by Bob Tarte
Back in the waiting room, I snapped open my phone and talked in hushed tones to Linda. I watched the Chinese apartment dweller defy the local authorities from his crumbling tower a few more times. The wearying boredom was therapeutic. It kept me from agonizing over Frannie.
Time slowed even more as Dr. Fitzroy clipped the first of two X-rays to a light box. I steeled myself for the worst, or would have, if I’d had any steel inside me. She pointed to a faint pair of streaks against white bone and said, “Her pelvis is fractured in two places.”
“How serious is that?”
“It should heal on its own without a cast if you keep her still for a few weeks, but that isn’t the only problem.” She hung the second film next to the first and explained that Frannie’s hind leg was dislocated. “Normally with a dislocated leg, we reposition it and pop it back into place. But we can’t do that with Frannie without shattering the fractured pelvis.”
“So what do we do? Will she have to have surgery?”
“You probably don’t have to do anything. Cats’ leg muscles are strong enough that they’ll form a false joint over time. It’s really amazing, but it works because their bodies are so light. It shouldn’t present any issues, though she may limp a little.”
“What do you think happened to cause this?” I asked and repeated the story of how Linda had found her in the weeds in front of the barn.
“There’s no way to know,” she said, jotting notes on Frannie’s chart. “She could have fallen from a tree. From the gash on her leg, she might have been clipped by car. If that’s what happened, she’s probably lucky. Most cats that get hit by cars have much more serious external injuries.” I could tell by her tone of voice that Frannie wasn’t out of the weeds just yet. “We don’t know if she has internal injuries. I see that her regular vet is Dr. Ziaman. Take her there in a couple of days for a follow-up. Let her rest until then and try to get her to eat.”
She handed me a plastic bag stuffed with syringes so thin they resembled lollipop sticks. “This is for the pain. Give her one three times a day.” Another bag of syringes materialized. “She needs this antibiotic twice a day. Keep the wound on her leg clean.”
I shuddered to think of once again having to give medication to Frannie, who disliked being handled under the best conditions. As I looked at her with concern, she fixed her eyes on mine and gave me the long, slow blink that a cat only gives to the people that it loves. She had never done anything like that before. That blink coursed through my optical nerves, pausing briefly at the tear ducts before setting my whole body aglow. If Dr. Fitzroy noticed my phosphorescence, she was too polite to mention it.
BACK HOME, WE pulled the lid off Frannie’s cardboard carton and set it on the porch floor, positioned her favorite pillow on top of it, and gently slid her out of the pet carrier. She lay flat and exhausted, but sufficiently awake to swallow her meds when I tilted up her head. Outdoors a tree frog repeated a mournful note.
I went to bed with a strange sense of elation. Frannie’s accident had swept aside everything comfortable in my tiny world. I worried that she had suffered internal injuries, and the knowledge that she was in pain clung to me like a ringing in my ears. But I still felt filled with light. The spark of love that had passed between us was a once-in-a-lifetime gift.
I woke up early hoping to find a greatly improved Frannie who was essentially her old self, though unable to walk. But she was nearly comatose. “She won’t eat,” I told Linda as I teetered on the edge of our bed sipping coffee from an ORIGINAL AMERICAN KAZOO COMPANY OF EDEN, NY coffee mug. Both our Dubious Daily Word and Ya Better Believe It! calendars focused on medically grotesque subjects, so I set them aside. “I tried chicken. I tried tuna from a brand new can. I even heated up a dollop of Bits o’ Liver and tempted her with it on my fingers. She wouldn’t touch a thing.”
“You can’t expect her to be hungry when she’s in pain.” Linda said. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
I would have welcomed some resistance when I daubed the stitched-up gash in her leg with Betadine. And when I pried her mouth open to dose her with her pharmaceutical, she complained with an alarmingly weak rendition of her usual squeak. These should have been two-person jobs, but my vacant self proved sufficient. By evening she continued to decline.
“I think we’re going to lose her,” I said. “There must be some damage inside.”
Showing my characteristic lack of good sense, I trudged out to the porch before bedtime and blubbered my good-bye. For once I could pet her as much as I wanted. When she lifted her head to peer at me through cloudy eyes, I didn’t know whether she was acknowledging my messy farewell or asking me to stop.
It seemed like a miserable irony that a cat who had survived on her own outdoors for months should perish in the process of becoming domesticated. I could have locked her inside and tried to ignore the pacing from door to door—and the flitting from window to window just to catch a whiff of the sweet world beyond our walls—but her unhappiness would have worn me down. I could at least have kept her in until after lunch, for all the difference that would have made. Fate had robbed her of years of chasing Agnes up a tree, turning up her nose at one canned cat food product after another, and evading my touch.
The next morning she had slipped so far into the bottomless pit of oblivion that it seemed cruel to force more meds down her. Linda made an appointment with Dr. Ziaman to see if anything could be done—including euthanizing her, if necessary. I took the morning off from work.
SHE PERKED UP a little by the time I hauled her carrier into Dr. Ziaman’s office. With a cocked head she glanced around the room and yawned. This small activity was such a huge improvement over her previous comatose state she might as well have suddenly vaulted up to the ceiling. I wrote off her flicker of wakefulness to my having thumped her over potholed roads between our house and the clinic. Dr. Ziaman had another interpretation. “It’s the painkiller,” she told me. “It’s too strong for her. You said you didn’t give it to her this morning.”
“They gave us the wrong painkiller?” I asked.
“It was proper for the day of the accident, but I think we should cut back now and switch to one that doesn’t sedate her so much.”
“So her painkiller is the problem?” I felt my elation surging again.
“We’re not out of the woods yet.” Weeds, I wanted to tell her. Out of the weeds. “I recommend we do a blood chemistry test to make sure that her internal organs are functioning correctly.” She explained how elevated numbers in her blood profile would reveal a problem with her liver, kidneys, or something . . . but the explanation sailed right past me, because I was too busy mentally splashing around in a fountain of optimism.
“Normally we would take her into another room for the blood draw,” Dr. Ziaman said, “but we don’t want to jar her pelvis any more than we have to. So if it disturbs you to watch, you can look away while we take the blood sample right here.”
I didn’t understand what specifically might disturb me, but since I was easily disturbed, I stared at my shoes while Dr. Ziaman and an assistant went to work. “We usually draw blood from the inside rear leg, but we can’t do that with Frannie. We have to lean her head and shoulders down off the edge of the countertop.” I concentrated more intensely on my feet, but Frannie didn’t utter a sound. “Dad, this is one brave cat,” she said, making my day a second time not only with her praise of Frannie but also by addressing me in beatnik lingo. After running the test she explained that Frannie’s major organs were, like, dreamsville, and that the scene should stay cool if she just hung loose.
Even though the big ticket items inside Frannie appeared to be undamaged, I was instructed to keep a close eye on her. “Make sure she eats, and also make sure that sometime in the next few days she uses her litter box. She’ll hold out as long as she can, but she’ll eventually use it if everything’s all right.”
“But she’ll never get to it. She can barely move.”
“Put some ki
tty litter in a shallow tray and move it close to her bed. Trust me, she’ll use it when the time comes.”
And if she needed a refresher course, I only had to open the porch door and Lucy would march out to show her how it was done.
I SHOULD HAVE felt great on the drive back home. But the further I traveled from the magnetic center of Dr. Ziaman’s optimism, the glummer I grew. As my car clicked and popped to a stop in our gravel driveway, I had reverted to my usual negative self. I was always a bundle of nerves when one of our animals got sick, and Frannie’s accident had turned me into one big throbbing synapse. When I delivered the good news to Linda that her injuries probably weren’t life threatening, I managed to make it sound like a death sentence. The way I saw it, I still had a gravely injured cat and no reason to celebrate.
“We’re in trouble if she doesn’t use this,” I told Linda as she prepared a new litter box for the cat. “She needs to eat—right now,” I said as we surrounded her bed with bowls.
“She’ll be fine. She just needs time to heal.”
I shushed her when I heard Bill Holm’s voice on the answering machine. I had completely forgotten about the overnight trip to Saginaw Bay that we were supposed to take. “He must be out of his mind,” I said. “I can’t leave when she’s like this.”
“Does he even know about her accident?”
Mumbling a non-answer, I picked up the phone. After getting the usual informalities out of the way, I told him what had happened to Frannie and explained that I was too worried about her to even think of taking a trip.
“Do you still have Moobie’s funnel?”
My voice cracked in irritation. “What good would that do for a fractured pelvis, a dislocated leg, and possible internal injuries?”
“Not for Frannie. For you.” Before I could complain about him wearing out a joke that I hadn’t enjoyed the first time, he asked, “Remember how deathly ill Zippy was?”
“Yes,” I lied, embarrassed that I’d been too absorbed in my own woes to recall that one of his cats had been sick.
“She was vomiting,” he told me. “She stopped eating and drinking and looked like she was going to die. I was headed to work for a meeting, and I thought that by the time I got home, Zippy would be dead. She looked so pathetic and small and sad. So I knelt next to her in misery as she lay curled in a circle on a TV-room chair, and I said good-bye. But I also emphasized that if she wanted to get better, she had to eat. About three hours later when I came home, I opened the door, and she hopped off the chair and wobbled over to meet me. She made me follow her to her food where she took a few bites.”
“She ate for you just like that?”
“And then she threw up in the dish.”
“Oh, great.”
“No, it helped. That was the moment she turned the corner, and now she’s fine. Cats are such fighters.”
I peered out the living room window at Frannie’s flattened body on the porch. She lay on her side like a pork chop with a slight curve to her spine. I watched her abdomen move in and out as she breathed, which somewhat vaguely reassured me that she was still alive. “So I just need to tell her that she’ll get better.”
“Tell her you’re going to Nayanquing to look for the yellow blackbird thing. She’ll do the rest.”
JUBILATION BRIEFLY STRUCK when I ducked through the doorway onto the porch and noticed that the minced chicken on Frannie’s delft china saucer had vanished. I started to holler for Linda. But I stifled my excitement as I discovered a second empty plate, which had previously contained a dollop of tuna, and another plate formerly occupied by a lump of canned cat food. Over the two days since Dr. Ziaman had examined Frannie, we had placed these treats in front of her twice a day. Her untouched snacks were providing a bounty for Moobie, Agnes, and Lucy, who slurped up the hours-old but by no means French toast–quality outdated food.
A peek into the living room revealed the most likely culprit. Looking more self-satisfied than ever, Lucy avoided my eyes as she licked her chops. The level of kibbles in her bowl hadn’t dropped a fraction of an inch since I had replenished it earlier that afternoon. “You couldn’t wait your turn,” I said. “Now we’ll have to keep the porch door closed.” Moobie changed direction when she saw me in the hallway and hurried into the bedroom—so multiple perpetrators might have colluded on the raid.
Armed with another round of meats, I did my best to convince Frannie to break her fast. “It’s good!” I insisted when she turned her head away. A smudge of tuna on my finger earned a sniff, but no tongue.
“What are we going to do with you, honey?” Balanced on one knee, I scratched her neck and she surprised me by responding with a stretch.
Then I heard it. She actually started purring. I stroked her back, we exchanged slow blinks, and I floated back into the house on a wave of encouragement, and a short time later she proved me right. A chunk of chicken held no allure. She said can’t to the canned food. But when I held a lowly bowl of kibbles under her chin, she took a bite, then another, and when she didn’t want a third, she consented to lick a gob of tuna from my fingers.
“That’s one end accounted for and in working order,” I told Linda. “Now let’s hope the other end still works.”
As her appetite increased, we began examining her cookie-sheet litter box for any evidence of use. No prospector ever scrutinized his pan for grains of gold more closely than we squinted over her litter. A week after her accident, she had regained enough mobility to shift position on her carton-top pillow, but we had never seen her move off it. Not even an accidental visit from Agnes prompted her to stir. I caught our black cat snuffling around Frannie’s litter tray after I had left the door open to refill her water bowl. Neither cat acted as if she had seen the other, and Agnes scampered back upstairs to resume her second-story exile.
Frannie may have had her rough-and-tumble uncivilized aspects, but she proved to be scrupulous in her bathroom etiquette. Even though she couldn’t walk, in the middle of the night she somehow managed to inch herself over to the litter box, use it with the utmost neatness, and crawl back to her pillow again. I doubt that any human being in the entirety of human history had ever been as excited to clean kitty litter as I was the following morning.
AGNES DIDN’T TAKE long to turn Frannie’s injury to her benefit. Although she had only nosed around the porch for a minute or two, she had worked out the mathematics of the situation. Adding Frannie’s immobile carriage to Frannie’s subtraction from the rest of the house, Agnes began dividing her day between the upstairs and the basement. The inevitable moment arrived when she bleated at the door to go out. I thought up several reasons against it. None of them convinced me in the end, considering that Agnes had spent almost as much time outdoors as indoors over the last thirteen years. She had come to us as a stray just like Frannie and boasted far more street smarts than I’d ever have. So I opened the door.
I watched her as she became queen of the world. She streaked between the pine trees. She made the wind blow through the weeds. She dug holes in Linda’s vegetable garden, climbed the gate post, fled from the geese, soaked up every inch of daylight, and brought out Venus dangling low on the horizon. I didn’t know if Frannie envied her, lying on her pillow on her cardboard box top, but I did. I needed to go outside. I needed to escape from worry. I needed to run to the river with Agnes flying behind me.
“You need to go on your little trip with Bill,” said Linda.
Just the thought of the yellow-headed blackbird, half midnight, half blazing sunshine, put a half smile on my face.
Bill had phoned the ranger’s office at Nayanquing Point State Wildlife Area and learned that this was probably the final week if we wanted to see the yellow-headed blackbird. After that, the handful of courting males would stop singing, sink behind the cattails, and disappear.
“Frannie can take of herself now,” Linda said.
WE SHUDDERED DOWN a deeply rutted gravel road. The weeds that brushed the Volvo Bill had named Turbo were s
o high, we might as well have been driving through a tunnel. I asked Bill to turn off the CD. He was playing Buddy Ebsen Says Howdy to annoy me, and I needed to listen for birds. “You don’t want to enjoy ‘Everything’s Okay’ one more time? It’s my new theme song.” Buzzes, zips, and trills swirled past us in a rush of heat when I rolled down the window.
“So, that’s your philosophy?” I shouted above the tire noise. “Everything’s okay?”
He rolled up my window. “My what?”
“You told me twice you had a philosophy of life, or happiness, or something.” Sunlight blanked out the screen of the GPS, which didn’t recognize the road we were on anyway. It showed the icon of a car in empty space.
“I guess it’s to just let things happen, more or less.”
“Kind of a Zen thing?” I asked. “Living in the present moment? That sort of thing?”
“God, no. Anything but the present moment. I avoid it at all costs.”
We reached a wide spot at the end of the road near the observation tower. I’d brought a hat this time. Last year we had trudged around the cattail ponds for hours in heat that sapped our wits, leaving us no wiser and no closer to the yellow-headed blackbird. This year we were better prepared for the grueling hike that was exactly what I needed to derail my anxiety over Frannie.
“Give me your water bottle.” He fitted it into a survival belt bulging with loops and pockets that he had grabbed from the backseat, then he wrestled his field guide into the belt. “I’ve got organic blueberries and fair-trade peanuts in case we work up a mighty hunger.” He flung open the door. “Anything else we need?”
“Yeah, luck.”
The plan was to climb the tower and pick a starting point for our search. As Bill’s survival belt slipped off, I heard what sounded like a red-winged blackbird as interpreted by Buddy Ebsen. “Yellow-headed blackbird,” I gasped. It was shockingly beautiful, grafting the brilliant head of a yellow warbler onto the body of a cowbird.
“Isn’t that one?” asked Bill, pointing to a second patch of weeds less than twenty feet from the car. “Sitting with a female?”