Dewey's Nine Lives (12 page)

Whenever Bill rode his Harley—the one he’d bought in Alaska—he tied Spooky’s carrier to the rack on the back. One day, he saw a man with a Chihuahua sitting on the gas tank of his bike, just behind the handlebars.
Spooky would love that
, he thought. Bill knew Spooky’s paws would slip off the metal tank, so he scrounged a piece of carpet for Spooky to sit on. He attached it with two-way aircraft tape, but when that didn’t work, he glued it down. As long as Bill went slower than twenty-five miles an hour, Spooky would squint, lay his ears back, and let the breeze glide through his hair. Once Bill hit twenty-five, Spooky would jump off. He wasn’t angry; he just didn’t like that much speed. He could ride in the carrier at any speed, but he could only take so much breeze sitting in the open on the tank. One year, Bill took the bike up to the Sturgis Rally in South Dakota—more than a thousand miles—and Spooky rode up front as Bill eased to a crawl down the main drag. People were whooping and hollering, drinking and making crude jokes, but Spooky didn’t care. He laid his ears back and cruised Sturgis like the world’s coolest pussycat.

Bill and Spooky went other places, too. They camped together in the forests of the west, hunting insects for Bill’s collection. They tromped through the Sierra Nevada mountains. They hitchhiked to Quartzsite, Arizona, for the big rock and mineral show. When Bill went to music festivals, Spooky sat beside him on the blanket. When he moved to a new house, which he now did every September, Spooky went along without complaint. Except for the bar and the job, they went everywhere together. Bill and Spooky. Spooky and Bill. They were a pair.

Then, in 1981, another addition joined the family: a woman. The house she had been living in was covered by ash in the explosion of Mount St. Helens, the big volcano in western Washington, and she ended up renting a room from Bill in Southern California. Bill was managing a beer bar; his female boarder was a bartender at a place down the road; they talked often but always through the bottom of a beer glass. Bill and Spooky were still moving every September, living an itinerant life, so when the woman went back to Washington after a fight, they followed her north. Before Bill knew what was happening, they were married. Bill took a job fabricating metal, settled into married life, and started drinking.

“It was all surface,” he would say later of his human relationships. Nothing deep. Nothing lasting. “Anything that had any depth of soul had to do with an animal.”

They moved again that September. And the next one, too. And the next. He never thought about that terrible September in Vietnam in 1968. It had been fifteen years, so he never made the connection. He just knew that every September he had the overwhelming feeling that he had to move. It was bigger than his wife, bigger than his career, bigger even than his friendship with Spooky. That fear, even all those years later, was the biggest thing in Bill’s life.

The marriage, needless to say, didn’t last. It was doomed at the wedding, when Bill stood up to say “I do” and thought,
What am I doing here?
It was crashing on the rocks when, about a year later, Bill woke up to his wife screaming. Spooky, who had been spending more nights in the forest, had brought them a present: a big fat garden snake. And it was writhing in the sheets.

“Get rid of that damn cat,” Bill’s wife demanded. “Just get rid of it.”

It was pretty clear how that relationship was going to end. In 1986, after a year apart and then another year back together, Bill and his wife officially divorced. Spooky moved back onto Bill’s lap and back onto the pillow on his bed. From then on, it was just the boys.

 

 

No, the snake wasn’t a message. There was no jealousy or loneliness or anything like that. Spooky didn’t need to be underfoot to know he was loved, because a true connection goes both ways. Comfort, that’s how I described it with Dewey. A belief in each other’s love. The snake? That was just Spooky being Spooky.

He was a quirky cat, the Spookster. He was always cooking up adventure. For a year, Bill and his wife lived in a ground-floor apartment on a lake. Each apartment had a balcony—Bill’s was a few feet off the ground—and every afternoon the woman upstairs threw handfuls of corn from her balcony to the resident ducks and Canadian geese. Spooky would stand at the sliding glass door meowing at the birds, his tail quivering with excitement. He was like that. He saw possibilities. He could never pass up an opportunity to play.

One day, Bill slid the door open. Spooky didn’t freak out. He didn’t charge onto the deck. Instead, he backed up to the far side of the room, ran as fast as he could, and hurled himself over the railing and right into the middle of fifty ducks and geese—all of which panicked, honking and flapping and running into one another as they tried to get away. Spooky stuck his tail up and his head in the air and strutted back to the door. He was so proud of himself. Every time the flock was outside after that, Spooky meowed and rubbed Bill’s legs until he opened the door.

Then one day, Spooky ran and jumped . . . and landed right on top of an enormous goose. The terrified goose jumped five feet in the air, squawked, and started running wildly in a rush of feathers, leaping and honking and trying desperately to take flight. Spooky, clinging desperately to the goose’s back, glanced back for a moment at Bill. They locked eyes, and Bill could see that Spooky’s were as big as saucers. Then the goose took off. He flew about ten feet before crashing and rolling in a pile of feathers, beak, goose feet, and cat fur. The goose immediately got up and started running for the lake. Spooky got up and sprinted to the apartment. He never jumped into the middle of the flock again.

Spooky being Spooky. Figuring out a plan. Pushing himself toward disaster. Rushing back to the safety of home. That was his charm: He was a lover
and
an adventurer. He was a homebody who sat on your lap one hour and hunted snakes the next.

He even welcomed a new cat into the family, a black kitten named Zippo. This was just after Bill met his wife, when he was working and spending a lot of time in bars playing pool, and he thought Spooky needed a companion. Somewhere along the journey, Spooky had contracted FIV, the feline form of AIDS, so Bill put an ad in the newspaper seeking a friendly, FIV-positive cat. A young couple couldn’t afford the medication for their sick kitten, so a few days later, Zippo joined the family.

Spooky loved him instantly. From the first moment, he not only adopted the kitten, he treated him like a brother. If ever there was a natural pair, it was Spooky and Zippo. Spooky was the leader, always into something, while Zippo . . . well, Zippo was a fat, jovial butterball. Spooky chased insects; Zippo lounged in the house. Spooky followed Bill down the street; Zippo watched from the window. On the rare occasions he toddled outside, Zippo could never remember to come back when called. He’d get distracted by a blade of grass or a shadow on a fence and not come inside until the food dish was down. One weekend, Zippo was having one of his rare outdoor adventures when he found an enormous wolf spider in the grass. He played with the spider all afternoon. When he was tired of it, he waddled inside. Spooky was napping on the bed. Zippo jumped up and started looking at him. Spooky’s head jerked up. He “listened” to the silent message, then sprang off the bed, ran straight to the spider, and started playing with it, too.

How close were the two cats? Bill once snapped three pictures of them in quick succession. In the first, Zippo was licking Spooky’s ear. In the second, Zippo had his tongue out and a horrible look on his face, as if he’d just tasted the worst substance of his life. Spooky looked like he was laughing. In the third, Spooky was licking Zippo’s ear.
That’s okay, brother
, he could have been saying.
I got you that time, but we’re still friends
.

They had each other, the three boys. It was a good life. But that didn’t mean life was easy. The divorce left Bill hurt and confused, unable to put his finger on exactly what had happened and sure there was something wrong with him. Why couldn’t someone love him? Why couldn’t he make the marriage work? There had been a wall between them. In five years of marriage, they had never spoken a single word from the heart. He didn’t blame his wife. He blamed himself.

“I went through some heavy drinking after the divorce,” Bill admits, “and then I went through some heavy working.”

When he was a kid on his family’s Michigan farm, Bill had dreamed of becoming a forest ranger. He had a forestry degree; he had fought forest fires; he had even worked for the Bureau of Land Management, but his yearly application to the U.S. Forest Service always received a “Thanks, but no, thanks” reply. He always scored high on the aptitude tests, but less qualified people were given the jobs. In despair after his eleventh rejection (not to mention his divorce) and convinced the world was against him, he pulled into the first factory he passed. As he was filling out his application, a foreman walked into the office, threw a bunch of papers on a desk, and said to the secretary, “Write up his last check. He’s out of here.”

He turned to Bill and said, “Do you know how to braise?”

“Sure do,” Bill fibbed.

“Then you’re hired. Bring your application in the morning.”

Bill left the office and went straight to the library to look up “braise.” He had no idea what the term meant. It turned out braising meant joining copper to copper, like a plumber does when he solders pipes together. There was a metaphor in there somewhere about two like substances (a man and a cat) who came together to form a solid and unbreakable whole. But there was also a career. The factory made jet engine blades; the braising job was an introduction to the airline industry. Bill worked in the industry on and off for twenty-two years, until retiring from Boeing in 2001. For much of that time, he worked as much as he could physically take, sweating out his frustrations and keeping himself busy on the line.

But even on the longest days on the job, and even when those days stretched into months, Spooky and Zippo stuck with him. He might be gone for sixteen hours, or even whole days, but when Bill Bezanson walked through the door dead tired or drunk, Spooky was always there to meet him. Before he sat down to unwind with some television, Bill made sure to put everything he could possibly need within arm’s reach: beer, chips, remote control, books, paper towels. He knew Spooky would be on his lap before he hit the sofa, and he didn’t want to have to get up and disturb him. When he went to bed, Spooky crawled up next to his face, as he always had, and demanded to be cradled. Bill fell asleep to his purring, breathing in his fur. Zippo snuggled against Bill’s back.

By the time he came out of the fog of work and drink, Bill was ready for a change. He was tired of the cycle: the drinking, the succession of cheap apartments, the mind-numbing jobs with only Spooky and Zippo to keep him company. In California, just before his marriage, a friend had contracted AIDS. It was the early 1980s; everyone was terrified. No one would go near her. Only Bill would touch her. So he took care of her: cooked her meals, bathed her, cleaned up her messes. He did everything but give her shots. He was there as she withered, and he was there when she died. It was the closest thing to useful he had felt since 1968.

Ten years later, he cut back on his drinking and looked for a second job, in health care. After his ten-hour shift on the aircraft assembly line, he worked a ten-hour shift as a night guard at a drug rehabilitation center, but you can only survive on three hours’ sleep for so long. When a friend contracted brain cancer, he applied for work at a traumatic brain injury center, where he helped people who had suffered serious accidents. He became a hypnotherapist. He helped crime, accident, and rape victims through their struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder without ever realizing he had PTSD himself. It was physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausting work.

Why did he do it?

“I felt I was paying back.”

How so?

Silence. “Because of some of the situations I got out of without being killed or maimed.” Another pause. “Because somebody helped me then.”

During one particularly long airline industry layoff, he took a job in hospice, working for the dying in their homes. For his first assignment, the company sent him to the most difficult patient on the roster. She was a nasty, cussed, constant complainer, and no caretaker had ever lasted for more than a few days. On the second day, she was screaming at Bill as fiercely and as loudly as she could, when he turned to her and said, “You’re afraid of dying, aren’t you?”

She quieted down. She stared at him. She looked like she wanted to say something, but then she dropped her eyes and stared at her hands. Bill sat on the bed beside her, and they talked about her life, about its past and its end. They talked until she didn’t have anything else to say.

A few days later, on his off day, he received a call from the woman’s children. “Mom’s dying,” they said. “She wants to see you.”

When he arrived, she ushered her children out of the room. “Tell me what it’s like again,” she said, a tremble in her voice.

“Picture the most beautiful place you’ve ever been,” Bill told her, “and you will drift there.”

She closed her eyes. When she spoke again, it sounded as if she was shouting softly from a long way away. “You were right, Bill,” she whispered just before she died.

This is what I was meant to do
, Bill thought.

He quit his career as an aircraft mechanic and devoted himself full-time to home care for the terminally ill. He found a nurse he trusted and started a company, each of them working five days on, then five days off, to provide constant care. When he was working, he left Spooky and Zippo alone with the bottom of a five-gallon bucket full of food. There was a hole in the screen so the cats could play outside. Zippo lounged inside, sleeping mostly, but Spooky loved the old logging towns in the northwestern corner of Washington—towns like Darrington and Granite Falls—that were in constant rotation in Bill’s yearly migration to a new home. The forests came right down to the houses, and Spooky had never seen such towering trees. He’d chase a squirrel forty feet into their branches without a second thought, then stretch out and relax while the nervous squirrel chattered away on the slender end of a branch. There was nothing Spooky found more entertaining than squirrels. It was as if he thought they had been put on the earth solely for the amusement of cats. The voles—small mouselike creatures that burrowed through the needles on the forest floor—were for eating. Spooky would dig through the pine needles, dance onto his back legs when he found what he was looking for, and pounce down on the helpless creatures. If left to his own devices, Spooky could catch voles all day.