Bandit's Return

Bandit’s Return

　

1.

The baby squirrel was damaged in some way and it’s gait charmingly lopsided. Bandit regarded his prey from two related, but differing, perspectives. Through his amber lens, the baby squirrel was a mouth-watering treat, a delectable morsel whose squirming between tooth and tongue would fill his jaws with delight. But, of course, that pleasure would be fleeting, as is always the case, and considered from his blue point of view, the pink, ill-formed and fetal creature could afford him with several minutes, if not an hour, of entertainment there on the plush grass in the shade of the old oak tree. From her vantage atop a utility pole, the mother squirrel scolded Bandit in a high-pitched chattering voice to which the infant appended a whistling, peeping cry, but the tom-cat was rather deaf and these sounds reached him only remotely and, therefore, did not add to his delectation.

To sate his hunger pangs, Bandit bit off one of the baby squirrel’s feet. The little flipper-like limb crunched between his teeth and there was a brief, satisfying squirt of blood, something that reminded Bandit of a nice mug of beer that he had once drained in a single heroic guzzle. He swallowed the squirrel’s foot and, then, released the embryo from his clutches. The baby squirrel scuttled away for an instant before Bandit cupped the little pink tube of flesh under his paw. He sniffed curiously at the baby squirrel and, then, lifted his paw so that the squirrel could continue its hopeless flight. After the squirrel had limped to the limit of Bandit’s grasp, and, even, beyond, he pounced, caressed the squirrel with his teeth and, then, spit the infant out on the lawn so that he could continue his play. The squirrel was blind and hairless and decided to roll over on its side and play dead. But Bandit saw the sides of the baby animal twitching and so he gouged at the squirrel with a claw, splitting the creature’s belly. The wound was serious but not mortal and, viewed through his blue eye, Bandit decided that the fun could continue for, at least, another three or four-hundred heart beats. But, at that moment, a bigger brute intervened, something with coarse, wiry fur and equipped with a muzzle like a sledge-hammer filled with inch-long yellow teeth. Bandit reared, and the fur stood on his back inflating him like balloon, and, spitting, he darted away from the German Shepherd, sprinting close to the ground toward a tight squeeze under a fence through which he had chased a small rabbit only a few hours earlier. It was no problem for Bandit to outrun the dog, at least across a short distance, but the tom cat was well aware that canines had stamina and that they could be alarmingly single-minded, if clumsy, in their pursuit and so he was appalled to find that someone had patched the hole in the fence with a wooden board. The tight squeeze was no longer available as an avenue of flight and so Bandit reversed his direction, darting between the legs of the pursuing hound and scrambling through some shrubbery to emerge near another fence that seemed long and impermeable. The dog was caught in the shrubs, blundering through the undergrowth, and Bandit turned the corner of the fence-line, found an alleyway and another tight squeeze under a pile of wood into a nest where a rat had lived the preceding summer. The rat had gnawed a passage into an adjacent shed and so Bandit wiggled through the opening and found himself in a dim chamber festooned with spider webs ornamented by mummified flies and beetles. In the chase, Bandit had forgotten about the baby squirrel. But an old crow had observed Bandit’s torture of his prey from his perch on a winter-killed bough in a nearby evergreen tree. As soon as the tom cat fled, the old crow flapped his wings and landed next to the wriggling baby squirrel. With a few deft jabs of his beak, the crow eviscerated the squirrel and returned to his branch to swallow the baby animal’s innards.

All of this occurred on a day in early August on the 1300 block of 8^th Avenue Southeast.

　

2.

Squeaky’s best friend was Dolan. They had been drinking buddies for twenty years when Dolan died. Dolan’s death saddened Squeaky to the point that he felt that his heart was broken: he was short of breath when he thought of his old buddy and felt stabbing pains in his chest that caused his ears to ring and made the fingers on both of his hands tingle.

Dolan was a big man whose left eye had gone missing in some remote brawl or combat zone. Alcohol had polished him the way that an agate is polished in a tumbling machine: the booze had smoothed away all of his hard edges and sharp lines so that he was a round, pinkish sphere without neck, waistline, and with his legs seemingly fused together at his upper thighs. It seemed improbable that he could walk, but he could move, sometimes with surprising swiftness in pursuit of his next drink. Like Squeaky, Dolan had refined his digestive system so that it functioned best on beer supplemented sometimes with peanuts or a slab of microwaved Tombstone pizza or a bit of beef jerky.

Dolan lived above the Hiawatha Bar, a tavern by the railroad yards that had once been a Fraternal Lodge, a meeting place for the Improved Red Men of America. Old age had decimated the tribe and, ultimately, the Red Men sold the bar. The new owner preserved some of the more noteworthy decorations in the lodge, including a mural showing Indians shooting arrows at a disgruntled moose and a bas relief calumet displayed on the wall next to the toilet. Since the Red Men was a fraternal organization, the tavern was originally equipped with a men’s room only. However, law required the bar-owner to install a ladies’ room. This renovation was duly accomplished but the plumbing was configured in such a way that the tap for hand-washing was a basin outside of the small closet-like toilet, a white porcelain sink installed next to the rest-room door. As it happened, the deficiencies in the sanitary accommodations were moot anyway because women rarely entered the bar and, when they did, stayed only so long as they didn’t require the facilities – when a lady had to use the rest-room, she invariably left the tavern, crossed the street to the bar on the opposite corner and didn’t return. So the Hiawatha was a male enclave, a place where serious drinkers assembled in the morning and didn’t depart until late at night, and, as far as Dolan and Squeaky were concerned, this was fine with them – women were excitable and made complicated demands and both of them were dedicated to serenity, that is, accepting the things that they could not change, principally the fact that both of them were drunks.

A few years before Dolan died, Squeaky had some heart trouble. He collapsed while chipping ice from the stoop of his tiny house. In the hospital, Squeaky did well for the first twenty-four hours, rallying and showing the nurses’ elaborate, and charming, courtesy. But, then, withdrawal symptoms afflicted him and he suffered from seizures and clawed the IV tubes from his bruised forearms and tried to flee the hospital. Dolan came to see him and pleaded with the doctors’ to let his friend have a simple glass of beer but this was forbidden and Squeaky ended-up unresponsive in a medically induced coma. The booze and starvation had withered Squeaky so that he was tiny, brownish thing, a wrinkled baboon or chimpanzee, motionless in the intensive care unit, screened from the world by a tangle of cords and tubes and monitor leads. Squeaky emerged from his coma, weak and baffled. But he saw Dolan at his bedside and smelled the strong drink congealing on his breath and looked into his friend’s one surviving eye, chalky blue as the water melted from a glacier, and said: "Get me out of here!"

A day or so later, Squeaky was released from the ICU and, after the weekend, Dolan took him to his home. Since neither of them had a driver’s license, and since Dolan did errands by bicycle, a cab had to be called to take the two men to Squeaky’s house. Dolan stayed with him for another two or three weeks, nursing Squeaky back to health and, as soon as he was able to reliably walk, they went to the Hiawatha Bar, took up their accustomed places in the tavern, and returned to their habitual lives. Squeaky put his arm around Dolan and said that he had saved his life and Dolan’s blue eye became moist with tears and the bartender said that for the next ten minutes all drinks were ‘on the house’ in honor of Squeaky’s return to the land of the living.

A few years passed. Dolan developed diabetes and his toes became gangrenous. Squeaky had to care for Dolan after the amputations. Of course, both of them knew that it was necessary to avoid any extended hospitalizations that might result in a booze ban enforced by censorious and humorless doctors. One night, Dolan remained in the bar after Squeaky had gone home to his tiny cottage. Dolan swept out the bar and cleaned the toilet, work that he did for the tavern-owner in exchange for his rent. Smoking was forbidden in the bar – the laws had changed – and so Dolan, who sometimes smoked Swisher sweet cigarillos went outside to light up. Either he slipped on the ice or was knocked down by a passing car. In any event, Dolan fell onto the cold pavement and couldn’t get up and, then, at least, two or, possibly, three vehicles drove over him. Blood and fluids were squeezed out of Dolan’s body by the tires of the vehicles and he was found the next morning frozen fast to the cement, still alive but unconscious – he was dead before noon.

3.

Squeaky sat in the afternoon sun on the block of poured concrete that was his backstep. His tiny cottage was too warm to be comfortable. In a cooler at his ankle, he had a liter bottle of Diet Seven-Up and a bottle of vodka bedded on ice. Dolan used to sit next to him on the backstep perched on a white plastic chair that sometimes edged dangerous close to the side of the poured concrete steps, but Dolan was dead now and Squeaky was alone. Although once there had been a railing enclosing the steps, the metal balustrade had been set uncertainly in the concrete and eroded by rust, until it’s supports had fractured and fallen down among the feral shrubs and, sunflowers growing along the backside of the house. Dolan’s plastic chair, unused for half a year, had also fallen into the shrubbery and a big brown garden spider had spun a web between its forlorn plastic legs.

An air conditioner plugged a window on the side of Squeaky’s house, defeating any cross-ventilation through the structure. In order to cool the little shack, Squeaky had to run the air-conditioner since the window admitted no breeze, but this was expensive and not particularly efficient. The air conditioner was old and it made a throbbing noise when it operated, sometimes achieving a resonant frequency that vibrated in the studs and lathe walls of the house frightening the centipedes so that they fled their nests in the insulation and, emerging onto the faded wallpaper or bathroom tiles, skittering across wall and ceiling with shocking speed and impunity. The breeze that the air conditioner pumped into the house had the stink of a swamp, a malarial dense odor of rotting vegetation and methane bubbling out of mud and stagnant water and didn’t cool the house so much as it made the rooms humid and only slightly warmer than the back stoop where it was shady, after all, and the shadow sometimes probed by a breeze and cooled, at least to knee height, by the ice packed around the vodka and soda pop. Sometimes, Squeaky thought it would be best to just knock the air conditioner out of the window and restore the flow of air into the house, but the metal box of the machine was unwieldy and heavy and he had hoisted it into place only with the help of his friend, and drinking buddy, Dolan and now Dolan was not around to assist him in removing that appliance.

Squeaky was contemplating the weather, and worrying about the warmth that increased every day as the sun lingered longer and longer on the horizon, and he was wondering if he should buy some fans to push the hot air from place to place in his house, calculating the cost of fans as compared to his next social security check and alcohol budget, and he wished that Dolan could come from his grave and sit next to him on the back steps so that they could debate the pros and cons of removing the air conditioner and substituting fans in its stead, a plan that Dolan would probably have vetoed in favor of simply spending more time in the nicely refrigerated Hiawatha Bar, arriving earlier in the morning before the days’ heat became excessive and staying as long past closing as the bartender would allow, remaining in the air-conditioned bar as Dolan swept the floor and cleaned the toilets and, maybe, even sleeping on the tables until dawn came and it was cool enough to go outside in the freshening air and, maybe, stroll a block or two — that would probably be Dolan’s contribution to the argument and, then, they would either agree or agree to disagree and pour more drinks from the vodka and the liter of Diet Seven-Up, watching the traffic passing on the street and the little girls playing hopscotch on ladders chalked on the sidewalk and waving in a friendly manner to people from the neighborhood walking their dogs, Squeaky watched the shadows of the leafy branches decorating the pavement as the day turned blue and became evening and, occupied by his thoughts of this kind, and remembering his dear friend and drinking buddy, Dolan, Squeaky did not notice the large tom-cat that emerged from nowhere in particular and moving, step by step, with a pompous rectitude, strutted across the backyard and, then, climbed the poured concrete steps to sit as still and regal as the statue of a pharaoh at Squeaky’s feet. Squeaky was worrying about his air conditioner and wondering whether he could persuade the social worker who paid him a weekly visit, a so-called "wellness check," to assist him in moving the bulky air conditioner, removing it from the window that it blocked, when he felt eyes upon him, had the sense that he was being closely observed and, then, looked down to see a large tom-cat at his feet, gazing up at him. The cat, welcoming his look, purred contentedly and, then, rubbed himself against Squeaky’s trouser leg. Squeaky put his hand down to touch the animal’s velvety skull and the cat suddenly jumped upward to sit on his lap. Squeaky was surprised at the cat’s friendliness. Normally, he thought of cats as remote and indifferent but this animal was very gentle and it peered up at Squeaky’s face with unabashed love and, even, admiration. The cat patted at Squeaky’s chest with little tapping motions of its paws as if it were trying to heal his wounded heart.

"Who are you?" Squeaky asked the cat. It meowed in response to his question. "I wonder what’s your name," Squeaky said to the cat.

The cat was odd-eyed. It’s left iris was a warm rich honey-color, an amber eye next to a blue one that was cold and chalky the water melted from a glacier in the high mountains.

The cat sat with Squeaky until it was dark outside and the mosquitos were biting so that he decided to go into his house. He gently set the cat down on the ground at the foot of the steps and said: "Shoo! Now, you go home." The cat looked up at him quizzically. Squeaky turned and walked up the steps and, when he opened his back door, he felt a sudden, graceful caress against his calf and, then, he was indoors and the cat was with him not prowling so much as strutting happily a few steps ahead of him. "I guess you’re here for the night," Squeaky said. He opened a can of tuna and fed the cat and it, then, curled up at the foot of his bed, humming a little in its throat.

The cat was clean and affectionate. It did its business outside and followed Squeaky around as he went from place to place in his house or yard. Squeaky named the cat "Bandit" and bought the animal a collar. He fed the tom-cat milk and canned tuna. Bandit spent half of his time outside, hunting or patrolling the shrubbery and the flower gardens adjacent to the alley way. But each night, the cat came to the door and tapped gently, not insistently but with a kind of grave courtesy, and so Squeaky let Bandit into his house where he slept curled-up at the foot of the bed.

Squeaky had a sister who lived in Iowa. Every two or three months, she stopped at his house to deliver him some groceries and, even, brownies that she had baked or caramel fudge. Squeaky’s sister was suspicious of cats and didn’t trust Bandit at first, but, after a half hour or so, she warmed to the animal and, even, stroked his shoulder, the cat arching his back toward her hand. "Where did you get him?" she asked. "He’s just a stray," Squeaky said. "It’s a very nice cat," Squeaky’s sister said, "and someone must be missing him." "I don’t know," Squeaky said. Squeaky’s sister took a couple of pictures of the cat with her cell-phone. "Maybe you should post one of these pictures," she said, "in case the owner is looking for him." "I’m the owner now," Squeaky said. She shrugged and said that she would email the picture’s to Squeaky’s computer but he told her that it had become infected with a virus and didn’t work any longer.

One day, Squeaky rode his bicycle to the Hiawatha Bar. He had not been there since Dolan’s death. A few old men greeted him when he came through the door and they bought him drinks and reminisced about Dolan. It wasn’t as painful as Squeaky had expected and so he stayed longer than was prudent and, later, found that he couldn’t ride his bicycle – as soon as he mounted the bike, it wobbled out of control and several times he fell, scraping his elbow and knees. It was an endless summer afternoon that became an endless bright evening, the sun pasted in the sky and not dropping below the horizon but merely becoming a different color, the orb changing its hue from blindingly bright white to amber and, then, to a glacial blue, all the while, the shadows lengthening but the cool darkness frustratingly remote. Squeaky had been away from his shack for many hours and he couldn’t quite remember where he had last seen Bandit. He poured some milk into a saucer and opened a can of tuna that he placed on his back step and, then, went to bed, wearily conscious that the cat was not curled up at his feet.

The next morning, the milk and tuna fish were still on the back step. Flies were swarming the tuna in its can and drowning in the milk. Squeaky dumped the spoiled milk in the bushes, disturbing the big garden spider who scrambled into hiding, and he replaced the tuna with a new can, waiting for Bandit to return. But Bandit didn’t come home. Squeaky decided to walk around the neighborhood to see if anyone had seen his cat. At first, he tried to ride his bicycle but the frame was bent and he couldn’t get the wheels to turn without making an irritating grinding sound and so he went on foot.

A couple blocks from his house, he saw an old lady spraying her garden hose at her sidewalk. Squeaky asked the old woman if she had seen Bandit. She set the hose aside to flood a flower bed next to her house. "I seen a nice big tom-cat a couple days ago," she said. "The cat had a little animal friend, something like a baby rabbit, and he was playing with his friend."

"Where was this?" Squeaky said.

The old woman pointed to a lawn across the street.

"A dog chased the cat," the old lady said, "and I saw him run between the houses by the fence and, then, up the alleyway."

Squeaky thanked her and crossed the street to lawn where his cat had been playing with the baby animal. An old crow sitting in a green cloud of leaves made a derisive sound.

Squeaky walked up and down the alleyway behind the houses. The heat had fermented the garbage in the bins along the alley and the stink made Squeaky feel dizzy. He called Bandit’s name and, once, thought that the cat was padding along a couple feet behind him, but when he turned, he saw only the utility poles and the little garages and the wrecked motorcycles and abandoned cars and boats disabled atop concrete blocks, wood piles rotting against old fences that were themselves collapsing, discarded odds and ends defended by dogs that rushed out from hiding places to bark at him.

The next day, the social worker made her "wellness check." Squeaky said that his heart was hurting him and that he had felt very sharp, stabbing pains in his chest when he was walking in the alleyway looking for his lost cat. The social worker asked about his cat. Squeaky described the animal. The woman brightened as he spoke – this was a problem that possibly could be solved.

"Have you seen him?" he asked.

"No," she said. "But we could make a poster, even offer a reward for his return."

"That’s a good idea," Squeaky said.

The social worker asked Squeaky if he had a picture of the cat and he answered quickly: "No, no, do I look like I have a camera?" But, then, he recalled that his sister had taken the cat’s portrait with her cell-phone. "There is a picture," he said.

He called his sister and told her that he needed her to email the picture of Bandit saved on her phone to the social worker’s computer. Squeaky’s sister did as she was told and the social worker said that she would print the picture, duplicate it in color even so that Squeaky could post signs offering a reward for the missing cat. The social worker was young and optimistic and had only been on the job a half-year and she still believed that what was lost might be found and that, at least some problems had solutions and that the solutions were within reach.

The next day, Squeaky took a dozen posters around the neighborhood. The posters were neatly printed and said that the cat "answers to the name ‘Bandit’." "REWARD for Bandit’s return!" the poster told readers, advising that the cat was last seen "on the 1300 block of 8^th Avenue SE" – that is, the place where the old lady had watched the tom-cat playing with the baby animal. Squeaky had an old claw-hammer and some small tack-like nails and he held the poster at eye-level against the splintery tar-coated wood of the telephone poles, pounding the nails through the card-stock on which the poster was printed. Hammering the nails into the utility poles was more strenuous than he expected and, when Squeaky was done with the task, his heart was pounding and clammy sweat beaded his forehead.

Squeaky and the social worker had not decided what sort of reward Squeaky would pay if the cat were delivered into his custody. The reward would have to be valuable, something rare and fine, for the kind person who returned the odd-eyed cat to its owner.

　

4.

Bandit explored the shed into which he had fled. A large, extended family of mice lived behind the walls and, sometimes, they emerged to taunt him. He stalked the mice unsuccessfully, their profusion distracting him – no sooner had he settled upon one of them as prey, then, another emerged from hiding to lure him into futile pounces and inaccurate leaps. In the course of the chase, some jars on a shelf were dislodged and they crashed to the concrete, disgorging a sticky, fragrant substance. The heavy scent, as inedible as a rose bush, filled the air and the odor made Bandit drowsy. He made a couple of desultory dives after fleeing mice and, then, pillowed his head on a pile of burlap sacks in the corner of the dim room. The world slipped away from him and he felt as if he had fallen in thick, glutinous water, sucked down through the half-light into strange, feverish dreams. Perhaps, the poisoned air would have suffocated him, but, just as he was about to surrender to the fumes pressing him down, a young mouse ran over the burlap and across his tail. This roused Bandit to the chase, ancient instincts galvanizing him so that his spine arched and his fur bristled, and he hurled himself after the mouse, firing himself like a torpedo through a squeeze in the wall that set him free, if dazed, to wander an alleyway where the air felt cool and fresh, even, though it was, in fact, humid and heavy with an approaching thunderstorm. Bandit set the prisms in his eyes to detect the polarization in the light, a means of navigating even when the sun was hidden behind clouds, and aligning the rays in a certain manner, he darted down the alley toward the place where he lived with Squeaky. He smelled the rancid tuna fish on the back stoop, the souring milk, and the greased metal scent of the garden spider, and looked up, with relief, to the back door of his house and, just at that moment, lightning snapped through the air, ionizing the oxygen in his nose, and the light came an instant later, blinding him, then, the deafening crash that rocked him on his paws and set his ears ringing. Disoriented, Bandit fled into the shelter of some nearby trees only to find that the lightning had speared them so that barbs of fire and ash were drizzling down into his fur. He fled into the alley where torrents of water and gusts of wind drove him through ruinous backyards and past toppling branches and collapsing fences into a neighborhood that was completely unknown to him, the territory of another tom-cat, threatening scents billowing around him like red flags signifying danger.

After a couple of nights sleeping rough on porches and under parked cars, Bandit followed an odor trail to the queen-cat of the territory. She was seductive and Bandit mated with her and, then, discovered that she had a brood of kittens. Good taste and decorum required that Bandit kill the kittens and so he snatched each of them, one by one from the queen cat’s nest, snapped their spines just under their skulls and flung the tiny corpses into a flower garden. The queen cat understood the imperative, but, nonetheless, tried to stab him with the daggers of her claws. Bandit knocked her aside only to confront an earlier suitor, another menacing tom-cat with a fat belly and a nose that had been split in previous combat. There was no choice but to fight and, after a long and bloody brawl, Bandit was defeated. He crept off to lick his wounds. In the battle, Bandit’s amber eye had been gouged-out, an instant of agony that seemed oddly familiar to him, and the monocular world shifted shape and was unfamiliar and, when danger loomed and he darted for a squeeze in which to hide, his surviving ice-blue eye misled him and, sometimes, he crashed against the wall or the posts of a fence. He thought it best to simply die and so he crawled under a porch and remained there for several days, lying on his side and panting mournfully, but death did not come to him, and so he emerged and limped into a backyard where there was an old woman. The old woman smelled of a hundred cats, a rank, festering odor, and she was like him: one of her eyes had been wounded and had fallen out of her head. The old woman noticed Bandit staggering across the lawn and scooped him up in her apron. She carried him into her house and set him on a table and Bandit was conscious of hundreds of eyes glaring at him, other prisoners in her house, ragged, emaciated cats too weak to even challenge one another, lying in the hot shadows of the room, their fur matted with their own feces. The old woman put some kibble on the floor and shoved Bandit off the table so that he could elbow aside a half-dozen other cats and kittens scrambling for the food. The other cats were sick, infected with salmonella and a dozen other bacterial infections, and Bandit knew that if he were trapped in the house for more than a few days he would succumb to illness as well and perish. So he found a pillow in the room where a dozen or so cats, feeble with inanition, were watching televison. The old woman had the TV tuned to Fox and she talked back to the screen and Bandit decided that he would recuperate for a couple days, watch some TV, and let his eye-socket heal before making his escape. He kept apart from the other miserable inmates, cautious about sharing even their water bowls, and he disdained the noisome, clotted litter boxes, filthy caskets in which several mummified cats lay, victims who had perished while defecating. After three or four days, cadging food from the old woman, and following her up and down the stairs and into the toilet to learn her routine, Bandit discovered that she would leave the house, always around mid-day when the sun was high overhead, stepping onto her front porch to pick up a kind of advertising flier, the Shopper. So, he clung close to her calves, rubbing his fur against her dirty jeans, and, when she opened the door, he shot through her legs, flinging himself with desperate abandon out of the house. The old woman spun to the side and fell and Bandit heard her hip snap like dry wood and, as she called out for help, the other hungry cats swarmed over her, tearing her flesh and eating it. Bandit bit off the tip of her little finger for good luck, swallowed it in a single gulp and, then, ran down the front steps, fleeing along the sidewalk toward downtown.

For a few days, Bandit wandered far and wide, a lone wayfarer on the windy paths of the earth. Once, he found himself in an alleyway smelling of beer and urine. Voices came from inside of a bar and Bandit knew that the people who were shouting and calling to one another were very drunk. The parking lot by the tavern aroused strange memories in him and he felt a gloomy kind of panic. The faces of the dead trembled before him and he could smell their different odors, the scents that had distinguished them when they were alive. His mother who had been run over by a car came to him, resurrected and trotting across the parking lot in the twilight. He moved toward where she was squatting, impenetrable as a boulder on the edge of the night, and was about to groom her with his tongue and teeth when she vanished and he was left alone in a great hollow place were moles underground made peeping sounds and shrews savagely bit through the throats of grasshoppers who screamed in frequencies unimaginably high. All of creation seemed to tremble and cry with pain and Bandit remembered his friend Squeaky and wished that he could find his way back to him.

At dawn, Bandit went to the river, cautiously climbing down a slope of fractured concrete rip-rap. Laotian and Vietnamese refugees who had come to town sometimes fished in the shallow water below the dam over which the river foamed and slid in a moving dark sheet. The fishermen cleaned their fish on the flat rocks and, sometimes, left coils of innards on the stones, enough fish-guts to make a reasonable meal. Bandit was sniffing the broken stones for his breakfast when two boys approached. He saw that they were carrying a kind of plastic pail and a wicker basket. The boys paused upstream, cast a line into the water, and, then, squatted by the edge of the river. Bandit approached cautiously, hoping for a hand-out. Then, he felt a sharp pain in his flank. One of the boys had whirled a fishing line with hook through the air and the barb was caught in his hip. The boys shouted and splashed through the shallow muddy water, dislodging frogs squirting away from them in all directions.

　

5.



Squeaky was sitting on his back step, wondering how it could be so hot in late September – probably, it was climate change. The world was getting warmer and the seas were feverish and the ice-caps were melting into the hot broth – at least, that’s what Squeaky had gathered from watching TV – and so, now, he wondered if he should attempt to cool his little house by running the air conditioner even though he had almost no money and it would be another ten days before his next disability check arrived and comfort was expensive, better maybe to hike to the Hiawatha where it was cool and dark, a long walk for him in the blazing sun since his bicycle was busted. He looked at the trees and saw that the leaves on some of them had already brightened to yellow and red and, yet, the sultry heat enveloped everything and the cicadas hummed overhead in canopies of gold and brown the color of fox-fur.

And, as he was considering his poverty and the air conditioner and the distance to the bar by foot on the hot day, two kids from the neighborhood approached, toting a battered plastic bin. Squeaky recognized the two boys. For several years, he had taken bribes to buy booze for them at the liquor store ten blocks away – the transactions were structured as a bottle for each boy and one for Squeaky as well, all financed with money filched from the kids’ parents. The boys looked hot and irritable and the bin that they clutched between them seemed perpetually on the verge of falling down to the pavement, overturning and spilling its content onto the sidewalk. Jeremy, wearing a tattered black tee-shirt showing a green-faced zombie, beckoned to Squeaky. Squeaky waved back to him. The boys took that as an invitation to walk through the alleyway gate in Squeaky’s broken-down fence, dragging the bin between them as they approached the back step.

"What do you have there?" Squeaky asked.

"It’s your cat," the other boy, BJ, said.

"My cat?"

"What’s it called? – Bandit. We caught Bandit."

"Where?" Squeaky asked.

"Skulking around my backyard," Jeremy replied.

"Well, bring him to me," Squeaky said.

"We want our reward," BJ said. They dropped the bin at the base of the concrete steps rising to where Squeaky was sitting. A faint yowl came from inside the plastic box.

Squeaky took out his wallet. He opened it and counted his money. He had seventy-two dollars.

"I’ll give you twenty bucks," Squeaky said.

"Twenty bucks?" Jeremy replied. "You gotta be kidding. You offered a reward. That’s no reward. We want a hundred bucks. A hundred bucks for sure."

"I don’t have that much money," Squeaky said.

BJ kicked the plastic bin so that it skidded forward against the concrete back steps. The cat hidden inside protested again with a feeble moan.

"I want my cat back," Squeaky said.

"Well, then, pay up," BJ told him.

The two boys squinted at Squeaky and their pale, childish faces were indistinct masks of indifference, half-formed and incomplete.

"I could give you forty, but...forty, forty is all I got," Squeaky said.

"Fuck, you probably don’t even have forty," Jeremy said. "You’re just a fucking old drunk."

"You’re right," Squeaky said. "I need my money for booze. But, listen, I can give you forty."

The two boys stooped as if to pick up the bin and haul it away.

"I don’t have any more than forty right now," Squeaky pleaded.

BJ looked at Jeremy and asked: "What do you think?"

Jeremy said: "Give us the money."

Squeaky handed him two crumpled twenty dollar bills. BJ kicked the bin hard so that it toppled over so that the lid slipped aside. A ragged brownish cat that looked as if it had been singed in a fire, scrambled out of the bin and stood blinking at the sunlight. The cat’s tail had been partially burned off and the animal made a forlorn meowing sound.

"That’s not my cat," Squeaky said. "I want my money back."

"Fuck you, you’re just an old drunk," Jeremy said. The two boys grinned at him and tried to make their faces look hard and contemptuous, but instead they seemed merely mischievous, playful even, high-fiving one another and, then, backing away from Squeaky as if afraid that he would pounce on them from his height atop the back steps. Squeaky knew that without the forty dollars he would run out of money and that, unless he could cadge drinks, the level of alcohol in his blood would run dangerously low and, then, he might be visited by monsters, not hallucinations or fantasies, but real monsters, disfigured creatures that stood silently in the corners of his room and glared at him, as real and palpable as the cat licking itself at his feet, and, after the monsters, there would be delirium and, probably, seizures and, then, he would wake up in an emergency room intubated, possibly unable to breathe for himself -- it had happened before and, now, it would happen again because he was short money that he had depended upon and so Squeaky began to cry, his shoulders stiffened and tears flowed from his eyes, and his lips sputtered some curses at the departing boys. BJ and Jeremy were shaken that Squeaky was crying and, of course, they each wanted to comfort him and, even, perhaps return one of the two twenties that Jeremy clutched in his hand, but neither one was willing to show weakness to the other and so, instead, they trotted to the back gate and kicked at it, and when the back gate in the old fence, didn’t open immediately, they kicked at it again, so hard that half the fence fell down, startling them and, then, cackling. the two boys ran away down the alleyway.

Squeaky’s hands were trembling with rage and his eyes were blinded by tears. He reached down to the cat limping up the steps toward him. The cat lunged and bit him on the knuckles and, then, with a shriek like a wounded human baby, departed sideways into the shrubbery vanishing as if it were smoke blown away from a guttering fire.

A cop car pulled into the alley and spun its light for an instant, emitting a taut little howl from its siren. – This is good, Squeaky thought, the cops have come to arrest those boys, they will be detained and have to return my money. I have been defrauded. This is good.

A police woman wearing a complicated belt and a square-cut boxy uniform stepped out of the squad car. Her eyes were hidden by black sunglasses that reflected the half-collapsed fence and Squeaky’s little shack and the place where he was standing, face wet with tears, on the back stoop. The police-woman stepped over the fallen fence as if she were daintily stepping across a corpse thrown suddenly into her path. Her nose wrinkled with contempt. In her hand, she was holding one of Squeaky’s posters offering a reward for Bandit’s return.

"Sir, did you put up these posters?"

"I lost my cat," Squeaky said.

"Are you the one who put up these posters?" the officer asked again.

"I’ve been defrauded," Squeaky told her. He couldn’t stop crying and his voice vibrated with emotion.

"You didn’t answer my question," the lady cop said.

"I put up those posters ‘cause I want to get my cat back," Squeaky said.

"Well, you know that it’s a criminal offense to post placards or advertising on city utility poles, you can’t do that."

"Why?"

"The staples degrade the poles. Those poles are the property of the city. You can’t be using them as a bulletin board."

"I didn’t know," Squeaky said.

"I could fine you five-hundred dollars right here and now," the lady cop said.

"I don’t have no five-hundred dollars," Squeaky told her.

"I figured as much," she said, looking around at the chair fallen into the bushes, the garden spider dangling from its web, the little cooler at Squeaky’s feet containing cans of malt liquor, the air conditioner crammed into the window and blocking ventilation to the house, the broken bicycle, and the smashed fence.

"You’re gonna have to go to each utility pole and remove those posters and, also, remove any staples or nails or tacks – whatever it is that you used to affix the illegal advertising," she told him.

"I can’t do that."

"You have to do what I tell you, or I’ll give you a ticket and summons to appear in court and, then, you can pay the five-hundred dollars or sit in jail."

"I can’t sit in jail," Squeaky said.

"Then, get off your ass, and remove the posters from each and every utility pole. Listen, Squeaky, I’m trying to cut you some slack. Just do what I tell you to do."

"I’ll get my goddamned posters," Squeaky said. "I’ll get them down. But I want you to find my cat."

"I’m not animal control," the lady cop said. "You can call animal control. But I’m giving you 24 hours to get those posters down from the utility poles. Do you understand?"

"I understand," Squeaky said.

The female police officer turned and walked back to her squad car in the alley, cautiously stepping over the broken fence. She looked hot and irritated and Squeaky thought that she was probably happy to regain the air-conditioned comfort of her vehicle. There were some deep and jagged potholes in the alley and the lady cop didn’t want to drive her squad car over them and so she backed up onto the street, reversed direction, and, then, cruised away, rolling through the stop sign next to Squeaky’s house.

Squeaky felt his heart shudder in his chest. He stood up and went into his garage to look for his chainsaw. A few years before, Squeaky had made some money cutting wood and selling it for people’s fireplaces and he had an old chainsaw that he had used in that enterprise. The saw was shoved into a corner, covered with spider webs and dust, and it seemed astonishingly heavy to him – that he really once wielded such an implement for hours at a time seemed fantastic. Now, it was almost beyond his strength to clutch the thing in his fist, trembling with rage and his eyes blinded by tears. He tugged at the starter cord – two, three, four times but the machine didn’t even cough. His heart lunged and bucked in his chest again and the pain made him want to sit down but he had to start the chainsaw so that he could take down the posters attached to the poles lining the streets, telephone poles up and down the avenues, eleven poles, since the lady police officer had clawed one of his reward posters from one of those utility poles and had carried it as evidence, like a wounded bird, into his back yard to confront him with the proof of his crime. He tugged at the starter cord of the chain saw again but the machine didn’t respond – there wasn’t even a rattle or a puff of smoke from its motor.

An old axe hung on the wall. Squeaky cast the chainsaw aside, letting it drop heavily to the concrete and he saw the plastic guard over the blade break and the dust was shaken from the grip. He took down the axe and swung it experimentally, feeling its weight and heft. Then, Squeaky carried the axe to the front of his house and stood by his mailbox, clutching the tool. The sun beat down on him and the cry of cicadas reached a deafening pitch and Squeaky heard his breath coming in sobs as he strode down the sidewalk to the first telephone pole on the block, the splintery black and tarry wood still emblazoned with his poster offering a reward for the return of Bandit. He swung the axe against the pole and it kicked back hard, ripping the tool out of his grip so that the axe bounced away from him and skidded across the sidewalk.

Squeaky turned and found the axe lying a few yards away. He stooped to pick it up and, then, saw that the lady policeman was standing across the street, her revolver drawn and aimed in his direction.

"Don’t pick up that axe, Squeaky," she said.

"You told me to get my posters down and so that’s what I’m doing," Squeaky said.

He picked up the axe and walked back to the utility pole. This time, he swung the axe less ferociously and it bit into the wood a little so that chips from the pole ricocheted off his chest.

"Stop chopping that pole," the lady cop shouted. She had approached to the middle of the street and her revolver was trembling. From the corner of his eye, Squeaky saw the muzzle of the gun vibrating.

Squeaky hit the pole again, swinging less violently so as not to bruise his hands. The pole was hard as iron and the dull wedge-shaped edge of the axe bounced away from the wood. The scent of creosote filled the air.

Sirens sounded and, suddenly, there were other squad cars and the landscape flashed red with their lights as Squeaky hit the pole again. Two male cops approached Squeaky, screaming at him.

"You might as well shoot me," Squeaky said.

He turned toward them and held the axe out to the side so that its handle and blade would not interfere with the bullets that he expected them to fire into his chest and face.

"Put it down, Squeaky," one of the cops said.

Squeaky’s heart stopped and his eyes overflowed, bulging as if to pour everything in them out onto the sidewalk. He took a faltering step forward and, then, plunged toward the ground. As he was falling, one of the two male cops fired his taser, aiming at Squeaky’s genitals since electrocuting suspects in the testicles afforded the most comical results, a pleasant and amusing diversion from the tension of the stand-off. But Squeaky’s legs had crumpled under him and he dropped into path of the electrodes fired downward at his groin. The electrodes caught him in the chest and the surge of the electrical charge plugged into his failed heart and coursed through the muscle reestablishing his heart beat.

Squeaky writhed on the sidewalk next to the telephone pole, his eyes luminous with tears.

　

6.

The hospital was cool and people spoke in soft voices. Everything was very clean and white. Under sedation, Squeaky slept peacefully and without dreaming. When he woke, the IV in his forearm felt inflamed and he had a headache. He could see over a low dustless ledge to a window and, outside, it was still hot – people coming and going in the parking lot wore shorts and sleeveless blouses although the trees in the distance blazed with Fall colors. After his midday meal, a couple of silent figures entered his room and stood at each side of his bed. The figures were grey with protruding pinkish ears and exorbitant whiskers like black spikes drilled through their cheeks. Squeaky asked the two intruders what they wanted from him but they were silent, glaring at him with tiny black eyes. When the nurse came to take away his dinner tray, Squeaky asked her to expel the two intruders standing as sentinel by his bed. She made some kind of an excuse that led him to understand that the two men were guards that had been sent by the police because he was in custody and awaiting arraignment for posting bills on the utility poles. Squeaky was given some more sedative so that he could sleep but he felt very feverish and the IV site on his arm irritated him and, when he closed his eyes to rest them for a few minutes, two more sentinels had been posted, sullen-looking disfigured men in grey uniforms with protuberant pink ears and whiskers, one guard at each corner of his bed. Squeaky said to them: "How do you expect me to sleep with you standing at each corner of my bed?" He called for the nurse and, again, pleaded with her to make the sentinels go away.

Squeaky closed his eyes again and, when he awoke, he couldn’t speak. Something was choking him. Each breath that he took encountered some kind of resistance and seemed to tremble on the edge of a deep and black abyss – his breaths were physical things, rectangular in shape and shoved out of his throat and mouth, teetering on the brink of suffocation. He gagged on a tube pushed through his nose and throat and felt a kind of pumping that threatened to inflate his sinuses and skull to the bursting point. The sentinels now numbered many dozens and they crowded tightly around his bed.

Later, Squeaky saw Dolan. It was if he were looking through a blue lens. The atmosphere over his bed was like the inside of a gemstone. Dolan shredded the sentinels with his teeth and they vanished like vapor. Squeaky’s breathing was coordinated with the pump automatically inflating and deflating his chest. The edges of his body were filled with light and tingled.

When Squeaky next looked out the window, the sky was dark with heavy, rumpled-looking clouds and the people in the parking lot were hustling to escape the cold, wearing heavy coats and walking bent forward as if against an icy wind.

　

7.

One of the boys stroked Bandit’s fur while the other removed the barbed hook from his side. "The poor cat is missing an eye," the boy said. "He got hurt somehow," the other boy replied. When they returned to the place where they were fishing, the cat followed them, rubbing against their bare legs. "He is very tame," one of the boys said to the other.

After they had finished fishing, they climbed up from the river, scaling the bank that was cluttered with fallen trees, red sumac growing from collapsed walls, and thorns flying tattered pennants of plastic shopping bags. The cat followed them home. Someone mentioned that the animal looked vaguely like a fat, well-fed cat shown in flyers tacked to telephone poles in a neighborhood a few blocks away. "There’s a reward for the return of the cat," one of the boys said. "But does it say that he’s got only one eye," the other boy asked. "I don’t think so," his friend replied.

They fed the cat and it stayed on their porch overnight. The next day, autumn finally arrived. It was like turning off a switch that controlled the hot, sultry weather. The day was grey and overcast and cold rain fell through trees that suddenly looked grim and metallic. The boys hiked the neighborhood where the flyers had been posted but found that someone had peeled them off the utility poles. Just as they were about to abandon their search, they saw a pole tucked away in an alleyway still bearing the poster. The wind had tattered the poster and it was bleached by the sun and, now, wet and half illegible with the icy rain spilling down from above. But they could read the address where the cat’s owner lived and the name of the pet. "Are you Bandit?" one of the boys asked Bandit. He cocked his head and showed, for an instant, the little flame of his pink tongue.

The boys led the cat to the address where Squeaky lived. But no one was home. A housewife came from across the street and said: "You don’t want to be associating with this man. He’s insane, crazy, dangerous." The boys nodded their heads. When they looked around, the cat had vanished.

　

8.

When the weather turned cold, families of mice fled their nests in the grass and hidden in the shrubbery to invade Squeaky’s little house. The back door had been left open when the police used the tazer to knock Squeaky to the ground and no one had come to shut it. An opossum and a musk rat also temporarily took up habitation in the house, but they were den animals and the rooms were too big for them, open space that made them uncomfortable, and so, after rummaging around the rooms for a couple days, the bigger mammals abandoned the home, leaving it to the invasion of mice.

When Bandit entered the house, he found that it was full of mice. Bandit stealthily slunk through the open door and, then, turned and, with his paws, patted the door shut. This would prevent his prey from escaping from him. Then, for the next couple days, he mercilessly hunted the mice. When he was done, he had shredded with his teeth and claws 108 mice in total.

A few days later, Squeaky returned from the hospital. He was very happy to see Bandit, one-eyed now, but otherwise none the worse for wear sitting in his chair by the TV. The cat greeted with him a silky purr and came to be petted. Then, they sat down together to watch television.