Stories

Them Keddis

I miss my cats.

I have always been a Cat Person. We had a passel of them growing up. I can name them all—Oscar, Jinks, Miki, Grendel, Griselda, and Tiki. All were indoor/outdoor cats and most came to an early end for various reasons. Miki stayed with us for about ten years and died of a stroke.

When Kady was growing up she says she had “all the animals,” six cats and six dogs. I only met Missy, her last dog.

While in Turkey, on my second tour, we lived in a high-rise apartment building. There were feral cats all around the building. 

Coming in the entrance one day, Kady saw a kitten in the hallway who was far too young to survive. When she told me about it, I rushed downstairs.  Boom, we had a cat.

It was an adorable little orange Tabby, about 4 weeks old, and all eyes and tail. We fed it milk in a bowl; it was so tiny it had to put its front feet in to drink.

I made a half-hearted attempt to find where it belonged, knocking on all the doors of every apartment in our building with a note written by our neighbor Nurgul. The Turks mostly laughed at me.

I promised Kim I would be the kitten's person, take it to the Vet, and take care of it. The Kids were delighted . . . their first pet.

I have never been good at determining the sex of kittens, especially one this young. After what I thought was a thorough inspection, I named him Bustopher Jones, after the Musical Cats character. We had seen the play twice while in England.

I took her to the American Vet when he came to town. He corrected my identification, so we scheduled her spay surgery during his next scheduled visit.

The name stuck.

Bustopher was super intelligent. She would fetch like a retriever, play hide-and-seek like a champ, and learn to open doors. She even answered the phone. When the phone rang, she would knock the phone off the cradle and make a noise into the mouthpiece that sounded very much like Hello.

Though she was my cat, she loved Kim and called her Mara. She thought Jay and E were her littermates.

She despised Sylvia, probably because Syl always wore black and Bus hated black. That was my fault. I roughhoused with Bus a lot. I had to wear a thick, black glove to protect my hand.  She knew it was time to wrestle when I put on the glove.

As we began our second year in Izmir, we were greeted each morning by a little gray kitten who wanted to rub all over our ankles. He was an anomaly. All of the other cats around the house were mean as hell. He was sweet, but we figured we had done our part.

One afternoon, while Kady watched for the kids to get off the school bus, she saw a Turk kid pick up the little cat and throw him in a 55-gallon trash can. He was too small to get out, so she went to get him. I came home to a filthy little kitten at the bottom of the bathtub.

I caught a cab back to the PX, bought some flea dip, and hurried back home. Ellen and I dipped the little guy in a bucket, up to his little face. The water turned black with dead fleas, and what emerged was a beautiful orange-and-white kitten marked like a Turkish Van.

Since our female kitten was named a boy's name, I chose a girl name from Cats for our new cat, Rumple Teaser, R/T (like the Dodge Challenger) for short.

He quickly became a part of the family, even gaining a semblance of acceptance from Bustopher. His crowning glory as a kitten was the night he got into an unwatched pot of chili, earning a trip to the Vet.

I was elected to massage his butt with Vaseline until he had a poo, which, of course, made the whole house smell with what can only be described as chili cat poo.

R/T wasn't as clever as Bustopher but had his ways. To show he loved you, he would give you a little bite on your nose, not enough to hurt, but enough to show he cared. 

As sweet as he was, outside female cats drove him crazy and he was likely to attack the nearest moving body as Kim found out one day. He hurt her so badly that I was about to strangle his sweet neck, but she called me off. We and the other cats gave him a wide birth when he started his mating nonsense. 

R/T was also the most annoying alarm clock. When he wanted you up, he cried incessantly, until you opened the door. We all learned to keep magazines by the bed to throw at the door, which would run him off. Like a snooze alarm, he'd return a few minutes later, resulting in more magazines or getting up.

Moving them back to the States was trouble. I tried to get them in one cat carrier, saving us money on the flights from Izmir to Atlanta.  Getting Bus in was hard enough, but putting R/T in with a pissed-off Bustopher was impossible. It looked like a cement mixer tumbling around on the floor. When I opened the door, both cats flew out. We didn't see them for a few hours. 

I bought another carrier and learned to lock them in the bathroom and wear gloves before putting them in

We had to claim our luggage in Istanbul to move it to the International Terminal. Once there, we sat with all our bags and the cats while we waited to check-in. Turks would look in the carriers expecting to see some exotic American pet, only to look at us and ask why we were taking home street cats. They may as well have been rats to the Turks.

Arriving in Atlanta, Bill and Sylvia picked us up in their car. The two-hour trip to Birmingham was epic. 

Bill got all of our bags in the trunk. He drove with Jay and Syl upfront. Kady, E, the carriers, and I were in the back. Bustopher was maniacally quiet, but R/T whined the whole way home. At Bill and Syl's house, the first order of business was to build two cat boxes. Both were immediately used.

Bustopher had a notoriously bad attitude about the Vet.  Once in Birmingham, I had to take her to the Vet, hissing, and scratching. I forget the reason. The Vet asked me, “What's the point?” She meant, what's the point in having a cat who acts like this? I was offended. I said, “Hey! That's my kitty; she doesn't like YOU!” 

After that visit, her carrier displayed a Cat Bites Sticker as a warning. Even giving her pre-vet-visit chill pills didn't work. She was the worst patient.

We lived for five years with just these two Cats. We took them to Texas with us, Jay and I drove them out, E and I drove them back.

They enjoyed chasing down the gigantic palmetto bugs but became bored with this game, overwhelmed by the numbers. Maybe they were just tired. They began watching them, expecting the humans to kill them.

After Texas, when we were assigned to Lexington and VMI Army ROTC. I came home from work one day to find two new kittens in the house. The kids had brought them home, Kady said OK, and though I argued a bit, they sure were cute.

I wanted to continue with the T. S. Elliot names but lost to older children and their ideas. Jay named the white cat after an online buddy called Fofo. E named the black cat Abby. When Abby's true gender was discovered, his name went into flux. Everyone gave him a name but we finally settled on Black Kitty, B-K for short.

These two little cats took over. They chased each other, willy-nilly, all over the house. Nowhere was safe.

Bus and RT watched in amazement, offering a hiss and a slap if the kittens came too close. RT treated them well enough, but Bustopher must have seen the writing on the wall and established her dominance early on. 

She held onto her alpha cat position until Fofo became one of the largest cats I have ever seen, weighing almost twenty pounds and solid as a rock. BK was a slight little thing who looked big because of his extra-long black fur. He probably only weighed about seven pounds. He was, however, a great hunter, ferocious when it came to catching the occasional mouse that got in the old house.

The pecking order went from Bustopher to R/T, to Fofo, down to poor BK. 

Everyone picked on BK. Mostly BK and Fofo played together all their lives, but sometimes it got rough and Fofo always won. R/T was nice to everyone and Bus was the only cat who could back him down. Bus was a bitch to the kittens, but Fofo could back her down, especially if she picked on BK. Fofo became his brother's protector. If Fofo got too aggressive with Bustopher, R/T would intercede. An uneasy peace fell over the house.

R/T was the first to go. He became very ill, very quickly, and stopped eating. He wasted away. After a trip to the vet, I had him put down. The way he went, with his eyes glazed over from the calming shot, traumatized me and I mourned for about a month and a half. I swore that I would never drug another animal up before the shot to stop their heart. 

Later, I discovered that the food he was eating, Special Kitty, had been poisoned, and, though Kady doesn't believe it, I am convinced they killed my buddy. He was old and had some thyroid problems and surgery, but his symptoms were the same as poisoning. He had lived a long life but I was sad to see him go.

Bustopher was the next. She had a few minor episodes where she would flop over and shake for a few seconds.  One day, she had a massive stroke that lasted much longer. I took her to the vet and they suggested I put her down. I went home and got Elise out of ROTC Class, and she and I went to take care of Bus. 

Bus went out like the major league bitch that she was, growling and spitting through the exam, through the shot, and then growling under her breath until her heart stopped. That, somehow, made losing her a little better.

Bus was almost eighteen.

Fofo went third. He developed kidney problems and began peeing all over the house. He had lived a long, happy life and I couldn't see trying to medicate him and still having to live with that, so I put him down.

With the other three cats gone, BK came into his own. He became the Big Cat and took up with everyone. He was, by far, the sweetest of the cats. About a year after Fofo, I had to put BK down too. He had Cat Alzheimer's and couldn't remember where the litter box was. Not OK.  I had no choice.

I buried them all below the parking lot behind the house, in a large tract of woods belonging to W&L University, under a huge oak tree, just off the top left corner of the Women's Soccer Field.

Kim and I have decided that we are done with pets. It's nice not having a litter box, fur balls all over the house, dead animals in the hall, need for pet sitters, or scratched-up furniture.

I sometimes miss having a warm fussy buddy climb in my lap, playing laser chase, or getting a little nose nibble.