Dewey's Nine Lives

THREE

Spooky

“I had a cat for twenty-one years. . . . He shouldn’t have survived . . . yet he did survive to bring so many hours of joy to my life for so many years. And to this day, you can sometimes feel his wet nose touch your leg as he still waits for my spirit to join him.”

Bill Bezanson grew up on a family farm outside the small town of Romeo, Michigan. Even today, Romeo has a population of only three thousand people, a newspaper that costs eighteen dollars for a yearly subscription, and a downtown whose claim to fame is that it has never been destroyed by a major fire, something apparently quite common in the old logging communities of Macomb County. After living for thirty years in Spencer, Iowa, a town whose downtown was destroyed by fire in 1931, I agree this is quite an accomplishment.

I also understand the isolation of the family farm, at least in the 1950s and early 1960s, when both Bill and I were growing up. In those days, you didn’t have television or video games or computers to keep you connected to the outside world. You had a radio—and a ham radio, if you were interested in that hobby. You had an old truck, which might have a CB. And you had a telephone. It was a party line, with a local operator, and half the time the connection was so fuzzy you couldn’t understand a word. When my family finally bought a television around 1960, my father mentioned it to his cousins in South Dakota. The phone connection was so bad, they thought our family had tuberculosis—TB. They prayed for us for an entire year.

What you also had on the farm in those days was family and work. Even as a child, you worked from dawn to dusk during the harvest. When the sun went down, you went to sleep. If you couldn’t fall asleep, you could look out your bedroom window and see a million stars but only a single house light way off in the distance. That was my experience anyway. Bill Bezanson couldn’t see the light on the next farmhouse no matter how dark the night, and as for neighborhood children . . . well, there weren’t any other children around. There was nothing outside the town of Romeo, Michigan, for a young farmboy but fields and trees.

And animals.

The Bezanson farm had two barns, so Bill’s dad gave him a room in the smaller one—the breeding barn—for his rescued animals. Bill had dozens of them: foxes, possums, dogs, cats, whatever wandered into his path and needed help. Anything that was hurt, Bill Bezanson nursed back to health. He even had a skunk that ran all over his shoulders and played hide-and-seek with him in the hayloft. If anyone else came near the breeding barn, that skunk lifted his tail. But with Bill, he was as playful as a kitten.

Bill’s favorite animal, though, was his rescued raccoon. The mother raccoon had been hit by a car, and the babies were huddled in a tree by the side of the road, staring down at her lifeless body. They were tiny, distraught, confused, no doubt cold and hungry, and nearly petrified with fear. Only one survived. Everyone called him Pierre LaPoop, after the love-crazed French skunk Pepé Le Pew on the old Bugs Bunny Saturday morning cartoons. Bill’s grandmother named him. The baby raccoon had pooped right on her lap the first time she held it.

Pierre was a good raccoon, loyal and loving. He and Bill would play together in the barn, toss sticks in the yard, walk together through the fields like a stereotype of a sandy-haired Midwestern boy and his loyal dog. Often, Bill even had a fishing pole slung over his shoulder. But raccoons aren’t dogs. They are wild creatures, curious and mischievous and, let’s face it, more clever than the average pooch. Pierre could catch fish with his bare hands, peel ears of corn, pick carefully through the garbage, and open doors. One day, the family came home and found Pierre sitting on their kitchen counter, casually throwing plates. There were broken plates all over the floor. There had been a run of raccoonlike behavior from Pierre—petty thievery, picking locks, incessant hand-washing in the rain barrels (raccoons are notoriously anal retentive about hand-washing)—so smashing the family’s dinnerware was the proverbial straw that broke the farmer’s back. No argument was going to save Pierre this time. Bill’s dad threw him in the back of the truck, drove him twenty-eight miles away, and dropped him off at an abandoned barn.

Three weeks later, Bill and his dad were fishing at a nearby lake, and a raccoon started chattering at them from a tree. Bill looked up into the branches and said, “Pierre, is that you?”

Pierre came sprinting down the tree, climbed up Bill’s leg into his arms, and started licking his face and biting his nose.

“Well, I guess we’ve got to keep him,” Bill’s father said. “I can’t afford a plane ticket.” In truth, the old farmer was touched by the bond between his son and the wild animal. He wouldn’t have driven Pierre away again if he’d had his own plane.

Maybe it was Pierre that made Bill want to be a forest ranger, his dream job for most of his childhood. Everyone else thought he should become a veterinarian. He had a talent with and love for animals like no one they had ever seen. But things change. Pierre LaPoop grew up and started thinking about a family. Raccoons are docile when young, but they often become aggressive and nasty when they reach mating age. Not Pierre. He simply left the barn. Found a wife and moved off to a far corner of the farm. One day, Bill and his father were sitting on the back steps of their farmhouse. Bill looked off toward the fields and saw Pierre coming toward him, four little brown bundles waddling at his side. His mate stood at the edge of the cornfield, pacing nervously, while Pierre picked his children up with his mouth, put them on the porch, and introduced them to his lifelong friend. They stayed only long enough for Bill and his father to hold each child. Then they turned back to the cornfield and headed home.

“That’s the most amazing thing I ever saw” was all Bill’s father said when the raccoons finally disappeared.

That was the last Bill ever saw of Pierre LaPoop. The raccoon moved into the forest with his family and disappeared. He had just come out to say good-bye.

A few years later, Bill graduated from high school and said his own good-byes. He wasn’t going to veterinary school or forest ranger training. He wasn’t even going to college. It was June 1964, and Bill Bezanson was going into the army, infantry division, full volunteer. By July 1, he was on his way to basic training. Three years later, barely twenty years old, he was in Vietnam.

Bill was assigned to B Company, 123rd Aviation Battalion of the United States Army. The Warlords. Their job: air cavalry reinforcement, snatch and grab, reconnaissance, secret missions behind enemy lines. Twenty-one soldiers in the unit, seven per helicopter, plus two pilots and two gunners. If an infantry unit or bomber crew reported suspected enemy positions in the distant hills, the brass called in the Warlords. Their role was to sweep through the area, laying down as much fire as they could, to see what kind of return fire they would draw. Bill was the tunnel rat. His job was to drop into any nearby tunnels alone, no cover and no radio, to flush out any Vietcong holed up inside.

Needless to say, it was a messy, dangerous, and unpredictable job. The kind of job so dangerous and unpredictable that, after a few months, it made a man feel invincible just because he survived it. Bill had more running firefights in pitch-black Vietcong tunnels than he cared to count. After one mission, he and the guys counted more than a thousand bullet holes in the shell of their helicopter. There had been eight men inside. Several had holes in their uniforms, but not a single man had bled. That was the way it was for the Warlords. Minor wounds, “a little Purple Star and stuff like that,” as Bill says of his military decorations, but nothing major. Nothing lethal. For almost a year.

Then September 1968 hit the calendar. It started badly. One of Bill’s close friends—everyone in the unit was close, but they were closer—took a bullet to the head. Bill held the boy on his blood-soaked lap in the chopper back to the medical area, but the hole was so big that Bill could see his friend’s brain pulsing every time his heart beat. “I thought I’d never see him again,” Bill said. “But in 1996, I got a letter from him. He survived. He’d had complications all his life, but he survived.”

A few days later, the Warlords were flown up near the demilitarized zone, beyond an area known as the Rock Pile, near Khe Sanh, where earlier that year a Marine base had been pinned down for 122 days by enemy fire. They dropped as usual, but this time it was right at the edge of a major Vietcong encampment. Every Warlords mission had two gunships and a spotter helicopter for support, but when hundreds of guns opened up, the sky cleared in a hurry. The first gunship went down; the pilot of the second was shot through the heel of his foot. He managed to pull out of the spin and limp home, but the men on the ground were left behind. It took the 196th Infantry Brigade to extract them. By then, the Warlords had taken wounded, and Bill Bezanson had lost his best friend, Lurch (Richard Larrick, rest in peace), to a North Vietnamese bullet. He flew back to base, buried the whole month in his head, and went on with the war.

By the time he came home in November 1968, Bill Bezanson didn’t want to have anything more to do with the United States Army or the war in Vietnam. He didn’t want to be a veterinarian or a forest ranger. The big banner on the Michigan farmhouse said WELCOME HOME, SON, but he didn’t feel like he was home. He and his father went out bass fishing in the eight-foot pram the old man had built by hand. They had always talked on the lake. It was their sanctuary. But this time, they didn’t have much to say.

Bill wasn’t sure what to do. He didn’t know where he fit in. On the way home from a relative’s house, where he had gone to show them his dress uniform and medals, a cop pulled him over, looked at his uniform, and snarled, “So you’re one of those baby killers.” He was asked to speak at his high school, the hero returned, and gave an impassioned antiwar speech. When his mother found out, she was mortified. She was such a strict Catholic that she hand washed the church’s altar cloths. She loved her son, but he had changed. He was moody. He was sullen. He was drinking. And now he was antiwar. The war was for God and country and everything else America stood for and believed in, at least for his mother and the “silent majority” of American people who stood by their government on principle. After months of tension, Bill’s mother literally closed the door in her son’s face.

He hit the bottle hard for a while, then he hit the road. As an active member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he gave speeches at PTA meetings and churches, anywhere a group would welcome him. The stories of massacres by American troops were piling up, and a large segment of the public was turning against the war. He didn’t know whether his audiences would be for the troops or against them, but he told them all the truth: Even while he was killing for his government, he lost his faith in the war. He had seen too many deaths, too much destruction, too many burned-out villages and hollowed-out souls. He told them how he had pointed his M16 at a fellow soldier who had taken a female prisoner and told him, “If you cut that woman, I will kill you.” You don’t put a gun to a comrade’s head. Not ever. But especially not in a war zone, surrounded by the enemy. His fellow soldiers thought the woman knew something important. They had no proof, but they believed torturing her for information might save lives. Bill believed they were losing, day by day, the values they were fighting for, and he refused to blur the line between right and wrong.

“It was easy to cross a line out there,” Bill told me. “Good people lost their way.” What had Bill lost? I think he lost his faith not just in the war, but in life. He didn’t know what it meant anymore. He couldn’t tell the good from the bad. He didn’t want that to happen to any other good young men. He didn’t want any more parents to send their boys to Vietnam.

But beyond a few speeches, what could he really do? He drifted. He drank. He’d get a job, work it for a while, and then one morning he’d light out, hitching mostly, not sure where he was going or why. Often, he didn’t even know he was leaving until he was standing on the corner with his thumb in the air. He made friends, but they didn’t last long. There were always people moving into and out of his life, mostly with bottles in their hands. Sometimes he moved because he didn’t like his new friends; sometimes he moved because he liked them too much. He didn’t want to get close to anyone. One summer he found himself in Alaska, so he bought a Harley-Davidson and rode it back to the Lower 48. That was the stupidest thing he ever did, he said, because it was twelve hundred miles of potholed, washboard, washout dirt roads, and his eyes didn’t stop bouncing for a month.

But what difference did it all make? Bill Bezanson was twenty-five years old and he was absolutely convinced that he wouldn’t live to see thirty. That feeling had started in the war. He had carried it home along with his scars and his medals, but he didn’t realize that at the time. It just became normal to feel doomed. A lot of young men came home that way. Set adrift from the normal world, they found each other. It was all they talked about back then, that they were living on borrowed time.

But Bill didn’t die. He just kept going through the motions, day after day, until he found himself in his thirties, with the 1970s winding down, and at almost the same place he’d started twelve years before. The war was over and his anger had cooled, or at least retreated somewhere else to hide. He had narrowed his travels mostly to the sprawling suburbs east of Los Angeles, but he was still working odd jobs, still leaving behind his old life every few months, still hitting the bottle or the road whenever the fear closed in. He’d somehow managed a degree in forestry from Chaffey College in Alta Loma, but beyond that, he was free: no friends, no possessions, no place to be. By June 1979, he was living in yet another Los Angeles suburb, working for a small company that manufactured travel trailers and truck beds and whose name he can’t even begin to recall. He was waiting at a stoplight on a nameless road on the edge of downtown San Bernardino, watching the early morning light burn off the haze of another California morning, when, out of nowhere, change came crashing into his life.

It hit like a concussion grenade, literally smashing down above his head. He heard the strike, then the echo, and instinctively he ducked. He waited, but the world around him was silent. He looked out over the dashboard. There were buildings along both sides of the street, but it was 5:30 in the morning and nothing moved. The alleys were quiet, the windows in the storefronts black. There wasn’t another car on the road. So Bill cracked his door and squeezed out to examine the top of his car. He figured teenagers had thrown something at him. Sure enough, there was a dent, with a black lump in the center. There were impact lines in the metal and liquid running out in several directions.

Then he realized the liquid was blood. And the lump wasn’t a bag. It was a kitten. Someone had thrown a kitten at his car. And from the looks of its broken body, it had been a long throw.

Bill scooped up the kitten and cradled it in his hands. It just lay in his palms, its eyes closed, its head collapsed to the side, its legs curled. The only sign of life was the desperate heave of its chest and a bubbling, rasping sound as it struggled for breath. Bill knew what that meant: a puncture through the rib cage and into the lung. He’d seen a lot of sucking chest wounds in Vietnam. The soldiers in his unit had stripped the plastic wrappers off their cigarette packs and kept them in their kits. Put the plastic wrapper over a sucking chest wound, cover it with a bandage, then a body wrap, and it might save a friend’s life. Bill Bezanson didn’t have a cigarette packet wrapper that morning in San Bernardino, California, so he did the next best thing. He put his thumb over the puncture to close the wound, swiped his other hand downward over the kitten’s face to clear the blood from its nose, and started looking for help.

There was a veterinarian’s office down the block. There were no lights on, but Bill was pretty sure he’d just seen someone enter the building. He left the car idling at the intersection and started running. When he reached the vet’s office, he started kicking the door. The kitten gurgled, covered with blood.

A man opened the door. Bill thrust the bloody kitten toward him. “Call the vet,” he said. “Tell him to take care of this animal. I’ll pay whatever it costs, but right now I have to get to work.”

The man took the kitten. Bill turned and raced back to his car, sped through the intersection, and arrived for his shift on time.

There’s a bond that is formed when you save an animal’s life. It can happen even with something as typical as rescuing a dog from the pound. For you, it is an exciting afternoon, but that dog knows he was trapped in a bad place, and you set him free. It happens with dogs when you take them off a choke chain or rescue them from a backyard where they have been abandoned without food and water. It happens with cats when you take them in—not just give them food until they refuse to go away but bring them inside when they are sick or starving and make them a part of your life. It certainly happened with Dewey when I pulled him out of the library return box in the winter of 1988. Like Dewey, most rescued animals never forget what you did for them. They cherish it. And unlike so many people who, no matter what you have done, find a way to turn their back on you, animals are forever grateful.

And if that animal is hurt and needs to be nursed back to health? Well, that just makes the bond stronger. Taking care of Dewey’s frostbitten footpads in the week after rescuing him was, as much as anything, the act that pinned us together. Dewey learned my kindness wasn’t just for a moment. I was committed; I would be there as long as he wanted and needed me. And I got to know him. That sounds trite, I know, but what else is there to say? After only a few days, I knew Dewey: his outgoing personality, his friendliness, his trust. I had seen him vulnerable, so I had seen his true self. I knew he appreciated me—you could almost say loved me, although we had known each other only a few days—and that he would never leave my side. I like to say we had looked into each other’s souls. And maybe we had. Maybe that was the hardwire that connected us for the next nineteen years. Or maybe we had just spent enough time together to realize we were both openhearted individuals ready for someone to love.

Something similar happened to Bill Bezanson. He didn’t love that kitten the morning he ran with it bleeding in his hands to the veterinarian’s office. That was an act of kindness from a softhearted man who always helped a fellow creature in need. It is probably a stretch to say that he loved the kitten when he stopped at the veterinarian’s office after work and discovered that, by some miracle, the little guy had survived. After all, Bill Bezanson hadn’t developed a deep, meaningful relationship with another living thing since September 1968. In fact, he had spent twelve years running from every meaningful relationship and hardening his heart against the entanglements of life.

It’s probably more accurate to say Bill Bezanson admired the kitten. He was small—only a few pounds and about six weeks old—but he was a survivor. The puncture wound in his lung was not, as Bill had assumed, the result of abuse or neglect. It was from the talon of a bird of prey. His forehead was badly torn, probably because the bird attacked him with his beak. At 5:30 in the morning, the only bird feeding would have been an owl. An owl doesn’t clutch a small animal and kill it later. An owl attack is designed to hit the animal with enough force to break its back. The kitten had survived the strike. It had struggled with the owl—thus the beak marks and torn face—and somehow in that struggle, the owl had lost its grip.

“This cat is very spooky,” the veterinarian—who happened to be the man who opened the door that morning—kept saying as he talked Bill through the kitten’s injuries. “He fell out of the sky and landed on your car . . . that’s very spooky. This cat is very spooky.”

“That was his name,” Bill would always conclude when telling the story later (and he told it hundreds of times over the years). “From that moment on, he was Spooky.”

Spooky stayed at the veterinary office for a week. The vet donated his time; the only charge was for the medicine, but there was a lot of that. Spooky needed serious attention and care. He was battling infection, a stab wound, and major blunt-force trauma. Every inch of his body was scraped and bruised, and he was so torn up inside that he couldn’t eat solid food for a month. Bill had to spoon-feed him every meal. Spooky had several stitches in his chest, where the owl talon had pierced his lung, and he wore a protective cone-shaped collar so he couldn’t bite them off. There is nothing more pathetic, I can imagine, than a little kitten head poking through the bottom of a big white megaphone-shaped collar.

But even with the collar, Spooky was beautiful. He was tiny, only a pound or two, less than two months old, but you could see the majestic cat he would become: lean and angular, with bony hips that stuck out from a wiry body. His face was long and lean, with an almost pantherlike thrust around the mouth. It was a regal face, calm and sophisticated with big staring eyes, like the cats in ancient Egyptian carvings. In ordinary light, he was black. But the sunlight, which he loved, would bring out a shimmering copper undercoat. He was a practical cat, not prone to fits of scampering, plaintive meowing, or manic bouts of pencil chasing, but that copper coat hinted at his internal heat. Spooky was never going to let anyone or anything beat him.

Did Bill Bezanson love Spooky after a month of spoon-feeding? If pressed, he would say yes, then he loved Spooky. But thirty years later, that’s hard to know for sure. At what point, after all, does admiration become love?

But it isn’t the right question anyway. The important thing to know is that Spooky the cat loved Bill Bezanson. Immediately and forever. The first thing Bill would do, whenever he moved into a new rental house or apartment, was cut a hole in a screen. That way, Spooky could entertain himself while Bill worked long hours on assembly lines and in fabrication garages. Spooky spent most of his day outside. But as soon as Bill came home, Spooky came running. If he wasn’t there at the front door to greet him, all Bill had to do was step outside and yell, “Spooky,” and the little cat would come sprinting home. Often, he came running from four yards away. Bill could see him leaping fences at full speed. He’d come skidding right into Bill, weaving in and out between his leg, rubbing against him and almost tripping him. Bill would plop down on the couch with a beer, and Spooky would climb up on his legs, put his front paws on Bill’s chest, and lick him on the nose. Then he would stretch out on Bill’s lap. He didn’t care about getting back outdoors or having his own space; he just wanted to be with his buddy. Some nights, the two of them sat like that for hours.

It wasn’t just friendship. There was a kinship, a parallel in their lives that eased Bill’s discontent. Like Bill, Spooky had confronted the darkness of the world. Like Bill, Spooky shouldn’t have been alive. But he was. Spooky was alive and healthy and happy and somehow, in some way, that made Bill feel better about his own survival. At night, Spooky climbed into the bed. Bill always slept on his side, and Spooky would climb onto the pillow and lay beside him, his face pressed against Bill’s beard. He would wrap his paws around Bill’s arm and pull on it until Bill cradled him in the crook of his elbow. Even when he went to sleep without Spooky, Bill would wake up and find the cat curled on the pillow and his arm around its back. And it made a difference. After a decade of thrashing, Spooky’s presence calmed the nightmares. Bill knew, both consciously and subconsciously, that he needed to lie still. If he didn’t, he might hurt Spooky.

Not every night, of course, was peace and quiet. Like many Vietnam vets, Bill lived a hard-partying life, and as often as not, his house was filled with loud music and people smoking and drinking beer. Call it self-medication, or youth, or what inevitably happens when you feel doomed to an early death, but ultimately it wasn’t anything more than a lifestyle. If the party got too rowdy, Spooky would wander into a back room and curl up on Bill’s hiking pack or inside his sleeping bag, but most of the time, Spooky didn’t mind the noise. He’d sit right on the back of the couch while the party whirled around him. Or he’d sniff the smoke. Or he’d slink along the floor and put his cold nose on someone’s exposed calf. That was Spooky’s trick. He’d sneak up on people and put his nose on the square of skin between the bottom of their pants and the top of their socks. That nose was like a sudden splash of water. It got their attention. They’d reach down and pet him, and if he sensed they were friendly, he’d hop on their lap. Spooky loved sitting on laps.

The cold nose of Spooky. It was his thing, his announcement of intention, his calling card. No matter what happened the night before, Bill Bezanson could rest assured he would feel his friend Spooky’s cold nose the next morning. At exactly 5:30 A.M. Like many cats, Spooky had an internal clock. He knew exactly when his food was supposed to be served, and he wasn’t going to wait a minute longer. No matter how badly he felt, Bill would pad out to the dark kitchen at 5:30 A.M. and give Spooky his bowl. “He was attached to me,” Bill would say, by way of explanation. He was attached to me.

And Bill Bezanson was attached to him, too. He wouldn’t go anywhere without Spooky. When Bill was home, Spooky was beside him. If Bill went for a walk, Spooky followed behind him, never more than a few feet away. There was no more hitchhiking alone. When Bill went out on the road, which he still did whenever the anxiety set in, Spooky went with him. A bowl, a bag of food, and they were free. While Bill thumbed, Spooky played in the grass, chasing grasshoppers or shadows or the tops of daffodils waving in the breeze. When a car slowed down, Bill shouted, “Spooky!” just once and Spooky came running, jumped in the car, and off they went.

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.

But as soon as Bill arrived home and called, “Spooky! Spooky!” the cat dropped his voles and came bounding. Sometimes, he was in the backyard. Sometimes, he was ten houses away. Bill would yell, “Spooky!” and see him jump in the distance. Wait a few seconds, and there he was, bounding over a fence. Bill never quite knew what Spooky was doing out there on his own, but he always loved the sight of him hurtling those fences. He would come sliding into Bill’s feet, often unable to stop and smashing into him headfirst, and they would spend a day curled up together inside, Bill unwinding from the emotions of five days of devotion to a dying person, and Spooky recovering from his five days alone with Zippo.

But nature is fickle: Sometimes, you’re the cat; sometimes, you’re the vole. One night in Granite Falls, Bill was throwing out the garbage when he heard several coyotes yelping at each other nearby. He saw movement, a coyote’s tail in the shadows, and then he saw Spooky. The cat was suspended in the air, sort of dancing on the noses of four coyotes as they snapped their jaws at him. Bill grabbed his ax, yelled, “Spooky!” as loud as he could, and started sprinting toward the fight. Spooky kept dancing, pushing off their faces and leaping out of reach, but just as help arrived, a coyote clamped his jaws firmly around Spooky’s face and started to drag him away. Bill lifted his ax and yelled, and the coyote dropped his meal and ran into the forest. Spooky sprang up and ran the other way, into the house. When Bill got inside, Spooky was curled on his favorite pillow in a pool of blood. Bill rushed him to the vet. He had a deep gash and a broken jaw, but after a few weeks of a liquid diet, he recovered completely. Despite the coyote’s bite, Spooky still had a lust for life and that gorgeous Egyptian face.

In Darrington, Washington, a shambling lumber town north-east of Seattle on the edge of the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, it was a bear. Bill’s house that year was right on the Sauk River, and every day, the bear would amble through the yard to the river, catch a salmon, sit down near the bank, and eat it. And every day, Spooky would sneak through the bear’s legs, snatch a piece of salmon, and keep running. The bear would take a lazy swipe with his paw but with little conviction. Spooky was always long gone. Then one day, as Bill watched out the kitchen window, the bear caught the fish. Spooky slipped between his legs to steal a bite. The bear took a lazy swing with his paw. But this time the piece of salmon Spooky grabbed was still stuck to the bone. It jerked him to a stop and spun him around. The bear’s paw caught him flush in the side and flung him thirty feet through the air, over some bushes and into the neighbor’s yard.

Bill was crushed. He thought, That’s it. Spooky’s done. Once that bear leaves, I’m gonna have to go over there and find his body.

Two minutes later, Spooky came trotting in through the hole in the screen door. He had three broken ribs and a big gash on his side, but he still had that piece of salmon hanging out of the side of his mouth.

That was Spooky. He was a fiercely loyal friend. But he was also the kind of cat that would stalk a squirrel down the branch of a forty-foot tree and risk his life again and again to steal fish from a bear. And he was tough. There seemed to be no wound—self-inflicted or otherwise—that could keep him down. Spooky might try anything—ride a goose, put a snake in the bed, taunt a bear—but Bill could rest assured about one thing: He would always come back.

Until one day, he didn’t.

It was the 1990s. The economy was in a funk. After eight years, Bill had given up his job caring for the terminally ill. The emotional toll of saying good-bye to so many people had worn him down. So he went back to his old work as a mechanic, first in the airline industry and then, after another round of layoffs, for a boat hull manufacturer. One Friday, the owner came into the factory and said, “Business is bad. Really bad. As of Monday, everyone with a beard is fired.” Absurd. But also serious. The owner hated beards, and in Washington, you apparently can get fired if the boss doesn’t like the way you part your hair.

Bill went home and struggled all weekend with his decision. He had been badly wounded in Vietnam. He spent three months in the hospital with an injury he still won’t talk about. When the bandages finally came off, he looked in the mirror and saw a full beard. He didn’t want anything more to do with the army, and the army didn’t want anything more to do with him, but Bill Bezanson loved that beard. For more than twenty years, he had never shaved it off. Not once. And, he decided, he wouldn’t start now. Not for a boat braising job. On Monday morning, he was fired. Over his beard! Everyone who had shaved was laid off within the month anyway.

A few nights later, Bill started talking with the bartender at the local Elks club, explaining his situation, and she offered him her house for a few months. She was leaving for the summer and needed someone to feed her goats. Two days later, Bill, Spooky, and Zippo moved into a nice new home in northwestern Washington. Two days after that, the woman was back. She’d gotten into a fight with the man she was going to visit; she wasn’t going away for the summer after all; Bill and his cats had to scram.

That wasn’t easy, unfortunately, for an unemployed metal fabricator in the middle of a recession. Bill couldn’t rent an apartment without a steady paycheck or money in the bank, and his personal housing crisis dragged on and on. For two weeks, Bill hunted for a job while the woman got madder and madder. Finally, he found work as a caretaker for the very ill. It was a good job in a bad economy, and quite a relief. The first thing Bill did when he arrived home from his first day on the job was to call out, “Spooky! Spooky!” He wanted to celebrate.

No Spooky.

No Spooky for dinner.

And no Spooky at bedtime, either.

Bill knew something was wrong. He searched the neighborhood. No sign of Spooky. The woman said the coyotes must have gotten him. Bill didn’t think so. He knew what death felt like, and he didn’t have the feeling. He just didn’t believe Spooky was gone. He figured Spooky must have been accidently locked in a garage or a work shed, and that when he broke free, he’d come home. At dusk, Bill would stand on the porch and listen for Spooky. Every night, he thought he heard Spooky’s distant meow. Zippo was out all the time looking for Spooky in his own way, so it could have been Zippo’s meow being carried on the wind. But Bill didn’t think so. He’d wake up in the middle of the night and swear he heard Spooky. He became convinced Spooky had fallen in an old well or been trapped in a hole, and he searched through the backyards and the forest looking for him. Bill had walked out on so much else in his life. He would never walk out on Spooky.

But the days passed, and there was still no Spooky. The woman wanted Bill and Zippo out. She was convinced the coyotes had gotten Spooky; she didn’t care about that lousy old cat anyway; she just wanted her house back. Bill fought her every day. There was no way he was leaving without Spooky. No way.

Three weeks later, he and Zippo were still there. The woman was standing in the doorway, screaming at him to leave. Bill refused. Again. Not without Spooky, he told her. Not while Spooky might still be alive. The woman turned in a rage, looked into the backyard, and turned stone white. She had to grab the door frame to keep from falling over. There, coming across the yard, was Spooky. He was very skinny, and very dirty, but he was alive.

Bill clutched him in his arms. “Spooky. Spooky,” he said, burying his face in Spooky’s fur. “I knew you’d come home.”

They left that night: Bill, Spooky, and chubby-tubby Zippo. Bill didn’t even have a place to go. He just took his cats, his few possessions, and left. He and the cats slept in his car until the first paycheck came through.

A year later, he struck up a conversation with a stranger in a bar. After a few drinks, the man said, “Oh, wait a minute, you’re that guy. You lived with my mom. She took your cat to the dump, man, and threw him out with her trash. She almost died when that cat came back.”

The dump was twenty miles away. Twenty miles! It took three weeks of walking, but Spooky came back. He had survived a strike from an owl. He had outfoxed four coyotes and withstood a swipe from a bear. He had been thrown out with the trash and found his way home. He was a survivor in every sense of the word.

Eventually, though, there comes a point when we can’t come back. Zippo reached it first, in June 2001, at the age of eighteen. He had gone into the animal hospital for routine surgery to remove a tumor. Bill called later that morning, all smiles, and asked how Zippo was. The veterinarian, Dr. Call, had been Zippo and Spooky’s veterinarian since they first moved to Washington fifteen years before. One morning soon after moving there, Bill had seen a dog hit by a car. He ran into the road, scooped up the dog, and drove it to the nearest vet. The dog was biting itself and screaming; it was in tremendous pain. When Bill reach for him, the dog reared back and bit him on the neck and shoulder. On the examination table, it thrashed and screamed. It was frantic with terror. Dr. Call walked in, touched the dog gently with his bare hand, and it calmed right down.

Bill was so impressed, he brought Spooky to see Dr. Call the next day. Spooky loved him immediately. And Dr. Call loved Spooky. He later nursed him through the coyote attack and the bear attack. He shook his head in amazement when he heard about the owl. He always called Spooky his miracle cat.

But now Dr. Call was sniffling into the telephone, trying to keep his voice from cracking. Zippo, he told Bill, had a reaction to the anesthesia. He had died in the middle of surgery. Big, sweet Zippo. Just the day before, he had seemed so full of life. Now he was gone. Bill was in shock. Spooky was devastated.

Spooky’s own health had been in decline for several years. He was almost twenty-one years old, and the feline AIDS was finally getting a grip on him. He had trouble keeping food in his stomach, and he was prone to terrible, body-shaking fevers. Now, without Zippo, he was lethargic and morose. He missed his buddy, his lazy best friend. When Bill came home from work every day, the first thing he did was close all the cabinet doors. Spooky opened them during the day, looking for Zippo.

Bill adopted another cat: a black kitten just like Zippo. He wanted Spooky to have a companion, but Spooky would have nothing do with the new cat. Spooky had never hated anyone or anything in his life (even those poor voles—that was just his hunter nature getting the best of him), but he did not want that little kitten around.

His fevers grew worse. Most days, he couldn’t keep food down. His body was failing on him, and he was sick at heart. In August, Bill took Spooky to Dr. Call, who told him Spooky was dying. There wasn’t anything he could do. Spooky had only a few days to live. And it was going to be a painful, difficult death.

Spooky was a survivor, a fighter, an adventurer and a lap sitter, a loyal friend and a constant companion for almost twenty-one years. He was the one who was there, by his side, when Bill needed him. He was the constant in Bill’s life. For years, he was his only true connection. He was his security, his lifeline on all those nights when the dreams were bad or the fear crept in. He always came back when Bill called him. And even at the end, he didn’t want to go. When most cats receive their final shot, they lie down and pass peacefully away. Spooky lunged when the needle touched his skin. He meowed and tried desperately to pull away. Then he turned, looked Bill in the eyes, and roared like a lion. Like he was fighting. Like he wasn’t ready to go. Like Bill had made a terrible mistake.

That scream was a hammer blow to Bill Bezanson’s heart. It haunted him. Dr. Call swore Bill had done the right thing, that Spooky had less than a week to live and that he was suffering terrible pain. But that scream ate him up inside. Spooky had wanted to live! Even in pain, even though he knew he was dying, he wanted to live.

A few weeks later, on September 11, 2001, the towers crumbled. Bill Bezanson looked up from his line job at Boeing and wondered if more planes were coming, if the helicopters were all shot down, if he was finally left behind. He missed Zippo. He missed Spooky. He missed the connection. He had lost the security of their presence. He felt, this time, that he was truly alone.

Then he received a letter with no return address. (He found out later it had been sent by Dr. Call’s office.) When he heard about Dewey’s death seven years later, he sent me a copy. “I know how you can mourn for a cat,” he wrote, “because I have done it myself.” He thought the note might help me because it had helped him. This is what it said:

LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

I, Spooky Bezanson, being of poor health, do hereby bequeath to my friend and master, my last will and testament, to be recalled fondly whenever he may think of me.

My time on earth has been a happy time, full of joyful memories and carefree hours. I take with me no worldly possessions, because possessions and property have never been my primary concerns. What was important to me was earning your trust and praise, being obedient and always faithful. But the one thing I possessed and will cherish above all else was my master’s love, for no one could have loved me more.

When I am gone and you have occasion to think of me, do not feel sad, for I am at peace and no longer feel any discomfort or pain. All the maladies that age and circumstance had thrust upon my physical being are no longer a concern to me. I am free to romp with the wind at my face and the grass tickling my feet. I nap in the warmth of the sun and sleep under a blanket of stars. In this joy I wait for you.

Because we shared so many happy times together, I know you feel like I cannot ever be replaced and that perhaps you should live the remainder of your life without another pet as a faithful companion. My friend, don’t try to replace me, for what we shared is irreplaceable. We grew together, through some pretty hairy (and cold) times. But don’t deprive yourself of the warmth and love another companion can bring to you. I would not want you to be alone.

Most of all, remember, dear master, I will always be with you, in your heart, in your mind, and in your memories. For what we shared was special, today, tomorrow, and always. And if you should ever feel a cold nose on your skin, and there’s no animal around, just know, in your heart of hearts, it’s me, saying hello.

Bill Bezanson is better now. The fear and isolation triggered by the events of September 11, 2001, sent him to the local Veterans Affairs (VA) center for counseling, and he finally confronted his memories of Vietnam, and especially of September 1968. He had been experiencing the “fight or flight” syndrome so common with PTSD, a biological response triggered by a subconscious conviction that the world is unsafe, that to survive, you must either run or defend yourself. For more than thirty years, Bill Bezanson had been running.

“What would you have told me about your life before that breakthrough?” I asked him.

“I wouldn’t have talked to you.”

It was as simple as that.

A few months later, in late 2001, Bill retired. He adopted another kitten so that the cat he brought home when Spooky was sick would never feel alone. After decades of rental houses, he purchased a condominium in northwestern Washington. He no longer felt the urge to flee, but that September he painted his entire condominium. Painting was a good middle ground.

In 2002, he bought a house outside Maple Falls, Washington, a small town near Mount Baker and the Canadian border. He’s still not sure he’s truly let anyone in, not all the way, but he’s found a home for life, and he’s made good friends in the neighborhood. Mr. Helpful, they call him. He built a porch for his neighbor, who is battling cancer. He drives another neighbor, a ninety-year-old former schoolteacher with macular degeneration, on her errands. His father died ten years ago after a long battle with cancer, having told only one story to the nurses who cared for him—the story of how a raccoon loved his son Bill so much that it jumped out of a tree to greet him and brought its babies onto the porch to meet him—but Bill has reconnected with his mother. He calls her in Michigan two or three times a week.

Every now and then, he has friends over: fellow retirees, neighbors, people he met on the job or in the past few years. They share a few drinks, laugh, chat. At some point during the evening, someone always reaches down and brushes the back of their leg. “I thought I felt something,” they say, when they see Bill watching them. “A cold spot. But there was nothing there.”

Bill doesn’t say anything, but he knows there was something there. “It might be Zippo,” Bill told me, but I could tell he didn’t mean it. That’s just a kindness to an old friend. In his heart, he knows it was the cold nose of Spooky. The cat has never left him. He still comes around, sometimes, to say hello. He is waiting for Bill to come home.