Because Red came when she was called, she earned the right to go outside whenever she wanted to when we were home. Everywhere we lived, she figured out the geography immediately, knew the perimeters of our property, knew our house, and knew how to find her way back to our front porch.
Even when we lived in the city above a dress shop, she knew how to circle the building without getting in the way of cars or dogs. She was especially responsive to a noise my husband made to call her, a combination of a loud purr and a motor boat putter.
Red never had any use for the indoors. When she was inside and awake, she stood by the door and called out for someone to open it. If no one came, she tried pulling the door open herself. If that didn't work, she'd go into a closet and get in a box, even if the box had stuff in it, and take a nap. I seldom saw her eat. I seldom saw her in the litter box. She paid no attention to the other cats. She was either outside or asleep in the closet.
She had a lot of things to do outside, many things to examine or observe. At one house we rented for five years, she kept busy digging up and eating voles. She was so light and moved so gracefully, she practically flew. She walked with a prancing step. She didn't like to be held, but if you straddled her across your forearm so she thought she was flying, she let you walk around with her.
She was named after the Kiss song, "Hard Luck Woman," although everywhere I've searched for the lyrics, it says the woman's name is Rags. My husband claims the lyrics are mistaken. The band is singing "Red." Red was hardly a hard luck woman. She was very lucky all her life.
I've heard the story of how Red and Bobby met many times. It's one of his party and family gathering staples. He and his sister lived in their childhood home in deep, heavily wooded suburbia. He was coming home late one night from band practice when he saw a flash of orange moving in a roadside ditch. He pulled over and walked back and couldn't find the kitten. Then he heard meowing, frantic and insistent. The kitten of about eight weeks had climbed a tree so she was eye level with him and calling to him. He plucked her off the tree and put her inside his jacket where she immediately settled in and purred all the way to her new home.
Where she came from, how she came to be in the woods…all that is only known to her. She stayed with Bobby almost 18 years, adapting to every place he moved. He was her one true love, although she seldom sat in his lap. When he went outside, she'd wrap herself around his legs. I couldn't always get her in at night, but all he had to do was go outside and stand there.
I first met her on my first visit to his house in 1996. She managed to pack herself into my purse. Most orange cats are males, I'm told. She was a rare orange female, with a swirl of white so she looked like a Dreamsicle. She had a fluffy Maine Coon neck and tail. She could easily come and go from his house through a broken window in the basement, so when they moved into my city apartment in February 1997 with Bobby's other cat, Merly, I thought she'd have a difficult time adjusting to being an indoor cat.
The first order of business was to get Red and Merly fixed. When I picked them up from the vet, I was surprised by a higher bill. Both of them had been pregnant. That was the closest Red ever came to motherhood. By spring, she made the decision she wasn't going to be an indoor cat, even in the city. People on S. Dooley Avenue became accustomed to seeing her sitting out on the second floor brick ledge when the window was open. I don't know how it came about that we finally let her out, but soon she was the master of the block.
In front of the parking lot next door to our building was an elevated strip of trees and mulch, which she made her yard. She figured out how to safely cross the street and jump over a high fence into the yard of a house on the corner. Concerned she might get lost or killed, I tried putting a collar on her with our address and phone number. She came back without the collar. A few days later, some helpful person found it and left it in my mail box. So much for collars.
In 1999, we moved to a great little cottage in Mechanicsville, back from the road and surrounded on two sides by woods. On the other side was a house used as a daycare center, so in the evenings and weekends, no one was around. There was a fenced, sanded play yard, which must have seemed like a giant litter box to her. A stream ran through the woods behind the daycare. She loved it there. From the time we got home from work to bedtime, she was out in the yard or the woods, hunting voles, or surveying her domain. I often found her in the front yard of the daycare center in the evening, or sitting on the rail of the daycare porch. She preferred the daycare to our house. She could dissect a vole as precisely as a surgeon, leaving just the neatly arranged internal organs on the sidewalk.
When we moved to a house in a crowded, old suburban neighborhood in Dumbarton in 2004, I thought
it was going to be a big come-down for her. The woods were behind the houses across the street, not around our house. The yards were all small and fenced in. The voles were few and far between. She was eight years old, approaching middle age. She limited herself, by choice, to our front yard. When my husband came home from work at 4:30, she went out and sat on the hood of his car until the heat faded away. Then she did a perimeter check and took up a sentry position on the cement front steps. At some point I acquired a rectangle shaped wicker basket with low sides, and left it on the porch. She used it to rest her head on the rim and keep an eye on the street until we went to bed.
Rarely did she leave the yard. When I went up and down the block, or across the street, behind the houses to the field at the edge of the woods looking for another one of our cats, she'd trot along with me. But for the most part, she patrolled the small front yard diligently. The last year of her life, when she couldn't go out because she moved too slow to dodge a car, she watched the front yard from a second floor window.
She was not the least bit interested in the other cats that came and went in our lives, some for many years, some for brief stays. She didn't fight anyone. She took her meals separately in another room from the others. She kept calling us to follow her with her food bowl to ensure she always dined privately. She liked warm. She liked napping on the top of a printer.
We knew things were changing when she moved to the floor in my office and never jumped to any high spots anymore, or expressed any desire to go outside. She thinned out, alarmingly so in the last year. She stopped grooming herself two years before the end, and I had to help her along with warm, wet washcloths, brushing -- which she hated -- and finally just clipping the mats out so she looked like a ragamuffin. She started walking with a constant bobbing motion, as if she was continually ducking something flying over her head. She was constantly hungry, but ate very little.
July 4 she was restless and cried out several times in the morning when my husband tried to pet her, which upset him to the core. But we had waited too long to establish a relationship with a vet who would come to the house. So far we hadn't moved past emails and she didn't have an available slot for a home visit until the following week. So we had no one to call to put her down. We waited. She quieted down, but every hour or so, she laboriously moved herself from one corner of the room to another. Sometimes we couldn't even figure out where she was, then she would appear in another corner an hour later from out of nowhere. Her eyes were darkened slits, and she only lifted her head if she heard my husband's voice.
The morning of July 5, even though I had been awake since 3 a.m., dreading what I would find, I waited until my husband woke up at 6 to look for her. We found her curled up in a litter box that just had a puppy pad in it. It was damp with pee. After using it, she had been too tired to move. We moved her to a canvas basket bed with supportive sides. I sat with her, hand to paw. Three hours passed. Until the death rattle, she didn't make another sound. She'd lift her head once in awhile, but just to slightly change position. She stretched her arms out. She pushed up against the side of the basket at times. Her body would twitch periodically. She was getting cooler to the touch. I put a little blanket over her. I opened the windows to let her hear the birds and smell the warm, summer morning air. She didn't notice either.
Around 10:30 a.m., she took a few noticeable breaths, rested, then a few more. Then she tilted her head back and made a final squeaky sound. Even then I wasn't sure. Her jaw went slack, but her paws and shoulder kept twitching for a few more minutes. It was so quiet, so easy. I was reading my iPad at the time, trying to figure out how to know, what to expect, and I was reading this strange essay about a woman who claimed the room filled with spirit cats at the time her cat died and lifted her cat's spirit up with them. I wish I had seen that, too.
