Two-faced!

Photo by the author

Sire a living, breathing two-faced kitten and the NY Post and the Drudge Report will beat a path to your door. Let your two-faced kitten die, and you have two choices: Bury it in the backyard or put its body up on eBay with a starting bid of $10,000.

“The world would probably like to know why we’re putting Gemini up on eBay,” Snow Wolf Bluetear said as we drove along the twists of the Little River toward Roseburg, Oregon. He is a heavyset man of mixed heritage: Tarascan Indian, Spanish, and Chirakawa Apache. He has bristly hair that’s graying at his temples, worn over a neatly trimmed mustache. His dark skin is embroidered with tattoos and scars. He served in the Navy in the late 70s, when he believes he was exposed to Agent Orange. He lives on $390 of Social Security a month.

We were on our way to the vet’s office where the body of Gemini, the two-faced kitten, is frozen while the couple tries to find a buyer. Snow Wolf sat in the back with his estranged wife, Lee. On the phone, Snow Wolf had agreed to let me photograph the animal in return for helping him create an eBay account and put Gemini up for auction.

“Personally, I feel funny trying to sell a dead cat,” Lee said. Her deep-set eyes are the shape of almonds, and they turn upward when she talks, like she’s shrugging. “I suppose if this were 20 years ago I’d run an ad or something, but I figured because this is the internet age eBay would be my best bet.” She’s in her early forties, a few years younger than Lee, and with her heavy brow and corn-colored hair she has the look of a farmer, except for her delicate hands and manicured nails.

Snow Wolf finished his thought as though he hadn’t heard her. “The bottom line is she’s a godsend. She’s going to save my family.”

I wasn’t yet ready to tell the Bluetears that eBay doesn’t allow sellers to list most animals or anything containing cat hair. As the Bluetears do not have an internet connection, or a listed number, or even a telephone, they had no way of knowing this. Lee is the more technologically savvy of the pair and probably came up with the eBay idea. She uses the “I” when talking about the plans for Gemini; Snow Wolf talks about “we” and has a tendency to steer Gemini’s story back into his. For him, $10,000 is a magic number: $5,000 to hire a lawyer to get their kids back from the state, and $5,000 to finish building the world’s deadliest sniper rifle.

He calls the rifle project Leviathan. “A Leviathan is a two-headed dragon that breathes fire,” he says. “What better name for my weapons system.” He keeps the schematics in an old olive-covered mortar tube from his Navy days. On a worn roll of butcher paper, Snow Wolf has rendered in pencil a rifle whose array of springs and curlicues resemble a Super Soaker. The system, as he explains it, consists of several “products” like the Thunderheart product, which muffles the force of the shooter’s heartbeat. A single heartbeat, Snow Wolf said, can throw a shot off by six feet at 1,500 yards.

He’s already made a prototype of his rifle’s stock—fashioned from a 1903 Springfield and ergonomic neoprene—which he pawned to buy gas to drive newborn Gemini to the vet in a fruitless attempt to keep her alive. Until the money comes in and he can buy patents to protect his invention, he won’t allow the schematic to be photographed.

“What a rifle is, really, is a cannon,” he said. “The most accurate cannon in the world is made in Germany, and it’s mounted on rails to absorb the recoil. So is my system. The stock is the most user-friendly in the world, because everything on it moves and becomes part of your body. Rather than laying your head on the weapon, you’re laying it in the weapon.”

“It’s not quite like that,” said Lee, sitting beside him in the back seat. Snow Wolf ignored her.

The Bluetears enjoy a level of reclusiveness somewhere between J.D. Salinger and Ted Kaczynski, picking up their mail once a week from the general-delivery address at the Glide post office. I was able to reach them only after placing several calls to a “message phone,” a sort of voicemail system where Chief Yellow Wolf, Snow Wolf’s adopted father, passes along messages whenever he sees the Bluetears at his house or in town. This was a source of great frustration to journalists from Israel, Russia, Greenland and Japan who saw Gemini’s photo up on the Drudge Report and attempted to contact the Bluetears by leaving messages at the first vet’s office, which, Snow Wolf says, never passed them along. He believes the vet was trying to parlay the blessing of Gemini to his own devious ends by pressuring the Bluetears into donating the body to a research university.

There is indeed a two-faced kitten at the center of this story, but the further away you get from the kitten itself, the weirder things get, until you start to believe that Gemini’s short life was a kind a porthole into a heretofore invisible universe of uncanny conjunctions and unaffected eccentricities. The story runs from the halls of the Pentagon back to the copper mines of Arizona, but it begins right here in Glide, about three years ago, with a feral cat who has no name.

The little stud was on his usual nocturnal patrol on the outskirts of Glide. He passed by the Bluetears’ trailer, where they still lived with their five children, three German shepherds, and a cat, Nalla, who was in heat. She heard our hero’s calls and slipped out an open window to get laid. It was on.

This would have been like any other midnight feline tryst had Nalla and her mate not both been carrying a rare mutant gene that would make their kittens smaller, cuter, and many times more valuable than ordinary housecats. A cat born with one of these genes is a “toy,” weighing around six pounds as an adult. Two of these genes make a “teacup,” an even smaller cat that will never outgrow the palm of its owner’s hand. (Lee prefers to group her cats down into three sizes: pixies, pee-wees, and pockets.) Unlike the freakishly overbred munchkin cats, which have the full-size bodies and stubby legs of a dachshund, toys and teacups have perfect feline proportions but stay the size of a kitten for life. The toys can sell online for $500 to $1,000; the teacups can bring in $2,000 or more. When Lee saw Nalla’s tiny litter and learned the prices small cats can command, she decided to step up her breeding program. And so Nalla begat Dixie and Dixie lay down with Mungojerie, a full-size orange tabby, and by the time Gemini fell into this world Lee had assembled an inventory of two dozen toys and teacups. Where the two other U.S. breeders who offer miniatures protect their cute oligopoly by selling only neutered or spayed animals, Lee is willing to sell breeders, fully intact toys that can breed with full-size cats to produce more toys and eventually teacups. But she can’t afford a website and a phone for buyers to call, the pinch of capital needed to get the operation off the ground. Until now, it’s been as though she’s won the lottery but can’t afford bus fare to go and cash in the ticket. Once again, Gemini’s body seems to hold the only possible salvation.

Gemini, the godsend, had only the briefest of transits in this world, and painful delays greeted her at the gates of both arrival and departure. She came out tail first, caught by her oversize head until Snow Wolf massaged her mother’s belly and gave Gemini’s tail a gentle pull and Dixie released her from the breach. She suckled greedily, trying to overcome the challenge of funneling milk from two mouths to one esophagus. Her two faces were the result of diprosopus, identical twins trapped in a single body, and given the brain and heart abnormalities that usually accompany the disorder it is something of a miracle that she wasn’t stillborn.

The only photographs of the living Gemini were taken by a saleswoman from the Roseburg News-Review, during the cat’s whirlwind tour of Roseburg’s print and broadcast media. (Snow Wolf said he was promised digital copies of the image; if this is true then the paper’s editor has since reneged.) Gemini’s head, held in Lee’s hand, looks to be about the size of a gumball; her four eyes are dashes of gray fur in the two pale whorls of her faces, which are joined at the cheek by a seam of bright red tissue. With their eyes sealed shut and mouths hanging open, the faces seem to be doing a duplicate charade of a boxer who’s been knocked out.
Snow Wolf can silence his wife instantly just by saying her name, “Lee-ee…” drawling it out into a second upturned syllable that suggests a question or maybe a threat. Sometimes he did this under his breath while carrying on a separate conversation, sometimes he chastised her directly for giving us confusing directions, for talking while he’s talking, for not seeing that we’d accidentally left a raspberry in the back seat that left a stain on the back of her jeans. When we had finished filling the Bluetears’ propane tanks and Snow Wolf went to pay the bill, there was a palpable sense of relief, as though Lee and I were in class together and the teacher had just left the room. But she needs him too, as an impresario who keeps matters moving forward, an advocate who can negotiate the details of their windfall.

We arrived at the vet’s. Lee took Gemini’s body out of its cardboard sarcophagus, unzipped the plastic bag, and unrolled the paper towel. The body itself was cold and gray, about the size of a hot dog. The Bluetears suspect other people have been fooling with Gemini, because the body is never in the same position that they left it. This time, her left paw was covering up the gap between her two little faces. Snow Wolf let her thaw for a few minutes and eased the leg down so I could get better shots. We weren’t able to list the cat on eBay because the Bluetears had left their ATM card back at the trailer.

As we drove back to Glide, Snow Wolf told me his story. It’s so unbelievably sad and full of gaps that at first I thought he was bullshitting me. But then I remembered what I’d seen when he bent over to load the propane tanks back into the car—the thick belt of scars ringing his waist and the zipper where the doctors had cut his back open—and the story began to make sense.

Snow Wolf Bluetear was born Johnny Steven Gonzales to a Tarascan prostitute in Superior, an old Arizona mining town. His father was a Spaniard who pimped his mother to Apache copper miners. Following his Navy years, Snow Wolf’s first marriage dissolved in drink, and he changed his name to Lone Wolf, then Snow Wolf, when he met another pretty girl. Gonzales became Bluetear on 9/11, when his mother, on her deathbed, revealed his father’s identity. “There ain’t no honor left in the Gonzales name,” he remembers. He came up with Bluetear while contemplating a blue glacier through the rainy window of a Greyhound bus. “I realized that I don’t want to cry no more.” Lee changed her name, too, as did their five children. Snow Wolf met Chief Yellow Wolf, who adopted him as his son and blessed the trailer with burnt sage and sweetgrass. But the bad luck refused to leave. A few months later, Snow Wolf was in the parking lot of a 7-11 buying a gallon of milk when he was struck over the head and knocked unconscious. He awoke rolled up in a carpet. His wallet, his truck, and all his tools were gone. Unable to work, he went into a liquor-fueled depression. The order of these tragedies seems to change each time he tells the story, but it always ends with Snow Wolf climbing to the top of a bridge.

“They said I wanted to jump,” he said. “I said I was trying to catch a pigeon to give to my daughter. So I fell,” 40 feet down. He broke his back and spent the next three weeks in a body cast. Snow Wolf’s X-rays revealed an extra pair of half-formed ribs, their jagged edges ending right where his lungs began. The doctors put him on 21 drugs, several of which were psychoactive. They dulled the pain but made him moody and sometimes violent. One night, after an argument, Lee was afraid Snow Wolf was going to kill her. She locked herself in one of the couple’s his-and-her Suburbans. Snow Wolf staggered out with a pistol and shot the tires out. The way he remembers it, he was afraid Lee was going to run him over. He spent the next twelve days in prison and the state came and took the children away. The court-appointed lawyer has been no help getting them back, even though a psychiatric evaluation determined that there’s nothing wrong with Lee, and Snow Wolf has moved in with Chief Yellow Wolf. (“Together, we make Yellow Snow,” he jokes.) Like their mother, the children identify as Jews, but their foster parents forced the boys to cut off their budding payos and won’t let them meet with a rabbi. If Providence sent you a two-faced cat after all these troubles, how could you not see it as some kind of payback?

I got on the phone with Chief Yellow Wolf, the de facto patriarch of this clan, to get his take on the coming of Gemini. He is 79 and sounds like you’d expect a chief of the Ottawa tribe to sound: gentle, soft, and kind of like that old guy from Little Big Man.

“I didn’t think she would live,” he said of Gemini. “I knew she wasn’t strong enough.”

What, I asked, was the meaning of the cat with two faces?

“I would imagine it was preordained,” he said. “These things don’t happen to everybody. We believe in things that will happen, that everything that happens is still in our future. We’re given a path to walk from the Great Spirit. Is Gemini a part of their path? I would think so.”

Theology is indeed one big can of worms but Chief Yellow Wolf opened it, so I’m going to dive right in. From Genesis on, the Bible is full of animals. You’ve got your waters swarming abundantly with moving creatures, your crocodiles, your docile herds and wild beasts, your great winged birds flying in heaven’s open firmament. There’s the serpent who tempts Eve and the god-sent ram who saves Abraham’s only son. In those early days, animals were chattel. We kept them for their utility, for riding or eating or hooking up to a plow and turning the earth with. Today, all that goes on behind the scenes. The animals that we do see are pets, bred and bought for their cuteness.

Now, what is cute exactly? The essence of cute is something like a miniature cat, something small and wide-eyed that is completely incapable of surviving without us. Cute is those big, helpless eyes turned upward, pleading us to change the litter box or open the screen door or drop the treat, because they’re too weak to do it for themselves. Cute is about power, the ability to satisfy the simple needs of a simple creature. God likes cute, too—this is why he hangs out in church and gets jealous when we worship earthly things. Grudgingly, he permits us to keep pets of our own, but every so often he sends us a humbling reminder, a darling little freak so cute that it’s grotesque, a victim born with its short clock ticking, a thing that we’re powerless to save.

MATT SCHWARTZ