Oklahoma Dreaming: Fidel
by Donna Schoenkopf
He was pathetic. A picture of misery, starvation, fleas, grease and pus running out of his eyes.
He was an orange tabby kitten, the son of the calico school cat who lived under my classroom bungalow which hunched up next to (and I mean NEXT TO) the Harbor Freeway in South Central L.A. The off-ramp whooshed past the back of my classroom.
Flower Street, as well as the off-ramp, bordered our school on the east. It was piled with detritus deposited by the poor. Burned out cars, old mattresses, bags of garbage were dumped there overnight, because paying for garbage service is not the highest priority when you’re poor.
I know this because I have been that poor. I do not stand in judgment. Garbage is a true hassle.
So, because our school is unseen at night (being next to the Harbor Freeway which sings above it) and the street is dark and there are no neighbors, stuff gets dumped.
Stuff like animals. Puppies and kittens and dogs and cats.
Once a pack of dogs ate a puppy behind our school.
Another time I rescued a puppy which sat forlornly on the corner. I washed her in the classroom sink before the kids came in that morning because she was covered with a weird, white grease.
I fed her scraps of hamburger that day from the cafeteria and kept her at the back of the classroom in a milk crate padded with waste paper.
After school, I took her to the pound to get her washed and vitamined and rescued. I would have taken her if they couldn’t find someone to love her, but then I was told by the pound lady that she was too far gone. The weird, white grease I had tried to wash off of her was actually her dissolved skin which had disintegrated from mange and scabies.
They put her to sleep.
I thought about her for a long time after that. Her only happiness was that day in that milk crate eating school kids’ leftovers and having me pet her poor ravaged flesh.
Later, half the class and I got scabies from her. And every time I scratched, I cried.
It is tough in the ghetto.
Back to Fidel.
So there he sat, barely holding himself erect, all nasty and dirty and sad on the hot, black asphalt of the school parking lot. I leaned down and touched the top of his head and he purred. He PURRED! He purred in spite of being barely alive and eaten by fleas. He looked at me with love pouring out of his eyes and he KNEW I would help him.
I put him in a milk crate, (you get them “free” at the back of the cafeteria) and took him after school to the San Pedro pound, where I told them that I would take him if they couldn’t find anyone to adopt him, and to please call me in any event.
They called me five days later. No one wanted him. He was mine.
When I got there to pick him up, he was all happy and darling and cute. The pound lady told me he LOVED his vitamins and his cage. He had been bathed and brought back to life.
I named him Fidel, after my hero, Fidel Castro.
And he became my cat.
He never stopped loving me with that sweetness of his. He would look into my eyes and practically swoon with adoration. He grew and grew and became very, very handsome. He had his best friend/sister/“mother” in Rosie (Rosa Luxemburg), a calico cat I had adopted to kill the mice (HA) which romped through my house. Instead, they were experts at bird catching. I’d find feathers in the den. Once I even found yellow parakeet feathers and a parakeet head with no beak. I guess beaks are tasty. Never, however, did I find a mice corpse. However, their turds in my kitchen drawers did disappear. Mice leave when cats come.
Rosie and Fidel loved each other. In spite of them both being fixed, they would get kind of sexy with each other. Fidel would clamp her neck in his mouth and climb on top of her. He wouldn’t actually “do it”, but he had a genetic urge to just mount her and hold her captive.
Rosie would wash his face every night. He would plop down on the couch next to her and put his face out and she would wash and wash. Every time he came in the house she would sniff him all over, including his butt, where his balls used to be. She would occasionally wash that area, too.
What a couple of scamps!
Fidel, unlike Rosie, would come every time I called him. Every single time. If I sat outside, with my legs crossed and my foot dangling, he’d rest his chin on my foot and just gaze up at me, loving me with an intensity I have never felt from another living creature.
One day, when I was still living in San Pedro, I came home after a couple of days away. I had let both cats stay outside for the first time and fend for themselves, instead of locking them in the house. (Yes, I did feel like a really bad parent, but John, next door, said that’s what he did with his cat, so I tried it. It actually worked out really well. At least they didn’t get burned up in a locked house!)
ANYWAY, when I came home, I went into the backyard and called Fidel. (I knew Rosie wouldn’t come, but she’d follow him.) As I called his name, I caught sight of him walking atop the cement block wall at the back of the house and when he heard my voice his head WHIPPED around. He was actually thrilled to hear my voice. I have never seen a cat do that.
He was my hero when we made the trip from L.A. to Oklahoma. HE’D never hide in the box springs at the Motel 6. No. He would come right out in the morning for his love time with me. (Not Rosie, who made me tear the damn bed apart to get her into her carrier.)
Oh, Fidel. My hero.
That’s when I started calling him my Top Cat.
But two days after I started letting him out into the big, wide world of Chigger Lake, Oklahoma, he disappeared.
An owl.
I think that’s what got him.
I don’t think it was the coyotes which howled almost every night in different parts of the surrounding countryside. Fidel was too fast and clever. He could climb a tree like a squirrel, taking it at full gallop, and never hesitated when he got the urge to do it.
I don’t think it was a hawk. He was still noodling around during the daylight hours before his disappearance.
I don’t think it was neighbor Steve’s pack of ten (count ’em, TEN!!) pitbulls. Fidel would have sensed them coming from a mile away.
But, he wouldn’t have suspected a bird getting him. A night bird. A big, silent bird that could pluck him from a tree like an apple. That he couldn’t have protected himself from.
The night Fidel disappeared, Rosie came in late and alone, shaking and nervous and peering out the door. I waited and waited for him. MAYBE he was having an adventure. I called and called from the top of my hill, into the darkness, but he didn’t come. My heart stood still.
I knew, almost certainly, that something had gotten him. If he could have gotten home to me, he would have. He never, never would not come........
Yesterday, at dusk, after Fidel had been gone for several days, I saw a huge owl, standing, oddly, in the pond, ankle (?) deep in the water. I opened the sliding glass door and stood on the crest of my hill and whooped at him to scare him away. (I thought he was drowning my Rosie. Do owls drown cats?) After I yelled at him he opened his huge wings and slowly floated up to a tree branch next to the pond. He sat there, completely disguised by his coloring, on that branch for a long, long time.
Was I looking at Fidel’s killer?
I’ll never know.
But I hope that his beautiful body fed some little owlets and that his death was fast and fierce.
Here’s to Fidel. My hero. My love.
It’s tough in the country.
donna@fourstory.org
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