Dewey's Nine Lives

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.