Some cats are lazy or inept as killers, but the white-footed black Bobby wasn’t one of them. Bobby was shrewd enough to retreat to the Hoffbauer house at dusk, when raccoons and coyotes became a danger, but every morning in the snowless months he could be seen sallying freshly forth along the lake’s denuded southern shore and entering Walter’s property to kill things. Sparrows, towhees, thrushes, yellowthroats, bluebirds, goldfinches, wrens. Bobby’s tastes were catholic, his attention span limitless. He never tired of killing, and he had the additional character flaw of disloyalty or ingratitude, rarely bothering to carry his kills back to his owners. He captured and toyed and butchered, and then sometimes he snacked a little, but usually he just abandoned the carcass. The open grassy woods below Walter’s house and the surrounding edge habitat were particularly attractive to birds and Bobby. Walter kept a little pile of stones to throw at him, and he’d once scored a direct aqueous hit with the pressure nozzle on his garden hose, but Bobby had soon learned to stay in the woods in the early morning, waiting for Walter to leave for work. Some of the Conservancy holdings that Walter managed were far enough away that he was often gone for several nights, and almost invariably, when he returned home, he found fresh carnage on the slope behind his house. If it had only been happening in this one place, he might have stood it, but knowing that it was happening everywhere deranged him.
And yet he was too softhearted and law-abiding to kill somebody’s pet. He thought of bringing in his brother Mitch to do the job, but Mitch’s existing criminal record argued against taking this chance, and Walter could see that Linda Hoffbauer would probably just get another cat. Only after a second summer of diplomacy and educational efforts had failed, and after Linda Hoffbauer’s husband had blocked his driveway with snow one too many times, did he decide that, although Bobby was just one cat among seventy-five million in America, the time had come for Bobby to pay personally for his sociopathy. Walter obtained a trap and detailed instructions from one of the contractors fighting the nearly hopeless war on ferals on Conservancy lands, and before dawn one morning in May he placed the trap, baited with chicken livers and bacon, along the path that Bobby was wont to tread onto his property. He knew that, with a smart cat, you only got one chance with a trap. Sweet to his ears were the feline cries coming up the hill two hours later. He hustled the jerking, shit-smelling trap up to his Prius and locked it in the trunk. That Linda Hoffbauer had never put a collar on Bobby-too restrictive of her cat’s precious freedom, presumably-made it all the easier for Walter, after a three-hour drive, to deposit the animal at a Minneapolis shelter that would either kill it or fob it off on an urban family who would keep it indoors.
He wasn’t prepared for the depression that beset him on his drive out of Minneapolis. The sense of loss and waste and sorrow: the feeling that he and Bobby had in some way been married to each other, and that even a horrible marriage was less lonely than no marriage at all. Against his will, he pictured the sour cage in which Bobby would now be dwelling. He knew better than to imagine that Bobby was missing the Hoffbauers personally-cats were all about using people-but there was something pitiable about his trappedness nonetheless.
For nearly six years now, he’d been living by himself and finding ways to make it work. The state chapter of the Conservancy, which he’d once directed, and whose coziness with corporations and millionaires now made him queasy, had granted his wish to be rehired as a low-level property manager and, in the frozen months, as an assistant on particularly tedious and time-consuming administrative tasks. He wasn’t doing dazzling good on the lands he oversaw, but he wasn’t doing any harm, either, and the days he got to pass alone among the conifers and loons and sedge and woodpeckers were mercifully forgetful. The other work he did-writing grant proposals, reviewing wildlife population literature, making cold calls on behalf of a new sales tax to support a state Land Conservation Fund, which had eventually garnered more votes in the 2008 election than even Obama had-was similarly unobjectionable. In the late evening, he prepared one of the five simple suppers he now bothered with, and then, because he could no longer read novels or listen to music or do anything else associated with feeling, he treated himself to computer chess and computer poker and, sometimes, to the raw sort of pornography that bore no relation to human emotion.
At times like this, he felt like a sick old fucker living in the woods, and he was careful to turn his phone off, lest Jessica call to check up on him. Joey he could still be himself with, because Joey was not only a man but a Berglund man, too cool and tactful to intrude, and although Connie was trickier, because there was always sex in Connie’s voice, sex and innocent flirtation, it was never too hard to get her chattering about herself and Joey, because she was so happy. The real ordeal was hearing from Jessica. Her voice sounded more than ever like Patty’s, and Walter was often perspiring by the end of their conversations, from the effort of keeping them focused on her life or, failing that, on his work. There had been a time, after the car accident that had effectively ended his life, when Jessica had descended on him and nursed him in his grief. She’d done this partly in expectation of his getting better, and when she’d realized he would not be getting better, didn’t feel like getting better, never wanted to get better, she’d become very angry with him. It had taken him several hard years to teach her, with coldness and sternness, to leave him alone and attend to her own life. Each time a silence fell between them now, he could feel her wondering whether to renew her therapeutic assault, and he found it deeply grueling to invent new conversational gambits, week after week, to prevent her from doing so.
When he finally got home from his Minneapolis errand, after a productive three-day visit to a big Conservancy parcel in Beltrami County, he found a sheet of paper stapled to the birch tree at the head of his driveway. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? it asked. MY NAME IS BOBBY AND MY FAMILY MISSES ME. Bobby’s black face didn’t reproduce well in photocopy-his pale, hovering eyes looked spectral and lost-but Walter was now able to see, as he hadn’t before, how somebody might find such a face worthy of protection and tenderness. He didn’t regret having removed a menace from the ecosystem, and thereby saved many bird lives, but the small-animal vulnerability in Bobby’s face made him aware of a fatal defect in his own makeup, the defect of pitying even the beings he most hated. He proceeded down his driveway, trying to enjoy the momentary peace that had fallen on his property, the absence of anxiety about Bobby, the spring evening light, the white-throated sparrows singing pure sweet Canada Canada Canada, but he had the sense of having aged many years in the four nights he’d been away.
That very evening, while frying some eggs and toasting some bread, he got a call from Jessica. And maybe she’d called him with a purpose, or maybe she heard something in his voice now, some loss of resolve, but as soon as they’d exhausted the meager news that her foregoing week had produced, he fell silent for so long that she was emboldened to renew her old assault.
“So I saw Mom the other night,” she said. “She told me something interesting that I thought you might want to hear. Do you want to hear it?”
“No,” he said sternly.
“Well, do you mind if I ask why not?”
From outdoors, in blue twilight, through the open kitchen window, came the cry of a distant child calling Bobby!
“Look,” Walter said. “I know you and she are close, and that’s fine with me. I’d be sorry if you weren’t. I want you to have two parents. But if I were interested in hearing from her, I could call her up myself. I don’t want you in the position of carrying messages.”