Dewey's Nine Lives

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.