It is with a heavy heart that I must relate to you this story. It’s not easy to tell it because I feel that I am, in some ways, partly to blame.
We’ve been living in this house since 1986. When the boys moved out a few years ago we found we really missed their comings and goings and began to console ourselves with the similar, but very different comings and goings of our cat, Tornado. She came to us during the only tornado we’ve ever experienced here. The neighborhood got a little torn up, tree limbs, shingles, awnings, that kind of thing. No one was injured, but there was a howling that stopped your heart. It was like I’d always been told, it sounded like a freight train. Anyway, just when this howling started, I had gotten out of the car to come inside, and glad that the wife and kids were already on the porch. “Get inside now!” I yelled, because they had frozen there by the door to see where the sound was coming from. “It’s a tornado!”
I was the last one through the door, and almost tripped over this slightly damp, gray cat that came streaking inside and slid under the couch. “Smart cat,” I thought to myself, and herded the family into the hallway outside the bathroom. We were fine, more nervous than anything else, and when the noise stopped, we came back out.
Nothing had changed outside as far as we could see, so we turned the TV on and watched the weather report. Yeah, there had been a tornado, but it was small and only touched down for a second or two, yada, yada. So it was an hour later when I remembered the cat that had barged in. She wasn’t hard to find, she was sitting at my feet watching the weather report with us. I leaned forward and said, “Hey kitty.” She scrambled back under the couch and wouldn’t come out. While we were trying to coax her out of hiding, one of the boys named her, Tornado. “Uh oh,” I thought, “Give a cat a name, and she’s yours forever.” The wife came up with the idea of using tuna fish as a lure, and then I knew we had a house pet.
You can throw a cat out the front door – yes, you can. They understand that they’ve been rejected if you do it soon enough, and without feeling. But if you named her, you will see her around forever, looking all sad-eyed at you. Still, you’ve put her out and it’s pretty much over. If you’ve fed her, she will automatically show up on your front porch at the same time every single day. I think there are exceptions to this. I have heard of cats being adopted from the street by a family, and them moving away with it, and you never see it again. I’ve never seen this happen, but people I trust have told me it’s true. But if you feed a cat tuna fish, even once, you can never ever get rid of it.
Fifty-eight years ago, when I was a kid, my dad was headed out the door to go to work and found a cat in our trash eating the leftover tuna fish casserole we had thrown out. When he chased it, it ran up under his car and he couldn’t get it out until he started the car and drove off. I never saw this cat, as I was still a babe in arms, but I certainly heard about it afterward. Apparently it was the ugliest, smelliest, feral menace that had ever opened its eyes on the entire East Coast. According to him, one cold autumn morning, he got into his car and found prints all over the hood, windshield and roof. That was all it took to get him serious. He got some tuna fish and lured the cat into a cardboard box which he then taped shut, threw in the trunk of his car, and drove 25 miles to Boston to work. He left the cat in the taped shut box behind his factory. The next morning, the cat was back outside the garage, probably looking for more tuna fish or another joyride.
And so Tornado became part of our family. The kids had just lost two other cats, one right after another, named, Thunder and Lightning, so there would be no going back; no getting rid of this one. I resigned myself to the idea of sacrificing everything I treasured to this 20-clawed, 8-fanged feline monster they apparently loved. Even that long ago, while they were cuddling her on the living room floor, I thought I saw her grin at me like she knew what I was thinking, and had even conjured up the storm of wind which brought her name with it.
As her name suggests, she was always a nuisance, with constant hairball problems and occasionally neglecting her litter box in lieu of more – shall we say – creative places to go. All the furniture in the living room has submitted to her shredding and shedding. There are scratch marks and pulled threads throughout the unrestricted areas of the house. I’m almost sure that some of those pulled threads have been replaced by her own long hair, although I really have no idea how she did that.
At various times, I have tried to put her out and not allow her to come back in. For a while, it seemed she was happy as a “porch cat,” not even moving her head when the door opened, but other times, she would beg to come in, reaching up and playing the wire harp which used to be our screen door. I modified the door somewhat, replacing the screen and installing a plastic panel in the bottom section. On that panel, she has signed her name. People think I’m crazy, but if you look at it in just the right light, and allow for the fact that the capital ‘T’ at the beginning has been replaced by an image of an eight inch tall tornado, the rest of the letters in her name are pretty clear, although she seems to have had a hard time with the letter, ‘o.’
I know that you’re wondering why we didn’t take her to the vet to have her claws removed and keep her in the house. We thought of it, but I think I mentioned how tricky she was, even in her old age. You’d walk from the kitchen, where she was scattering kibbles and saliva from her bowl, and, thinking she was occupied, you’d walk through the dining room, checking to see that you had no feline follower, and cross the living room to the front door. If you listened, you could still hear her crunching away over her linoleum Limoges, but by the time you stepped onto the porch, she would be sitting on the doormat sharpening her talons with that raspy tongue of hers, and looking at you as if she thought you were invading her personal space, and not the other way around.
Now, I don’t believe for one moment that there was anything supernatural about that cat, or that she ever had any malicious intent behind her behavior. She was just a cat, and every cat seems to be linked with the dark side on some psychic level. Perhaps that’s because they’re all predators, and the death of other things is part of their nature. Living in Jacksonville Florida, I hear enough on WJ XT every evening at six o’clock to be convinced that humans are often the same way. Some of us are just more predatory than others. Cats, however, and especially Tornado, seem to have an affinity with the shadowy end of life. This goes a long way toward explaining her destructive behavior, but it does not explain the grin she gets on her face when she is chased away from the curtains.
I would not have known about that grin, at least I would’ve never been sure, except for my new cell phone. Cameras aren’t always close by, but my cell phone never leaves my side. Snatching it up and snapping a photo has never been easier. One night last year, I flipped it open, aimed it at the curtain climber, and yelled, “Get off of there!” She glanced at me and leaped onto the back of the couch just as I took her picture. There it was. Unmistakable. That grin. I took a few moments to set the sequence of events precisely in place in my mind. I then knew exactly how long it would take between the angry shout and the snapping shutter to catch her secret lip-curl.
One must be patient when tracking a cat. Patient and sneaky. That first time, my phone created a make-believe shutter sound. I found the configuration in the cell phone’s menus and silenced it. I also turned off the flash, and experimented until I knew how much time would be required for the amount of ambient light in every photographic situation, so that I wouldn’t miss catching her facial expression whenever I had the opportunity again. Of the 372 pictures that I took in the next two weeks of her misbehavior, the 17 photos in which my timing, the lighting, and her angle to the camera’s line of sight were just right have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that she knows exactly how irritating she is, and that she thinks she is enormously funny!
I uploaded all of these photographs to my computer and deleted them from my phone so I would have more room for more photos. While I was sorting through the pictures on my computer screen, I heard a cat gasp behind me. I never knew cats could gasp before, but I was learning a lot of things I never knew about cats. I spun my head to see her staring, open-mouthed at her images. She glared at me and stalked out of the room, holding my eyes with hers without looking away. I don’t think I’ve ever been afraid of cats before, except of course for the big ones at the zoo, but they were nothing to be afraid of because they were all in cages. But now, I felt real fear, because I was trapped in the cage along with a very spooky animal.
We could not find her that night. After she walked out of our home office, she disappeared to some secret hideaway in the house. That night, after we shut off all the lights and turned off the computer and TV, we went to bed, still not sure where she was. She had not begged at the table, shredded anything, or made a sound in five and a half hours by then. My wife thought she had gotten outside at some point, but I know we hadn’t opened the front door all evening. I was paying attention. She thinks I merely imagined the whole thing, but when we got up the next morning, the computer was on – I know I turned it off – and the folder into which I had placed her incriminating photos was open. It was also empty. So was the Recycle bin on the desktop. The mouse smelled like tuna fish, and she was lying on top of the CPU absorbing its heat and grinning at me. Well, her lips were grinning, but her eyes … her eyes were still glaring.
I’m sure, at this point, it’s very easy for you to just laugh this off as some sort of mad paranoia. I wish I could laugh it off as such, even if it meant I was insane, but I have seen it with my own eyes, and I know now that cats, at least some cats, are a lot more aware of us than we ever thought, and that knowledge is really unsettling.
Perhaps by now I am a little crazy. After all, who can give a reliable account of his own sanity? If I were crazy, I wouldn’t know it, and would proclaim my sanity. If I’m not crazy, I would do the same thing. When I tell this story, people look at me like I’m crazy, which I find rather comforting actually, because it means I can still properly interpret other people’s emotional reactions to crazy sounding stories. Because of this fact, I really don’t believe I’m nuts, and part of the reason I’m telling this story to the whole world today is my attempt to reassure myself.
At the same time, I have another reason for telling this story, its the hope that someone else has had the same experience, and there are two further reasons for that hope. If other people claim to have seen cats grinning at them in a similar (dare I say) demonic way, then I hope either that I will be able to tell that they are not crazy themselves, or, if they are crazy, I hope to have some agreeable company on my voyage into lunacy. When I think about this, there really is no comfort in any of it. Right or wrong, either I’m insane, or housecats are evil. How can I possibly like the answer?
I didn’t dare to do anything to the beast. She was watching me, and I felt threatened. I never worried about her sneaking into the bedroom at night to rip my throat out, because I’m confident that she could not manage doorknobs by herself. I made a point of always knowing where she was and not keeping any poisons in the house. Sharp objects were always locked away. I have found some marbles on the front steps at various times, but she never managed to do me in. When she disappeared last fall, I worried for a couple of months, but gradually, I came to realize that she had been getting really old. It had been almost 20 years since she had come to us. In fact, by Christmas, I was actually missing her a little bit. Oh, I wasn’t missing the furry fiend that may or may not have been satanic, but the scared little kitty that was afraid of twisters? I kinda missed her.
My wife was concerned at first that I might have done something to Tornado. She knew I had not been happy with her, claiming that she had deleted a folder on my computer and all that, but I never let on that the folder was full of pictures of a grinning cat, so I was able to help her through her loss. If anything, we’re closer than ever, and after a month or so, I really missed the little furball as much as she did. It hasn’t been easy, but together, we’ve been toughing it out. Life goes on, you know?
So one Saturday last April, I went to Wal-Mart. There was a guy just inside the front door there selling “Easter Bunnies.” I had not been planning on purchasing anything to fill the void in our lives, but when I saw Harry, well, I just knew I had to take him home. Harry was a cute little brown bunny who came very inexpensively, with his own colorful pressboard and aluminum cage. I figured, “why not?” I put him in the shopping cart and brought him home as an Easter gift for my better half. To ease the loss of the cat, you know? But then, I had no idea what was coming – really I didn’t. If I had known then what I know now, I would have left Harry at the store.
All day on Saturday, we kept him in his cage in the dining room. I spoke to him in that funny little voice that adults use with little babies. I was already growing quite attached to him, and I thought the little woman was too. Even though we missed Tornado, she has never gotten along with the idea of having pets in the house. Tornado’s habit of clawing everything in sight made us both nervous about the bunny, I think. I’ve been told they sometimes even chew through electrical cords! Anyway, by Saturday evening, we were both talking to Harry like he was a member of the family. I don’t think there ever was a cuter little critter. In my eyes, he was without peers. And I could tell by the fiercely determined look in his eyes that he wasn’t afraid of anything – I needed to see that. Happily, I never saw him smile, which was sort of comforting, really, but I just assumed that he lived a hard life, and was glad to provide him with a place he could live in peace where people loved him.
Imagine my shock and dismay then, when on Sunday afternoon, after a nice lunch of chicken and wild rice, I found that Harry was gone. I looked everywhere for him, but even the cage was missing! I wanted desperately to take a nap, but sleep avoided me like reality avoids sitting presidents. I waited until my wife rose from her nap, hoping she’d taken such a liking to Harry that she had him with her for company. I opened the door, and there, to my horror, lay Harry, once, a beautiful specimen of bunny-dom, now, a cheerless, fearless, peerless, earless creature, bleeding peanut butter on a paper plate. It was just so sad!
Now I am left to wonder: What really happened to Tornado?