I was on my lunch break, sitting in my truck outside the QuikTrip on Route 9, eating a gas station burrito that had gone cold twenty minutes ago. My shift at the county road department starts at six, and by noon I'm usually ready to stop looking at potholes. That's when I saw them: two women in puffy coats, arguing under a utility pole just past the car wash.
The older one—mid-sixties, lavender parka, the kind of permanent scowl that comes from decades of disappointment—kept pointing up. The younger one, maybe her daughter, had her phone out, stabbing at the screen with one finger. Between them, the reason for the whole scene: a black cat hanging from a metal crossbar about thirty feet up, front paws hooked over the steel, back legs dangling in the January wind.
I should have driven away. My burrito was cold, my thermos was empty, and I had forty minutes before I needed to be back in the cab of a county truck with a busted heater. Instead, I pulled my jacket tighter and walked over.
"You ladies need a hand?"
The younger of the two turned. Her face was raw from the cold, and she had that look people get when they've been trying to solve a problem with phone calls and nobody's picking up. "We called the fire department, animal control, even the power company. Fire department said they only rescue people. Animal control said they don't do utility poles. The power company hung up."
The cat made a sound then—not a meow, exactly, more like the noise a hinge makes when it's rusted shut. It had probably been up there since before dawn. The temperature hadn't cracked twenty since Tuesday.
I looked at the pole. It was a standard forty-foot distribution pole, three-phase lines on the top crossarm, a transformer about two-thirds of the way up. The cat was below the transformer, caught on a secondary crossarm. Not in direct contact with any lines, but one good jump and he'd be fried.
"I've got a ladder in my truck," I said. "Extension, thirty-two feet. Not tall enough."
The younger woman's face fell.
"But I know a guy. Dave Olmstead. Runs a tree service out of Marengo. He's got a bucket truck that can reach forty."
"Will he come now?" The older woman spoke for the first time. Her voice had that particular edge, like every sentence was an accusation she'd been waiting years to deliver.
"For a cat?" I pulled out my phone. "I can ask."
Dave picked up on the third ring. I could hear a chipper running in the background. "Olmstead Tree and Stump."
"Dave, it's Marcus. I've got a cat stuck on a power pole off Route 9. Any chance you can bring the bucket truck?"
There was a pause. The chipper whined, then cut out. "You're serious?"
"Serious as a heart attack. Cat's been up there since morning. It's twenty degrees and dropping."
"Where exactly?"
I gave him the cross-street. He worked it over in his head for a minute. "I'm on a job in Harvard right now. Could be there in an hour, hour and a half. Tell you what—I'll do it for two hundred. That covers fuel and my time. The cat's not paying me, so somebody's got to."
I covered the phone. "He'll come. Two hundred dollars."
The younger woman didn't hesitate. "Fine. Tell him fine."
The older woman made a noise in the back of her throat, something between a snort and a curse, but she didn't argue. Her eyes stayed fixed on the cat, which had stopped struggling and now just hung there, front paws wrapped around the steel like a shipwreck survivor clinging to a spar.
That's when I learned their names. The older one was Beverly, and the cat was hers—had been for eleven years, she told me, ever since she found him as a kitten in a storm drain behind the Food 4 Less in Woodstock. The younger one was her daughter, Mel, who'd driven forty-five minutes from Crystal Lake the moment her mother called in a panic. The cat's name was Mittens, which struck me as wrong for a black cat, but nobody asked me.
"The thing is," Mel said, lowering her voice so her mother couldn't hear, "Mom's not going to pay. I know her. She'll say she never agreed to anything, and then she'll tell the guy he's price-gouging and threaten to call the Better Business Bureau."
"Then why'd you say yes?"
She looked at me like I'd asked why the sky was blue. "Because the cat's dying. Look at him."
I looked. The cat's back legs had stopped twitching. That was worse than the twitching had been.
"Don't worry about the money," Mel said. "I'll pay him. I just have to do it without her seeing, or she'll make a scene, and then the cat will still be up there tomorrow, and I'll be the one cleaning up the mess."
We stood in the cold and waited. I learned that Mel worked as a respiratory therapist at the hospital in McHenry, that she'd driven up on her one day off because her mother had called her three times before seven a.m., that she and Beverly had been having the same argument about the cat for years—indoor versus outdoor, safe versus free—and that the cat always seemed to take her mother's side.
"Last year he almost died," Mel said. "Got into antifreeze somebody'd poured behind the garage. Four hundred dollars in vet bills. I paid. She said she'd pay me back. That was March."
"Did she?"
"She brought me four dollars in quarters last week. Said it was all she could spare, with the price of heating oil."
I wanted to ask more, but Dave's truck pulled up then, all thirty-eight feet of it, a faded International with a bucket lift and a chipper mounted on the back. The truck looked like it had been through a war; the paint was chipped down to primer in places, and there was a crack in the windshield that ran from the driver's side to the middle. But the hydraulics worked; I could hear the pump singing as Dave got out and started setting up.
Dave's a big guy, used to be a lineman for ComEd before he lost two fingers to a table saw and found himself uninsurable. He's got the kind of forearms that come from forty years of climbing and cutting, and he walked around the pole twice before he said anything.
"Cat's on the neutral side. That's good. I won't need to kill power to the line. Bad news is, he's wedged between the crossarm and an old insulator bracket. Gonna take some finessing."
He looked at Beverly. "Ma'am, this your cat?"
Beverly drew herself up to her full height, which wasn't much. "He's been mine for eleven years. He was a gift from my late husband, may he rest in peace." She said it like a warning, like Dave was about to hear a claim he'd better not dispute.
Dave nodded, then went around to the back of the truck and pulled out a long pole with a loop of rope on the end. "I'm going to try to snare him first. If he's calm, I might be able to ease him off the bracket without firing up the bucket. If he fights it, I'll have to go up."
He didn't wait for permission. He extended the pole, rested the loop against the crossarm a few feet from the cat, and began inching it closer. The cat watched the rope with what looked like mild curiosity. Then, when the loop was about six inches from his neck, he let out that hinge-creak sound again and tucked his head down against the metal.
"He's not having it," Dave said. He retracted the pole and walked to the bucket controls.
Watching a man go up in a bucket truck is like watching a spider lower itself on a thread. Dave stood in the basket, one hand on the controls, the other gripping the rail, and the lift rose with a hydraulic whine that echoed off the frozen houses. The wind picked up; I could see the basket sway six, eight inches with each gust. Dave didn't seem to notice. He had on a pair of thick leather gloves and a hooded sweatshirt under his work jacket, the kind you don't wash because it's holding together a personality.
When the basket drew even with the cat, Dave locked it off and leaned out over the rail. The cat's head came up. It watched him approach with the same expression cats have had for ten thousand years—*you're going to do something stupid, but I'll allow it*.
Then Dave's hand slipped.
Not the one holding the cat. The one holding the rail. The basket lurched, and for half a second his whole upper body tipped forward over the edge. Beverly screamed. Mel grabbed my arm. The cat yowled—a real yowl this time, full-throated, the sound of an animal that has finally run out of composure.
Dave caught himself on the crossarm, gloves scraping against the wood. He hung there for a second, one foot still in the basket, the other swinging free. Then, with a grunt I could hear from the ground, he pulled himself back in.
"Jesus, Dave!" I shouted.
He waved without looking down. "I'm fine. Just lost my footing. Damn wind's worse up here."
"You want me to call for backup?"
"What backup? It's me and this cat. He's not going anywhere."
He reached for the cat again, slower this time. His left hand came down on the animal's scruff, and his right worked at something—I couldn't see what—below the crossarm. The cat went rigid, then limp. For a terrifying moment I thought he'd died of fear.
Then Dave lifted him clear of the bracket and pulled him into his chest. The cat's head came up. It was alive. It was, in fact, hissing.
"Got him!" Dave shouted. "Stubborn little bastard was stuck on a bent lag bolt. Somebody used it to hang a bird feeder years ago. Probably been waiting up here all day for a pigeon to land."
The descent took four minutes. Watching it, I remembered that my burrito was still in the truck and my lunch break was nearly over and my shift supervisor would be calling any minute to ask where the hell I was. I didn't care. This was better than potholes.
When the bucket reached the ground, Dave stepped out with the cat cradled in both arms like a baby. The cat had stopped hissing and now just looked dazed, ears flat, tail wrapped tight around its flank. Dave held it out to Beverly.
"Here you go, ma'am. Might want to get him checked out. He's cold, but I don't think anything's broken."
Beverly took the cat and pressed her face into its fur. The cat did not object. It just closed its eyes and went limp in her arms, breathing hard.
"Thank you," Beverly said. It came out cracked, and I realized she was crying. Or trying not to. "Thank you so much, young man. God bless you."
Then she started walking toward her house, the cat a black lump against her lavender coat.
"Ma'am?" Dave called.
She stopped, but didn't turn around.
"The fee. We agreed on two hundred for the call."
There was a silence that felt longer than the whole rescue had taken. The wind had died down; I could hear the buzz of a heat pump kicking on somewhere, and the distant moan of a freight train crossing a county road.
"That wasn't me who agreed to that," Beverly said, still not turning. "Talk to my daughter." And then she was gone, through the gate, up the walk, into the little bungalow with the peeling white paint and the mailbox shaped like a barn.
Mel stood with her hands in her pockets, staring after her mother. She didn't look surprised. If anything, she looked relieved—like the axe she'd been waiting for had finally fallen.
"I'll get my checkbook," she said.
"You don't have to—" Dave started.
" Yes, I do."
She went to her car—a gray Corolla with a missing hubcap and a Saints sticker in the back window—and came back with a check. She wrote it out on the hood, the pen scratching against the paper, and when she handed it to Dave I saw the amount: three hundred dollars.
"That's more than we said," he told her.
"The extra hundred is for nearly falling off the truck." She folded her arms. "And for not saying anything about my mother just now. I know you wanted to."
Dave looked at the check, then at Mel, then at the house. He folded the check and put it in the front pocket of his work pants.
"You know what the problem is?" he said. "It's not the cat. The cat was just up there waiting to be saved. It's the people on the ground." He shook his head, not angry, just tired. "No offense."
"None taken," Mel said.
We stood there a while longer, the three of us, watching the empty pole and the frozen street and the little house with the barn-shaped mailbox. Then Mel said she'd better go check on her mother, and Dave said he had to get back to Harvard, and I said I needed to get to work before my supervisor put my picture on a milk carton.
We went our separate ways.
I thought about it all afternoon while I filled potholes on a county road east of Le Roy, my hands numb inside my work gloves, the truck's heater rattling and spitting lukewarm air. I thought about the cat, hanging up there in the January wind, waiting for someone to decide it was worth two hundred dollars. I thought about Dave's hand slipping, and the noise Beverly made when it happened—not a scream for the cat, but a scream for him, a stranger who'd driven an hour and risked his neck for an animal she'd known for eleven years. And I thought about the check, three hundred dollars on the hood of a Corolla, written by a woman who knew from long experience exactly who was going to pick up the tab.
I never did ask where the bird feeder came from. Or whose lag bolt it was, or how long it had been rusting up there, waiting for a cat to make one wrong move. Maybe it came with the house, a leftover from a previous owner who liked birds and never imagined a cat would climb forty feet to chase one. Maybe Beverly's husband put it up, back when he was still alive and the world seemed like the kind of place where a man could hang a feeder and trust that everything would stay put.
Some questions you don't ask because the answer would just get in the way.
That evening, on my way home, I drove past the route again. The pole was still there, of course. The crossarm, the transformer, the bent lag bolt no longer visible from the ground. The little bungalow was dark except for one window by the kitchen, where a light burned amber against the cold.
I pulled over for a minute and killed the engine. The heat in the cab began to leach out immediately, and I could see my breath start to fog the windshield. In the window of the bungalow, a shadow moved—a woman's shape, backlit, with something dark in her arms. She stood there for a long time, just holding it, rocking slightly, and then the light went out.
I started the truck and drove home.
