Has This Ever Happened to You?

"I think someone broke in," Mrs. Rodius said. "And it looks like they cut themselves."

We had just come home from work, and I was still closing the front door as she walked in ahead of me. I followed her into the living room to see what she was talking about. My mind couldn't make sense of what I was seeing. It looked like a murder had been committed on our living room carpet.

We bought this townhouse primarily to save money while we straightened out our financial affairs and reduced our credit and student loan debt. It was a successful plan of action and helped enable us to buy the home we have now. But price was our first and greatest concern. We didn't research or explore the neighborhood much before we bought it, so we discovered over time that one of its drawbacks was a proliferation of loose dogs.

We learned something about our sweet, little Harley in this townhouse that we hadn't known before: he was tough and tenacious. He seemed to be more a master of the meditative arts than the martial. He was an active kitten that we adopted from the shelter. His owner had abandoned him there because, his information card said, he was "too much trouble." This was probably just a heart-string-pulling kind of marketing on the part of the shelter, but it worked on us. They called him Ernie because he came with a little doll of the Sesame Street character. He didn't look like an Ernie to us. He ran around like a little lunatic, and when he stopped long enough to sleep on me, he demonstrated a flatulence problem that would have been embarrassing in anyone else, but was just kind of adorable in him. He was consistently the most sweetly dispositioned cat I have ever known. He once went nose to nose with a skunk outside our apartment in Everett, Massachussets. I sweat bullets as I watched, and thought of what I'd heard about tomato juice baths. Harley was undisturbed, though, and only seemed to say, "You're a funny looking kitty. What have you been rolling in?" Then the two parted and went contentedly about their separate business.

As he grew older, Harley spent most of his time in meditation, and he was much more accepting of our adoption of Puck, a feral kitten, than his righteously bitchy little sister, Tasha, had ever been. He was a lover, so far as we knew, not a fighter. Mrs. Rodius and I were very much surprised, then, when a roaming Rottweiler barked at us through the open front window of our townhouse, and the 8- or 9-pound Harley, without a thought for his own safety, began charging at the screen. He rammed into it head-first several times before Mrs. Rodius grabbed him and carried him into another room. He threw himself against the screen with such determination that he bent the frame and almost knocked it entirely out of the window. "Aw," we thought. "How cute! The little guy's protecting his Mama!" All of our cats, we are sure, have thought of her as that: Mama. If she had not married me, she may very well have developed into the quintessential cat lady. They have always filled a deep and earnest need within her soul, and she, apparently, has done the same for them.

So we fixed the screen. We were careful not to leave windows open when we weren't home. We told the tale of our brave little Harley at parties. I for one, though probably not Mrs. Rodius, chuckled a bit at what a surprise the brave little boy would have had if he'd succeeded in getting at that Rottweiler. We thought of it as a charming little quirk to this small cat, like the fact that he clearly understood the mechanics of doorknobs, but without thumbs, was sadly unable to put that understanding to practical use. He stretched his full length and rattled the knobs, but his fuzzy little feet weren't able to gain enough purchase to make the damn things turn. We noted the Rottweiler incident as another interesting little fact about him, and then we kind of forgot all about it.

And it didn't come to mind immediately as we stood looking at the blood. It was soaked into the carpet. It was splattered on the entertainment center, the windowsill, the broken fragments of glass. We looked around, but nothing seemed to be missing. The TV, the stereo, the computer were all where we'd left them. Perhaps the burglar had cut himself breaking the window and decided to leave before he could make off with anything. But why did the bloody carpet look so smeared? Had he decided to roll around on the floor awhile, cradling his injured arm, or leg, or carotid artery?

Almost immediately, though, Mrs. Rodius said, "Where are the cats?" So we did some reconnaissance. Tasha came out when we called to her, but she was limping. Puck was hidden in the first place we looked: the deepest darkest spot under the bed. But Harley was not to be found. We agreed he probably went out the window to explore, but he wouldn't have gone far. He'd never stray far from his Mama.

And he hadn't. I found him in the back yard, stiff and still.

A new idea began to form for us about what had happened that day. But it seemed so bizarre, so surreal, that we called the police anyway. They sent out an officer, and we nearly begged him to come up with a more likely explanation. Harley had puncture wounds in his side, and his fur was matted like he'd been licked by a big, slobbery tongue. There was a trail of blood drops that began at the top of our fence. I followed it down the sidewalk to where it disappeared into the grass several units down from ours. The officer agreed: it looked like a dog jumped our fence, broke our window, entered our house, killed our cat, carried him into the back yard, jumped the fence again, and went on his merry way, probably with a minor wound from the broken glass.

Have you ever heard of that before? I mean, really. Is that, or is that not, a very freaky occurrence?

We took Harley's body to the vet, who confirmed that he had bled to death from puncture wounds in his side that were consistent with a dog bite. Mrs. Rodius sister and her best friend came over to clean up the blood while I boarded up the window. Once the window was replaced, there was nothing left to tell the tale of the carnage, except a faint pink stain, almost invisible to those who didn't know it was there. We had our suspicions about which dog had done the deed, but there was no way to confirm it. There was a Spuds Mackenzie dog that lived in a back yard in the direction the blood spots had lead. He was a bull terrier, I know now, but when I was trying to remember what kind of dog the Spuds Mackenzie dog was, "rat bastard terrier" was all that would come to mind. That dog had previously demonstrated his ability to clear his own fence and was frequently seen wandering around loose. Perhaps the glass wounds would have given him away, but we couldn't confirm it without making the accusation, and we'd already spent enough energy in neighbor battles over noise, and parking. We didn't have the heart to jump into another one with people who would probably not be willing to admit their fault anyway, even if the dog did have cuts on his belly. So we let it go.

We imagined the scene, though. The dog, in his wanderings, scales our fence. Harley becomes enraged at the interloper's audacity and attacks the window. The dog, seeing the cat, becomes excited and jumps up, his paws on the window. Sometime around this point, Tasha makes a frantic dash from the scene, pulling a muscle in her hip and accounting for the limping we will notice when we get home. Puck probably beat her under the bed, and for the first and only time in their lives, they are huddling together, unified in their terror. Harley and the dog proceed to drive each other to greater and greater levels of hysteria until finally the window breaks. From that point, we try not to imagine the scene any more.

We had our little Buddha kitty cremated. We moved him with us in his little box to our new home, because it just didn't seem right to spread his ashes there at the site of his murder. We thought about releasing him into our beautiful new garden, but Mrs. Rodius isn't yet ready to see him go. The previous owners built a deck, and installed a small pet door for their lhasa apso. The dog door is now a kitty door, and the first home project I undertook after we moved in was screening in the deck. Tasha and Puck spend most of their time out there now, watching the birds as they ransack the feeder I hung. Harley would have liked this place. I can see him curled up with Puck, something Tasha still, after all these years, refuses to do. I can see him out there in the last patch of afternoon sun, breathing in the smell of the flowers, eyes closed as he contemplates "the echo of the empty valley, bearing tidings heard from the soundless sound."