Homer's Odyssey

13 • Lord of the Flies

He looked like some lion of the wilderness that stalks about exulting in his strength and defying both wind and rain.

—HOMER, The Odyssey

ASIDE FROM THE SAFETY CONSIDERATIONS I’D HAD—FOR MYSELF AS well as for Homer—in eschewing garden and ground-floor apartments, there had also been that secondary, but persistent, reality that dominated so much of Miami living.

I’m talking about the insects.

To live in Miami is to learn, the hard way, that the human population is on the losing side of a never-ending war with the insect kingdom. It’s a battle in which you know you’ll never gain any ground; the most you can do is shore up your defenses and try to hold the line. I might as well have set out cookies and featherbeds for six-legged intruders if I’d decided to go the garden-apartment route.

It was spring when we moved into our new apartment, and now we were in the thick of summer, that buggiest of all South Florida seasons. It was particularly rainy that summer, with thunderous tropical systems moving through practically on a daily basis. It was the kind of weather that drove outdoor critters in, looking for relief.

Living on the eleventh floor went a long way toward controlling my apartment’s wildlife population, but there were always those hardy souls who were more than equal to the climb. Chief among these were the flies—huge suckers bigger than my thumbnails and excruciatingly annoying.

For Homer’s sake, I made something of a religion of getting in and out of the glass door leading to my balcony as quickly as possible. But—no matter how quickly I slid the door shut behind me—flies always managed to get in. If an influx of flies ran the risk of compromising my enjoyment of our new apartment, however, they added immeasurably to Homer’s. Once all the boxes had been unpacked and thrown away, Homer again found himself unable to launch a successful frontal attack against Scarlett or Vashti. With the influx of flies, finally, there was something Homer could track and hunt without having to encounter either Vashti’s passivity or Scarlett’s scorn.

The first time Homer caught a fly was a few months after we’d moved in. I was shelving some new books in the living room when I heard a loud, angry buzzing from somewhere in the vicinity of just over my head. Looking around, I saw all three cats lined up—as if in formation—trailing slowly behind a fly zigzagging madly about five feet in the air.

Homer’s head was raised and it pulsed rapidly back and forth in perfect time with the fly’s irregular movements, his ears pricked up as high as they would go. Scarlett and Vashti’s pupils were hugely dilated, so that their eyes seemed to be all pupil. They didn’t unfix their gazes for even a second. It looked like they were making up their minds to pounce—but while they were still thinking about it, Homer, without any warning, was airborne.

He sprang straight up, rising and rising until the top of his head was higher than mine. The lower half of his body curved beneath him in a graceful arc. He hung in midair for a moment, an Olympic gymnast at the crest of a dismount, and I heard his jaws snap shut. He landed nimbly on his hind legs and rested on his haunches.

The buzzing had stopped. The fly was gone.

“Oh my God!” I exclaimed involuntarily. Even Scarlett and Vashti blinked, looking impressed despite themselves. Did we just see what we thought we saw?

The only one who didn’t seem surprised was Homer himself. His jaws worked furiously, like a child chewing taffy, and I realized that—having never successfully captured anything before—he hadn’t considered that catching a fly in his mouth would mean he’d … well … end up with a fly in his mouth.

I’d bought a swatter and some fly strips when I first moved in, but they were destined to remain unopened, gathering dust in a kitchen drawer. I didn’t have the heart to deprive Homer of the joys of what soon became his favorite pastime. And to be honest, any efforts I might have made in the direction of fly control would have been superfluous anyway.

Homer honed the catching of flies into an art form, experimenting with different styles and strategies as necessity, or boredom, dictated. Sometimes he would leap up, as he had that first time, but rather than catching the fly in the air, he would slap at it energetically with his front paws, like a swimmer doing a doggy-paddle, until the fly was forced to the ground. Then, while the fly was struggling to take off again, Homer would back up a few inches and pounce on it. Sometimes he would chase a fly toward the balcony until it hit the sliding door. As it banged helplessly against the glass, Homer would press one paw against the hapless bug and slide it down into the corner where the door met the floor and hold it there until it stopped moving.

If a fly landed on the wall behind the sofa, Homer would stand on top of the back of the sofa with his hind legs and, lightning-fast, whap out a front paw to pin the fly against the wall. Then he’d lift his paw just enough to wedge his head in and scoop the fly up in his mouth. One time, I saw Homer dart up the back of a chair in pursuit of a fly. Balancing on three legs on the back of the chair, he used the fourth one to swat at it feverishly. But it flew to a spot just behind Homer’s head. Homer—I swear—propelled himself off the chair into a spectacular backflip, a head-over-tail pinwheel of a cat, catching the fly in the air and twisting his body around so that he landed, perfectly, on all fours.

“Okay, now you’re just showing off,” I told him. But I couldn’t help laughing at how remarkably pleased he looked with himself.

It got to the point that I didn’t have to hear any actual buzzing to know there was a fly in our midst. Out of the corner of my eye I’d catch a black blur of speed and sinew zipping by, and I’d know.

I used to entertain myself sometimes by imagining conversations among those flies who observed the particular indignity of their compatriot’s being caught by a blind cat. In my head, the dialogue went something like this:

FIRST FLY: Did you see Carl get caught by that eyeless cat? And Carl had, like, a hundred eyes!

SECOND FLY: Yeah, well, Carl was an idiot.

It wasn’t only the flies that Homer felled in his new capacity as our home’s head gamekeeper. He proved himself equally adept at dispatching all manner of pests: ants (which were so easy for him to catch, it was almost an insult to his abilities), mosquitoes, the occasional moth.

And then there were the roaches. I live in New York now, and I’ve seen what passes for a “roach” here in the Northeast. But let me tell you—some of those southern bad boys were so big, you could saddle them up and ride them in the Kentucky Derby. Living on a higher floor meant we weren’t plagued with a full-fledged infestation. Given, however, that the larger ones—the ones we call palmetto bugs in the South—were able to fly, more than a few managed to creep their way in. And the ones that did always lived (briefly) to regret it.

Even big roaches are fast, but none of them were as fast or difficult to pinpoint as the flies Homer routinely caught. So the only thing that made catching roaches a real challenge for Homer was that flies announced their presence with loud buzzing, while the roaches were soundless. Or so I thought. But Homer’s hearing was infinitely more sensitive than mine, or even than Scarlett’s and Vashti’s; on numerous occasions, I’d catch Homer cocking his head to listen to something I couldn’t discern. Then he’d leap toward a particular spot where a bookcase met a wall and, sure enough, an enormous cockroach would come scuttling out.

Homer tended to eat everything he caught, except for the roaches. Those he saved for me. During a particularly rainy two weeks, I woke up every morning to find a neat pile of two or three palmetto bug corpses stacked in front of my bed.

As soon as he heard me stir, Homer would jump from the bed to stand over the pile of dead roaches, meowing in an inviting, anxious sort of way. (It would have been irrational in Homer’s worldview to assume I would find, unassisted, anything soundless.) Look, Mommy! Look what I brought you! Do you like them? Do you?

“Thank you, Homer,” I always said, grateful he couldn’t see my reflexive grimace of disgust. “You’re a very thoughtful kitty. Mommy loves her new roaches.” Homer would stretch up his front paws and clutch my shins in a gesture that meant he was eager for me to pet and praise him, which I did—lavishly.

Now that I had my own place, I was entertaining friends on a fairly regular basis. Homer would always greet them with his customary friendly interest, but nothing ever diverted his attention from a six-legged intruder on the loose. “That is so crazy!” people would say upon seeing Homer snatch a fly out of five feet of air. “I mean, he’s blind!”

“Don’t tell him that,” I’d reply. “I don’t think he knows.”

“He’s like Mr. Miyagi catching flies with chopsticks in The Karate Kid,” my friend Tony observed once. “I wish I had a whole box of flies and roaches I could release in here for him to catch.”

I shuddered at the hideous prospect. “I’m incredibly glad you don’t.”

Homer hadn’t yet bagged his biggest game, however. That was an honor still to come.