vituperation

February 2, 2003

When the first scream pierced the veil of my sleep like an arrow, cutting into my dreams of family reunions and strippers, I’ll admit I didn’t recognize it for what it was. I jerked awake, immediately tense. I knew something was wrong but I wasn’t quite sure what. I’m a light sleeper and I wear one earplug at night in the ear that isn’t pressed into a pillow, to weed out the extraneous home sounds. The scream made it through the earplug with no problems, despite the fact that it had come from downstairs.

I lifted my head, almost preternaturally alert, and tilted it so my unencumbered ear was pointing up. A second scream erupted from below me, high and warbling with a growling finish. Not a human scream at all; it was a cat scream. As my feet hit the floor running, I had an idea of what was going on.

Two or three months ago I was awakened by the same sound. When I went downstairs - slowly and carefully, because a cat’s scream is one of the creepiest things ever - I found Tubby at the window caterwauling at a black and white cat sitting in the yard. The black and white was calmly looking back at Tubby. A smack on the window with the flat of my hand sent him running.

I crossed the room and grabbed my glasses on my way to the door. I left the aqua-colored earplug on the dresser where my glasses had been. On the landing outside my room the screams were more audible, and I could also hear the mad scrabbling of claws on hardwood mingling with the cries from below. I ran down the stairs, my heart pounding and my body flooding with adrenaline. I felt like I should do something.

"Hey!" I yelled. I immediately felt foolish, because it had absolutely no effect on the activities below. Upstairs, Robyn and the spud slept soundly, oblivious to it all.

As I neared the bottom of the stairs my imagination kicked into overdrive, fuelled by the hormones and neurotransmitters coursing through my system. My mind fed me a vision of a rabid skunk, hauling ass and leaving a trail of almost visible stank, racing around the corner below with a spray-dripping cat following closely behind. In that vision we ended up with a malodorous house and me getting a series of injections in my abdomen to prevent me from going Cujo.

I rounded the bottom step and looked down the hallway to the kitchen, the nexus of sound. In the dim light illuminating the room I saw Tubby going toe to toe with the black and white bastard cat, who was in our house. They were just beyond the doorway into the kitchen, a whirling grey dervish that crawled with sound.

"Hey!" I shouted again, and this time I got a response. The black and white cat saw me and started running as fast as he could to get away from me. Because he was on a slate floor, he mostly just ran in place, though, for a couple of seconds. In a cartoon it would’ve been funny.

Finally, his feet made purchase and he streaked out of sight into the library. Tubby was on his ass, howling and growling like a banshee. I heard a quick slickery sliding sound of claws on the wood floor again, followed by the loud clacking of our cat door swinging open and closed violently.

More cat screams ensued from just outside the house.

I ran into the library, which was devoid of cats. Looking out the window, I could see the whites of both cats in the streetlight that spills into our yard from the thoroughfare running beyond our back fence. They were facing one another and being quite vocal in their disagreement. I whapped the window a good one with my palm. The cats launched up and into one another at the sound, and tangled into a spinning blur.

Without a second thought I raced through the house and into the backyard, my nearly naked glory stunning whichever neighbors happened to be up at 1:30 and looking my way. The black and white cat caught sight of me coming out the door and hightailed it for the opposite corner of the yard. Tubby bolted behind him, his ass end reminding me - strangely - of a rabbit bounding away from me. The black and white cat leapt to the top of the fence and perched there for a second, tauntingly. He looked back at me, saw I was coming his way, and jumped out of sight.

Tubby crouched on the ground like a meatloaf below where the cat had been, growling. I knelt with him for a while, calming him, then led him back inside and went to wake my wife. He’s got a tiny bloody spot on his ear and is walking with a slight limp this morning. Hopefully the limp is from going through the cat door so forcefully and not from a bite; the door is a pretty tight squeeze for him even on good days.

It was after 3:30 before I was able to sleep again.

Aftermath

Our hero, dirty butt and all.