How Billy accomplished his remarkable feat remains a mystery, not only to me but to everyone. After a few minutes of mutual adoration, the cat hopped down, purring, devoured the food I had put out two hours earlier, lay down in a sunny patch of grass by the door, and embarked on an elaborate bath. Phil, a six-foot-tall bartender of the badass variety, promptly started to cry. The cat, who had been pacing continuously, took one look and leaped into Phil’s arms-literally hurled himself the several feet necessary to be bundled into his erstwhile owner’s chest. Ninety minutes later, Phil showed up at my door. Flummoxed, I took a picture and texted it to my landlord with much the same question I had asked the cat: “Is this Billy?” I retreated inside and returned with a bowl each of food and water, but he ignored them and banged again at the door. Then I opened the door and asked the cat, idiotically, “Are you Billy?” He paced, distraught, and meowed at the door. I was standing there, sleep-addled and confused, when up onto his hind legs and into my line of vision popped an extremely scrawny and filthy gray cat. The house had double-glass doors flanked by picture windows, which together gave out onto almost the entire yard, but I could see no one.
Braced for an emergency, I rushed downstairs. Some weeks later, at a little before seven in the morning, I woke up to a banging at my door. After nearly an hour in the pouring rain trying to make his own way to the other side, Phil gave up and, heartbroken, continued onward to his newly diminished home. Moving carefully, he got out of the van, walked around to the other side, and opened the door a gingerly two inches-whereupon Billy shot out, streaked unscathed across two lanes of seventy-mile-per-hour traffic, and disappeared into the wide, overgrown median. Phil pulled over to the shoulder but found that, from the driver’s seat, he could neither coax nor drag the cat back into captivity. Thirty minutes down I-84, in the middle of a drenching rainstorm, the cat somehow clawed his way out of the carrier.
On the day Phil vacated the house, he wrestled an irate Billy into a cat carrier, loaded him into a moving van, and headed toward his new apartment, in Brooklyn. Phil adored that cat, and the cat-improbably, given his otherwise unenthusiastic feelings about humanity-returned the favor. Billy, a big, bad-tempered old tomcat, belonged to the previous tenant, a guy by the name of Phil. This was some years ago, shortly after I had moved into a little rental house in the Hudson Valley. One of the most amazing things I have ever witnessed involved an otherwise unprepossessing house cat named Billy.
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