Crazed Cat

It felt like another plain vanilla Saturday in our suburban Sacramento household.

My younger sis and I grumbled while ironing dad’s starched white shirts that mom had sprinkled with water and stuffed into a big pillow sack last night before going to bed. We took turns tugging a damp wrinkled mass out of the pillowcase and flattening the hot iron against the cotton fabric until it took the shape of a dress shirt, ready to wear on a metal hanger. It was our least favorite Saturday ritual. By early afternoon, I wrapped the frayed cord around the cooled iron and stuck it on the wobbly shelf above the utility closet, while Jean released the metal hook off mom’s WWII ironing board and shoved the whole contraption into the closet.

At last I could ponder my date with Brad Thompson that evening. After school yesterday, he had asked me to go out with him on Saturday night. The prospect of a movie date with the senior class president of La Sierra High, Class of ’63, was enough of a jolt to make me forget to pull the chicken out of the freezer after school so it would thaw before my mother returned home from work at five.

As if that wasn’t enough to send shockwaves down my teenage spine, my date was first- string on the basketball and football teams at our high school. I’d watched him catch a Hail Mary pass last fall during the homecoming game with El Camino High, a feat that propelled the crowd into a cheering frenzy. In short, Brad was known for his athletic and academic prowess, you might say a high school hero, whereas I was a wannabe cheerleader who was better known for having good grades and a big brother who graduated the Class of ’62, two years ahead of me.

I met Brad in science class last fall when he was the teacher’s lab assistant. His work in the narrow lab behind the front of the classroom caught my interest one day as he walked in and out of the open doorway to the left of the teacher’s table carrying gallon-sized glass jugs filled

with dead frogs floating in formaldehyde. My stomach churned at the prospect of cutting open one of those slimy gray-green things. Though I couldn’t help noticing the big jugs he carried, it was mostly Brad’s good looks that caught my attention: how his black hair, trimmed neatly around his ears and neck, enhanced his sculpted athletic body. Anyway, he was charged with prepping the classroom for dissection of the frogs. It was a big day for our class— you might say the apex of our biology studies to that date.

All was going according to classroom protocol until Brad abruptly stopped in the lab doorway, his arms wrapped around a fat jug, and shot me a wink as if I were the only student in the classroom. I froze in my seat, mortified, as the class erupted in laughter. Mrs. Elkhart stopped her lesson on frog dissection and turned to see Brad’s face redden like a plum ripe for harvest. Right then, the jug slipped from his arms and crashed to the linoleum floor, spilling the dead frogs and stinky solution along with shards of broken glass all over the place.

When Mrs. Elkhart ordered a classroom evacuation, we students enjoyed a few minutes’ break while she and Brad along with the school janitor cleaned up the mess. Of course, I did my best to pretend I hadn’t noticed Brad’s attention-getting gesture towards me in the classroom, hoping the whole spectacle would vanish as quickly as the room cleanup. And it did work pretty well until Chrissie, known for being outspoken on everything, pointed at me and shouted so the whole class could hear, “Turn-em-on Thompson got distracted by your looks!” Luckily, my loyal girlfriends stared her down with that “what’s it to you?” defense. After a few rocky days, my attention returned to getting good grades and attending the boys’ basketball games on Friday nights.

A hush-hush conversation between my dad and my older brother in the living room interrupted my daydreaming. David solemnly reported a sighting of the rabid cat at the next-door

neighbor’s house that morning. I must have been lost in my Saturday ironing project when this happened because I was surprised the cat was causing a commotion again. All week, mom and dad had warned us kids to steer clear of him after a neighbor told dad that cat had pounced on his back legs in a surprise attack one evening. Soon after, another frightened neighbor watched the cat leap off his front railing toward his wife as she carried a bag of groceries into the house. That was enough to convince my parents the cat was a menace to the neighborhood and probably rabid.

When Dad said, “You can shoot that cat if it shows up on our doorstep,” I was immobilized, but my brother’s lips quivered and his shoulders shuddered ever so slightly. He was trying hard to be cool about his new assignment, but I knew David was downright excited about the prospect of using the .22 again. He hadn’t had any opportunities to go hunting in the years since our family moved off the Wyoming ranch in summer ’56. Six years ago! That’s a long time for a guy who went deer hunting on his own when he was twelve. But we lived way out in nowhere then. I’m not exaggerating either. Cody, Wyoming was the closest big town to our ranch, and it was thirty-six miles away by dirt and gravel road. Now we live in a modern California suburb on the outskirts of Sacramento. Clearly, my dad never lost confidence in David’s ability to handle the rifle, even in the big city.

Even though David was known for being girl crazy in high school, not for getting good grades, somehow he and Brad had managed to become friends. This was a comforting thought as the afternoon hours dwindled toward seven o’clock when Brad was supposed to pick me up for our first date. Minutes before he was due to pull into our driveway, things took a turn for the worse. My dad announced he was going to watch the Saturday evening boxing match on TV. That was his way of saying he wanted some quiet in the living room.