Notes from the Small Pond: Friday night

It’s a Friday night in June, just before 10. At the corner of 12th Street and Carlton Avenue slow cars drone by, going somewhere, their dull Doppler pitch rising and falling. An occasional cop car eases — then races past, sometimes with lights and sound. The cop traffic glides west,

toward Pinehurst Park and the just-set sun.

A purple pickup truck with Minnesota Vikings decals and a skinny driver with a tapered beard makes its way east, toward Highway 45, apparently where the trucks live. Robins flute and trill nervous lullabies, and as the sky darkens toward the color of tomorrow, mosquitos Drrrzzzz in my ear and alight on my knuckle, proboscis probing, wings winging until I smash it in a smear of blood and viscera. I lick the blood off my fist and it tastes like iron.

Bats dip and disappear, darting in and out of my field of vision. I try and follow but I’m like a tree sloth trying to catch a hummingbird, so the bats flit their leathery course all around and I feel their presence and movement, though I don’t see them, triggering a self-check of my waning sanity and I give up on that, too, believing that, like the bats, my sanity is there somewhere, beating its pitchy flight even if I can’t see it.

The trees are alive and still. They shift their weight in the treetop breeze, like standing in church, the rounding moon yellow in the black sky, silent as God and as promising.

Someone’s cat treads across Carlton Avenue, angling toward me, muscularly meowing his approach through the pool of white light spread in a circle on the street from the streetlamp.

“I’m a dog person,” I say, and the cat doesn’t answer but pads toward me like a brazen feline vampire, traversing the soft boundary between night and day. He stops for a moment at the iron-gated fence before softly tiptoeing through it toward me and I stand up to properly greet him. He’s lean-but-not skinny, his presence shot through with quiet confidence as he gracefully skulks closer, observing me, taking my measure. Typical narcissist cat.

“How’s your night, so far?” I ask and his ears flicker. “You looking for love tonight?” He doesn’t answer. “Or blood?”

He still doesn’t answer but seems to hear and steps closer.

“Me too, neither,” I say and lean back in my chair, absently expecting him to approach and when he does it’s with a bound. He alights at my feet, back arched as he vocalizes his temporary possession of this new real estate on my front steps.

“I’m wicked allergic,” I tell him, but he doesn’t listen and begins to wind loosely around my feet. I softly bump him with my boot, shoving him a little and he spazzes a fang-filled Meow at me, and it makes me laugh.

“Hey, Cat,” I tell him. “These are my steps and I was just minding my own business like any other overtaxed citizen around here and you come around, uninvited as a hemorrhoid, and now you’re bossing me around? Trying to take over my spot?”

He stands still, then, looking at me. His green eyes have yellow stabs of starlight in them that dance off the banked light of the streetlamp. He stares at me and I stare back.

“Well, what?” I ask, finally, honestly wanting to know, half expecting an answer. I turn my head a little, cocking it slightly as if to communicate my effort to hear.

Meow.

“That’s it?” I step toward him and he crouches like a tiger. He stays crouched and it occurs to me he may be prepping to lunge — straight up into my chest, perhaps, feral claws and yellow fangs slashing and ripping at my face and throat, werewolf style.

“So, blood, then,” I say and take a small step backward. He visibly relaxes, like an uncoiling snake. “You want blood. Not love. I get it. Don’t blame you.”

He meows again.

“Izzat all you say?” I ask and plop back down on my chair, looking for something to smoke. The broader night comes back into view. A breeze blows and the trees sway and shush their whispering.

The cat watches me watch him. His small, perfect skull rolls, as if on bearings, as his ears point every direction, tuned to noises I can’t hear and a few I can.

“Hear that?”

He catches my gaze and holds it, responding to the elevated excitement in my voice. “Hear that train?”

His tail sweeps in long strokes, bored.

Meow.

“I think that’s my brother,” I say. “He’s on tonight, I think.”

The cat doesn’t care and looks away, licking his lips as if either finishing or anticipating a snack. As if on cue, he bolts from his place at the top of the steps and is immediately atop an eyeless vole, who screams and wails a disturbingly loud dying lament as the cat shreds and disembowels him.

“Blood,” I say and push back in my chair.

The cat drags his prey into the shadows at the corner of the yard. I hear flesh and fur being pulled from the tiny carcass.

“… Goodnight, Cat,” I say. “Glad you found the blood you were looking for.”

Down the street a dog barks his abandonment and individual clouds of mosquitoes buzz like kindergarten soccer players, clumped together, quasi-organized. The light of the moon bathes the treetops in edges of gold against the black-sky curtain.

When I look to the corner of the yard, the cat is gone and the lack of movement there feels like a loss and I realize I want the cat to come back because everyone likes an interesting, murderous visitor that can’t talk, doesn’t listen, won’t offer advice, refuses to pray and knows when to leave.

Cloquet’s Parnell Thill is a previous “Best Columnist” winner in Minnesota and author of “Killing the Devil and Other Excellent Tricks,” available online. His opinions are his own. Contact him c/o [email protected].