Chapter 19: Frijol

Kike bought two mousetraps. These traps are not like what you think. They are called “glue traps” and they are basically flypaper stuck onto a piece of plastic that you put somewhere along your floorboard so that when mice run by they try to run right over it and get caught. It was a remarkably simple solution that if I stopped to consider exactly what had to be done after the mouse was caught (the instructions show you wrapping up the trapped mouse in newspaper and putting it in the garbage) and how the mouse stopped “being,” the whole situation became rather morbid. But the mouse that we had for a week now that constantly kept me up at night with its nibbling on things that I knew were of value, as well as the one incident when I found him below my pillow, made me easily forget the consequences of the glue traps and simply place them, one at the corner of the room where I knew I had had heard the mouse run past many a night, and the other outside around the corner so that if anymore tried to come towards our room, they would not make it even to the door.
And as simple as the traps were, the mouse was no more complex and that same night we had him wrapped in newspapers and out with the pile of garbage. We rested easy now, no more chewing on my boxes or clothes or waking up to push all our stuff into the middle of the room and attempt to beat it senseless with the broom.
The next night we caught a cat. We heard the trap moving in the early morning, and we both got up to see why the mouse could be sliding the trap around on the ground. Except, as I said, it was a cat. A sandy brown, black, and white cat, that was no bigger than a four month old kitten except it looked like a full formed cat, not a kitten at all, and was staring up at us. It was sitting contently, its back right foot firmly stuck in the glue trap, looking as if he had no idea that he was stuck at all. Of course the trap is not stuck to the ground or anything, so that cat stood up, moved its front feet forward, and then lifted his back right foot, complete with trap and all, as high as he could almost over his head and set it down as if he had been walking like this his whole life. He sat back down and looked around as if taking in the view, and then attempted to shift his weight to his left side and bring his right foot, with trap, up to his mouth to clean the front of his paw. He managed to do this, which was quite a feat, and licked his paw clean until he looked tired and without noticing that his whiskers were stuck to the trap, set his foot back down which pulled his whole head down to his right side. He yanked his whiskers loose and shook his head, sticking his tongue out to lick the sides of his mouth.
This was all entirely too amusing to free the cat, but finally I felt bad and approached him to see if he would understand that I wanted to help. He seemed to not really notice my existence, and when I grabbed his back leg to pull off the trap, he looked back to see what I was doing and once free, even though it pulled a good many hairs off his back leg, he didn’t complain but only proceeded to clean the area that was stuck a second ago. We laughed and went back to sleep.
When we woke up an hour or two later, the cat was in the trap yet again.
That night Kike and I were out on the balcony chatting. The moon was out bright and Kike had his notebook out, drawing a picture of whatever. The cat came wandering up the ramp towards us, and found its way under Kike’s chair. He sat there the whole time, just sitting and looking about. We tried to coax it out so we could play with it, but it just sat there like it had no where else to be. As Kike shifted his weight forward to try to grab the cat, he was careful not to lean too far forward and thus tipping over. However, he couldn’t quite reach the little thing and just barely grabbed it by its right ear, pulling it forward. When he could get a little better grasp, Kike grabbed the cat’s whole head and lifted him out to the side and up onto his lap. Anyone would have gasped seeing a cat picked up by its head, which I did, but the cat, like everything that had happened so far, didn’t notice or seem to mind at all. Kike held it down and searched it for fleas. We weren’t going to keep a dirty cat around. That would just be trouble.
“We will name it ‘Frijol’” he said.
“Why?”
“I like the name.” I laughed and watched as Frijol jumped off Kike’s lap and came over to me. He put his claws on my jeans and used them to begin to scale my body, slowly moving up. I was so entranced, I didn’t mind the occasional scratch on the leg as Frijol made his way up into my arms all by himself.
“This is the coolest cat I have ever seen. Look at him! He is actually climbing up me and doesn’t even care what I think.”
The next few nights he became our official third member of the tribe. Frijol would come into our room and jump up on one of our beds and snuggle underneath the covers. One time he was sitting up on the edge of Kike’s bed looking at me. I grabbed my wool hat and threw it at him. It hit him directly on his head, and he fell straight backwards off the bed, landing square on his back on the blanket below the bed. I jumped up.
“Did you see that? He landed on his back?”
“Yeah, that was strange.”
“Is that allowed? Does that break some law of physics? Are we going to jail?” I am not joking at all. Square on the back.
And he ate everything. We fed him cooked green beans on a tortilla and he ate it right up. I could not believe some of the things that he would eat. I never knew any dog or cat to love vegetables, but he ate everything we put in front of him. Sometimes we would eat and he would bring a mouse in and eat it there with us. You think I am starting to exaggerate but I am not. He would occasionally kill mice and leave them around. The girls who worked there would find them and scream. It was like he was setting them up for a good laugh.
Adalid didn’t care for him, but we didn’t mind. I think she hates all cats, not just Frijol. He was our friend and we were used to being outcasts, being thought of as strange. Hey, no problem.