by Bob Tarte
Mostly I loved our animals for their flighty yet constant companionship and the way their wildness was mitigated by an addiction to comfort. Dusty the parrot had learned to call Moobie by name. Rudy the rabbit had started mountain-goating up the backrest of the couch. Liza the goose stared longingly at the bowl of cat food that Linda had set for the white-and-black stray.
The kibbles went untouched. Then one afternoon the wisp of the woods became flesh and dwelled beneath our sunflower seed feeder, scattering the tree sparrows to the winds, and I grew alarmed. I didn’t want her munching on wild birds that already had enough trouble surviving a cold and sunless winter.
She was white with mostly black hind legs that made her look as if she were wearing a pair of tights that were falling down. Her tail was black. A black continent floated in a sea of white on her right side, and a few black islands had broken off and drifted to her left side, shoulders, neck, and head. Although her eyes weren’t large by cat standards, they formed an alliance with her pink nose to dominate her slender face when she peered up toward the house.
She looked smaller and more delicate than I had expected. The bright white expanses of her fur embarrassed the dinginess of the compacted snow, made the cloudy sky seem even gloomier. The flitting of goldfinches to and from the seed perches apparently didn’t interest her, nor did a feeder-robbing squirrel who hung back behind the pump house flicking his tail as he scolded her. She seemed fixated on some other concern.
Her body twitched as she sat. It could have been a reaction to the cold, but I feared that she was pretending to ignore the birds while on the verge of an explosive strike. I leaned forward to scare her away before she managed to snag a goldfinch. But before I could knock on the bathroom window she glanced up at me first with that heart-shaped face. One moment, she was crouching on the icy ground a leap away from the feeder. The next moment she was melting into the woods, running until her white-and-black coat faded to a gray smudge on the riverbank.
The merest flicker of eye contact had passed between us. But in the brief instant between the crouching and the rocketing away, as my cloudy blues met her metallic yellows, I felt the spark of a connection between us. It was a serious crush, though I had no idea at the time how deeply she would set her hooks in me.
Partly, she had moved me in the same way that any homeless animal would. But I also recognized a special quality in her that resonated with my own temperament. In my scant few seconds observing her, I had identified a kindred spirit, a creature who in spite of her many strengths was apparently as anxiety laden as I was. She was a shadow afraid of a shadow.
I told Linda about my encounter, leaving out the touchy-feely, neurotic aspects. “I put a dish of kibbles out for her in Don’s driveway last night in case she didn’t find the dish out back,” she told me, referring to our former neighbor’s empty house. “But it looks like a raccoon got to it first. The food was spilled all over the driveway and the dish was all chewed up.”
I WAS ASHAMED of myself for blowing the white-and-black kitty’s chance for an easy bowl of kibbles, but Agnes soon reminded me why I should be focusing on the troublemakers inside the house. After ducking into the kitchen to retrieve my coffee from the microwave, I padded down the hallway toward Moobie. She broke off from noisily crunching on her food to fix me with a high-voltage “I Want” stare, intent on scoring a tastier morsel. Agnes was nowhere in sight—for the moment. Puffing on the hot handle of my South Dakota Badlands mug, I bent down to scratch the top of Moobie’s head as I passed her on my way to check my e-mail. Then I took a fateful step around the corner.
Agnes, having overheard Moobie’s noisy grazing, had positioned herself on the other side of the wall and was lying in wait for her. My stocking foot unfortunately made an appearance first. Needle-sharp teeth pierced my skin. I went airborne, ejecting a sparrow-size glob of hot coffee from my cup. The liquid hung in space, whistling a happy tune and biding its time until my as-yet-uninjured other foot moved directly below. Then it descended in a steaming splash. Deeply offended by my hopping and cussing, Agnes shot up the stairs.
After fortifying my feet with shoes, I felt contrite all over again about having uprooted the white-and-black cat. Although I couldn’t make atonement to the stray, I could do the next best thing by apologizing to Agnes for spoiling one of her few indoor pleasures. Agnes was the embodiment of rolling-on-the-ground warmth if you encountered her outside in temperate months. But imprisoned inside the house during our endless winter, she got so grumpy that if someone substituted a wolverine in her place I wouldn’t have noticed.
I discovered her curled up on my office chair doing her best impression of a life preserver. Her eyes shuttered open and regarded me warily.
“What a good, good girl you are,” I said, and I reached out to stroke the curve of her back. Quick as a chameleon’s tongue, a paw lashed out to bat my hand away. I had ignored the fact that Agnes could only be petted at certain times of the day, and only then if a particular set of legalistic conditions had been met. Although no one but Agnes had a clue as to what these conditions might be, a bad mood rendered every other consideration null and void. For failing to take her temperament into account, I had earned the exercise of her claws clause.
That night, just before Linda and I snapped off the light for an all-too-brief respite, Agnes leaped upon the bed and rubbed her face against my fingers. Complex feeding, watering, and out-of-cage shifts for our pets meant that there was barely an hour of daylight that didn’t involve a task, although strangely I had discovered that I liked the structure that it lent my life. Each chore was like the picket of a fence that helped keep worry, obsessive thinking, guilt, and fantasies of success out of reach. But reliance on routine also made me less open to deviations from the norm, and I didn’t embrace this unusual eleventh-hour interplay with Agnes.
She was insistent to the point of nuzzling my hand even after I had stuck it under my pillow, and one, two, three, or even fifty strokes weren’t enough to satisfy her. She demanded to be petted, neck rubbed, and back scratched until she had covered my entire arm in an electrostatically charged coating of shedded hair. In the end I enjoyed it almost as much as she did. I could never look at a cat without longing to touch it, and Agnes had quenched my kitty-petting thirst far into the distant future.
“What a good, good girl you are,” I told her as I hugged her, and this time she agreed.
AS I SQUIRTED green dishwashing detergent on the living room rug and scrubbed our newest stain, Linda mentioned having seen the white-and-black stray eating from the bowl behind the fence. “I’m glad you’re feeding her,” I said, “But I don’t want her hanging around all the time and thinking she belongs here. Next thing you know, she’ll be throwing up on the carpet like Moobie.”
“Did you give Moobie her hairball medicine?”
“I squeezed a slug into her food this morning. It’s already gone.”
Linda assured me that a stray cat this skittish would never come anywhere near us, much less amble indoors, confer with Moobie, and leave me a present to step on in the morning. Still, even the most misanthropic wild creatures sometimes developed a tolerance for humans when they needed help. We had experienced this with injured songbirds, hungry turkeys, and down-on-their-luck Realtors.
The past summer, a friend of ours had found a juvenile downy woodpecker on the ground after a storm and brought the tyke to us. He was already weak when we put him in our large outdoor flight cage. He refused to eat and spent every waking moment hammering away at the cage. Finally we opened the door and let him go, because there was nothing else we could do. Two days later, Linda’s gardening helper said, “Did you see that bird on your wreath?” The little woodpecker was clinging to the plastic dollar-store flowers that adorned our front door. Back in his once-hated cage, he let me feed him with a syringe and by the next morning was eagerly pecking at a block of suet. After we let him go, he still frequented the yard, and he trusted us to come quite close while he was fee
ding.
So as I spotted the kitty hunched up against our pump house the following afternoon, I wondered whether the bitter cold might make her more people friendly. She was obviously lingering in our yard. I snuck a long look at her through the bathroom mini-blinds. Her face was beautiful, small and sleek like a ferret’s and with a steely demeanor that had little in common with the complacency of a domesticated cat. She bristled with nervous energy. Even at rest, she seemed in implied motion and never relaxed her guard. But a divided cap of black fur on top of her white head undercut her serious expression. It reminded me of Alfalfa’s slicked-down and parted hairdo from the Our Gang comedies and increased the inexplicable stab of affection that struck me as I stared. She seemed to sense that I was watching. I ducked just as she lifted her head toward the window, but not before I noticed a strange discolored strip that ran down her nose and lip.
I decided to venture out with food, so that she would associate me with something positive. I also wanted to get a closer peek at the mark on her face. After donning fifteen pounds of winter outerwear, gloves, boots, cleats, and scarves, I made my exit from the basement as unobtrusively as possible—softly easing the door open and letting her see my cherubic expression through the pickets of our gate. “Alfalfa gal, I’ve got food,” I started to coo, but she wasn’t ready for her close-up. Before I could get the phrase past my tongue she was already just a memory.
Over the next few days, I assured myself that I was simply indulging in the feline equivalent of scanning the snowy wastes for redpolls and other winter finches. But my thrumming heart gave the lie to my brain when I saw the stray at a distance stalking mice in our frozen swamp or skulking near a pile of branches where tree sparrows hid. The close encounter had evidently spooked her. Now she wouldn’t come anywhere close to the house. Once, I caught her glancing up from our field to see my stick figure in the dining room picture window, and even that lo-res view caused her to hightail it. Churning up a spray of ice crystals in her wake, she tore across the tundra racing all the way to the river, where a trickle of unfrozen water might wash away the hideousness of the sight.
LATER THAT WEEK, the day started with a bang. A crash like a meteor hitting the house jolted us as we ate breakfast. Ice blocks weighing ten, twenty, fifty pounds, or one hundred tons thundered, rumbled, and scudded down the roof, exploding on the ground with crater-forming intensity. An alienated chunk would occasionally teeter on the edge of the second-story roof and drop straight down to wallop the first-story roof directly above my head as I cringed with a bowl of grits. The terrified parrots flapped their wings, hovering inside their cages as if they occupied a falling elevator.
The massive berg-size rectangles of ice on the ground reminded me of the ruins of an Aztec city. “I’m glad the geese weren’t out in the yard,” Linda said, shuddering. “Or The Little Kitty,” which was how we had started to refer to the stray.
“I’d better stay home today,” I told her as I pushed a lump of grits from one side of my bowl to the other. “I’ll be killed walking out to my car.”
“I don’t think a thaw is a reason to skip work.”
As I ducked out the door, rivulets of water funneled down a row of icicles under the eaves and onto my head. Our skating-rink driveway had turned into a bog of slush. It would be thunderstorming by evening, according to our weather radio. While this wasn’t what you’d call bikini weather—at least not for me—I welcomed any respite from winter misery. But later that day as I wrote sales copy for my employer’s hi-fi products website, waxing poetic about a pair of loudspeakers that cost more than my car, I fretted about the stray. I wondered what she would do if she got caught in the rain and the flash freeze that was predicted to follow.
I worried about Linda’s safety, too. We’d be pratfalling as we struggled with our outdoor chores the next day. I wasn’t concerned about myself. I moved too slowly to easily slip on the ice; when was the last time you saw a slug lose its balance? But Linda always scraped her feet, and she had worn her boot cleats down into polished bumps.
Home for the day shortly after lunch, I had a plan to wrap a few strips of fencing around her boots as a makeshift traction device. But Linda was just back from her chiropractor, and I could tell that she was bursting to share a piece of news.
Linda’s chiropractor was located midway between Michigan and Ulan Bator, and he was the only chiropractor in the northern hemisphere who could fix her up. Since she couldn’t drive herself much farther than down the street due to her sacrum slippage, every Monday her friend Jan drove the sixty-mile round trip as Linda lay flat in the aptly named backseat.
“Jan dropped me off, and I was standing outside talking to her, enjoying the sunshine, when I felt something rubbing up against my leg. I looked down, and guess who it was.”
“Agnes was in the front yard? She knows better than that.” We didn’t mind our cats losing themselves in the mud, weeds, and impenetrable thickets that lay between our house and the river. But we didn’t want the cats anywhere near the busy two-lane road out front.
“No, not her. Agnes is waiting for you in the basement. It was The Little Kitty. Miss Run-If-I-See-A-Face.”
“The white-and-black cat? Are you sure it was her?” I couldn’t imagine our fraidy-cat rubbing against someone’s leg. And if she did, why didn’t she choose the leg attached to the person who was every bit as anxiety laden as she was and who carried her around in his mental worry bucket like a precious gem?
“She was rubbing against my leg and even let me pet her. She might be still around.”
I tried not to judge my wife too harshly. I’d been reading how polar explorers subjected to prolonged periods of sensory deprivation often suffered from delirium, and our winter had been brutally cold, unusually snowy, and extensively icky even by Michigan standards. Plus, she had been living with me for over fifteen years, which would send anyone over the edge. She had probably encountered a frostbitten squirrel or, more plausibly, the Bigfoot-like creature that I believed inhabited our woods.
JUST BEFORE DINNER, as I trudged toward the barn carrying a bucket of table scraps, the scaredy-cat darted out from under one of our monster pines and then began a full-body massage to my booted calf. She cupped my leg beneath her chin, bumped me with her hip, and snaked her tail around my ankle before making a U-turn and doing it all over again. I wondered how this could be the same high-strung beast whom until this very moment I had only been able to glimpse like a holograph. She certainly seemed real enough. She purred and rubbed her head against my hand just as Agnes would, arching her back and halving her length as I stroked her.
“I wish we had room for you inside,” I told her. I took a mental inventory of spaces in the house currently unoccupied by cats, birds, or rabbits. A few dresser drawers and the wastebasket in my upstairs office were all that I could come up with. “Maybe we can set up a bed for you in the barn. You’d like that better anyway.”
I had imagined that her fur might be coarse and matted from the hardships of living outdoors, but she felt as luxuriously soft as any house cat. Then the house cat underwent a sudden transformation. Shifting her weight to her hind legs, she raised her nose and every nerve ending in her body went on alert, from the slits of her eyes to her cocked tail. For a moment she inhabited a world that I knew absolutely nothing of, a realm far older and deeper than my plodding-out-to-the-mailbox-for-the-daily-bills existence. Then, just as effortlessly, she came back to Planet Bob. The feral look slid from her face, the tension exited her body, she went back to rubbing against my leg, and I went back to petting her.
I sunk into an approximation of bliss, but not for long. A cat as distrustful of humans as she had been would only resort to intimate contact out of desperate need. I squished through melting snow back to the basement, dipped a plastic margarine dish into a bag of cat food, and pushed it under her snout. Then I stood by with grandfatherly pride while she vacuumed up the food. She danced tight circles in appreciation before zipping back beneath th
e evergreen—leaving me with an ungloved outstretched hand and nothing to pet except our propane tank.
Tossing spaghetti, potatoes, and chunks of bread to our mysteriously fat ducks and hens a few minutes later, I thought about the discolored strip of skin across her muzzle. I wished that she had followed me into the barn so that I could shelter her from the coming weather and whisk her to the vet if necessary.
Shortly after dinner, as Agnes waited for my feet to hit the basement steps, I carried an empty plastic pitcher through the living room and out onto our front porch to refill it from our refrigerator-size sack of kibbles. The television blaring from the other end of the house warned me about the 80 percent chance of precipitation after midnight. Rain had already started to fizz against the sidewalk. How would the white-and-black cat fare in the downpour, I thought, and then jumped back as I noticed her peering in at me, her paws propped against the aluminum door.
“Sorry, honey, you can’t come in,” I told her, though I had already opened the door. She shot onto the porch, but it was obvious that she was going through an internal tug of war. Before I could close the door again, she bulleted back outside then turned to stare up into my eyes with a sweet Sunday school expression. “You can stay out if you want to,” I told her. She emitted a squeak so high pitched that if I hadn’t seen her open mouth, I wouldn’t have believed that she had made it. I held the door for her again, shutting it immediately when she popped inside—only to be chastised with the same plaintive eek.
