Last night we faced danger. If you are squeamish about bloodshed and violence, please don’t read on, as the following tale will send cold chills down your spine and your usual pleasant sleep will be interrupted by nightmare visions of impending doom.
Our night began much as in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Instead of a ship called the Nellie, our journey into darkness began in my car—a faithful beast that has gotten me and mine to many a far-flung destination. The sky, to paraphrase Conrad, “seemed condensed into a mournful gloom.”
Just as Conrad’s story had formed a basis many years after it was written for the movie Apocalypse Now, it might as well have formed the basis of our journey. While we were not seeking Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, the object of our escapade was just as frightening. No! It was even more frightening.
“The horror! The horror!”
Perhaps I should start at the beginning, because the story begins so benign. What could be more wholesome than for a mother to tend the pet of her son while he traveled across two states to attend the wedding of a young man and woman? Ah, the betrothal of a young couple—a fresh springtime in the prime of life. The young man who journeyed those many miles to attend the wedding was the son of Jimbo’s girlfriend, the mother who would attend to the needs of her son’s cat in his absence.
On the first night of the young man’s journey, his mother came to his apartment, fed and watered the feline and then came home to the arms of Jimbo—a gentleman with whom she shared her life.
“That stupid cat hissed at me,” she said upon arriving home. “He scratched me, too. I’ll have to put peroxide on this. I guess I got too close to him while he was eating.”
She showed me her bleeding hand.
“Never get close to a cat when he’s eating. I’ll go with you tomorrow night and help out,” I told her.
Sometimes twenty-four hours can pass in the blink of an eye, and in that amount of time, it was necessary to go back to feed the cat again.
When we arrived at the apartment, the cat was in a back bedroom with the door closed, as he had been left the night before. When we opened the bedroom door the cat ran out, seemingly happy to see us. I reached down tentatively and petted the cat’s head with my index finger. The cat pressed himself against my hand, as cats will do and sort of petted himself with my fingers. I took the cat’s water and food dish and rinsed it out and put fresh water in it. The entire time the cat was rubbing up against my leg. Sure, when I tried to put the dish back on the floor, next to his litter box, the cat was rubbing against my arms and we spilled a little water, but cats will get a little anxious when it’s dinner time. I rinsed out the coffee pot in the kitchen sink and put a little water in it and poured it into the dish. The cat followed me back to the kitchen and I reached down to pet it again after putting the coffee pot back into the sink.
This cat has been given a bad rep, I thought to myself. He can be very friendly and he is not at all as mean as he has been described to me. It was at that point the cat hissed and swung his paw at me, scratching the side of my hand and putting a claw deep into the palm. I went into the bathroom and got a piece of toilet paper and soaked up the blood with it. My girlfriend recommended I put peroxide on it, which I did. Afterward, she went back and finished cleaning out the litter box.
The cat re-entered the bedroom and saw my girlfriend straightening up after bending over to close the bag of litter. From seven feet away from her the cat leaped and buried his claws into her upper arm. Jimbo escorted the cat from the room and closed the door as his girlfriend swore oaths. Although the state senate is debating making carrying concealed weapons legal, the law has not yet been enacted. Therefore, fortunately for the cat, neither of us were in possession of firearms, so his life was spared.
We treated her wounds much as we had treated my own, and then we put food in the evil feline’s dish and the cat went about eating. One of us walked near the cat and he hissed again, and again my girlfriend swore oaths. The cat looked up at us with the eyes of Beelzebub himself—red as the fires of hell—so we booked it out of there, turned out the lights, locked up the apartment and left.
Yes, we had looked deep into the eyes of Satan and deep into the heart of darkness, and we lived to tell the tale. We discussed it much more that evening, and my girlfriend swore oaths many, many more times. Sometimes it is necessary for a man to go to hell and back—and a woman, too.
It certainly makes a tale for the ages here in Jimbo’s world.
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