Vagabonds: Anthology of the Mad Ones Vagabonds Vol. 3 | Page 61

“That’s all you got for me?”
“Well, what did you expect me to say?”
“I don’t know. To maybe get rid of that one cat I got there already?”
“What are you, crazy?” he shouts. “You can’t do that!”
“Why the hell not? It seems to make sense to me. I mean, (a) the cat is an asshole, (b) it
scratches me all the time, (c) I don’t want it to scratch me, so (d) I throw it out the door.”
“Because,” he says, “because you can’t just go kicking cats out of apartments. Whether
you want to acknowledge it or not, that cat is part of that apartment. It was there when
you got there and it’ll be there after you leave. Hell, I bet it’s even worked into your deed
or lien or whatever, that that cat has to be there forever. Whether you like it or not, that
cat is part of the history of that apartment. And you can’t just go tossing history out the
door. And anyways, you do know that there’s a law written somewhere that says if you
move into an apartment and th ere’s a cat there, that cat has the right to stay. Which means
you can’t just go kicking it out. Legally speaking and all.”
“That can’t possibly be true.”
“You betcha it is. And even if it wasn’t. You still can’t just go on kicking cats out of
apartment. Can you imagine if everywhere, people like you went and did something like
that? You’d see cats just being tossed from every door, thrown up in the air like it’s some
type of goddamn cat blizzard. And you know where’d they’d all go?”
“Out of my house?”
“No. In the street. Now that would be dangerous.”
“You know what’s dangerous? This one cat indoors. In my doors. Do you even know
where it scratched me when I was on the toilet?”
“No, and I don’t want to know,” he says sipping his beer, washing the taste of that image
out of his mouth. “If you think that cat is dangerous indoors, imagine a bunch of illegal
cats outdoors. Christ, you’d have a goddamn illegal cat army, just marching up and down
the street and scratching whoever they want, whenever they want. And they’d be eating
people’s pet birds and lapping up other people’s milk and littering the street with fur
balls. No, no you can’t have that.”
“I wish I could.”
He ignores me. “And think of the bad precedent it would set, too. If you kick a cat out,
what’s next? Dogs? Well, dogs are more quote-unquote dangerous than cats anyways. Do
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