In the beginning our walk on the wild side was a walk on brambles and brier. On top of our devastating loss of Elizabeth and everything else including our soundness (wounds which to this day remain sore to the touch of memory), there was now cold, hunger, and fear. We’d been thrown away somewhere as strange and threatening to us as any alien planet would’ve been: We saw animals we’d never knew existed and heard sounds we’d never heard. The nocturnals—raccoons, foxes, possums–-spooked us with piercing cries from every direction. Baying dogs scared the shit out of us. Deer stamped their feet, sending us scrambling. Hunters snuck around the underbrush taking pot shots at deer and rabbits, their bullets whistling overhead. Being green and as yet powerless to deal with our surroundings, because every day seemed to be bad news, we lived in constant dread of would happen next.
One night plodding wearily through bracken, cold drizzly fog draped like a giant cobweb over everything in sight, we were so dead on our paws we would’ve walked straight into a bog if a hellish screeching overhead hadn’t stopped us in our tracks. “Supreme Cat!” Bob gasped. “Up there, Fairbanks! Look! What the hell are they?” Bats were what they were, dozens of them shrouded in heavy mist, hanging upside down from the trees. Well. To stumble upon that sight at dusk in the kind of fog-veiled forest where Wolfman might’ve hunted was to enter the twilight zone between wakefulness and nightmare. Quivering, fur standing on end, rooted by terror, I stood unable to move; as if frozen I cringed staring up at those sinister rodents so different from mice and moles until Bob’s urgent “RUN FAIRBANKS RUN!” enabled me to turn tail and dash after him dashing away from those fanged faces uttering bloodcurdling cries.
Of course in time it all became commonplace—even the danger. I for one came to like what the young ferals’d touted: the freedom, the challenge to wits and courage, the nights lit by a cold white moon—things I miss now—until I remind myself of the price you eventually pay for them, what Booley would call a Faustian bargain. As for Bob, he saw too many pitfalls to ever enjoy the life as much as I did. Also, per Mama’s request it fell to him to keep me in check, to raise a STOP! paw to any ill-advised act I might be considering with the result that he was often on my back about this or that: “Too risky, forget about it, Fairbanks”; forever nudging: “Wait! Stop! Look before leaping!”
I had my paws full alright. The Fairbanks Project.
Still, for all of his diligence, there were times impulsiveness made a preemptive strike and screwed up any chance he had of stopping me. Like on the night we were still looking for FDR, wandering spaced-out from hunger, calling, calling his name until a furious hiss almost under our noses stopped us cold. “Shut the fuck up, assholes!” We jumped a mile high. We whirled round to see a cat slink from a thicket, pounce on a squirrel, snap its neck in his jaws. All— the thud of it, the squirrel’s scream—in a split second. In shock we watched him—after a furtive glance in our direction—crouch over the still twitching body and tear into it. Which was when, my empty belly groaning and not a thought in my head for anything but food, I bounded over to join him.
“FAIRBANKS!” hollered Bob too late. “DON’T!” “What the hell?” spit out the tom, and before I knew what was happening, this wild-eyed scruffy beast twice my size stinking of piss and swamp had me belly-up, going for my throat full-fang, and if it wasn’t for Bob jumping him, I shudder to think, I shudder to think. But there was my brother clawing the bastard’s eyes and muzzle, hissing if he didn’t lay off, he’d make a rug out of him. Well, between the two of us, Bob on his back, me growling and spitting, raking whatever my free paw could reach, he had to give up. By myself, I would’ve been made into hash by that backwoods beast who didn’t know from sharing, that smelly polecat who got me but good all over the neck before he finally surrendered. “Fuck off, fishfood,” he hissed, clamping down on the gutted squirrel, backing up slowly with menacing growls. “Keep the fuck outta my turf,” he spit through a mouthful of squirrel, “or else.” Then with studied nonchalance turned his back and swaggered off.
For all I know that criminal’s bites were what gave me my FIV. For sure they were toxic. By morning they’d festered, made me sick as a dog, brought on a seizure Elizabeth would’ve treated with phenobarb, stroking, reassurance; but Elizabeth now existed only as an ache in my heart, so it was Bob who pulled me through those days I lay almost out of it, nauseous and feverish, feeling absolutely awful, every movement excruciating. Thanks to his gently and conscientiously licking the absesses I was too sick to lick myself, and which I know now could’ve been the end of me, did I rise to fight again.
Not that he let TLC distract him from his mission of trying to whip me into some sort of cautious shape. No, when he thought I’d rallied enough to take it, between cleaning the pussy results of my recklessness with a firm tongue, he’d resume his efforts to remodel me along more sensible lines. To have let up on the job wasn’t in his nature. Curled against me to keep me warm, his green eyes, alert for predators, moving like motion detectors, ears perking at every sound, “Gotta curb those impulses, Fairbanks,” he’d say. “Only lunatics horn in on a feral’s kill. What the hell were you thinking? Were you thinking? Think ahead, for Pete’s sake! Lucky he didn’t tear you apart.”
“Only partly apart. Have mercy. Give it a rest, Bobby. I’m sick,” I groaned. “Enough. You’re right, it was crazy.” No lie. And my kingdom to have him (in the flesh) lecturing me now on what I should and shouldn’t do, when every day in every way I feel worse and worse. What wouldn’t I give to nestle against him and be calmed by the beating of his heart and warmed by his body on this raw November day too warm for Booley’s radiators to kick in but too cold for my crashing immune system.
Sorry, Fairbanks, no can do. Disembodiment has its limitations.
The best, Bobby. A brother in a million. I may be the true believer that things’ll turn out alright no matter what—a mindset, granted, which often leads to counting chickens before they hatch—but Bob was the cat who’d go about trying to make sure they would hatch by finding out about optimum hatching conditions. Which was why before I’d made my fatal leap and needed backup, realizing our survival depended on nourishment which in turn depended on hunting, he hadn’t just watched the tom get the squirrel—he’d noted how he got it. And instinct aside, until he’d paid attention to that beast’s MO we hadn’t a clue that to hunt you hid, you timed your pounce, you pounced with lightning speed. . . . Never an ill wind.
Soon as I could be left alone my brother went hunting armed with mental notes and self-confidence —to come back empty-jawed. His first stalked squirrel not only got away but (the only plausible explanation, he insisted, for no subsequent squirrel sightings) spread the word a stalker was in the vicinity. Whatever. Necessity being necessity and Bob being Bob, defeat only strengthened his resolve, and he kept at it until he finally came back with an aged salamander who should’ve been hibernating. Not a great feast by a long shot, salamander, but considering our state of semi-starvation, a feast.
Once we started working in tandem and instinct kicked in, we soon perfected our stalking techniques. In short order we learned the ground tremors and rustles signaling prey, and two noses being better than one, before long we succeeded most of the time. After we’d caught and wolfed down our very first rodent, our joy at knowing we could make it in the wild knew no bounds. “Hey, Bobby, here’s to us! We’re feral!” I crowed, grinning from ear to ear, a smear of blood hot on my muzzle. And though at first they were a little gamy for our taste, soon we grew to relish our kills. We were lions in a jungle of brambles and bush. Our coats thickened. Our chronically sore eyes took on the wild gleam of hard-bitten, defiant acceptance of threat and danger.
What a team. Brothers in blood and soul. The differences in our temperaments only served to cement our symbiotic kinship. Between us was no mere mutual tolerance of our dissimilarities, but something way beyond. Our love for each other was so deep, so bound up with our own inner selves, that it was as if we were extensions o
f each other, facets of the same cat. Without Bob, I’m as deprived of essence as I am of eyelids and health.
But I’m here, Fairbanks, long as you are. In different form, that’s all. Enough with the bellyaching.
Days grew short, nights grew long, temperature kept dropping. Nights grew cold enough to keep us shivering in the shallow hollows filled with pine needles where we huddled together for warmth. “Time to shove off, Bro,” Bob said one late afternoon as a brief snow shower blew across the yellow and orange streamers the setting sun had tossed against the wintry sky. “Remember going to Penske’s? This stuff gets deep. We’ve gotta find some shelter.”
A great idea as far as I was concerned. For who knowing cats doesn’t know that wherever we are we want to be somewhere else, or sometimes in both places at once? By then, all hope of finding Bubby and FDR or (my secret hope) us being found by Manya was gone. So what was the point in staying where we were when there was a whole wide world of better places to see and be? By then we were cats with survival saavy. We knew how to hunt, when to arch our backs and show our fangs, make ourselves big and bristle our tails to scare off encroachers on our turf, how to read the wind which now whispered of adventures in better places. I itched to see the sun rise and set on other horizons and moonlight glitter in the eyes of possums and raccoons I hadn’t chased before. I craved the scent of strange skunks and wood turkeys. “I’m ready!” I purred. “Good Cat Almighty, I didn’t mean now, Fairbanks! The sun’s setting already. Hold your horse. Tomorrow morning’s soon enough.” I looked up at a sky fading into twilight, the sun reduced to a fiery smear on the horizon and reluctantly agreed tomorrow might be better. “Right. You’ve gotta give yourself every edge, Fairbanks, not rush from the frying pan into the fire.” That was Bob all over, while I was the cat on the hot tin roof with a fire under my tail and the wind’s song in my ears.
14
We set out in a bleak dawn, me in high spirits (at least at the beginning) over the prospect of finding shelter and adventure, Bob not betting on finding anything. “Don’t count your chickens, Fairbanks. How do we know this doesn’t go on forever? How do we know it’ll ever end?” he cautioned, meaning the boggy forest, its endless hollows of moldy leaves and bracken now skinned with ice, the rank smell of muddy wetlands, trees wrapped in browned-off brier and splotched with pale fungi creaking in the moaning wind. “C’mon, Bob! Like the world’s all woods?” “Would it surprise me?” “C’mon! Even on the way to Penske’s there were houses!” “In fields, Fairbanks. This is a swamp. Who’d want to live in a swamp? Watch that ice patch!” And in truth after awhile it had begun to look like the world was all woods, as if there was nothing more to it than what we’d left behind: the same rodents and nocturnals, and no place to go to get out of the cold. For days and nights we wandered as if fruitless footsore wandering was our fate. We joined what Elizabeth called the homeless—cat Diaspora. It seemed as if we’d been walking without letup since we were dumped—first searching for Bubby and FDR, and now searching for shelter—all of it to no avail. But at least thanks to our hunting skills we weren’t starving, and thanks to the dense fur we’d grown weren’t as cold as we might’ve been, I was telling myself as slipping and sliding on scales of ice in spots where no sun had penetrated the canopy, I plodded along in a semi-daze behind Bob.
The clearing came upon us suddenly, emerged from the brush the way ominous places rise up in dreams. All at once there it was with its remains of a burned-down house: two blackened upright beams rooted in charred wood and ashes restlessly stirred by the rising wind. An eerie sight in late afternoon light. A bad-news place I knew right away even before I saw the two chicken coops half-hidden by dry weeds and creepers.
“Like Penske’s!” I hissed. “We’re out of here!” But . . . “Are you crazy? This is what we’ve been looking for! Jumping the gun again, Fairbanks! Act first, think later. You see cars or trucks like Penske’s?” “No, but there’s a driveway!” “Sure there’s a driveway—for the house. Let’s at least check it out.” So, reluctantly I jumped after him through the broken window of the first coop. “See? No signs of life!” “Yeah? What about those chairs stacked against the wall?” I shot back, full of foreboding. “What about those stains on the floor?” “Fairbanks, Fairbanks, you agree it’s a chicken coop, right? So they used to kill chickens here. Who knows about the chairs and who cares? Who’s gonna come sit in chairs in a smelly chicken coop in the middle of the woods? If it’ll make you happy we’ll stay in the other one.”
It didn’t, but go convince Bob that chills along my spine should enter into his decision-making process. He was adamant. So we stayed in that godforsaken place that first night, and because of Hudak’s work on our throats choked and gagged on the decomposing feathers in every corner and crevice and the foul stench of chicken shit even worse than we’d choked and gagged at Penske’s. “So it doesn’t smell like Manya’s perfume. We’ll get used to it,” snuffled Bob between sneezes. “Don’t rush to judgment. Stop with the crabbing. Outside’s even colder than in here. And all the yelping out there means dogs.” With that I couldn’t argue, but feather fallout and foulness turned out not to be the worst of the place.
OK, so I was wrong. You should’ve sued me when you had the chance.
The following night we returned from foraging to find lights on in the coop with the chairs along with a lot of noise and shouting. Pickup trucks and vans with bashed fenders and unmatched doors were parked all over the place. And even before we jumped up to a window to see what was going on in there, I knew from the frenzied nature of the shouting that it was something nasty. But, no . . . not that nasty. For I’d never expected to see two snarling dogs rolling around in a pool of blood, tearing each other apart, muzzles red with bleeding gashes, ears ripped half off, torn genitals hanging while men in feed caps and baseball caps and camouflage hunting jackets standing despite the chairs, stomped, waved fists, swigged beer, cheering or cursing the dogs at the top of their lungs and little kids jumped up and down adding shrill screams to the bedlam.
“GET GOIN’, SUCKER! MOVE IT!” hollered some geezer crab- walking up to the blood-soaked ring shaking a pitchfork. “HE DON’T KILL YA, I’LL DO IT!” And stomach turning, I watched him stick it in the belly of the dog on its back before someone swinging a beer bottle barreled up and threatened to bash his head in if he didn’t quit it. “What Penske was talking about doing with Toro,” croaked Bob like I had to be told. It was as if I was actually in there with the blood of the dogs and the stink of the sweat and beer and tobacco of their murderers in my nostrils; my ears roared with obscene calls for more blood and death; I could barely breathe. “KILL! KILL ‘IM!”, “KILL THE MOTHERFUCKER!”, “I BET THE FARM ON YOU, SCUMBAG, RIP ‘IM APART!”
We couldn’t watch anymore. We jumped down and threw up. I cursed Sean’s Almighty Dog and Almighty Cat. I cursed the gods humans worship—fucking sadists one and all, Almightys. Words can’t describe my desolation of spirit over that spectacle of cruelty. A mythic stench of evil stank up that arena where ancient rituals untouched by millennia still went on, a sickness of soul festered in those creeps lusting for the blood, pain, and death of creatures with nothing to say about what was done with them or to them, nothing to do about it but fight for their lives.
What you do with experiences like that I didn’t know then and still don’t. Somehow you never forget abominations the way you forget so many other things. But did it help to talk them over sensibly, try to neutralize their horror via rational discussion, after (despite my pleas to get the hell away) we’d run trembling from the gruesome spectacle to the other coop? Or did hashing them over, as Bob had to do just reinforce their horrific impact and lifelong aftermath?
“Why the hell do dogs do it?” he’d asked, wanting to shed light on something so black and evil that all I wanted was to get as far away from it in body and thought as I could. To talk over why those dogs were mangling each other was not what I wanted to do. “What, Bob, you’ve got to g
o into this when you know from Penske they’re trained by the dogmen to make big bucks for them? What’s to talk about? Let’s get the hell out of here or we’ll end up being used for bait.“ But: “Trust me, it’s better to stay at least for now. Where’d we go? It’s freezing outside, Fairbanks. And, yeah, we should talk about it unless you want to just shake and listen to them yelling instead of trying to put things in perspective. Could catmen train cats to do it?”
“You need me to tell you?” I asked, going on to tell him what he already knew only because he was right about the cold and it being better to focus on anything but those dogs trying to kill each other and the cheers and curses tearing the frigid air to shreds. Cats, I said, didn’t take to training, they obey only when it’s in their best interests, never put themselves out for anyone —let alone commit suicide to satisfy some trainer. “C’mon this isn’t inside information, Bob. You know if we kill it’s never another cat and mainly for food; you know to be admired for beauty and grace, not performance, is our position-–so, what the hell what else can I tell you?” I said with the hope he’d let it go at that. But, no. “Exactly, Fairbanks! Who could train cats to offer a paw or sniff out drugs or bombs or pull sleds through snow? Would any cat be caught dead herding sheep or cattle?” “Still,” I pointed out, “there’s training and training. Maybe dogs like Shep or Sean could be trained to do those things, but could they be trained to kill each other?” Well, he said, maybe they could, maybe they couldn’t, he didn’t know. And to my relief that unresolvable question ended the discussion.
More to comfort ourselves than to clean up, we’d groomed each other and tried to sleep in spite of the racket outside and the images of horror running like tapes through our heads. But for a long time I stayed awake unable to stop myself from mulling over the conversation I hadn’t wanted to have and asking myself other unresolvable questions. Was it training, wanting to please, fear of punishment if they lost, or maybe just an itch to risk for risk’s sake driving those dogs? Or do they have wolves in their bellies thirsting for blood?
Sisypuss: Memoirs of a Vagabond Cat Page 10