Fixing Bootsie

A large field overgrown with brush separated the last rent house that Anne and I lived in from several giant apartment complexes. Tenants in the apartments were constantly coming and going, often abandoning their unwanted pets along the way. Since we had three cats of our own and treated them like kings and queens, some of the cast offs naturally gravitated toward our house.

Our three cats were Hamlet, a black male; Whiskers, a black and white female and also Hamlet’s mother; and Chani a calico (calicos are always female). We fed them every evening on the front porch and it wasn’t long before we had other hungry cats nosing around, looking for food. None of them ever went away hungry.

We soon had three new cats that called our place home. The O.J. Simpson trial was in the news at the time so we named the stray orange fixed male O.J. The female brindle that appeared about the same time naturally became Nicole. Bootsie was a very large black and white tom with a black marking on his white chin that looked like a boot. Unlike O.J. and our other cats, Bootsie still packed all his equipment.

O.J. was friendly. Nicole was standoffish and Bootsie aggressive, terrorizing all the other cats and generally acting like the bully on the block. We weren’t doing well financially at the time and couldn’t afford to take them to the vet for their shots and examinations.

“When we get some extra money,” Anne said, “We’ll take them to Dr. D and get their shots. And when we do, we’re getting Bootsie fixed.” The thought worried me because Big Black was a grown cat. “He’s a cat, Eric, not a human. We need to neuter him and that’s what we are going to do.”

“But -” I complained.

“No buts. The only thing saving his little balls is we can’t afford to take him to the vet right now.”

Anne had lung cancer at the time and she told me, “Please don’t let me die in a rent house.”

It was 1997, not a very good year in the oil biz, but I had somehow managed to sell a geologic idea to an oil company. With my profit, I leased three-hundred and twenty acres on a prospect idea that I had in Major County, Oklahoma. It was a wonderful prospect and a company offered my money back and a twenty-five thousand dollar profit. I was hungry but I knew the deal was worth much more. It didn’t matter because I still got a very large lump in my throat when I turned down the offer.

Two weeks passed, my rear-end puckered, praying that I hadn’t fallen in love with a prospect that was never going to sell, at least for the price that I was asking. After another week passed, I considered returning, hat in hand, to the company whose offer I had rejected and beg them to take it for twenty-thousand dollars. As things would happen, I didn’t have to.

Another company finally decided they couldn’t live without the prospect, almost doubling the first company’s offer. I probably could have sold the deal for even more money but I didn’t reject this proposal. With it, I had enough money to make a large down payment on the house where I still live, and my good friend Banker Bob bent his bank’s rules slightly to lend me the rest. We even had enough money left to take the cats to the vet.

I was nervous for Bootsie but needn’t have been. Following the operation, his aggression quickly disappeared. He also stopped fighting and bullying the other cats. When Anne and I got the two Maine Coon Kittens, Rouge and Tabitha, Bootsie took them under his wing, lying with them on the couch and grooming them with his tongue. When people came to visit, Bootsie would jump into their arms and put his arms around their necks. All the other cats, needless to say, were very happy with his new persona.

Sadly, Bootsie, like Anne, has gone to the great beyond, but while he was here, his operation transformed him into one of the most lovable cats that I have ever had. I’m not really sure what the moral of this story is, but just in case it gave any of you ladies out there ideas about your tomcatting husbands, I ask you to remember Anne’s wise words:

“He’s a cat, Eric, and not human.”

Louisiana Mystery Writer