Laura Asks About the White Cats Who Were My Friends

 

Laura asked when I stopped seeing the white cats.  (This photo taken later of Babylon on his cat tower shows one of the large white cat sculptures in the background)

 

I never knew anything about wild cats as a kid.  I could not have told a bobcat from a cheetah.  The cats were not really white, so much as they were almost hard to look at, white light.  Their shape was very much like the shape of the cougar, but as a child, I would not have known that.  They were not shaped like cats, but that is how I referred to them.  They were the size of Shadow to me as a child, so probably the size of Catrina in reality.

 

They didn't have names and while their voices were distinctly different, they shared a unison that is hard, even now for me to explain.  I always heard their two voices and still do.  That part never left me.  Their voices have always been like two people saying the same thing in two different ways.  They always agree with each other and I am usually the one trying to argue some other perspective, but they are always right.

 

A case in point:  When Hercules, Armani and Jumanji were all about a year old, circa 1998 I had a limo that was like they haul old folks around town in.  On one side of the bus I had installed stainless steel cages and on the other side of the bus were seats and we were on our way to a T.V. station to do an on air appearance.  Jamie and Daniel, her boyfriend and I were going as the handler for each of the three cats.

 

Daniel was in the back of the bus holding Armani in his lap.  Jamie may have had Jumanji out, but I don't recall and Hercules was in the cage.  I was coming down off the ramp and heard the first voice say, "Hold on tight!"  Immediately the second voice expanded on that and said, "Hold on tight and no one is going to get hurt!"  and then my voice saying silently, "What are you guys talking about?  There isn't anyone around us.  What could possibly..."

 

There was an explosion like a bomb going off in the back.  I looked into the rear view mirror and all I could see inside the van was smoke.  The bus lurched to one side and it was all I could do to keep it from flipping over.  I wrestled it off the road and into a field.  Jamie was already freeing Hercules and leashing him up, with Jumanji on the lead in her other hand.  The smoke was too thick to get to the back of the bus, so I ran around the bus on the outside to the back door.

 

When I opened it, Daniel was sitting perfectly still, staring straight ahead.  Armani was slumped in his arms;  not moving.  Both of them and the entire back of the bus was sprayed with blood.  There was a hole in the side of the bus ripping all the way under the floor where Daniel's feet had been resting so that the ground could be seen beneath his dangling feet.  I didn't know if there was a fire in the bus because of the smoke, so I grabbed Daniel, who had a death grip on Armani and hurled them out of, and away from the van.

 

Jamie had Jumanji and Hercules a good distance from the bus and Daniel was starting to show some sign of life.  We all thought that Armani was dead.  She still hadn't moved.  Jamie and I got everyone into the shade as it was blazing hot that day.  Armani slowly regained (I pause, because it is hard to say what she regained.  It was as if she regained consciousness, but I don't know that she was unconscious, so much as scared stiff and the same seemed to be true for Daniel.)

 

Apparently both of the tires on the back right had blown at the same time and the force of the radial tires exploding into the fiberglass shell of the van had sent millions of tiny shards of metal and fiberglass across Daniel and it appeared that all of the blood sprayed all over the van and the cat was his, but he wasn't bleeding any more.  The smoke was from the rubber on the pavement.  The voices were right.  No one got hurt.

 

From the future, Lenore Infanti says this was probably as we wer