The Angel’s Cat

Twenty Years Ago on FITK

We were living on the fringes of an industrial zone—near downtown Minneapolis in the mid nineteen-seventies.

Rent was cheap but the neighbors weren’t exactly the best: a gang of rowdies with a penchant for settling their internal disputes with handguns.

They had a cat, José. I’ve mentioned him before, one of the more memorable cats of my acquaintance. He was just an ordinary Tom, orange-y fur, a little long and shaggy, not the best groomed feline, just a regular city cat. You'd see him around, crawling under the fences of the junkyards, keeping the vermin from over-running the area.

It so happened that one night José’s ‘owner’ was shot, seriously, but not killed. The gang broke up and left the house. José stayed. A part-time trucker moved in. He didn’t really have any furniture, so he just used the stuff that was left behind. One of the chairs had blood-stains on it. Jose always slept on that chair.

The angel?

One of Hell’s.