Crash

How the Mouse Police got a new recruit

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
8/31/05
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp

I gave the woman the type of look I felt appropriate for people who show up and present me with a box with a dead raven in it. This wasn’t something that occurred often in my life, or at all up until then, but somehow, I felt I was wearing the right sort of look.

She didn’t seem disturbed by The Look. “We found this cat in our shop a few weeks ago, and we knew that you had a black and white cat...”

“Mister Oh? That’s him, right there.” I pointed at our alley cat and representative of the Mouse Police, who was definitely black and white and, in all likelihood, a cat. Sharp in all directions and bad tempered. Almost certainly a cat. I peered closer into her cardboard box. OK, what at first I took for crumpled feathers might, in fact, be ungroomed cat fur.

Her face fell. She sighed and looked into the box. “Maybe you’ve seen him in the neighborhood,” she suggested.

“Let’s have a look, then,” I replied. She put the box down, and took out something that looked like a combination between a kitten and a toy construction girder set. The cat sat where she had been placed, blinking slowly. Half her head was shaved, with suture rows running here and there. One flank had been shaved, and some sort of metal contraption encased the hind left leg. The bottom of it seemed too small to hold a cat’s paw.

“What the f...what happened to this cat?”

“We think she was run over.” In our old neighborhood, that featured a four lane main road, a six lane freeway, and a two lane highway nearby, that seemed a likely possibility. “We found her on the floor in our metal shop about three weeks ago, and we think she crawled in to die. In fact, we thought she was dead and nearly threw her in the trash.” She smiled down at the huddled kitten. The kitten looked back up at her and vocalized. In another cat, it would have been a meow. With this kitten, it sounded more like “murap” and was too low pitched and scratchy. Imagine a cat toy with very low batteries. Yeah. That sound.

“So we took her to the vet’s. Three weeks, and three thousand dollars, and we were hoping to find her owners. I don’t think she’ll work out as a shop cat.”

I found myself warming to her. Anyone who would spend three thousand dollars to save the life of a strange kitten with limited hope of recompensation or even getting a functional cat out of the deal was pretty much ok in my book.

“Well, sorry, but this isn’t our cat. He’s fine.”

“Would you take her? At least while we try to find the owners? I don’t think a shop full of heavy machinery would be good for this cat.”

The kitten decided to explore. She started toward the door, describing a tight circle, clockwise. I estimated that it would take her about three hundred revolutions to reach the door. “She took a little brain damage” the woman explained. I sighed and looked down at the cat. I didn’t much like the idea of turning the cat away, but my girlfriend and roommate would probably want to know if we had picked up a fourth cat. I decided to see if the cat could at least respond to voice. “Hey, kitty” I coaxed.

The kitten stopped rotating, and looked at me. “Murap?”

OK. At the very worst, I might have to get a new girlfriend/roommate. “Does this cat have any special medicines or anything it has to take?”

She said none, and named the vet who had treated the animal. It was the same vet we used, which I found a good sign.

“So this cat, does she have a name?”

“Um, we named her Crash.”

When I got done laughing, I reached down and picked Crash up. A paw came swinging around, missing my left eye by inches. Startled, I pulled back, ready to drop Crash. She was flailing at the air, seemingly unconcerned by my presence.

“She has vertigo.”

“Ooh. I guess I’ll put her down, then.” I’ve never had a cat throw up on me, and didn’t consider it a time to pick such a promising new hobby.

I kept the cat, and later that day, discovered that I had kept my girlfriend, too. The other cats were all pretty dubious, and gave Crash a wide berth. She doubtlessly smelled funny to them, and her movements weren’t at all cat like, and I quickly realized that all the subtle little cues that cats use to communicate probably weren’t working here. The guys were suspicious of this strange new object, and Crash, well, Crash was just befuddled.

When I took Crash out to show my girlfriend the marvelous orbiting kitty, she looked a little skeptical. “She doesn’t seem to be functioning very well. I think she’s more a tchochkeleh than a cat.”

“What’s a ... whatever it was you said?”

“Tchochkeleh. It’s a Yiddish word. It means knick-knack. Dust collector. The sort of thing little old ladies collect.”

“Oh.” I tasted the word. “No, I think it will be easier just to call her Crash.”

My girlfriend stared at me and guffawed. “Is that what you named the poor little bastard?”

“That’s what the folks who found her called her. It seems to fit.”

On cue, Crash made it to the wall, and started slowly spinning along it. Friction with the wall had increased her linear momentum, but I wasn’t sure it was the direction that she wanted to go.

Later that night, after we had placed her in her cardboard box for the night (having made more orbits than Mir), I poked my nose in to check her one last time, and spotted Mister Oh, forelegs in the box. He was grooming her. He, at least, had decided there was another cat in there – somewhere.

Over the next six months, Crash slowly healed. The metal cast came off after two months, and the pins holding her leg together a few weeks after that. She was, in fact, missing a foot. And half her brains.

We had Crash for 18 years. She never did stop orbiting, although eventually, when she needed to, she could hop in a straight line for several yards. During that time, she beat up a doberman pinscher, walked nearly two miles down the side of one of southern California’s busiest freeways, caught a mouse, terrorized other cats, and once spend nearly an hour chasing two very confused, apprehensive, and humbled Samoyed dogs around and around a coffee table in a slow motion chase that featured many pauses to orbit. That was the most prolonged, and impressive, display of focused intent we ever saw out of that cat, and it gave both the Sams self-esteem issues for years.

Her last words were “Murap!” And she never did tell us what those Sams did to piss her off like that.