Brenda said the dead mouse was normal.
“They’re always doing stuff like that,” she said. Her voice sounded cool and calm, but John could tell by the look on her face that it still grossed her out. “They bring back dead animals to show that they’re protecting the family. It’s how they show love.”
“Fair enough,” John said. “But remind me never to let the cat make us dinner.”
He looked down at the big, lean tabby, standing in a wide bar of sunlight coming in through the kitchen window. The tabby looked up at John for a moment, then began licking his paw and using it to bathe the top of his head.
“What are we going to name him?” Brenda wondered aloud.
“I don’t know,” John said. “Nothing stupid like Patches or Muffin. Something original—but not too original. We don’t want people to think we gave the cat some deep and meaningful name just as a conversation piece. I hate people who do that. There is such a thing as being too clever.”
“You’ve never had that problem, babe.”
John ignored the jibe. “Grey cat . . .” he said thoughtfully. “How about Thunder?”
“How about Greybeard?” Brenda said.
“Maybe we should let Sally name him.”
“If you do that, the cat will definitely be named Patches or Muffin.”
John turned to her. “I thought she was still going through her angsty-teenager stage.”
“She is,” Brenda said, “but she’s focused mainly on skipping meals, staying out late, and hating her parents.”
“She doesn’t hate us.” John looked concerned. “Does she?”
“It’s normal. She’ll grow out of it.” She looked down at the cat. “How about Hunter?”
“As in ‘hunter-gatherer’? How about H.G.?”
“H.G. Wells?”
John winced. “That’s getting into deep-and-meaningful country.”
“How about just plain Wells?”
John tilted his head side to side, weighing it over. “Not bad.”
“You’re taking this awfully serious. I mean, it’s just a cat.”
John frowned at his wife. “Cut me some slack. I’ve never had a pet before. My parents didn’t even let me have a goldfish. Do you want to give it some stupid name like that mutt next door?”
The neighbours in question were Dave and Petra Robichaud. They owned a Chihuahua that weighed perhaps five pounds soaking wet—and that included her pink glitter collar. Her name was Rambo.
Brenda giggled. “God no.”
John sighed. “This could take awhile.”
They stared at the cat as it continued bathing itself in the sunlight.
The next day the cat—still unnamed—left a dead bird on the back porch.
Three days after that, he left a dead garter snake.
John started keeping the dust-bin and a garbage bag next to the screen door.
One night a week later, John woke up to the sound of a dog yipping outside their bedroom window.
The sound cut through his head like a band saw. It was those high-pitched barks that could probably make a man sterile if he listened to them long enough. Cheaper than a vasectomy, he thought drowsily.
The dog continued barking. It went on and on without taking a breath. John recognized it as the not-so-dulcet tones of Rambo the Wonder Mutt.
He rolled over and looked at the clock on the night stand. 4:07 AM. That was just great. He had to be up for work in less than two hours. Fucking Rambo. Why didn’t Dave or Petra take her inside? How could they not hear that? Were they so tuned out to that yapping that they could actually sleep through it undisturbed?
The answer: yes, apparently so.
John let out a heavy sigh and turned on his side. Brenda was still asleep, her breathing soft and even. John felt a strong urge to wake her up. Misery loved company, didn’t it? He reached out to pinch her arm and—
Something landed on the bed.
John almost screamed; his mouth fell open but nothing came out.
It was the cat. It looked at him curiously with its wide yellow eyes. Problem? it seemed to ask.
Yeah, John thought, you just about gave me a heart attack.
He sat up and stroked the cat’s back. It arched up to meet his hand, purring contentedly.
“How about you go next door and kill Rambo for me?” he suggested. “Earn your keep around here, huh?”
He laid back down and felt the cat curl up next to his feet.
Rambo went on yipping.
Sometime later John fell back asleep.
“Gross-out!”
John lowered his newspaper and looked over at Sally, standing in front of the open screen door. She was wearing a pink shirt that was too tight, and a black skirt that was too short. Of course these were the opinions of a father, but if he couldn’t comment on what his daughter wore when she left the house, then who could? Of course, the irony of the situation was that if he should ever voice his opinions, the result would almost certainly be tighter tops and shorter skirts. He reluctantly kept his mouth shut as he stood up and came over to see what she was staring at.
There was a new dead animal lying on the back porch.
Except “dead” was really too light a word. “Slaughtered” would have been more accurate. Or mutilated. The carcass was so badly mangled that at first John couldn’t tell what kind of animal it was. It wasn’t until he eased Sally aside and crouched down for a closer look that he realized it was a dog. And not just any dog, but one with a glitter collar.
“Oh shit,” he muttered. “Rambo.”
The dog’s fur was drenched with blood; only a few tufts of white remained. The body was covered in a brutal crosshatch of claw marks.
John felt his morning coffee gurgling unpleasantly in his stomach. He opened his newspaper, draped it over the dog’s body, and went to call the Robichauds.
“I just can’t believe it,” Dave Robichaud said, shaking his head.
“Neither can I,” John said.
They were standing in John’s garage drinking beers from the fridge he kept out there.
After John told him about Rambo, Dave had come over with a broom and a garbage bag. Together they scooped Rambo off the deck, both of them wincing at the sticky tearing sound the dog’s body made as it came off the wood planking.
“It must have been some sort of animal,” Dave reasoned.
“Must have been.” John nodded and took a sip from his bottle.
“But why would it leave her on your porch?”
“No idea. But why does an animal do anything?”
Dave nodded. His summer tan had turned the colour of curdled milk.
“Petra’s at her sister’s place in Huntsville. She’s coming back tomorrow.” He looked at John with wide, stunned eyes. “What the hell am I going to tell her?”
John shook his head. He didn’t even know what to tell himself.
A couple days later, John found two dead birds and a dead garter snake on the back porch. He cleaned them up without even thinking about it. Picking up the cat’s deliveries had become a part of his morning ritual. First he’d put on coffee, then he’d fetch the paper off the front lawn, then he’d open the back door to see what the cat had left for him. Most days there was nothing, but once every week or so he’d find a dead mouse or a dead bird or a dead snake. One time he found something he couldn’t identify. He went and got Brenda and she told him it was a woodchuck. Then she elbowed him in the ribs for getting her out of bed.
John rustled his newspaper and Brenda looked up from her crocheting. She glanced over at the clock on the mantel. It was almost 9:30 PM.
They had been sitting in the living room for almost two hours. The only sounds during that time were the rustle of John’s newspaper, and the creak of the floorboards in the hallway as the cat passed by on his way to the kitchen.
At 9:42 PM the front door opened and Sally slunk in.
“Where have you been?” Brenda said, bounding out of her chair. “You missed dinner.”
“I’m home before curfew.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I was out.”
“Out where?” Brenda pressed.
“Just out.” Sally gave her an indifferent shrug, the kind that comes naturally to teenagers and small-time criminals. Then she slipped upstairs. A moment later they heard her bedroom door slam shut.
Brenda looked over at John. “She’s lying.”
“You think?” John said sarcastically.
“It’s going to stop.”
“Good luck with that.”
“We should talk to her.”
“Go right ahead.”
Brenda glared at him. “You won’t talk to her?”
“What’s the point,” John said. “You said she hated us. And you said it was normal.”
“She doesn’t hate you. You guys used to talk all the time. You were thick as thieves,” Brenda added with an undisguised note of jealousy. “Maybe you should try taking her out for ice cream.”
“Ice cream?” John lowered his newspaper. “She’s fifteen, Brenda. A father is no longer allowed to take his daughter out for ice cream once she starts getting breasts. It’s like a national law.”
Brenda frowned. “She may hate us, but she still has to respect us.”
John raised his newspaper again. “I don’t think she got the memo on that one, dear.”
The following morning, the cat left a dead blue jay on the back porch.
That night, Sally came home at 11:30 PM. Brenda grounded her.
The night after that, Sally came home at midnight.
Brenda didn’t say anything.
John and Dave were outside raking leaves on their respective lawns. Autumn had come early, along with a week of gale-force winds, and every tree on the street had dumped its load.
After awhile they leaned on their rakes and talked over the low hedge that separated their yards.
“How’s Petra been? I haven’t seen her around lately.”
“She’s okay,” Dave said. “She’s still pretty upset about Rambo.”
John nodded sympathetically.
“Do you think you’ll . . . you know, get another dog?”
Dave gave a tired shrug. “I suppose so. I mean, Petra loved Rambo, and she wouldn’t want to replace her, but she needs something to, you know, fill the void. I could go either way. Although I suppose it’s good to have an animal around to protect the property.”
John made no comment. The idea of Rambo protecting anything, or anyone, was ludicrous. About as ludicrous as the idea of a cat killing a dog and leaving it on the porch.
He coughed into his fist and was about to resume raking when Dave spoke again.
“I don’t know how to say this, John, but, well, you might want to keep an eye on Sally.”
John’s eyebrows went up a notch. “Sally? What for?”
Dave sighed. “It’s none of my business, but I’ve seen Sally walking home lately with Kris Dunn.”
John shook his head to say he didn’t know who that was.
“He’s that kid who lives at the end of the street. Well, he’s not really a kid. That’s why I thought I should mention it. Sally’s what, sixteen?”
“Fifteen,” John corrected him.
“Yeah. I just thought it was strange, seeing her hanging around that guy. Ruth Meyers says he’s a drug dealer.”
John snorted. “Ruth Meyers thinks every kid on the street is a drug dealer. Or a terrorist. Or a serial killer.”
Dave nodded. “Yeah, she’s not the most reliable source, I know, but I have seen a lot of people coming and going from his house. Not just kids, either. Older guys, too. It’s a little strange.”
“What do you think, he’s running a grow op or something?”
“Maybe. This is the kind of neighbourhood where they do that kind of thing these days.”
Dave went back to work. John leaned on his rake, deep in thought.
“You can’t tell me where I can and can’t go,” Sally said indignantly.
“You bet your ass I can,” Brenda told her. “Until you’re eighteen you don’t go anywhere without either my or your father’s permission.”
John didn’t think the While you’re living under my roof speech was the best approach, but since he couldn’t think of an alternative, he opted to sit with his newspaper and keep his mouth shut. Brenda was taking the lead on this one; all he could do was back her play and hope it didn’t make the situation worse. He had a father’s nightmare vision of Sally in tears running to Kris Dunn, complaining about her asshole parents and then asking Kris to take her virginity. The ultimate act of rebellion.
“I don’t need to tell you where I am every single minute of the day.”
“Wrong,” Brenda snapped. “That’s exactly what you need to do.”
Sally’s gaze drifted off to the side.
“Bitch.”
She whispered the word, barely loud enough for her mother to hear it. But hear it she did.
Brenda’s hand seemed to move under its own power. It came up in a flash of motion and slapped Sally hard across the cheek. The sound was very loud in the quiet living room. Mother and daughter stared at each other, stunned. They looked like two strangers who had bumped into each other on the street. Then they both dropped their eyes and stared at Brenda’s hand, as if it were a handgun that had discharged accidentally.
Brenda stammered. “I . . . I didn’t mean . . .”
But Sally was already running upstairs.
Brenda started after her, then stopped. She stood there, gazing up the stairs with an expression of complete and total bewilderment. She looked over at John, still sitting in his chair with the newspaper draped across his lap. Her mouth opened and he waited for her to blast him for not saying something, for not stopping her, but she didn’t say anything. After a long moment of painful silence, she wandered down the hallway to the kitchen.
John stood up to go after her. He tripped over the cat just as it was coming in from the dining room, and grabbed the wall to keep from falling. He looked down at the cat and for a fleeting moment imagined how life would be so much easier if their roles were reversed. What did a cat have to worry about? Eat, sleep, and sit in the sun all day. Go out hunting every night, drop a dead bird or mouse on the back porch on occasion. When you thought about it, the suburban house cat really had it made.
John preferred not to think about it. Thinking was getting him nowhere.
It was time to do something.
The following morning, Saturday, John got up early, showered, put on an old pair of jeans and a paint-spattered sweatshirt, and walked down the street to Kris Dunn’s house.
That was how he thought of it, although Kris must have had parents. Right? John had never seen them—had never even seen Kris Dunn, for that matter—but he assumed the kid was too young to live on his own.
Or was he?
As he passed the Robichaud’s house, then the Smythe’s, John got to wondering just how old was Kris Dunn. As his estimates grew higher, John found himself getting angrier.
His hands were clenched into fists when he arrived at Kris Dunn’s house. The garage door was open and John could see three young men standing inside. They might have been anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five years of age. The one in the middle had a proprietary air about him, and John figured this was Kris Dunn. He was about John’s height, but thinner around the middle, with strong arms, shaggy black hair, and small dark eyes. His friends—a couple of deadbeats, John observed, just like Kris himself—stood on either side of him. The one of the left had blond dreadlocks and a tattoo on his forearm that said BITCHSLAPPER. The one on the right was tall and gangly and was wearing a black t-shirt with the word SLIPKNOT on it. John thought Slipknot was the name of a horror movie.
As he walked up the incline of the driveway, John noticed the three young men had already begun the day’s drinking. Kris and his buddies were each holding a can of beer, and there was a half-empty case on the concrete floor, next to a stack of boxes partially covered with an oil-stained tarpaulin.
It wasn’t even noon yet and these kids—as John thought of them—were already well on their way to getting sloppily drunk. Where the hell were the parents?
John stepped into the garage and immediately noticed a strange smell in the air. At first he thought it was beer, then realized it was something else. It wasn’t a yeasty smell; it was sharper, like turpentine, maybe, or rubbing alcohol.
“Hey, look who it is!”
Kris Dunn and his buddies noticed John standing in the garage doorway. They grinned at him like a pack of jackals.
“How ya doing, Dad?”
“I’m not your dad,” John said.
“Yeah, but we’re like practically related. Sal and I have been getting close, you know.” He covered his mouth in a gesture of mock embarrassment. “Or maybe you don’t.”
Kris’s friends snickered.
“I don’t want you seeing my daughter anymore,” John said. He tried to make his voice sound firm and strong. “Whatever there was between the two of you, it’s over now. I’m not asking you—I’m telling you.”
Kris exchanged a look with his friends, then all three of them burst into loud, troll-like laughter. Kris slapped one hand across his forehead like he had never heard anything so funny. The fluorescent lighting in the garage gleamed on the silver fang-shaped ring he wore on one of his fingers.
“Oh, Dad, you’re telling me,” he said, wiping away a faux tear. “That’s great.”
“How old are you anyway?” John asked.
“Old enough, Dad,” Kris replied cryptically. “Old enough.”
“Good, then you should be able to understand that I’m not fucking around here. If I see you with my daughter again, I’ll call the cops and have you charged with statutory rape.”
Kris snickered. “You oughta give your little girl more credit, Dad. She gives head like a champ.”
John’s face darkened. “You little fuck.”
“Shit, man, that girl could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch.” Kris winked. “Hey, if you don’t believe me just ask one of these guys—”
John lunged at him.
The kid in the Slipknot t-shirt stepped out of the way, and John thought, Good, his friends are going to stay out of this. They’re not as stupid as they look. Then the leg snapped out into John’s path. John tripped over it and did a face-plant on the cold concrete floor. He felt his nose crunch and fill up with blood. He snorted it out as he pulled himself quickly to his feet.
Just in time to catch the arcing, underhand punch thrown by the kid with the blond dreadlocks.
John expected Kris to get in a lick of his own, but it didn’t happen. He staggered backwards, blinking his eyes against the pain in his cheek and nose, and saw that Kris had moved back next to the door leading into the house.
“There’s someone else here who likes your little girl, Dad. I’m sure he’d love to say hello.”
And with that Kris opened the door and an enormous Rottweiler came firing out like a sleek, black-furred torpedo.
John watched the dog coming at him and thought, What a lousy way to spend a Saturday morning.
“I said I don’t want to talk about it,” John said, and winced as Brenda pressed the frozen steak against the dark swollen skin puffing up around his left eye.
The kid with the dreadlocks had done that. The one in the Slipknot shirt had hoofed him a good one in the balls, and John figured he’d be spending the next week or so scraping them off the roof of his mouth.
Kris’s dog, Shredder, had bitten him on the right calf, and John felt lucky to have gotten away with just that. The Rotty had looked mean enough to chew nails and spit tacks. Kris had pulled him off after that one love bite, maybe realizing that anything more might get him into serious trouble. Those punk kids had a great sense of self-preservation.
“You look like you got mugged,” Brenda said. “Was it the Girl Guides?”
John gave her a wry look. “Hardy-har.”
“Well, if you’re not going to tell me, I’ll have to come up with something to tell our friends and family. Was it Mr. Petersen? Did he catch you walking on his lawn and beat you with his walker?”
“I’ll beat you in a minute,” John said, without force.
“Please,” Brenda scoffed. “You couldn’t beat up a Care Bear in your condition.”
She touched his ear gingerly, and John hissed in pain. Kris had punched him in the side of the head, and the fanged ring he wore had cut his ear. The blow had knocked John to the ground, and then the three fuckers had quite literally kicked him out of the garage. He didn’t think any ribs were broken, but it wasn’t for their lacking of trying.
“Are you going to call the police?”
John didn’t answer right away. He had thought about calling the police. Of course he had. Kris Dunn had sicced his dog on him. He had been assaulted. He pictured himself telling all of this to the police. Unfortunately he also pictured what would almost certainly happen next. Kris Dunn telling the cops that John had stormed onto his property—trespassing was the word he would use—and the dog had attacked him in defence of its owner. Of course, the only injury the dog had caused was the bite on John’s leg, but who’s to say the dog didn’t do the rest of it as well? Especially with two other witnesses who would undoubtedly back up their friend’s story.
John had gone off half-cocked and he had no one to blame but himself.
“I’m not calling the cops,” he said. “I’ll handle this myself.”
“Okay,” Brenda said, a bit coolly. “Then I guess you can take care of yourself, too.” She stood up and put his hand on the frozen steak. “Hold it there. And keep it wrapped. That’s our dinner tonight.”
John watched her leave the room, then his gaze drifted over to the cat. He was standing on the arm of the easy chair, licking his chops and staring at John with an unreadable expression.
“I know what you’re thinking,” John said. “You think you do a better job of protecting this family than I do.” He sighed deeply. “And I think you might be right.”
He looked past the cat at the telephone on the side table.
“Should I call the cops?” he asked himself.
He watched the cat jump off the chair and saunter into the hallway. His gaze drifted up to a pair of pink-socked feet on the top step of the stairs.
He called out “Sally?” and the feet disappeared.
John sighed and picked up the phone.
The cops didn’t find anything.
Brenda served the two uniformed officers coffee while they spoke to John in the living room.
“Are you sure you smelled drugs in the house?” one of the officers asked.
“I wasn’t actually in the house,” John clarified. “I was in the garage.”
The officers exchanged a look.
“But you did smell drugs,” the officer prompted.
“I . . . I think so.” John hated the uncertainty in his voice. “I thought so at the time.”
“Was it marijuana that you thought you smelled?”
“No, it was a sharper smell. I couldn’t quite identify it.”
“But you were sure it was drugs.”
John muttered a reply. He could see how this was going, and he wished now that he had made an anonymous call. It was so humiliating. He felt like Ruth Meyers, the old biddy who thought the Girl Guides were putting LSD in the cookies they sold door-to-door every year.
The cops stood up and headed toward the door.
“We appreciate your concern,” said the officer who had done all the talking. “There’s nothing wrong with making a mistake. It’s perfectly harmless.”
John nodded dimly as he saw them off.
Harmless? He’d have to wait and see about that.
John put down his paper and picked up the ringing phone.
“Yes?”
“Hey, Dad, how ya doing?”
“What do you want?”
“I just wanted to say thanks for sending the cops over to my place. I really appreciated that. It’s a good thing I’m an honest citizen. Too bad for you, though. I imagine the file they got on you has a nice little stamp at the bottom of it. Something about the boy who cried wolf.”
John clenched the receiver so tightly his knuckles turned white.
“I thought I might drop by some night. Have us a man-to-man chat. You know, seeing as I’m the guy boning your little girl.”
“Fuck you, you little shit.”
John slammed the phone down.
John didn’t sleep well that night. He stumbled through a series of dark dreams in which he found himself entering various rooms in his house, and every time, in every room, he came upon Kris Dunn. Sitting in his chair in the living room. Reading the newspaper in the kitchen. Sitting on the toilet in his and Brenda’s en suite.
Hey, Dad, just thought I’d stop by for that man-to-man chat.
He woke up sweaty in a tangle of sheets. He went downstairs to the kitchen, half-expecting to find Kris Dunn sitting at the table. But the kitchen was empty. The first faint glow of dawn was coming in through the window over the sink. John put on coffee and started back to the hallway to fetch the paper off the stoop. Then he stopped.
He looked over his shoulder at the back door. He went over to it. Opened it. Looked down.
He looked for a long time.
The police came to the house again, but this time they brought the circus.
Brenda was upstairs with Sally in her bedroom. John was in the living room, going over his story for about the thousandth time. How he had woken up, come downstairs, and found Kris Dunn on the back porch.
Most of him, anyway.
John recalled standing in the doorway, staring down at the ragged, bloody mess that used to be a human being. His gaze had drifted over to the bottom of the steps where a trio of worms were lying in the grass. Not worms, he realized. Fingers. He wouldn’t have recognized them as such if not for the silver ring on one of them. With an eerie sense of clarity he saw there was blood on the ring’s fangs.
The police asked John about his “confrontation” with Kris Dunn a few days earlier. That was their word for the encounter. John did his best to explain, and under other circumstances they might have shown more suspicion toward him. But there was the state of the body to consider. And the preliminary findings of the coroner.
John overheard the man talking to a pair of detectives in the hallway.
“An animal of some kind,” he proclaimed. “Something small, I’d wager, from the size of the teeth and claw marks. Maybe rabid, I don’t know. We’ll have to wait for the blood work to know for certain.”
John didn’t think anything would be known for certain. He had an idea the results would be inconclusive. Kris Dunn certainly wouldn’t be talking.
You could say a cat got his tongue.
“I don’t know what you’re crying for,” John said. “That kid was bad news and you know it.”
“You didn’t know him!” Sally screamed.
“I know he was dealing drugs.”
His words were like a slap in the face. And I didn’t even have to lay a hand on her, John thought.
They were upstairs in Sally’s room. John wanted to talk to his daughter privately, away from the police. Away from Brenda.
Sally sniffled and said nothing.
“Yeah, I know about that,” John went on. “The police were at Kris Dunn’s house this morning. You know what they found? The setup for a meth lab. It turns out the police knew someone in the neighbourhood was cooking drugs; they just didn’t know who. I told them to check out Kris Dunn’s house a few days ago. Did you know that? They didn’t find anything that time, though. Why do you think that is, Sally? Why didn’t they find that stuff the first time?”
Sally remained silent.
“Did you tell that son of a bitch I called the police?” John took a step toward her. “Did you tip him off?”
Sally glared at him blackly, then turned and faced the window, arms crossed.
John sighed and went back downstairs. The cat was sprawled across his newspaper. He stared down at the cat and prayed it was all over now. He hoped that with Kris Dunn dead, Sally would clean up her act. He worried about what would happen if she didn’t.
He knew he couldn’t protect his wife and daughter from everything in the world, but there was someone else in their family who was more than capable of picking up the slack.