Thursday, December 31, 2009

Close Call in Salem

I've been up looking for a lost cat all day in Salem. A very nice Hispanic woman, whom I was trying to give a lost cat flier, suggested this evening, that it might be a good time to call it day. I'd pulled into an apartment complex again, off Lancaster, to cruise it and give out more fliers. I so much wanted to find that cat and deliver him back, safe and sound, to my friend.

I was in the turn lane to pull into the complex, and the car ahead of me just wouldn't make the turn in. I saw a tan van with it's hood up in the front of the complex, just off the street, and then saw three Mexican guys striding away from it.

Finally I was able to pull in. I went by the van and drove around the complex, parts of which were puddled in deep water from all the rain. I talked to a little kid, gave him a flier too, then pulled out at the same entrance I'd come in, rolling down my window to talk to the woman by the van and give her a lost cat flier.

That's when she told me a shooting occurred right when I was driving in. I had heard about four popping sounds, but I thought it was something going haywire in my car and gave it no thought. I just wasn't in the mode to think "shooting". Click post title for story of the shooting, which started at the gas station right by the apartments.

She was very kind in urging I get out of there now. She told me "That kitty is going to get found!"

I stared at the bullet holes in the back of that van and wondered if it was her van and her kids standing now at the front of the van and why shouldn't she be getting out of there, too. Why should she care about my safety when she has to live there, is what went through my mind. I didn't want to leave, in a way, because it didn't seem fair that I could leave.

Somebody had pulled up with a big TV type news camera to shoot video of the bullet holes in the van. I left.

I drove around again. I turned down the road that the field is one side and the barn is on the other, to just take one look there and saw four sheriff's deputies or police cars, lights flashing, with two cars pulled over. I wondered if that was related the shooting that just occurred.

I drove back then to the field on the other side of the complex where the shooting occurred. I just know that cat is running through that field and the back of that complex. I thought about setting a trap by the side fence of the complex, where there is a definite trail under the fence into the field, but then I thought if I ended up running into people with guns and got shot, that wouldn't be good.

I don't like to be below windows. I got shot at once in Corvallis when sitting in my car between two complexes over near campus watching a trap behind a couple of dumpy duplexes. The shot came from one of those dark windows above me. I laid the seat back, turned on the engine and hightailed it out of there, laid out flat, below the doorline of the car. I had to come back to get the trap by sneaking through from the other side. Made me nervous. The students had just returned and were partying everywhere and hell, that was scary.

I left food, for the lost cat, near the field, and came home.

I was there all day in the pouring rain and wet. My friend was there most of the day. There have been no legitimate sightings, but we checked out another lead, that he was seen with two other cats in a field. The field was off another street and the back of it was against the end of a street lined in "projects". I'd been down that street too and there's nothing pretty about the trashy and trash littered complexes along there. There are signs to a sheriff's substation and I did put a flier in the doorknob of that, but it too looks trashed and maybe abandoned.

In the back of one complex a young dead nutria lies stiff, front legs up as if in his last moments of life, he was pleading with the heavenes for help. Out in the nutria crap filled field, another nutria, with a shot off back leg, ran a few feet, then had to curl up to rest, because of his injury.

This is not a nice neighborhood.

Across the way, a man who owns a falling apart leaky roofed rotting barn, vowed to watch for the cat and says he sees a white cat, maybe a calico come through. I know that calico and where it hangs out. I know all the cats now in a half mile radius.

Another woman told me she'd taken her cat, an unfixed male, to the humane society two days ago. I said, "You know he's probably dead already." I couldn't not say that, not after the days out there searching for that poor lost kitty. She looked uncomfortable and finally said, "Well, maybe he isn't."

A man opened the door to my knock at one house. I started my speil about the lost cat when he insisted I come in. He took my arm and tried to pull me through the door, but it wasn't forceful. The alcohol smell was strong. I twisted away and said, "You think I'm nuts? I don't know you and I'm not coming inside your house." He softened then and came outside and was quite sympathetic about the lost cat and took a flier.

I had no luck at all today, but I didn't get shot at least or raped. At least there's that.

I feel like a ditz. I don't even notice a shooting is going on in front of my eyes? How will I ever find a lost cat then.

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