by BB Curtis

Many years ago, in a city not too very far away lived a man, his wife, and their three children – two boys and a little girl. They lived well and happily with their large, rambunctious Chow-Chow and mellow British Shorthair silver tabby with soulful gray eyes. His name was Rafferty, aptly named by the youngest child, the little girl, for a character from a TV show that she and her mother watched together. The star of the show, Patrick McGoohan, was handsome in that bad-boy way that intrigues most women and his character’s demeanor fell on the feisty side. The cat was definitely handsome, and his swagger gave away a certain air of male feline earthy sensuousness, which the cat seemed to understand by nature was attractive to females – his favorite two people in the house.  His grouchy-sounding voice was a fair to middlin’ representation of the Rafferty character on TV.  The little girl insisted that he meowed with a British accent.

Our main character had a history of daring-do. One fine spring morning, about five years before the time of our story’s main thread, he arrived on the scene in this little family group by becoming a stowaway under the hood of a recent model Ford.  It could have been better only if he’d arrived on the scene in a 1965 Mustang, the car that Dr. Rafferty drove on the TV series AND, incidentally, was Mom’s first car. Across the street from the family’s somewhat sprawling home was an old-style gas station, owned and operated by the man who lived in the back of the station. Although this was a neighborhood within the city limits of a major metropolitan western city, there was a feel of Mayberry about it. Everyone knew everyone for a few block radius, older businesses that were owner-operated still flourished, and it was not unusual to take a meander across a four- or six-lane thoroughfare to say, “hey” to your neighbor and have a chat while sharing a cup of coffee that either of you might have just brewed. Just as the nighttime chill was falling off for the day, a navy blue Granada pulled up to the pumps as the station owner walked out the door and greeted his customer at her open car window.

“What can I do for you this fine day?” he asked as he bent down to meet her eyes.

“I’m having a bit of a problem as a matter of fact. There’s a terrible noise coming from my engine,” said the well-dressed, middle-aged woman at the wheel, “and I was wondering if you’d take a look to see if you can figure out what it is. I’m trying to get to work without being late, but I can’t take this sound any longer. It’s been going on for the entire fifteen miles I’ve gone since leaving home.”

Although he realized that this may not end in an exchange of money for service, he opened the hood, looked about a bit, pulled out a large ball of gray fluff, closed the hood, and went to the driver’s side window.

“Did that noise sound anything like a cat screeching?”

“Oh my, yes.” she said. “Thank you so much.” and she pulled away nearly as quickly as she’d shown up.

Our mechanic ended up waving goodbye to her while holding a cat rather gingerly under his left arm. The cat was shaking and holding on to the man’s arm with all his might, and across the street walked the man of the house on the other side of that street, morning coffee cups in hand, the man to whom you were introduced earlier with the wife and three kids

“I see you have a new mascot,” he said, with a bit of laughter behind his voice, knowing that our friendly neighborhood mechanic was not what you might call an animal lover.

“I just got stuck with him,” he stated with a bit of irritability.

“I saw. Whatcha’ gonna’ to do with it?”

“Don’t know. Don’t much care.”

“Let me have a look-see,” and the family man gently traded coffees for cat with the mechanic. He took the cat’s face and front paws in his right hand and lifted them up to meet him, eye to eye, falling in love with the big, scared eyes in the flash of that first moment. He held him close and started to cuddle his big head into his chest while the cat calmed down and started to purr. He nuzzled closer as his shuddering started to diminish. The humans spent a few minutes chatting and drinking their coffee inside the waiting area of the gas station, and the animal lover took home a new member of the family. Over the course of the day, as his wife got home from shopping and the kids got home from school, everyone became a huge fan of the big fuzzball; and he began to enjoy the warmth and love of that family, rubbing against each person, purring like a well-tuned Porsche and stretching out on each and every piece of furniture, checking for comfort one by one. He became an integral part of their lives immediately. This was a house pre-prepared for a new fur baby. The last cat had passed over the rainbow bridge a few months before, but they had a dog who preferred cat food to dog food since his last fur brother had also been feline. Bowls and food were already in place, and the only change needed was to get the litter box and an old bag of litter out of the basement and get it set up in the back hallway. No muss, no fuss, and life went on with the big silver tabby curled up on the little girl’s bed each night as though they’d been besties for many years, and day rolled into day, rolled into day, rolled into day.

The family’s home was over 125 years old and had been added onto a few times. The original front portion of the house had been built with a crawl space and no basement. Sometime during the 1930s or ’40s, when the last add-on took place, a basement was dug; and whole-house heating was installed. This meant installing duct work under the front end of the house. The construction had been a bit unconventional in that it left the crawl space under the front end of the house totally accessible through the basement at the top of the front-end wall. Rafferty had found his way into the crawl space early on in his explorations of his new home. The crawl space was au naturel – dirt floor with all the stuff that dirt surrounded by nature can bring. Early one morning, Mom was making coffee to get herself started on a day off that was going to be a busy one with plenty of chores to do. She turned to see Rafferty sitting at the doorway to the basement. He looked oddly excited. She acknowledged him; and he ran to her and dropped a gray mouse, about half alive, at her feet and sat back looking proud and expecting praise. The mouse began to wiggle a bit and was chee-cheeing. It sounded as though it were in pain. Rafferty nudged it closer to his mom’s feet and purred, looking up at her for approval. She patted him on the head and tried to get him to pick up the mouse as she called for her husband. The cat sat there smiling and looking pleased. The mouse was lying on its back, bleeding and struggling.

“Honey, please, come quickly!” she said more loudly than before.

He came around the corner into the kitchen. “What’s wrong?” Just as he finished the second word he heard and then saw the mouse. Grabbing some paper towels, he picked up the mouse with them and took off out the back door. Rafferty knit his brow, humphed, and clumped from the room disgusted. Mom went about her business of getting everyone else out the door. She sat down at the breakfast bar for a second, peaceful cup of coffee. Rafferty jumped up on the stool next to her, pawed her arm a couple of times, and said, “Rowl.” Without really thinking about it, she patted him on the head and then ran her hand down his back. She left her arm sitting next to him, hand on the stool top. He patted her arm again and said, “Rowl.” this time with more conviction. Mom looked over at him. He looked a bit perturbed. “Rowl,” he said pointedly.

“Oh my goodness! You brought me a gift.” She picked him up and held him to her chest with his head on her left shoulder, ruffling his fur on the back of his neck with her right hand. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to be unappreciative; but, Babydoll, a live mouse? I couldn’t even tell that was what you had. It was the same color you are.” She cuddled his big head a bit more. “You’re adorable. Thank you.”

The following spring, as the thaw was beginning, Rafferty took off out the back door. It wasn’t something he did often, but Mom wasn’t so very worried about it. He knew where he lived. She left the inner door partway open even though it was a bit colder than was comfy in the house, but she didn’t want to miss him announcing himself when he came back. He had been out for about 45 minutes when she heard his rather distinctive “rowl” at the back door. She let him in, he ran to the kitchen, threw something from his mouth onto the floor, and sat down looking quite satisfied with himself again. Mom walked over and looked down to see a frozen, dead eel. It seems a neighbor with a fish tank had lost a member of the swarm. So sad, but now that dead member was sitting on Mom’s kitchen floor, not far away from where there’d been a half-dead mouse a few months before.

“Honey! He’s at it again! It’s worse this time!” Mom yelled toward the living room where Dad was watching basketball. Dutifully and laughing under his breath, he went to the kitchen to see what kind of new present Raf had delivered to his wife. Dad took the dead eel out to the trash can beside the garage and all went on as usual until one cold winter morning later that year when our beautiful ball of fluff curled up in another car engine to get warm.

Mom got home from a night shift just before sunrise. She ran into the house to start breakfast for everyone. The boys came down first, and she asked one to take out the garbage while the other’s morning task was to empty the dishwasher. Dad came downstairs next, kissed his wife good morning, and started the coffee brewing. The little girl was the last to arrive. Her normal morning chore was to set the table for breakfast. Everyone was pretty used to the natural flow of the weekday mornings so no one paid a lot of attention to the fact that Rafferty had gone out the door with the older brother as he took the garbage to the outside trash can and had not returned. Everyone who needed to leave the house piled into the car, dad started it, dropped the boys at the high school down the street, his daughter at the middle school in the other direction, and headed across town to his place of business. In the meantime, Mom cleaned up the kitchen, got meat out for dinner, put down fresh food and water for the dog and cat, let the dog back in from the backyard, did a quick look around, and went upstairs to get some sleep after a 12-hour shift. The phone rang. Dad was nearly in tears. He had heard an alarming noise from under the hood of the car while on the interstate. He’d heard a bumping sound and saw in the rear-view mirror what he thought was their cat making a beeline for the side of the interstate and down the embankment. Upon arriving at work and parking the car, he checked under the hood to see a few clumps of silver-gray fur flying around. Mom jumped out of bed, threw on jeans and a sweater, searched the house, calling the cat’s name over and over (to which he, unlike a lot of other cats, usually answered by coming to see the caller). He was nowhere to be found. She went to the back door and called outside a few times, also without a response. She grabbed her coat, purse, paper, markers, tape, and a stapler and got in the spare car that was housed in the garage. She drove to the neighborhood across town where her husband had thought the cat had jumped ship. She traversed all the streets in a five-block area without seeing anything that looked like the best pet they’d ever had. She expanded her search to about 10 blocks out and 12 blocks wide – still nothing. She went back to where the exit lane came off the interstate and started going into the little neighborhood stores and convenience stores to see if they’d let her post signs. All of them did. She ran the route around the general area again, going up and down all streets, calling her cat, and getting nowhere. She had run out of tears by this point and was glad that they always kept at least one box of tissues in each of the cars. Her head was banging and her heart was breaking. She ran through the streets again. She saw a few outside cats walking about, but not her cat. Not her special baby. She could barely speak when she got home. She called out from work for that night, got the kids from school, and they planned their routes of attack as they drove back across town to search for Rafferty. They returned home late that night, distraught and catless. Rafferty’s little girl couldn’t be consoled. She cried throughout the night and into the morning. Mom kept her home from school. The boys weren’t much better off but wanted to go to school. Mom and daughter went back across town after dropping off the boys and started their search from the beginning point of the interstate exit again. No luck. They stopped in all the little local stores and convenience stores to ask if anyone had heard anything. No one knew a thing. They went back across town, got the boys from school, went to the house to get some snacks, and went back to cat hunt, but no cat appeared. Dad was going to work each day and holding down the homefront the rest of the time, hoping the phone would ring with news of their pet, getting meals ready, and the like. That night everyone got some sleep due to exhaustion, but Mom’s sleep was broken several times. Her night was filled with dreams of diagonal lights, claws, screams, snarls, gnashing noises, searing pain, and large teeth. She’d waken from the dream, bathed in sweat with her heart racing. She’d go to the bathroom, rinse off her face, calm herself and get back in bed only to fall right back into the dream as soon as she fell back to sleep. She went back to working her regular schedule, sleeping in the morning when the kids were at school, broken by the same nightmares, and then all of them going across town to search as soon as school let out. Two weekends consisted of searching and dreaming of diagonal lights, claws, screams, snarls, gnashing noises, searing pain, and large teeth.

At the end of two weeks, they went for their normal afternoon search, starting at the convenience store that was at the end of the interstate exit. They walked in, and she talked to the manager on duty.

“Well, we haven’t heard a thing. I was about to take down your sign since we usually don’t leave them up longer than two weeks,” he said with a bit of concern in his voice.

“Sir, as much as I understand, could I convince you to please leave the sign up for another couple of weeks.”

“Ma’am, I can see that your pet means a lot to you and to your kids. I’ve seen you here every day that I’ve worked. Let’s make a new sign so that it doesn’t look so much like I just left your sign up longer than I’m supposed to, and we’ll let the new sign take on a new set of two weeks.”

She thanked him profusely and repeatedly.  She made another sign with paper and markers she still had in the bottom of her purse, and they went about searching and talking to the other store personnel. They left the area disgusted and disheartened. They knew from talking to the other store folk that her signs weren’t going to be up much longer if they hadn’t already been taken down for good. They headed toward home. As they drove near a favorite hamburger stand, she stopped and went to the payphone to call home to see what her husband might want for dinner – the kids needed something that felt like a treat, and shakes from this place could make some of the pain seem a bit less cumbersome. He answered the phone out of breath. He gave her an address and quickly told her that a woman had called to say that she thought she had Rafferty. She ran back to the car and told the kids to hold tight. They got back across town in record time, and she pulled up to the address that her husband had given her. It was an older three-story frame house, built not too long after her own house. The porch was raised above ground level with five steps required to reach the porch and with wooden latticework forming the front and side walls that went from ground level to porch level. The crisscross pattern of the old-style lattice pattern immediately caught her eye – diagonal lights. She and the kids ran up the stairs to the house’s front door and rang the doorbell. It was one of the old ones that you turned the knob, and it made noise to let someone inside know that there was someone at the door. A young woman answered the door with a look of anticipation. She asked if Mom and the kids were the family who had lost the cat. Mom nodded. The woman indicated that the cat they’d found was pretty well beaten up by the neighborhood strays who had had him cornered under her porch for quite some time (claws, screams, snarls, gnashing noises, searing pain, and large teeth). Her husband had tried on many occasions to get him from under the porch but was not able to overcome the cat’s protective behaviors. This evening, the cat was so exhausted that he’d been able to get him out and bring him into their house (they were now inside a long hallway, lined with doorways, that went toward the back of the structure from the vestibule). Mom could see a man at the end of the hallway with his hand on what looked to be the doorknob to the door at the farthest end of the hallway on the right side. The woman explained further that the cat under their porch had matched the description at the convenience store at the interstate exit. She’d driven over there that very evening to get the phone number (if the manager had removed the sign, there would have been no phone number to call at the time the woman went to find it) and called to give her address. The man indicated that he was going to open the door, but the cat was very skittish so he didn’t know what we should expect. He opened the door and a streak of silver came at turbo speed down the hallway, up Mom’s left leg and chest, and became wrapped around her neck with his tail wrapped across her face – one of his favorite sleeping positions with her.

“I guess there’s no question as to the ownership of the cat, huh, Honey?” the young man said to his wife.

Mom attempted to get a word out, but cattail and wrestling-style cat hugging prohibited her from speaking. Her oldest son thanked the man and woman profusely, giving them the promised reward from Mom’s purse, as Mom was kneeling down so that her daughter and younger son could wrap themselves around their pet in a group hug. Finally, Rafferty relaxed his grip and his little girl was able to free him from her mother’s shoulders. Everyone exchanged the necessary pleasantries; and the family went home, crying happy tears this time. Dad had gone to the hamburger joint and had everyone’s favorite flavor of shake with awesome home-style burgers and fries, and their incredible sautéed mushrooms for Mom. Rafferty was on a pile of blankets with a heating pad under the top layer and his favorite toys and some treats within paw’s reach. His fur-brother was licking his wounds and nuzzling him with big, sad eyes. (Some people think Chow-Chows are vicious. Those of us who have accepted them as family members know better.) Mom had applied some antibacterial ointment to the cat’s most obvious wounds; the dog was licking it off; but nothing was ruining their happy reunion.

You may think the story ends here. You are close to the truth. Remember the dreams? There’s a bit more.

Mom was off that night and was easily able to take her most awesome cat to see the vet in the morning. She got up and made breakfast. Kids and husband did their respective chores and went to school and work. She packed up the cat and went to the vet’s office. They gave him a couple of shots for both infection and pain, gave her some pills and ointment for further treatment, and Raf and Mom went home. She lay down on the couch with her best-of-all-pets on her chest and both arms wrapped loosely around him so as to avoid causing him pain or distress. She stared into his eyes and was drawn into their depths.

“Yeow a-wow purrow magow,” Rafferty said.

“I know, my honey, they were mean to you, and it was terrible.” she cooed to him.

“A-mow ta-wow mahow oo-ow gawow,” he continued.

“Yes, my baby, I’m so sorry. They hurt you. You were scared and cold. You were lonely.” she cooed again.

He shook his head as if to say no. Their eyes were still locked on each other. “What, my love?”

“Now oo-ow gawow,” he insisted.

“You weren’t lonely?” she questioned.

“Ah aha aoo. Ah aha aoo,” he explained more slowly and calmly than he’d been articulating, taking great care with his pronunciation. He repeated, “Ah aha aoo.” with intensity, and suddenly she was seeing the diagonal lights of the latticework from under the porch, looking out. She heard the hissing and snarling and felt the nails and fangs. Her peripheral vision was clouded over and the fringes of the focal point were unclear.  She felt as though in a trance but was fully awake.  She was reliving pieces of her repetitive dream but was fully awake, having been drawn into the depths of those big, expressive, grey eyes.  Raf was showing her.  Wrapped within it all, though, she felt as though she were enfolded in her own arms.

“Ah aha aoo,” he insisted again.

“Did you just tell me that you had me?”

Rafferty slowly nodded his head without breaking eye contact with his human. He held her gaze for a few more seconds and said rather quietly, “Ah aha aoo,” licked her hand, put his head down on her chest and calmly fell asleep, listening to her heartbeat.

© Bobbi Bartsch Curtis, 2015, All Rights Reserved