I named him Boog after Boog Powell, who had played first base for the Orioles before I was old enough to care and who now sold beer on television. I picked it because it was the only name I could think of that sounded as big as I wanted the cat to be. My mother said it was a ridiculous name for an animal that size. Within a year the animal was the size of the name and then some, and nobody said anything about it again.
Here are the things Boog did, so you know him.
He drank only from the kitchen faucet, never from a bowl. If you put a bowl of water on the floor he would look at it the way my mother looked at the Jehovah's Witnesses, and then he'd jump up on the drainboard and sit by the tap and stare at you until you turned it on to a thin silver thread. He drank from the side of it, tipping his head, getting his whole face wet, and then he'd shake and spray the window over the sink.
He talked to pigeons. Not meowed, talked. He made a sound at them like a little wooden ratchet, a chattering in his throat, with his jaw going, and the pigeons on the wire across Decker Avenue would look down at him like he was a crazy person, which in fairness he was.
He sat on paper. This was the big one, the thing everyone who ever came into our house learned within ten minutes. If there was a piece of paper in the room and a person was looking at it, Boog would find that piece of paper and sit on it. The Sunday Sun, spread out on the living room rug. My spelling homework. The electric bill when my mother had it out on the kitchen table with her pencil and the checkbook. The TV Guide. A letter from my grandmother in Wilkes-Barre. The back of a cereal box if you were reading it at breakfast. He didn't care what it was. He would walk across the room, step onto it, turn around once, and settle down square in the middle with his front paws tucked, and he would look up at you with an expression that said this was a reasonable and even generous thing to do, that he was helping. My mother said it was because the paper was warm from your hands. My friend Dewey Stelmach's mother, who knew about cats, said it was because he wanted you to look at him instead. My father said nothing about it. He'd just lift Boog off whatever it was and set him on the floor, gently, both hands under his belly, and Boog would walk around in a circle and get right back on.
And he walked my father to the corner. Every morning when my father worked day turn at the Point, he left the house at ten after six to catch his ride with Mr. Florkowski from next door, who drove a brown Chevy Impala with one green fender. And every morning Boog went out with him and walked beside him to the corner of Decker and Fleet, tail straight up with the kink at the end like a question mark, and sat on the curb and watched the Impala go, and then walked back and sat on our marble steps until my mother let him in. Every afternoon at twenty after three he was back on the steps, waiting. Mrs. Florkowski said you could set a clock by him. Mrs. Florkowski said a lot of things, but that one was true.
When my father was laid off in April of 1985, Boog didn't know what to do with himself. He'd go out at ten after six and walk to the corner and sit there, and my father wouldn't come. He'd look back at the house like there had been some kind of mistake. After a couple of weeks he stopped going to the corner and started following my father instead, wherever he went, room to room, down to the basement, out to the alley when he took the trash out, up to the bathroom, where he'd sit outside the door. My father would step over him a hundred times a day. "You got a job, buddy?" he'd say to him. "Huh? No? Me neither."
So that was Boog. And on the night of November 19, when my father went down the steps with the suitcase and turned toward Eastern Avenue, Boog was in the front window, and he went crazy.
Our front window had a painted screen. If you're not from Baltimore you may not know what that is, so let me explain. In the old rowhouse neighborhoods in East Baltimore, Highlandtown and Canton and Patterson Park, people had pictures painted on their window screens. Little scenes, done in oil paint right on the wire mesh: a red-roofed cottage by a stream, a mill with a waterwheel, swans on a pond, mountains that nobody on our block had ever seen. The trick of it is that in the daytime, from the sidewalk, you see only the picture, and you can't see into the house at all. But from inside, looking out, you can see through it fine, just a little dimmer, like looking through a thin curtain. So you could sit in your front room in your undershirt and watch the whole street go by, and the whole street saw only a cottage. My mother used to say it was the most Baltimore thing ever invented: a way of minding everybody's business without anybody minding yours.
Ours had been painted by my grandfather, my father's father, before I was born. It showed a white cottage with a red roof and a little bridge over a creek and two swans, and a path that went from the cottage door down to the bottom edge of the screen, like it was supposed to lead right out onto Decker Avenue. Boog's spot was the windowsill behind it. He'd lie there all afternoon between the glass and the screen, in the sliver of space when the sash was up, and from the street you'd see the cottage with an enormous orange shape lying behind it, like the cottage was on fire.