Buddy

by Brian McGrory

  Add to that the two rabbits that lived in a large cage on the kitchen floor, constantly scurrying about, making noise, happily grabbing the food that came their way. Every once in a while, the kids would pull them out to hold and stroke, and one or both would invariably get away, setting off an urgent search-and-rescue operation, the rescue part being for the electric or phone cords that they would invariably chew. Somewhere else in the house, I believe, there were a couple of frogs in a goldfish bowl.

  Into this overpopulated world, Abigail wanted to bring a kitten. It was like saying the Brady Bunch sure could have used a few more kids to liven things up.

  “But here’s the thing,” Abigail said, oddly cheery in the face of my initial rejection. “You told me we could get a kitten.”

  I’d heard that one before. Hell, I’d used a variation on that bluff many times before.

  In an exaggerated tone, I said, “I never said you could get a kitten. I probably said, ‘Why don’t we get you a new pair of mittens?’ ”

  Abigail shook her head, still light and smiling. Something bothered me about it, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it was her confidence in the face of my negativity. Maybe it was the fact that, at nine years of age, she had an IQ that was probably fifty points higher than mine. Maybe it was the fact that I was starting to vaguely recall some dumb remark I might have made in regard to a cat many, many long months before. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Me saying something.

  Or maybe it was the fact that she was holding something in her hand that she was choosing not to show to me—yet.

  “You did say it,” she said. “You even wrote it.” She held out a sheet of paper, 8.5 by 11 inches, and written across the top were the words “The bearer of this certificate is entitled to one cat of his or her choosing, at a time that he or she desires.” Beneath those words was a crude depiction of, I think, a cat, something that a preschooler might have drawn with a beginner’s box of Crayola crayons. Beneath that were the words “This certificate expires upon the graduation of the recipient from high school.”

  And below that was a signature, some virtually illegible scrawl, like that of a madman, and I knew immediately whose it was.

  Mine.

  Shit.

  I looked over at Pam, who had watched the entire scene unfold utterly silently and with a look of bemusement on her face. She flashed me a warm, only semisympathetic smile. From our previous discussions about this, I was beginning to harbor suspicions that she was playing for the opposing team. In her mind, the more animals, the better, and I was living in the physical manifestation of that.

  I studied Abigail’s sheet like a drug-trafficking suspect inspecting a search warrant at the door of his apartment. Surely I must have been wise enough to write in some escape clause, some technicality to allow for a long stall. I vaguely recalled an eighth birthday, a desperate plea to Pam about what I could get a kid who had everything—every American Girl doll, every imaginable configuration of a stuffed pony, enough arts-and-crafts supplies to last a year’s worth of rainy days.

  “Well, she really wants a cat,” Pam had said then.

  A cat, I thought. Okay. I wasn’t living with them yet. A lot of things could happen between then and that. It was the afternoon of her birthday. I had no time. I had no ideas. I had only an irrational fear of this one little kid, a fear that I don’t think I’ve ever had of anyone before—not my editors, nor the powerful politicians or the criminals I sometimes wrote about, who were often one and the same. I could only imagine the look if she unwrapped a hula hoop or a badminton set or a board game, as if I was the biggest moron on the face of this Earth. All I wanted was to please her, to have her say thank you and really mean it, to confide in her mother that Brian, swell guy that he is, really does know how to give a good gift.

  The day I gave her the certificate, how was I supposed to see into the future? How was I supposed to imagine me and Pam and her kids and a crowing rooster proudly soiling the decks and porches and a dog named Walter panting in my face every moment I was home with a look that said, You and me forever! How was I supposed to imagine that the cat promised to the bearer of this certificate could and probably would become my sanity’s tipping point?

  To tell Abigail no, though, would have turned me into the exact kind of adult that I’d never wanted to become—the untrustworthy one. My job, my persona, was pretty much based on my word. I needed to tell the truth. To that end, I made a point of never even telling any one of my dogs something I didn’t know to be completely accurate. I’d never say, “I’ll be home in five minutes,” if I knew it was actually going to be two hours. I never faked a throw. If you want to have faith in the world around you, you need to give it faith as well.

  Of course, to say yes would have meant adding a cat to the barnyard cacophony that had become my life. This was not an easy one.

  I looked at Pam again. She shrugged. Never before had I seen her so silent.

  So I pulled the ultimate adult stall tactic with Abigail. I told her, “We’ll talk about this a little more in the next few days.”

  And we would have. We absolutely would have, except two cats, one, of course, for young Caroline, arrived before we had time for that talk. At work, I could and would stand up to corrupt politicians. I could and would take unpopular positions in print. At home, though, I buckled in the presence of a nine-year-old girl and her request to turn our house into a glorified petting zoo.

  Sure enough, it took me all of about a week to fall completely head over heels for those two cats, particularly the constantly purring one named Charlie. But that doesn’t negate the fact that it was just a couple of months into my move, a couple of months into this newfangled family life, and my very name had officially become an antonym for control.

  A few weeks later, after summer rolled into autumn, I blew out of work at about 5:15 one uneventful Wednesday afternoon with every intention of catching Pam and the kids for dinner. I was learning that I rarely made it home for dinner, though I don’t honestly think it was my fault. Young kids need to eat by 5:30 or 6. Newspaper columnists need to work until 5 or 6. Residents of my town have at least an hour’s drive during the evening rush hour. The formula, quite simply, didn’t work.

  Of course, on that particular day, I hit a wall of traffic on the highway that could make the sanest commuter question the meaning and purpose of life, and left me seething in my car. If this epic tie-up had happened a year before, I would have just assumed that there was a cataclysmic crash up ahead requiring a fleet of medevac helicopters to transport many grievously injured victims to area hospitals, perhaps a busload of orphans that had gone off the road. But what I quickly came to learn was that to the average, everyday suburban commuter, it was known as evening rush hour.

  I sat in standstill traffic and fretted. I am not by nature a complainer, but it was starting to get to me, this whole thing. I felt as though I spent the bulk of my day scanning radio stations and talking on the cell phone as I drove to and from work. There was, for the record, no easy public transit option, and as a columnist, I never knew where I’d end up on a given day, so I always needed my car. The old Brian, meaning city Brian, had loved long drives because he could use the time to gather his thoughts and regroup. But the old Brian hadn’t had a daily list of chores a mile long that had accompanied his foray into suburbia: running the dogs, cleaning the decks, watering the flowers, helping with the kids, feeding the unappreciative chicken. The old Brian hadn’t been wracked by guilt—guilt over not spending enough time with the kids, guilt that his dog’s life had become boring in the confines of a suburban yard, guilt because he was spending more time commuting than actually working, guilt over never getting everything done to the house that needed to be done, guilt over not being helpful enough with Pam.

  I was doing much more than I ever had before, and doing none of it well. Those people with houses and kids and yards and faraway jobs, they are one tough group, all of them scheduled to
within a nanosecond of their lives. There was no margin of error.

  So I sat in my car on the Massachusetts Turnpike and thought of the way it used to be, the simplicity of city life, the tranquillity of long walks with the dog, the ease of never feeling guilty over not being there enough with the kids, walking to great restaurants with Pam. That very night, for instance, I’d skipped a gym workout to get home, which meant I’d missed the regular group of guys who gather at the bar afterward to watch the Red Sox on TV, which meant I had grown one day more isolated from so many things I treasured about my old life.

  My cell phone rang. “Are you going to make it?” Pam asked. She sounded weary. Actually, that’s being polite; she sounded completely exhausted. As pressed as I constantly felt, she was infinitely busier, between the demands of her business and the relentless needs of two kids who want to be around her and all over her all day, every day. She also had a whining fiancé in need of reassurance that everything was going to end up all right.

  “I’m trying,” I said. “But I don’t know if the million other commuters are going to let me.”

  She paused and said, “All right. I’m going to go ahead and feed them. They’re starved, and we all want to get to bed early.”

  What was I supposed to say, don’t feed two hungry kids because I want to be part of it? No. I hung up, and fifty arduous minutes later, I was home.

  If I’d ever imagined suburban life as a fairy tale, me walking through the door like Dick Van Dyke used to do with his son racing out to excitedly greet him, that pretty much went away the first time Buddy leaped up on the front porch in a bid to extricate me from my privates. Pam knew I was trying, and she appreciated it. She knew I was struggling, and she appreciated that as well. When I finally walked in on this particular night, an hour after I’d intended to be there, the house was dimly lit. There was no one downstairs to greet me, no one—besides the dogs—who cared that I had arrived. Pam was on her computer in the family room, checking in on the day’s activity at her clinic. She gave me a quiet, bleary-eyed greeting. The two kids were hunkered down on the couch, swaddled in throws, mesmerized by iCarly.

  “Everyone’s exhausted,” Pam explained. So I retreated to the kitchen—me, my frustration, and my angst. There I pulled the foil off the plate of ravioli that Pam had made me and heated it up in the microwave. I found the local paper and sat at the counter, mindlessly eating pasta and marinara sauce while reading a story about how excited the new assistant town clerk was to work in a community like mine.

  Upstairs, the TV played softly. I heard Pam tell the kids, “Five more minutes to bed.” Tigger, the more demanding of the two Maine coon cats, jumped from the floor to the stool next to mine. He jumped from the stool to the counter. He lay down beside me, staring me in the face in the haunting way he always did, just the two of us in the dimness of the kitchen. I stroked his fur and told him he was a good boy, even if he was on the counter. Hey, at least he wanted to share a few moments with me.

  “You and me, Tigs,” I said. I took another bite and thought about what the guys were probably doing at the bar of the University Club that night, rooting for the Red Sox, giving one another a hard time, eating a dry-aged steak or a plate of oysters. It’s funny, because when you’re there, all those nights, you assume there must be something better, more meaningful, somewhere else.

  And there I was, somewhere else, and it amounted to nothing but a bucket of loneliness. I’d made the big move to suburbia because I’d feared the day that I’d be home all alone, night after night, eating with my dog. And there I was in this new house, surrounded by people and other various creatures, eating all alone with my new cat. I kind of laughed a little bit, quietly, a desperate person’s laugh. Suddenly Tigger lifted his paw and swatted at my plate, knocking the uneaten half of one of my last ravioli onto the counter. He grabbed it in his mouth, red sauce dripping down his furry little chin, and plunged victoriously to the floor.

  And then it was just me.

  20

  Help sometimes arrives at the most unexpected times from the most unlikely places. In this particular instance, it was an otherwise lazy autumn Sunday morning, the “otherwise” referring to the rooster that was strutting around the front lawn sometimes barking, occasionally crowing, and generally being a nuisance. I was tossing the tennis ball for two delighted golden retrievers. Pam and the kids were inside, starting breakfast and warming up to the day, coming and going from the yard. It was not a bad beginning at our humble house.

  I settled into an Adirondack chair next to an evergreen tree at the far end of the yard from Buddy and opened the Sunday papers. If he was going to attack me, he’d have to walk the length of the grass first and I’d see him the entire way. As I read, the dogs delivered the ball to me, placed it on the armrest, and set off in pursuit when I gave a brisk toss. Eventually, they lay down in the dew to contemplate their good fortunes.

  We were all immersed in our own routines—I was reading, the dogs were resting, Buddy was pecking at insects—when I heard an unusual sound emanating from the bird, kind of a friendly chirp or a curious caw more than a menacing crow or a happy bark. I looked up and saw him standing near the fence, staring into the street. I followed his gaze and saw a big black sport-utility vehicle at a full stop in front of our house, idling, no more than twenty feet from the bird. That didn’t at first strike me as unusual. Buddy had become something of a local spectacle, a one-animal zoo exhibit that seemed to attract visitors from far and wide, drivers who would slow to a crawl or come to a complete stop while kids in the backseat pointed, waved, and even called out his name: “Buddy, Buddy, we love you!” How they had learned his identity and how he inspired such emotions, I had no idea.

  But then I watched as the passenger-side window of the SUV glided down. A hairy hand protruded from the inside of the car. The hand held a camera. I heard the quiet click of rapid-fire shots, one after another, like you’d hear at a fashion shoot.

  Click. Click. Click. Click.

  Buddy continued to stare at the camera with an increasingly delighted look on his twitching face, as if he were posing, basking in the attention that has always seemed to fit him like a suit of custom-sewn feathers. A moment later, the two dogs noticed the visitor and began to trot in its direction. At that point the hand disappeared back into the confines of the vehicle. The window glided up as smoothly as it had gone down. And the black SUV, glistening in the morning sun, continued down the quiet country road, accelerating on its way.

  Of one thing I was certain: it had not been a random encounter. Some guy on a leisurely Sunday-morning drive didn’t just happen to spot a rooster in a suburban yard and say to himself, I’m so lucky to have this camera in the front seat with me because my wife is never going to believe it. For one, he had approached the house slowly. Two, he had spotted the rooster at the beginning of our property. The normal gawkers, and, as I said, we get many, are usually halfway past when they see his eminence strutting around the yard, at which point they slam on the brakes, roll down the window, and shout something creative, like “Cock-a-doodle-doo.” Third, the guy took the pictures with a camera, presumably one with a telephoto lens, rather than a cell phone, which told me he meant business. This wasn’t a snapshot on his iPhone that he’d pull up at a bar one night to show his friends—look at what this crazy family has wandering around their yard! No. My house had been his destination.

  Amid the calculation, I was trying to discern my own reaction, which can probably be best summarized as follows: what the hell took so long? For the last couple of months, I’d been starting to think I might be going crazy. I seemed to be the only person around who thought it wildly annoying, if not outright unacceptable, that we were providing sanctuary to a feathery monster who screeched to the treetops all day, every day, in our front yard. As I’ve said, Pam and the kids did their level best to ignore it. The neighbors had not complained about it, which stunned me. As a matter of fact, I’d happened across a scene in which Tim, the
very nice owner of the house behind us, was having a conversation with Buddy along the back fence. Come on, Tim. If I lived next door to me, I would have hired Colonel Sanders himself to stalk my front yard.

  Now, finally, hopefully, some mysterious driver in a jet-black SUV seemed to be taking matters into his own hands. I could picture the scene Monday morning when whatever town official it is that handles livestock complaints arrives in his or her office to find a manila envelope containing a set of glossy eight-by-tens of Buddy staring wild-eyed into the camera, a brand-new house as backdrop. If the owner of the black SUV was smart, the photographs would be accompanied by a noise study or actual tapes of Buddy crowing at various times in the day. I could have kicked myself for not jumping into my car and following the guy. I would have caught up to him in a strip mall parking lot, and he’d have been throwing up his hands and saying “I’m not trying to do anything, I just like chickens.” I’d have to tell him, “Relax. We’re on the same side here, pal. Let’s figure out a strategy together.”

  I struggled to get to my feet and ambled into the house to tell Pam, “Something happened just now that doesn’t feel right.” I gave her the blow-by-blow of the scene outside. At the end, she reached the same conclusion as me, only she didn’t take it as well.

  “He’s a rooster,” she repeated three or four times. “He’s adjusting to a new environment. What do people expect, that he has no instincts? That he’s just going to sit quietly and wait for some predator to jump the fence or swoop in from the skies? No, he’s doing what centuries of breeding have told him to do, and that’s to protect himself in any way he can.”

  I probably could have told Pam that most neighbors didn’t think it was normal to have a rooster in the yard to begin with, but I decided that was not the time to bring it up. “Well, hopefully Buddy settles in sooner rather than later and starts to quiet down, for his own good.” And mine.