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| Am's World |
Amethyst most certainly did bounce back from this ordeal. She became a favorite subject of my casual photography. I got her on videotape playing the game with the string. She had already gotten bored with the ball chasing. I took her places other than the vet in the car. She had been an indoor/outdoor cat all of her life. Now, deprived of unsupervised access to the outside world, I felt that I owed her some entertainment along this line. We went to remote places where she could stroll and not get away. She never bolted. She loved to stand and work her nose in the breeze. My attention span on these outings was more limited than hers. I would invariably pick her up and bring her home before she was ready to pack it in.
The work year started back up in the fall, and I had less
time to roam. I kept up the outside world entertainment by taking Amethyst down
to sidewalk and letting her walk and sniff. There was also, by my building, on
a side street with less traffic, a little grassy lot. The lot featured at this
time a pile of abandoned cars. The cars were literally in a pile, shoved close
to each other, and on top of one another. On one occasion, Amethyst tired of
eating the grass (which she always later puked), and went off in the direction
of the cars. A fence enclosed the cars. She found the fence easily
permeable. I did not. I found myself
looking on as Amethyst squeezed under the fence, jumped up onto the hood of a
rusty sedan, and from that perch, leaped to the hood of a van missing all of its
windows. I wasn’t sure exactly what she was after, but I was already looking
for a way to climb the fence myself. When I next got Amethyst in sight, she was
on the roof of the van, trotting briskly towards the back of the vehicle. I
realized now that there was no glass in the van’s many rear windows. No sooner
had I had this thought than I watched my “senior citizen” do a very spry thing.
Amethyst did a sort of a flip off the back of the roof, really a matter of
stretching to get a footing from the roof to the lower part of the
windowsill. Then, in continuous motion
and letting gravity do most of the work, she found the next foothold, which was
inside the van. Vanished. I could not figure out how she was going to reverse
this action. I knew that if she finally wanted to get back out, she probably
could do it somehow. I knew that I had other things to do that afternoon, and
waiting for Amethyst to emerge again was not on the agenda. I did not
immediately see how I was going to get over the pile myself and get into the
van. I immediately set to frantic work
doing just that, cursing my foolishness as a pet handler all the while. What
made me think this cat was going to do what I expected every time I gave her
even limited access the outside world and all of its opportunity for sin and
adventure? Clearly, I had now been disabused of this idyllic notion. My concept
of limits was strictly from my anthropoid point of view. Her view offered a
wider range of possible moves. Now I had seen one of these moves. Incredible.
Damn!
After some sweating, climbing, and yanking on rusted
metal, I got access to the inside of the van. There was Amethyst, upside down,
looking at me, but in the middle of having a nap on a warm, filthy cloth seat.
I quickly scooped her up, and working carefully so that there would be no vet
or doctor bills, got out of the van, back down to the ground, and back over the
fence with her. She moved one notch closer to being a sequestered indoor cat.
The interior of my apartment building featured an
adjoining warehouse space. It was only one door beyond mine. The fuse box for
my apartment was contained in there, and so, with a screwdriver, I could gain
access. (Amethyst and I had similar proclivities, come to think of it.) On one
occasion when both the door to the warehouse and the door to our apartment were
open, Amethyst naturally discovered the warehouse. This was a sort of feline
paradise. It, after all, might contain an exit to the outside world. That had
been the lay of the land at Shelley’s. No matter how many doors were closed or
opened, there was always a way in and out. The warehouse did not have an exit,
so far as I knew. (There was an elevator and shaft, but I really deemed that
too much for even this Houdini cat.) In any case, the space was still paradise
for Ammy. Birds had died in there. There might have been rodents. Not those
boring rodents that had been vanquished at Shelley’s and then negotiated with
when they reemerged, but real rat sized worthies. Even if this drool inducing
prospect were proved false, there were so many nooks and crannies to explore
that the cat imagination went wild. Or
so it seemed. It again took me awhile to locate the cat in this gloom. When she
had been once again secured behind closed doors, she now knew about this world
so near and yet so far. If permitted into the hallway, for many years after
this experience, she would pace and sing a song of desire. It was the same
song, repeated over and over. It sailed forth on a rising series of yells and
the iterations concluded with a breathy snort. I recorded this song while
trying out a new mini-disc recorder. It is among the best mementos of Amethyst
that I possess.
As the cool weather settled in, some of my routines had to
be adjusted to accommodate the cat. I liked to heat only a few rooms by keeping
doors closed. Amethyst liked to roam from room to room. I put up blankets,
weighted at the bottom so that they would fall to the floor when disturbed, and
left the doors open. Amethyst loved the radiator-style electric heaters. She
would jam her head between the fins and cook her brain. She also began joining
me in my bed, becoming much more affectionate, wanting the warmth of another
mammal. She had a different sleeping rhythm than I did. She would sleep close
to my head, and when she felt it was time to be up and crinkling packages,
she’d wap my head gently with a paw. I took to calling her the ‘four-legged
alarm clock’.
So it went until Christmas time. I had, surely, spoken to
Shelley off and on about taking Amethyst back. She now replied to these
requests by saying that “the missing cat signs were up again”, expressing the idea
that some Satanic Cult in Urbana was killing household pets for ‘worship’. Her permeable place was no place for “an old
lady cat still with the grace of fire.” Now I wanted to travel home to DC for a
week over the holidays, and I wanted Shelley to at least watch Amethyst for the
duration. There was a new impediment: Shelley had gotten another, younger, cat.
Mice overran her place. She needed a mouser. I insisted, and I got my reprieve.
I returned Amethyst to Shelley, with bowls, litter box and food. The
understanding was that I would take Amethyst back when I returned. (Did I think
that I would get away with simply ignoring this deal, as Shelley had done with
me? I might have thought so on one level, but on another, I had already become
attached to Amethyst. I took my trip. When I returned, Shelley reported that
she had had a fright, because Amethyst had disappeared. The kids had been
asking how long that cat was going to stay, because she made ‘that noise’ all
the time. It kept them awake at night. Amethyst had been found. She had escaped
the territory of the new, aggressive, interloping cat and taken up residence in
the unheated garage. It was not hard to see this turn of events in the paw
prints that cluttered the snowy ground between the garage and the house. My
recollection is that I said to Shelley, “it’s your cat, it’s time you took her
back.” I can’t remember when this conversation took place. The response I got
was, “then I will have her euthanized.” Whenever these words were actually
exchanged between us, or whether I have concatenated several conversations, it
eventually was clear that the roof over her original homestead was no longer
Amethyst’s to enjoy. Not even for a visit. When I went to Shelley’s to bring
her back to my apartment, I found her asleep on a second floor bed. She was
comfortable there. She did not even look up at me when I entered the room. I
don’t have a clear memory of bringing her back in the car with her box, bowls,
and food.
