 | |  | |  | |  | |  |
How Killer Stole The Cat's Wings Copyright C.J. Mouser 2008 (Nostalgia)
Thanksgiving afternoon 2004 the weather in central Florida was neither warm nor cool, but at that odd temperature that couldn’t
really be felt at all. I often wondered about the fact that the body’s temperature could be 98 degrees, but when the air temperature
was 98 degrees, it felt so horribly hot. Seems like you wouldn’t feel it at all, but that’s not the way it works.
Thanksgiving afternoon, though, it was perfect, so I felt nothing but misery from my bloated belly as I lay on the front porch on a
chaise lounge trying to rest away the massive dinner I’d just ingested.
The sky was such a color blue that I wanted to thank God or the angels, or my mother, for allowing me to be born able to see and
appreciate such a pure shade of blue.
It wasn’t long before Killer found me that way, stretched out the like a beached whale, barely breathing and mentally encouraging
digestion. He wiled his way up next to me demanding attention. He has a way of finding people, Killer does, which is how he found
our family to begin with; he simply showed up one day and never left.
Fact is, I thought he was a stray and did my dead level best to chase him away, yelling at him, throwing sticks his direction,
carrying on like an idiot … well, after all, we had free range chickens and strays were typically not invited to stay. I found out after
weeks of this behavior that Fred and Jake had been feeding him. It was official; he was no longer a stray.
The name “Killer” that was unceremoniously attached to him couldn’t have been less suited to him, as he was as sweet as he could
be. He gazed at me with one brown and one blue eye, begging from under his shaggy, dirty, red and white coat for a scratch or a
kind word. I could offer neither, but merely groaned and pushed him away.
“I’m too full for such nonsense, dog. Go on, now.”
He whined, as he was known to do, and lay his head on my shoulder.
“Your breath smells like death!” I hissed, and pushed him again. He rewarded me for that remark with two or three more putrid
pants, and a half dozen whacks on my leg with his bushy tail. When I refused to pet him, he reared up and placed both front legs
on my already sensitive midsection, prompting a grunt from me, and leaned in until his nose was nearly touching mine. He knew
that I couldn’t resist his charm for long, and he was right. Almost automatically I found the sweet spot at the back of his neck and
had him looking at me with eyes that seemed sure that I had hung the moon.
“Right there, yes?” I said and dug in with my fingernails. His eyes rolled back in his head and he sighed, nearly gagging me with
that fetid dog breath again.
It became clear that I was going to be held hostage petting this dog, so I began to think of all the things that I should be doing;
cleaning up the kitchen, storing away the Thanksgiving dinner leftovers … maybe putting a load of laundry in the washer. This
time I pushed him away with more force and waddled to my feet, sighing.
“That’s it,” I said firmly. “I have better things to do than pet you all afternoon.”
The kitchen looked like a cyclone hit it. First I attacked the turkey, preparing the leftovers to be stored away, but not before I
pulled off the wings that were traditionally reserved for the cat. For a while the cat got white meat, cut up into little bits, until it
occurred to me that, like the dogs, he seemed to prefer something he could lug away and crunch on. The wings were perfect for
that. So I pulled them off the turkey carcass, placed them on a saucer and took them out and put them on top of the washer.
“Here, Kitty! C’mon Salem! Turkey for you!”
Salem did not appear. Killer, however, did, and based on the longing in his eyes, I was grateful that he was too short to climb up
onto the washer. I went back in the house and gathered scraps for Killer and took them to him on the front porch and fed him.
Later, while washing dishes I heard an awful crash and went to investigate. I found Killer hunched over the cat’s saucer,
swallowing the second wing whole.
“How the … what did … how could … how’d you DO that!?”
Rather than provide an answer, he took off like his bushy tail was on fire, and went and lay down out in the middle of the pasture.
I have to admit; I stood there for the longest time, measuring the distance from the ground to the top of the washer, completely
stymied, before I called Fred and he figured it out.
“See the doghouse, there at the east end of the house?” He pointed. “He jumped up on there, walked west along that stack of cord
wood until the got to the barbeque grill and he jumped on top of there …”
“That wouldn’t hold him, it would tip over …”
“Apparently not. Then he jumped up on top of the pump cover …”
“That’s a 6 foot jump!”
“Not from the top of the grill …”
“Oh, right …”
“Then he shinnied down that 2 x 4 until he got to the dryer, and jumped north from the top of the dryer to the top of the washer.
Easy.”
“Easy for ju, not so easy for me ...” I said in my best Speedy Gonzales accent.
“Easy for him,” he corrected, and pointed at the red and white blob of fur, lying half-hidden in the weeds.
“Well, he stole the cat’s wings.”
“I’m not so sure I’d use that word. I think he earned ‘em. The cat waited too long to show up, and to the victor go the spoils.”
I was starting to understand why this dog had been being fed right under my nose, when typically he would have been chased
away; Fred had developed a respect for him and his ability to stay alive. He was a mess, crawling with fleas, sensitive to anyone
trying to pen him long enough to bathe him or cut off some of that fur, probably had a mouth full of rotten teeth, and God knows
what all else, but Buddy, he knew how to get by.
I felt bad for the cat for about 14 seconds and then I went back into the kitchen to finish my chores. It’s a tough world … you
gotta strike while the iron is hot and know how to answer when opportunity knocks on the dog house door. Killer knows.
CUJO
I hadn't brought a crate because of the dog's history of abuse, so I was standing there wondering how we
were going to get him home in the cab of the truck without somebody losing a finger or two in the process. I
got the bright idea to wrap him up in a jacket so maybe he would calm down, and it worked. So much so,
that halfway home Jillian got worried that he’s breathing all right and lifted up the corner of the jacket to
check on him, and up popped his head.
It was like that scene from ‘Alien’ where the creature came lurching out of the man's stomach. All you could
see was teeth and this little brown head spinning around looking for anything to latch onto and I was
screaming ...
"Don't you dare let him loose! Closed up in here like we are he'll make confetti out of every one of us!"
DOLLY
Today, having some time on my hands, I stopped to visit this cemetery. I’ve lost pets before, and they were
always buried somewhere on the property. In fact, yesterday, I was standing near the very spot where Dolly,
my daughter’s little mutt dog was buried last year. It was the one place I could find that would make an
adequate grave site and where the ground wasn’t crisscrossed with roots or other obstructions. The point is,
I was standing right there, and Dolly never crossed my mind. Not the fact that she was the friendliest little
thing you could ever hope for in a dog. Or the fact that she was the best rat catcher I have ever seen, and
that includes two useless cats. There was nothing there to indicate that I was standing near hallowed ground.
No reminders. There should have been.
Dolly loved the hog pens. She was tutoring herself in the fine art of hog management, dog style. Nothing that
we tried to teach her, just something that she aspired to on her own. It just happened to work out that she is
buried near there. She was no master hog dog, or trophy or blue ribbon winner. Dolly’s accomplishments
were few and fairly unremarkable. But she was loved nonetheless for that ...
ELVIS
The minute I walked in the door I smelled skunk. Jake was the most likely culprit as he was sitting on the
couch in the living room.
"Jake ... are you skunky ?
"Whut?"
"Did you get skunked?!"
"Not that I'm aware of."
"Is it possible that you wouldn't have noticed a thing like that if it happened?"
"I wouldn't think so."
"Can't you smell that?"
"I don't smell a thing. I got a cold. My nose is all plugged up." He sniffed then, a rattling sound, to emphasize
his point. Just then Fred walked in behind me.
"What the hell is that smell?! Boy! Did you get skunked?"
I was starting to get a sinking feeling in my stomach.
"Jake ... is Elvis in the house?" I asked.
He comes in at night, most nights, but the kids will always let him in if they're home alone. I have no idea
why. If they really needed protection he would be useless. He's scared of his own shadow.
"Yeah."
"Where's he at?"
"In your room."
Fred and I just about knocked each other down trying to get back to the bedroom. There was Elvis in all his
stinky, skunky, glory, stretched out like a dead dog in the middle of our king-sized bed. I heard a hissing
sound and looked over my shoulder at Fred. He had gone all red in the face and I could see he was trying to
form a word, and I suspected I knew right up front what that word was gonna be ...
GIRL AND SUGAR
I was awakened at four fifty five a.m. Saturday morning to the sound of Girl barking. Sugar and Girl are our
pasture dogs, and are bred to alert on wild hogs. Their sole purpose in life is to protect our domestic
breeding stock by keeping wild boars away. Up until Saturday, they had not been tested on anything more
threatening than an occasional armadillo or possum. Despite several false alarms, they have never been
chastised for barking and every ruckus created by them is checked out thoroughly.
The two dogs came to us together. Girl was hand picked for our purposes, and her sister Sugar was taken
out of sympathy. She had tried to escape the puppy pen at a young age and hung herself by one back leg for
several hours, leaving her with a limp. She was slated to be put down, so after one look at her sweet face
we decided that even if she never amounted to much as a hog dog, she would be good company for Girl.
Of the two, Girl is naturally the most tenacious, so when she kept barking without seeming to take a breath
in between, my husband Fred went out to check. When he came running back into the house telling me to
open the gun safe, I felt my blood pressure go up a notch. There was a wild boar in with our ladies ...
really be felt at all. I often wondered about the fact that the body’s temperature could be 98 degrees, but when the air temperature
was 98 degrees, it felt so horribly hot. Seems like you wouldn’t feel it at all, but that’s not the way it works.
Thanksgiving afternoon, though, it was perfect, so I felt nothing but misery from my bloated belly as I lay on the front porch on a
chaise lounge trying to rest away the massive dinner I’d just ingested.
The sky was such a color blue that I wanted to thank God or the angels, or my mother, for allowing me to be born able to see and
appreciate such a pure shade of blue.
It wasn’t long before Killer found me that way, stretched out the like a beached whale, barely breathing and mentally encouraging
digestion. He wiled his way up next to me demanding attention. He has a way of finding people, Killer does, which is how he found
our family to begin with; he simply showed up one day and never left.
Fact is, I thought he was a stray and did my dead level best to chase him away, yelling at him, throwing sticks his direction,
carrying on like an idiot … well, after all, we had free range chickens and strays were typically not invited to stay. I found out after
weeks of this behavior that Fred and Jake had been feeding him. It was official; he was no longer a stray.
The name “Killer” that was unceremoniously attached to him couldn’t have been less suited to him, as he was as sweet as he could
be. He gazed at me with one brown and one blue eye, begging from under his shaggy, dirty, red and white coat for a scratch or a
kind word. I could offer neither, but merely groaned and pushed him away.
“I’m too full for such nonsense, dog. Go on, now.”
He whined, as he was known to do, and lay his head on my shoulder.
“Your breath smells like death!” I hissed, and pushed him again. He rewarded me for that remark with two or three more putrid
pants, and a half dozen whacks on my leg with his bushy tail. When I refused to pet him, he reared up and placed both front legs
on my already sensitive midsection, prompting a grunt from me, and leaned in until his nose was nearly touching mine. He knew
that I couldn’t resist his charm for long, and he was right. Almost automatically I found the sweet spot at the back of his neck and
had him looking at me with eyes that seemed sure that I had hung the moon.
“Right there, yes?” I said and dug in with my fingernails. His eyes rolled back in his head and he sighed, nearly gagging me with
that fetid dog breath again.
It became clear that I was going to be held hostage petting this dog, so I began to think of all the things that I should be doing;
cleaning up the kitchen, storing away the Thanksgiving dinner leftovers … maybe putting a load of laundry in the washer. This
time I pushed him away with more force and waddled to my feet, sighing.
“That’s it,” I said firmly. “I have better things to do than pet you all afternoon.”
The kitchen looked like a cyclone hit it. First I attacked the turkey, preparing the leftovers to be stored away, but not before I
pulled off the wings that were traditionally reserved for the cat. For a while the cat got white meat, cut up into little bits, until it
occurred to me that, like the dogs, he seemed to prefer something he could lug away and crunch on. The wings were perfect for
that. So I pulled them off the turkey carcass, placed them on a saucer and took them out and put them on top of the washer.
“Here, Kitty! C’mon Salem! Turkey for you!”
Salem did not appear. Killer, however, did, and based on the longing in his eyes, I was grateful that he was too short to climb up
onto the washer. I went back in the house and gathered scraps for Killer and took them to him on the front porch and fed him.
Later, while washing dishes I heard an awful crash and went to investigate. I found Killer hunched over the cat’s saucer,
swallowing the second wing whole.
“How the … what did … how could … how’d you DO that!?”
Rather than provide an answer, he took off like his bushy tail was on fire, and went and lay down out in the middle of the pasture.
I have to admit; I stood there for the longest time, measuring the distance from the ground to the top of the washer, completely
stymied, before I called Fred and he figured it out.
“See the doghouse, there at the east end of the house?” He pointed. “He jumped up on there, walked west along that stack of cord
wood until the got to the barbeque grill and he jumped on top of there …”
“That wouldn’t hold him, it would tip over …”
“Apparently not. Then he jumped up on top of the pump cover …”
“That’s a 6 foot jump!”
“Not from the top of the grill …”
“Oh, right …”
“Then he shinnied down that 2 x 4 until he got to the dryer, and jumped north from the top of the dryer to the top of the washer.
Easy.”
“Easy for ju, not so easy for me ...” I said in my best Speedy Gonzales accent.
“Easy for him,” he corrected, and pointed at the red and white blob of fur, lying half-hidden in the weeds.
“Well, he stole the cat’s wings.”
“I’m not so sure I’d use that word. I think he earned ‘em. The cat waited too long to show up, and to the victor go the spoils.”
I was starting to understand why this dog had been being fed right under my nose, when typically he would have been chased
away; Fred had developed a respect for him and his ability to stay alive. He was a mess, crawling with fleas, sensitive to anyone
trying to pen him long enough to bathe him or cut off some of that fur, probably had a mouth full of rotten teeth, and God knows
what all else, but Buddy, he knew how to get by.
I felt bad for the cat for about 14 seconds and then I went back into the kitchen to finish my chores. It’s a tough world … you
gotta strike while the iron is hot and know how to answer when opportunity knocks on the dog house door. Killer knows.
CUJO
I hadn't brought a crate because of the dog's history of abuse, so I was standing there wondering how we
were going to get him home in the cab of the truck without somebody losing a finger or two in the process. I
got the bright idea to wrap him up in a jacket so maybe he would calm down, and it worked. So much so,
that halfway home Jillian got worried that he’s breathing all right and lifted up the corner of the jacket to
check on him, and up popped his head.
It was like that scene from ‘Alien’ where the creature came lurching out of the man's stomach. All you could
see was teeth and this little brown head spinning around looking for anything to latch onto and I was
screaming ...
"Don't you dare let him loose! Closed up in here like we are he'll make confetti out of every one of us!"
DOLLY
Today, having some time on my hands, I stopped to visit this cemetery. I’ve lost pets before, and they were
always buried somewhere on the property. In fact, yesterday, I was standing near the very spot where Dolly,
my daughter’s little mutt dog was buried last year. It was the one place I could find that would make an
adequate grave site and where the ground wasn’t crisscrossed with roots or other obstructions. The point is,
I was standing right there, and Dolly never crossed my mind. Not the fact that she was the friendliest little
thing you could ever hope for in a dog. Or the fact that she was the best rat catcher I have ever seen, and
that includes two useless cats. There was nothing there to indicate that I was standing near hallowed ground.
No reminders. There should have been.
Dolly loved the hog pens. She was tutoring herself in the fine art of hog management, dog style. Nothing that
we tried to teach her, just something that she aspired to on her own. It just happened to work out that she is
buried near there. She was no master hog dog, or trophy or blue ribbon winner. Dolly’s accomplishments
were few and fairly unremarkable. But she was loved nonetheless for that ...
ELVIS
The minute I walked in the door I smelled skunk. Jake was the most likely culprit as he was sitting on the
couch in the living room.
"Jake ... are you skunky ?
"Whut?"
"Did you get skunked?!"
"Not that I'm aware of."
"Is it possible that you wouldn't have noticed a thing like that if it happened?"
"I wouldn't think so."
"Can't you smell that?"
"I don't smell a thing. I got a cold. My nose is all plugged up." He sniffed then, a rattling sound, to emphasize
his point. Just then Fred walked in behind me.
"What the hell is that smell?! Boy! Did you get skunked?"
I was starting to get a sinking feeling in my stomach.
"Jake ... is Elvis in the house?" I asked.
He comes in at night, most nights, but the kids will always let him in if they're home alone. I have no idea
why. If they really needed protection he would be useless. He's scared of his own shadow.
"Yeah."
"Where's he at?"
"In your room."
Fred and I just about knocked each other down trying to get back to the bedroom. There was Elvis in all his
stinky, skunky, glory, stretched out like a dead dog in the middle of our king-sized bed. I heard a hissing
sound and looked over my shoulder at Fred. He had gone all red in the face and I could see he was trying to
form a word, and I suspected I knew right up front what that word was gonna be ...
GIRL AND SUGAR
I was awakened at four fifty five a.m. Saturday morning to the sound of Girl barking. Sugar and Girl are our
pasture dogs, and are bred to alert on wild hogs. Their sole purpose in life is to protect our domestic
breeding stock by keeping wild boars away. Up until Saturday, they had not been tested on anything more
threatening than an occasional armadillo or possum. Despite several false alarms, they have never been
chastised for barking and every ruckus created by them is checked out thoroughly.
The two dogs came to us together. Girl was hand picked for our purposes, and her sister Sugar was taken
out of sympathy. She had tried to escape the puppy pen at a young age and hung herself by one back leg for
several hours, leaving her with a limp. She was slated to be put down, so after one look at her sweet face
we decided that even if she never amounted to much as a hog dog, she would be good company for Girl.
Of the two, Girl is naturally the most tenacious, so when she kept barking without seeming to take a breath
in between, my husband Fred went out to check. When he came running back into the house telling me to
open the gun safe, I felt my blood pressure go up a notch. There was a wild boar in with our ladies ...
| Still to come: MOOCH, RED DOG, RAISIN, SUGAR AND COCOA, UNO, PETE and more ... |