“What’s root canals?” Jeff asked.
“It’s this thing the dentist does to you. She says it’s pure hell.”
For a moment Jeff imagined a dark, sewer-like tunnel running through a person’s jawbone. The pointy roots of molars hung down from the ceiling like stalactites. He pictured his own dentist, Dr. Voortman, tricked out in baggy silver coveralls and space helmet, braving the forbidding place in the prow of a gondola, and brandishing a flame-thrower which he used to blast the blob-like germs that lurked everywhere in the dank shadows. It was especially hard for Jeff to link such a ghastly scene to Phyllis Schindler, a stately brunette who was one of the better-looking mothers in his acquaintance.
“God, that’s too bad about your mom,” Jeff said.
“She’ll live,” Bobby said. “Hey, I’ve got some firecrackers, too.”
“No talking on line,” Mrs. Snipes said blithely as she switched off the lights and the children marched forward.
“We can pick up some supplies on the way,” Jeff whispered to the back of Bobby’s neck. “It’ll be great. We’ll blow up the whole city.”
“They’re going to blow up the whole city, Mrs. Snipes!” cried Barbara Mitterwald, Jeff’s partner in line and the class snitch, who wore skirts with felt poodles sewn on and always drew exactly the same picture of a horse every time the class did art.
“Don’t worry, children,” Mrs. Snipes replied musically. “With President Kennedy in the White House, nobody’s going to blow up anything.”
By “supplies” Jeff meant balloons, which they customarily filled with water and lobbed off the terrace at various targets below. So, on their way to Bobby’s house they stopped at the newsstand on 77th Street run by a prankish Hungarian who had been used as an ashtray by the Nazi guards at Treblinka, and who sold many things that boys liked such as plastic vomit, false beards, soap that turned an unsuspecting victim’s hands black, squirting boutonnieres, invisible ink, flies embalmed in plastic ice cubes, et cetera, and here Jeff was seized by inspiration when he beheld a rack of balsa wood gliders.
“Hey, I got a great idea,” he said. “We scotch-tape those firecrackers to the wings of these babies and sail ‘em out over the park. It’ll be like the Battle of Midway.”
“You’re a goddam genius, you know that?” Bobby said.
The gliders were a dime each. They bought a dozen plus two packs of balloons. There was no need to squander their cash on candy, since the Schindlers kept on hand at all times an impressive horde of the foods required by children. Then they hurried the remaining blocks to 74th street, rode upstairs with Kelly the singing elevator man, who always hummed a plaintive ditty of his native land on the way up (never down for some reason), and entered the penthouse to find Althea the maid ironing linens in the dining room.
“Don’t you chirrun mess up my flo’, now,” she warned them as they made immediately for the kitchen.
“What’s she doing here?” Jeff whispered anxiously.
“It must be her day to come.”
“Obviously it must be. She’s here.”
“Don’t sweat it–we’re taking our shoes off, Althea!”
“. . . and watch them crumbs. I already done cleaned that kitchen once today.”
Though it was not his home, Jeff knew exactly where the Schindlers stockpiled their goodies, the top drawer under the breakfast counter, where he now gazed down at a bonanza of Hershey’s miniatures, bite-sized Baby Ruths, Mounds bars, Butterfingers, and Milky Ways. Mr. Schindler was in the entertainment business.
Bobby scouted the refrigerator for Cokes.
“Holy moley,” he said. “Look what’s here!” He took out a Spanish melon bigger than his head. “Want to give this baby the old heave-ho and see what happens?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Jeff said, his mouth filled with confections.
They adjourned to the bedroom that Bobby shared, theoretically, with his older brother Steve, who was away at the Trent School in New Hampshire. Curled up on the lower of two bunk beds was a mottled brown and white angora cat named Mehetabel, an animal of undetermined age whom the Schindlers had rescued as a stray several years before at Cape Cod. A placid, pliable creature who slept twenty-three hours a day, she was generally considered “the boys’ cat” though Bobby’s mother had come up with her name.
Jeff took a seat at the desk and began the tedious task of assembling all the gliders. Bobby crawled onto the bunk and hoisted Mehetabel onto his stomach. She remained there, purring madly, and licking the melted chocolate in the corners of Bobby’s mouth.
“That’s disgusting,” Jeff remarked.
“It’s okay,” Bobby said. “We’re married. Hey, how’s about filling up those balloons?”
They were soon ready to remove to the terrace when another inspiration seized Jeff. He held up one of Bobby’s brother’s 45 rpm records. “You know what?” he said. “We could scotch-tape three firecrackers to a record and twist the fuses together in the hole in the center and wing ‘em out over the park.”
“They’re not my records,” Bobby said.
“If Steve cared about them, do you think he’d have left them with you?”
“He’d kill me.”
“Look at this: Johnny Angel by Shelly Faberes! Sickening!”
“All right,” Bobby said, retrieving his precious horde of firecrackers from a secret hiding place inside a hollow cardboard globe.
They armed the records and soon they were ready to commence the aerial bombardment of Fifth Avenue.
A moderate breeze blew out of the southeast, with occasional freak gusts in all directions. Below, Central Park spread like a mauve sea, the trees by now mostly stripped of their leaves. Directly ahead lay the Conservatory Pond, bean-shaped from this height, its surface dotted with the white sails of model yachts. Beyond the pond lay the greater ragged expanse of Olmsted’s lake, the Adirondacks in miniature. Behind all this stood the somber sentinel row of apartment buildings on Central Park West, stretching north into the mists of Harlem. A five foot high wall rimmed the Schindler’s terrace, but a set of French planting boxes placed against it made excellent platforms from which to stand and peer over the building’s edge.
“Let’s toss some pennies off first,” Bobby suggested. Pennies were fun because pedestrians would hear the sound of money ringing on the sidewalk and stop to look for it. Older people, especially who grew up during the Great Depression, were thrilled, and often got down on their hands and knees to search. Today, however, the wind was carrying the coins out over the street.
“That was a waste,” Bobby said.
“Let’s try that flying saucer,” Jeff suggested.
“Okay. I’ll light it, you fling it.”
The three little blue firecrackers were taped equilaterally to the “B” side, leaving Johnny Angel exposed to the heavens. Bobby struck an Ohio blue tip kitchen match on the rough brick wall. The braided fuses came alive with a bright sputter. Jeff held it in thrall, cackling wildly.
“Wing it, ya jerk!”
Jeff flung it with a backhand motion out over Fifth Avenue. It carried impressively on the wind and had barely begun to descend when all three charges went off sequentially in three discreet bursts of white smoke, and the vinyl fragments fluttered slowly to earth like the Devil’s own snow.
“Hey, that was all right,” Bobby said admiringly. “Let’s try a few more.”
“What’d I tell ya?”
So, Johnny Angel was followed by Purple People Eater by Sheb Wooley. It hooked in a broad arc to the right, and was cutting sharply downward across the avenue in direct line with a chestnut peddler’s smoking pushcart when the disk exploded. One larger fragment hung eerily in an updraft, then flew to pieces in a second and third explosion. Distant pale faces swaddled in fall clothing gazed up from the far sidewalk along the park’s edge at a gray smudge in the air which was all that remained of the number one hit record. The chestnut peddler hurried away as though he were pushing a rickshaw. They sacrificed two more top-ten hits: The Wayward Wind, by Gogi Grant, and Lonely Street, by Clarence “Frog Man” Henry. The latter lodged in the branches of Chinese elm tree across the avenue and sent up a flock of starlings on detonation.
“Y’all out of yo’ mind!?” Althea, unseen until now, screeched from behind them. “Git off that damn thang!” The boys stepped down from the planter. “You two gonna kill yo’sefs hanging off de roof like dat!”
“We saw this deer running through the park,” Jeff said.
Bobby cut an astonished glance at his friend.
“Say what?” Althea said, squinting in disbelief.
“It had antlers and everything.” Jeff said.
Althea, wearing her red wool coat–a sure sign that her day’s work was at an end–strode briskly to the wall and looked over. “Aint no deers in Central Park,” she muttered, “‘cept at de zoo.”
“It could have escaped from there,” Jeff said. “The way it was running I’m sure it did.”
“It might have been a big dog,” Bobby inserted.
“It wasn’t any dog,” Jeff said.
“Maybe it was a horse.”
“Do horses have antlers?”
“I don’t give a damn what it was,” Althea declared. “Y’all get off de terrace this minute. Go on, git!” She shooed them back inside. As Althea pulled on her gloves and stooped to pick up her immense vinyl tote bag, they stood sheepishly by the dining room table. “Yo mama be back at six. Don’t you go back out on dat terrace now, hear? If you kill yo’sefs, she only blame me.”
“Don’t worry, we won’t.” Bobby said.
“We have to study decimals,” Jeff said. “It’s really fascinating.”
“Well, you practice yo’ lesson, den,” Althea said, heading out the door. “And stay off dat damn terrace!”
As soon as the front door closed behind her, they returned to the terrace, this time with the four pound Spanish melon. Minutes later, Althea’s red coat could be seen emerging from under the green canopy at the building’s entrance.
“I have a feeling this could really hurt someone,” Jeff said.
“Okay, let’s try to heave it out into the middle of the street between lights when the cars are all lined up at seventy-fifth. We can time it.”
They climbed up in the planter again, the melon cradled between them. A stream of cars, yellow taxies, and buses passed in the avenue below.
“Start swingin’ her,” Bobby said.
“The light’s starting to change. They’re stopping.”
“Okay, on three, let her go.”
With excellent coordination, they discharged the melon over the terrace wall. Unfortunately, it arced sharply up before gravity overtook it, and it began plummeting rather short of the avenue’s temporarily vacant middle. As Jeff and Bobby gazed down in dread, the melon headed straight for a Buick parked at the curb. It landed directly on the vehicle’s roof. They couldn’t bear to see it and withdrew. A split second later a muffled report reverberated back up to the terrace, a sound as of a forest giant thumping on a colossal hollow log. Without another word, Bobby and Jeff bustled back inside and started watching television with ferocious intensity so that when the police showed up with Kelly the elevator man, they could feign complete ignorance of the dastardly act. The minutes ticked by with agonizing slowness. On TV, a fat woman was telling a story about her husband’s industrial accident to a studio audience who clapped when she finished.
“They’re gonna put us in reform school this time,” Bobby whimpered, clutching the purring Mehetabel.
“For Godsake, quit sniveling and act normal, in case they do come up here,” Jeff said.
Twenty minutes elapsed and no police arrived at the Schindler penthouse. They went back out to the terrace. Peering over the wall, they descried the fateful Buick parked at the curb below. The Spanish melon had landed in the exact center of its roof, its impacted residue radiating like a great slimy sunflower against the black metal. From this angle, the vehicle’s roof appeared somewhat cratered.
“Maybe we should stick to water balloons,” Jeff concluded.
“Let’s just fly some gliders for now.”
The first of the gliders hung on the updrafts generated by the canyons of apartment towers and repeatedly sailed back onto the terrace.
“Let’s take ‘em up there and launch them,” Jeff said, pointing to the art deco water tower that loomed another two stories above the Schindler’s penthouse roof. An iron ladder led from the terrace to a sort of workman’s balcony halfway up.
“You think it’s safe?”
“It must be. They put a ladder up to it.”
“I never saw anyone go there.”
“Come on.”
“Oh, okay.”
So they took several gliders up to the balcony, but the added height did not avail. The aircraft hung in the wind and landed on the terrace. By and by, Mehetabel the cat ventured out onto the patio and reclined languorously in a little puddle of sunlight.
“Your wife’s here,” Jeff said.
“I give up on these gliders.”
“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Jeff said. “Let’s parachute her down to the terrace from up here.”
“Who?”
“Your cat.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“It’d be just like Coney Island.”
“You’re crazy.”
“You saw the way all those planes are blowing. Come on, let’s fix up a parachute.”
“I don’t know about this.”
“Bobby, your cat is going to die of boredom. It doesn’t have anything to do around here.”
“I don’t think it needs anything to do.”
“Of course it does. How would you feel cooped up in an apartment all day. If it was me, I’d commit suicide.”
“Oh, okay.”
They went back inside to look for a suitable parachute and found a perfect one in Phyllis Schindler’s pink damask tablecloth, which they rigged with sturdy sisal utility twine to the leather chest harness that Mrs. Schindler had purchased that September they returned from Cape Cod with Mehetabel–thinking, like many persons who have never owned a cat before, that it would be fun to take her for walks in the park, as though she were a springer spaniel. Of course, it hadn’t worked out that way. It would have been easier to walk a twenty pound sack of Idaho potatoes.
The phlegmatic Mehetabel cooperated like a flight cadet as they fitted her harness with its thrilling new accessory and carried her back out to the terrace.
“You take her up there and I’ll stay down here and make sure she lands okay,” Jeff said.
“Are you positive about this?”
“I’m telling you, this cat needs some excitement in her life.”
Bobby took the cat up to the little balcony. It was, as a matter of fact, only twelve feet higher than the terrace. The chute already billowed out in the wind. Mehetabel felt practically weightless as Bobby held her over the rail.
“It’s gonna work,” Jeff shouted. “I can tell.”
“It feels okay.”
“Let her go, then.”
“Geronimo!”
Bobby released the cat. Like the gliders before, Mehetabel hung eerily suspended a moment on an updraft. Then she began to gently descend to the terrace, her damask parachute working beautifully–until a freak gust hoisted her up again and blew her toward the terrace wall.
“Grab her, for Godsake!” Bobby hollered from the balcony on the water tower. “Quick!”
But just as Jeff cleared a potted hydrangea, Mehetabel sailed over his head and out of reach.
“Hurry!”
Jeff lunged again, but tripped over a wicker chaise lounge. He looked up just in time to see Mehetabel’s back paws frantically backpedaling in space as she desperately tried to gain purchase on the concrete cap of the wall. She meowed once, and then she was gone.
“Omigod,” Bobby muttered from above.
Moments later, the two stood together on the planter at the wall, watching goggle-eyed as Mehetabel sailed westward across Fifth Avenue toward the immensity of Central Park, her legs now merely dangling, and her cries of “meow” gleeping across the ether like the yelps of an astounded voyager aloft in a strange and wondrous land.
“Forget the goddam elevator!” Bobby screamed, as Jeff frantically pounded the button. “Quick. Follow me!”
By the time they reached the lobby, their heads were swimming from all the turns and landings on the fire stairs. They got within a few steps of the building’s main entrance when Larry the swingshift doorman threw open the filigreed iron and glass door and in wobbled Phyllis Schindler, demure in a forest green cashmere wool coat, much like the Givanchy original Jackie Kennedy had worn on her recent state visit to Denmark. However, Mrs. Schindler held her head at a peculiar angle, her eyes looked bloodshot, perhaps even slightly crossed, and she seemed a bit unsteady on her feet.
“Where are you going?” she asked in a slurry voice, her lips still numb from the Novocain. “It’s almost six o’clock.”
“My grandmother just got hit by a taxi in front of Bloomingdale’s,” Jeff said.
“I gotta go along for moral support,” Bobby explained.
“It’s the truth,” Jeff said. “And she was only fifty-eight.”
“What! Is she dead?”
“They’re not sure yet.”
“Not sure. . . ?”
“Go upstairs and rest, Mom,” Bobby said. “I won’t be gone long.”
“Well, I certainly hope she comes through all right,” Mrs. Schindler said and reeled toward the elevator holding her jaw.
Once outside, they scanned the horizon across Fifth Avenue and spotted the distant silhouette of Mehetabel’s parachute against the pink-gray crepuscular sky, on a course that put her generally above the statue of Balto the Heroic Sled Dog, heading due west.
“Quick, follow me!” Bobby cried. The two bolted out into the rush hour traffic between a phalanx of checker cabs and a Penn Station bound bus, causing much squealing rubber to be left on the asphalt. Vaulting the stone wall that enclosed the park, they landed in a rhododendron bush, fought their way out of its ancient tangled labyrinth of limbs, raced around the pond past the statue of the pilgrim, caught up with the road that led to the Bethesda Fountain at the edge of Olmsted’s lake, and hurried down the stone steps to the masonry plaza below. At this hour of a crisp fall evening the park was empty of young lovers, nannies with prams, elderly strollers, and other of its more benign denizens.
“Look, there she is,” Bobby pointed to a speck flying above the graceful Bow Bridge.
“I think she’s getting a little lower.”
“Quick! This way!”
They followed the bike path that skirted the lakeshore, then crossed the Bow Bridge into that area of the park known as the Ramble, Olmsted’s favorite vignette, a Transylvanian wilderness of cliffs, secret grottos, twisted gnarly trees, dark vales, brooks, caves, and rotting rustic belvederes. They had just turned the corner on the twisting path when a very large man stepped out of the shadows and blocked their way. He wore pointy black shoes, checked pants, a greasy-looking greenish metallic suit jacket, and a blue porkpie hat with the rim turned clownishly up all around. He sucked on a toothpick that had the look of an auxiliary fang.
“You boys out for a li’l stroll?” he inquired.
“No,” Bobby said, “My cat is flying over the park in a parachute.”
“Hunh. . . ?”
“We really don’t have time for a robbery,” Jeff told him. “If you don’t move, I’ll bite you so hard you’ll bleed to death.”
“Just gimme a quarter.”
“Run, Bobby, run,” Jeff screeched as they dashed by the menacing if awkward figure. The man wheeled and made as if to give chase, but he had only moments earlier snuffed out his 37th Kool cigarette of the day, and his lungs could not take the exertion.
They emerged from the Ramble and darted across the busy Western Drive, where the cars now all had their headlights on. As they reached the far side, Mehetabel passed briefly over their heads–like an hallucination out of the Vedic myths–at an altitude now of about one hundred feet, and vanished over the treetops ahead. Sharing glances of amazement, the two dashed a final hundred yards to the 77th Street entrance and emerged from the park onto Central Park West, the mirror image of Fifth Avenue. Hurrying uptown, they stopped the occasional passerby to ask whether he or she had, perchance, seen a cat in a parachute along their way. Finally, they spied a crowd gathered on the sidewalk one last block north. Some of the crowd members were pointing up into a tree that grew along the outside of the park wall, a London plane tree, to be precise, one of the tallest examples of that handsome species to be found in the city (it was planted by vice-president Roosevelt in 1901), and, as they drew nearer, they could make out the telltale pink damask tablecloth dangling limply amid the bare branches about three quarters of the way up. Just below it, clinging to the tree’s mottled green-and-tan trunk, hung the intrepid Mehetabel. They could see her little pink mouth open and close, but her cries could not be discerned above the ambient noise of traffic and the chatter of the excited onlookers.
“Here Hetty! Here girl,” Bobby called up to her, making the little kissing noises to which, it universally supposed, cat’s cannot fail to do a human’s bidding. But Mehetabel would not budge from her precarious position hugging the tree’s great trunk. “Here Hetty!” kiss kiss kiss. “It’s all right. You can come down now.”
“That your cat?” a member of the crowd asked, a prissy man wearing a wine-colored ascot and toting a shiny red shopping bag from Saks.
“Sort of,” Bobby said.
“We know the owners,” Jeff added.
“Well, you better call the fire department to get it down.”
“Maybe we could climb up and get her?” Bobby said.
“The branches don’t start for twenty feet, for Godsake,” Jeff pointed out.
“Oh, all right. But you call them. I have to stay here and make sure she doesn’t get away”
There was a phone booth across the street, on the corner beside the New York Historical Society. Jeff ran over, dialed the operator and asked for the fire department. She connected him to the nearest fire station on 69th Street.
“Whaddaya mean you got a cat in a parachute stuck up in a tree?” the fire sergeant barked into the phone. “Chuck you, Farley!”
The line went dead. Jeff pounded the return coin button but his dime was gone forever. What is more, it was his last dime. In desperation, he lurched out of the booth and stopped the first person within reach, a woman of a certain age and immense dignity in a long lamb’s wool coat. Before she could hit him with her furled umbrella, Jeff cried, “Help, please, I’m lost and I need ten cents to call my mother.”
“Why, you poor thing,” the woman said, melting with grandmotherly tenderness. She went fishing in her Chanel bag and produced a little coin purse, from which, with great ceremony, she drew a dime. “Here you are young man.”
“Thanks a million.”
“But, can’t you tell me where you live?”
“Of course I can: 127 East 79th Street, Apartment 7-D.”
“Then you’re not lost.”
“No, this is different. It’s more like I’m lost mentally.”
“Huh. . . ?”
“Say, have you got an extra dime, ma’am? This phone gobbles ‘em right up.”
She handed him a second dime with a sour look of suspicion at being snookered and waddled off in a cloud of cologne.
Jeff went back to the phone booth and got the same fire sergeant on the line again. Instead of saying anything about any cats, he put on a falsetto voice and said, “There’s a terrible fire on 74th Street and Central Park West. Please come right away!” Before the sergeant could ask any questions, he hung up.
Not a minute later, a great uproar of winding sirens and pulsating lights turned staid Central Park West into scene of tumultuous melodrama. A pumper followed by a hook-and-ladder swerved around 73rd Street, stopping traffic in all directions. A captain dressed in full fire-fighting regalia of black rubber coat, knee-high rubber boots, and helmet with his rank emblazoned over the sunburst company insignia on the crown, stepped down from the cab of the pumper truck before it even came to a full stop and eyeballed the apartment buildings occupying the block. Seeing no sign whatever of any fire, and noting the doormen lollygagging beneath their canopies, the captain swaggered over to the crowd, swollen now to more than a hundred people, gathered under the London plane tree on the park side of the street.
“What seems to be the problem here?” he asked. Dozens of crowd members answered at once, gesticulating wildly up the tree, and soon the captain understood that there was a cat stuck in the tree. By this time, he had been joined by his sergeant, a short, barrel-chested Irishman who, in his rubber outfit, quite remarkably resembled a fireplug.
“Don’t tell me it’s wearing a parachute,” he muttered, just then making out the pink damask tablecloth and the vague mottled brown and white puffball below it. “Well, I’ll be jiggered…”
“Swing the cherry-picker around, O’Hara,” the captain said. Then to the crowd he said, “Anybody amongst you the owner of this alleged feline?”
“I am, sir,” Bobby said.
“What the hell is that pink thing up there?”
“Just a tablecloth, sir.”
Just then several bystanders volunteered that they had seen the cat descend from the sky under it, as though it were a parachute.
“That’s cute,” the captain said. “You throw your cat out the window to see if it had nine lives?”
“No, sir. It was an accident.”
“Oh? Was the cat having a little picnic out there on the windowsill all by its lonely?”
“It’s more complicated, sir.”
“I don’t doubt that, sonny.”
Meanwhile, the pumper had been positioned in front of the great tree and its cherry-picker was slowly rising up into the crown. Soon, a fireman up in the bucket was able to get his hands on Mehetabel. However, he seemed to have some difficulty getting her free.
“What’s the problem, D’Angelo?” the captain said through an electric bullhorn.
“Its claws is stuck,” D’Angelo hollered down.
“Whaddaya mean, ‘stuck?’”
“Embedded, like. In the trunk.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” the captain muttered. “Okay, just sit tight up there, D’Angelo. Don’t force anything.”
The captain now directed his bullhorn to the moiling crowd.
“Is any amongst you a vet by chance?” he asked.
Quite a few hands went up, including those of a couple of rum-soaked bums dressed in the filthy raiment of their lifeway.
“Guadalcanal!” the first shouted robustly.
“Sicily!” the other rasped.
“Not war veterans,” the captain snarled irritably. “I mean an animal doctor.”
All but one of the hands went down, and this one belonged to a wizened man barely five feet tall, leaning on a gutta-percha cane. Everything about him seemed dreadfully shrunken with great age, like a pear that has lain too long on the windowsill, even his head, which, but for its jug-handle ears, might have vanished under his ancient Homberg hat like a wrinkled pea under a walnut shell.
“You still in business?” the captain asked.
“Medicine is an art, not business,” the little old man replied rather fiercely, considering his frail appearance. “Doctor Teitlebaum at your service.”
“Do you think you could, maybe, get this cat’s claws unstuck from that tree trunk, Doctor Teitlebaum?”
“Do you think you could, maybe, put out a fire?” the old vet retorted.
The cherry-picker was lowered and Doctor Teitlebaum was helped aboard. As it returned aloft, a young man in cheap suit with a camera slung around his neck approached Jeff and Bobby.
“Eddie Huntzinger, Daily News. I unnerstand that’s your cat up there, kid?” he said, flipping open a small notepad and licking the tip of his ball-point pen. “Say, is it true you tossed him out the window with a tablecloth for a parachute?”
Jeff at once attempted to correct the reporter on a few counts. It was a roof, not a window, and it was for an important school report on science, and it proved that thousands of lives could be saved every year if people who were in the mood to commit suicide would only wear a parachute as regular apparel, just like people in the mood for a drive wear safety belts. The flight’s point of origin had to remain a secret for scientific purposes.
“All right, then, what’s your names?” the reporter asked.
“He’s Dale Long, and I’m Hector Lopez,” Jeff said, borrowing two names from the ranks of the New York Yankees.
“Long and Lopez, huh?” the reporter said, nodding his head skeptically. “Funny, you don’t look Spanish.”
“Well, chingate tu madre,” Jeff said, utilizing a vulgarism then much in vogue around the P.S. Six playground. The reporter was evidently unfamiliar with it.
“Yeah, sure, well, how ‘bout a picture…”
Just then, a cheer rang out from the surrounding mob. Jeff and Bobby wheeled around to see fireman D’Angelo descending from on high with Mehetabel clutched to his rubbery chest. Next to him in the bucket, Doctor Teitlebaum shook his cane at the ground, yelling, “Not so fast! Not so fast!” When the cherry-picker touched down, D’Angelo handed Mehetabel over to the captain, who conveyed the blinking cat to Bobby, who took her into his arms, weeping, indeed like a husband who has almost lost his wife to some awful quirk of the earth’s merciless and mysterious forces. Eddie Huntzinger tried to snap a picture but Jeff stuck his hand in front of the lens, saying the government didn’t allow it.
The fire captain led his valiant company back to the station, leaving Bobby and Jeff to a lecture at the frail but furious hands of Doctor Teitlebaum, who informed them that “animals are people, too, with rights, even!” and that tossing a cat out a window was like Hitler stuffing a baby into the gas chamber. But his rage eventuated in a coughing spasm, and with a gesture indicating that he was disgusted with the whole deplorable business, the aged DVM resumed his long journey to Kirschner’s Dairy Bar at 73rd Street and Columbus Avenue. The rest of the crowd also dispersed, for all New Yorkers innately know when a show is over.
Jeff and Bobby and the indomitable Mehetabel caught a crosstown bus in front of the Planetarium and made their way back to the more familiar precincts of the Upper East Side. Bobby managed a stealthy return to the family penthouse, since Phyllis Schindler was in bed sleeping off a Darvocet and three scotches, while Harvey Schindler attended the dress rehearsal of his latest Broadway show, a musical based on the Pullman Strike of 1894.
Jeff escaped his parents’ wrath by explaining that his friend Barry Bucholtzer had been hit by a garbage truck in front of PS Six and that they (he and many other concerned friends) had been down at the hospital since four o’clock waiting for the poor kid to come out of the operating room.
“Is he going to be all right?” Jeff’s mother asked, aghast.
“Yes, if he lives,” Jeff replied gravely before trudging off to his room to watch the latest installment of “The Untouchables” on TV, in which the ever-treacherous Frank Nitti once again challenged the authority of jailed mob boss Alphonse Capone.
For several years after the incident, a pink damask tablecloth hung in a London plane tree at 74th Street and Central Park West, and Bobby Schindler’s mystified parents could not understand the strange phobia that gripped the boy whenever there was occasion to travel anywhere near the vicinity of Central Park West in a taxi-cab, for instance, on Passover, when they had to attend the Seder at Uncle Alfred and Aunt Seema’s lovely art-filled duplex in the famous San Remo Towers. Once, returning home in a Checker cab from a matinee of “Fiddler on the Roof” he went so far as to fake an epileptic seizure–an incident that, unfortunately, led to months of medical tests.
Eddie Huntzinger’s story about the parachuting cat was killed by a cynical, hard-drinking night editor who said he’d heard a lot of whoppers in thirty years but that this was “the most ridiculous and unbelievable of them all,” and warned Huntzinger in no uncertain terms to quit making stuff up or he’d spend the rest of his career at the shipping news desk. The editor died of a cerebral infarction three months later, while Huntzinger went on to become the millionaire author of seventeen Roscoe Dowling Detective novels about a deaf-and-dumb private investigator who specializes in finding lost persons.
The End
James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency, The Geography of Nowhere, and many other books, both fiction and non-fiction. His recent novel World Made By Hand (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008), is set in the post-oil American future.
