Animal Magnetism

A Bicycle Built for Two

Cats love us despite our being human. Dogs love us because we’re human. Perhaps they wish to guide us, if we would only listen.

People ask me which I love more—cats or dogs. How can I possibly answer? That’s like being asked which of your children you love the most. The best you can say is that each child possesses different qualities but your love remains constant.

An odd thing about long, abiding love is that it’s often hard to remember where and when it all started. My business partner is a cat, Sneaky Pie. On Saint Francis’s Day, October 4, forget the exact year in the 1980s, I visited the SPCA with a friend, Ruth Dalksy, who was looking for her lost dog. The Albemarle County SPCA was crowded with adults and children waiting for the priest to bless their animal friends, which made looking for Ruth’s dog harder. We had to push through people to examine the dog runs. Finally, I drew back to stand in front of the cat cages, one crate stacked on the next. A little paw reached out and grabbed the back of my head. Untangling my hair from those tiny claws I turned around to look into gorgeous green eyes. A lifelong friendship followed. If only I’d had the room at that time to take her sister and her mother. I’ve often prayed that someone else adopted them. Sneaky grew into a sleek gray tabby. She liked to ride in the truck. Many of my cats jump into the truck as eagerly as the dogs do. In her case, she had to stand on the seat, paws on the dash, and drive with you. She rarely took her eyes off the road.

Whether we were born with it or developed it over time, we each knew what the other was thinking. I had a similar connection with a glorious American foxhound, Diane. Sneaky, however, could be tart. Diane was always sweet.

The name Sneaky Pie comes from an old Southern expression. When you watch a person put one over on another person or they do it to you directly (assuming it doesn’t make you mad or cost you a lot of money), you might say, “Why, you old sneaky pie!”

Tiny as she was when I brought her back to the farm, the kitten exuded all the wiles of Odysseus. Here was a trickster. She’d catch frogs, careful not to puncture their innards, and put them in the dog’s water bucket. The frog could get out if the water nearly touched the rim, otherwise it would swim until it died of exhaustion. I usually found them in time, but it scared the bejesus out of the dog. Why, I don’t know. The pond was full of frogs.

She’d taunt the geese at the pond. That worked until one day a large white female lost her patience and chased the cat all the way up to the house. Geese can be fierce. They’ve chased my cats, my dogs, even the horses. They’ve never chased me because I bought food for them. When the last one expired, it seemed prudent not to reintroduce such aggression.

Visitors would come. We’d sit on the porch on a hot day. In she’d dash, mouse, mole, or vole in her jaws. The benighted victim would scream and the guest would come undone. Then I’d have to rescue the little bugger without getting bitten.

How did Sneaky know which of my guests were especially squeamish? The de-tailed skinks (a kind of lizard with an electric blue stripe on the body like a racing car) elicited screams of horror and disgust. Once she drug in a baby bunny, comatose with fear, and my guest, a nice man from the city, nearly passed out. After I tended to my guest, I removed the tiny furball from the jaws of death and managed to nurse it back to health. In a sturdy wire cage, I might add.

My Corgi, Bandit—what a buoyant spirit—and Juts, the Chow, named after my mother, lived happily with Miss Pie as long as they obeyed her every whim. If not, the howls were awful. Blood dotted the carpet from deeply scratched noses. She could be as tyrannical as Baby Jesus. I brought her a little friend, an adorable stray kitten, Pewter. The gray kitten would approach and Sneaky would turn her back. After four months, Sneaky deigned to recognize the kitty. Ultimately they became great friends, their one bone of contention being catnip.

She liked horses. She liked gardening so long as she didn’t have to pull weeds. What a good bug killer, though.

When I returned to Hollywood to work for Norman Lear, she and Pewter came along. A dear friend kept the dogs until my return. She hated Hollywood because she couldn’t play outside. Who was happier once home in Virginia, me or Sneaky? Pewter could be happy anywhere as long as the food was good.

Sneaky saved me. The Writers Guild struck in 1988, an eight-month, almost nine-month strike. You couldn’t work. I could write novels, but Hollywood money is fast money. Novel money is slow money. The bills filled the mailbox. I paid them but cash dwindled.

One day at the typewriter, Sneaky, who was perched on the other side of the desk, looked up into my eyes and pulled down the paper. The Mrs. Murphy mystery series began.

She’d always follow me into the workroom. She stayed until each chapter was finished. She’d sink her fangs into the edge of the papers.

My agent, Wendy Weil, sold that first Mrs. Murphy to Bantam. Publishers, wonderful people for the most part, sit where they sit because they are left-brain people. If they were right-brain, they’d be doing what I do or what a painter, musician, choreographer, composer does. If you’ve produced A they can’t grasp that you have just produced B or that it might sell. How Wendy sold the first Sneaky Pie I don’t know, but she did. And for very little money, I might add. We’re coming up on our eighteenth volume.

Sneaky threw herself into the series. I’d watch her. The ideas she gave me. Much as I’d derided genre literature, I ate my words. I truly clicked my heels, and best of all, I had a partner. I could talk to her, rub her head, listen intently to the cascade of meows. Her cat capers, her killings of vermin and the occasional bird (not appreciated by me) pushed me in the right direction. There’s a nasty bluejay in the series based on reality. The cat’s view of the world is as accurate as I can manage without being a cat. It’s not exactly cute, either.

We began to make money. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Sneaky Pie. Thank you, Writers Guild. Without the strike the cat and I might never have formed our team.

I borrowed a bicycle built for two. What a wonderful author’s photo. Since Sneaky, now a fuller-figured gray tabby but never fat (Pewter, on the other hand, became quite round), liked to ride in the car, I thought if I put her in the front basket of the bicycle built for two and I rode on the rear seat it would make an accurate photo of the relationship. She wouldn’t stay in the basket. I put food in there, her favorite dried treats. No. I tried catnip. No. After three hours of diva behavior, I gave up. The photographer, flown down by Bantam, was fit to be tied. The next day he came up with a photo in the house where I was on the floor and she was leaning against me from behind. Her cooperation, illusory, lasted long enough to get the shot. My assistant at the time, all-around good guy Gordon Reistrup, was actually lying behind me holding her up. She was hateful to him after that but she eventually got over it.

People would laugh in interviews when I’d say she really was my writing partner. I never pressed it, but she was. I actually bought her a computer, a Gateway. Let me add here that I do not use computers. I never will. I value my eyes far too much. But I bought her a disc of different bird types and Gordon would load it. She sat and watched once. Then she walked outside to watch the birds live and in concert. She preferred reality to entertainment even if the birds on the disc actually were birds in life and thus filmed. She knew the difference.

She lived to almost twenty. She became thin but would still play. She came to work religiously. One morning she walked out the front door never to return. At that point coyotes had not invaded Virginia. I doubt anything snatched her. She chose to go off and die by herself. There’s dignity in that.

Poor Pewter. She searched for Sneaky for days, and I searched with her. Finally we gave up. Pewter lived until one week before her twenty-third birthday.

Today, Sneaky Pie II performs the work. Her real name is Ibid. If you remember your Latin, that’s “same as above.” Pewter II is Gracie, and both cats look like their predecessors. However, Ibid’s personality differs from her mother’s. Shy and watchful, she runs from strangers. But she’ll lurk nearby and I swear she’s spying. Gracie, on the other hand, lives to be the center of attention.

Sneaky Pie signed her contracts along with me. Fuzzy paw-prints, dipped in stamp ink, appear below my signature. She wouldn’t ride the bicycle built for two but she was a true business partner. Quite tight with her money, too.

The biggest lesson she taught me, among many, is that an animal can make money. Keep your eyes and ears open. Some four-footed creature or bird friend of yours might have the answer to that terrible truth of your life: there’s too much month at the end of the money.