broken is as broken does

I originally posted a version of this on Facebook, and I had left out a number of details from that original little story, to try to keep it from getting as long as I knew it quickly could become. A lot has happened since, which I’ve also added.

Happy endings, y’know? They don’t happen much.

I arrived with a knot in my stomach. It was a little after 2 p.m. yesterday, the rural outskirts of the small eastern North Carolina town of Windsor. It would take me a full hour then of wandering through junk-car-filled weed-yards and yelling under frequently abandoned, sometimes burnt-out trailers with their frayed and threadbare curtains hanging out of glassless windows, to finally, unexpectedly find what I had come in search of, even as I had already begun trudging back to my car to head home in dejection, and defeat.

A couple of weeks ago, I had learned from a wonderful Greenville-area woman who has saved a number of feral cats and successfully homed them, that she had, several further weeks prior, on her route as a Fed Ex delivery driver in Windsor, come across an uncared-for, remarkably friendly small, adult orange cat in a ramshackle dead-end trailer park along what was truly more deep potholes than dirt road. She had seen the cat there a total of three times, on three different deliveries to the same trailer, but was unable to take him in to help him herself, for a variety of reasons. Then she had her route switched up on her, and could never get back to where he’d been regardless.

She had stayed worried about him since, because he was also quite clearly wounded, limping along three-legged with his right back paw pulled up to his belly, and his tail cocked unnaturally in the middle. He likely had been hit by a car at some point. For reasons I won’t go into, she and I both came to suspect it may even have been intentional. Even if not, no one had helped the poor thing afterward, leaving him to suffer, and quite possibly to die.

So often, I find humanity a disgusting thing. But let’s not go down that rabbit hole now.

There are just so damn many desperate strays out there, of every description, in this very hard world, an impossible equation for any compassionate mind to handle. Yet once you get latched onto that one specific face, it’s over. You’re toast. If you’re anything like me, you become haunted by it. You feel you have to do something. It’s an imperative, and damn the details.

So to put it mildly, I was now emotionally invested here as well, such that I was all fuck-it-I’m-going! getting into my car early yesterday afternoon on a half-baked quest, loaded with cat food and other supplies, including a pet carrier and a borrowed trap, to drive the back roads to Windsor, increasingly nervous of what I might, or might not, find, when I finally arrived at the address I’d been given, where this cat had originally been seen, and photographed in the inset picture immediately below.

I traversed that sad trailer park, end to end, knocking on a few doors where it looked like someone might be living; most knocks went unanswered. The four people I did manage to speak with, all avowedly anti-cat, were nonetheless friendly and quite accommodating in trying to help me sort out where this animal might have gone, though none of them felt they’d ever seen this particular animal before. One woman came outside and practically walked me up the street to where she thought I needed to go next. All of them mentioned what sounded like a feral colony around one of the trailers about midway into the park, where yet again no one answered. Its wildly cluttered yard was a graveyard not only to several rusted-out cars, but also to old knickknacks of every description, everything from crumbling stone cherubs and gnomes to faded, whitewashed tires, along with piles of various junk that had not made it to a trashcan or the local dump.

I must have gone around that ramshackle trailer – “Here, kitty, kitty! Here, sweet boy!” – at least twice, hoping to hell no one actually then came out and pointed a gun at me, nosing around as I was where I didn’t belong.

Thus, one fail after another, I finally dragged back to the dead-end end of the park, where I’d left my car. Except I couldn’t quite give in to leaving, y’know? I had to walk the 50 feet or so back again to yell in a dumb high voice one final time at the torn-open spot under the trailer where the kitty had been spotted weeks prior, before I ultimately gave up and walked away that final time, even more dispirited, imagining this hungry, badly wounded boy, with his mangled foot and clearly broken tail, by now dead or having been chased away, possibly days ago, to try to survive elsewhere.

Then I happened to look behind me, because who doesn’t look back, one last time, I suppose?

And who then had literally popped out of that gash at the far end of the trailer? Who then was just sitting there, looking at me?

It’s silly perhaps, especially with me being the faithless, cynical crank I am, but I swear it felt fated.

Thanks, life. I don’t say that often. Thanks.

To baldly misquote Mack, the sage bum in Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck’s sequel to his classic Cannery Row, “Life te-tum-tum its wonders to perform.”

I hurriedly went into my car to retrieve some of the food I’d brought, before this wary cat might go back under the trailer and then not come out again, yet when I glanced down then toward my feet, there was this hobbled kitty teetering up behind me. When I got out the food bowl, he mewed up at me.

I opened a gabapentin capsule and mixed it in with a can of food, in hopes of calming him a bit for the trip back to Greenville, should I actually then be able to catch him, and he dove right in. I also had hoped he might be just docile enough in the moment for me to nab him while he was distracted and eating, to navigate him quickly into the carrier before he could react in panic and possibly hurt me, or himself.

I never even got around to taking out the trap.

Because this hurt boy never even resisted, not one bit. No hissing, no growling, no attempted biting. He just settled in, looking up at me, surely terrified, but not making any attempt to fight what was happening.

I put the rest of the food in with him and loaded the carrier into my front seat for the hour’s drive to East Carolina Veterinary Service, in Greenville. I let them know I was coming; I had, a few days earlier, clued in our vet, Patrick Godfrey, to the issues with the cat’s feet and tail, should I break down and go try and find the animal, discussing the costly expectation of amputations, as that seemed where things would be headed. Dr. Pat, a stand-up guy and as compassionate a soul as you could ask for, assured me they’d work with me as much as they could, especially given the circumstances.

This handsome orange boy, named already in my head as Banjax Bob, or BB, barely made a noise once inside the carrier, except for a tiny bit of meowing right at first, finishing his remaining food and then resting quietly for the whole trip. He was drug-drunk by the time we got to the vet’s, half of his body collapsed into the spotlessly licked-clean food bowl.

I left him at the vet’s last night, walking out with the unsettling knowledge he might not ever be leaving there again, if the worst were discovered through his bloodwork. But then shortly after, I received exceptional news: not only no FIV, which would have automatically prohibited Lisa and I from keeping him among our other cats, but even more hopeful, no FelV, feline leukemia, a literal death sentence. I actually cheered there in my car when I received that text update. I had to pull over to the side of the road to fully take it in.

I had been on my way then to have a beer, a seldom-pleasure now on my perhaps-too-effective GLP drugs. Because I had left the vet’s nervous as hell, so you’re damn right to a beer, what a day, could yet end in tears, fuck, fuck, fuck! By the time I’d reached the local Indian/Nepalese restaurant I love, that beer had moved from worried-guy-in-bar solace to a toast in celebration.

This morning, BB was neutered and given a fuller physical. He received treatment for external parasites, plus vaccinations and a course of antibiotics. An ID chip will be implanted. In a few days, he will get a de-wormer.

This is gonna be a hard slog for us financially, but how do you turn away from such a needy animal, once you find yourself connected? For some people, maybe that would be no huge dilemma, I don’t know; I simply don’t get that. Because for me, it’s an impossible choice. You can’t then walk away. You don’t.

As to the broken leg and tail, they had both changed greatly from the first pictures I saw of this boy, from weeks ago. The ruined portion of both had literally fallen off since, so nature may have done all the amputation necessary, as ugly as that image may be to think about, with this small kitty huddled in overwhelming pain under a trailer just at the edge of a fallow cotton field, beneath exposed insulation and among various loose scrap, receiving no care, literally living off of any edible garbage he could find nearby.

Dr. Pat felt BB’s wounds seemed to be healing now, but for the treatable infected skin around what’s left of that former leg.

Even there at the vet’s yesterday, BB was that most chill of dudes, beyond even the calming-drug effects. I’ve learned over time that while gabapentin can mute and dull an animal to its current situation, the real personality tends to leak out around the edges anyway. This cat, suffering as he has, was still just amazingly calm.

I have set up a full isolated space for him in our little bathroom upstairs, to try to get him healed enough for whatever’s next, be it an introduction soon to our other pets or a short foster with a friend while Lisa and I are to be out of town for a week, and then we start that delayed introduction. His health will decide.

BB came through his surgery great. He’s in a cone now, apparently very unhappy about it, because he was trying to chew at his nubbed foot. He growls a little, as any animal would after an experience like this, but is still otherwise just as calm, they tell me. I will pick him up in a couple of hours.

I am so hopeful that in the weeks to come, he can make the transition into our busy house, with our other pets, themselves all former rescues – two youthful, playful dogs and four older cats, one a persnickety 17-year-old diva, my shadow, my absolute heart. Our pets have been a kind of salvation to me, a balm to so many of life’s indignities. All of them obviously have priority here. It’s their house, after all, that’s about to be overwhelmed by newness and disorder.

So if our current pets, or BB, cannot make this big adjustment – and I am insufferably persistent, and patient, so if this can be made to work, it will – he will become a very rewarding addition to some other highly vetted home that I will work diligently to find. He will not, under any circumstances, be put back outside.

I’m kind of a broken guy, I’m not even gonna pretend otherwise. While I’m not proud of that, I’ve learned, this late into my life, to live with it. This little cat is clearly pretty broken himself, a bit banjaxed, you could say. Sometimes, I guess, it’s only the broken things that can come to each other’s rescue.