After the train went by, and it started to get brighter, the alarm clock in the upstairs bedroom would go off, and then there’d be noises in the bathroom, and after that from the kitchen the smells of breakfast. Breakfast was their favorite meal of the day, because it was always the same. A little glass of apple juice, and then either puffed rice or cornflakes with milk and sugar and then a crisp piece of toast with butter and jam. They would bow their heads along with Mrs. Fairfield, and Mr. Fairfield too if he were up that early, and thank the Lord for his blessings.
Some Sundays there were even pancakes. Dampy had lived at Grand Junction Day Care before he moved in with the Fairfields (at the time of the first Mrs. Fairfield), and once a month there had been a special Pancake Breakfast Benefit in the lunchroom of the day care. The first Mrs. Fairfield had helped make the pancakes on the gas grill, as many as twenty at a time. Wonderful pancakes, sometimes with blueberries in them, sometimes with shredded coconut, and you could have all you could eat for just $2 if you were under the age of six. Later on, the benefits were not so well attended, and only the children came, as though it were just another school day, except with pancakes, and that’s when Dampy had the accident that got him called Dampy. The children had a food fight, using the paper plates as Frisbees, even though there was syrup on the plates and Miss Washington said not to. No one paid any attention, they never did with Miss Washington, and one plate hit Dampy and got syrup all over him, so Mrs. Fairfield took him back to the big sink and gave him a sponging off, and when that didn’t get off all the syrup, she gave him a real dousing. And he never got entirely dry again.
He didn’t mind being called Dampy. Sticks and stones, as they say. But then there was the Terrible Accident (that really was no accident at all), but why talk about that. There is no need to dwell on the dark side of things, and anyhow that was a fine example of a silver lining, since if it hadn’t been for the Terrible Accident, Dampy would probably never have come to be adopted by the Fairfields on a permanent basis. And the Fairfields’ house despite the arguments was a better place to live than Grand Junction Day Care. Quite lonely, of course, until Hooter had come to live there too, but Dampy had always tended to keep to himself. The new Mrs. Fairfield was the same way. She preferred her solitude and the TV over a lot of friends.
But special friends are different, of course, and from the very start Hooter was to be Dampy’s special friend. He had come to live with Dampy and the Fairfields when Mr. Fairfield had abducted him from his home at the Grand Junction Reformed Church. There he’d been, sitting in his box, listening to the speaker at the Tuesday night AA meeting, but not listening all that closely, and then Mr. Fairfield grabbed hold of him. Mr. Fairfield was there because he’d been arrested for Driving While Intoxicated, and the judge had said he had to go to AA meetings twice a week. So there he was at the Dutch Reformed Church in the folding chair just beside Hooter’s box.
Mr. Fairfield had nervous hands. If he wasn’t fiddling with his cigar, he would be cleaning his fingernails with his Swiss Army pocketknife or tearing a piece of paper into the smallest possible shreds. That night, after he’d turned the two-page list of local AA meetings into confetti he began to play with Hooter, not in a rough way exactly, but certainly with no consideration for Hooter’s feelings. After the people at the meeting had shared their experience, strength, and hope (except for those, like Mr. Fairfield, who had nothing that needed sharing) everyone joined hands and said the Our Father.
That was when Mr. Fairfield had picked up the young owl and whispered into his black felt ear, “Hooter, I am going to adopt you.” “Adopt” was what he said, but “abduct” was how it registered on Hooter, who left the church basement concealed beneath Mr. Fairfield’s Carhardt jacket with a feeling that his Higher Power had betrayed him. After all the time he’d lived in the church basement he’d come to assume that he belonged there, that no one was ever going to take him away, even if he spent every Saturday in the box that said FREE. At first that had been a heartbreaking experience, but the AA meetings had been a consolation in coping with the loneliness and isolation. But Hooter had put his trust in his Higher Power and turned over his will, and he’d learned to accept his life as a church owl. And now here he’d been abducted.
Mr. Fairfield pulled open the door of his pickup, and Hooter was astonished to find that someone had been waiting out here in the freezing pickup all through the meeting. Sitting in the dark, wrapped in a blanket, and looking very miffed at having had to spend all this time in the cold.
“Hooter,” said Mr. Fairfield. “I want you to meet Dampy. Dampy, this is Hooter. He’s going to be your new buddy. So say hello.”
Dampy did not respond at once, but at last he breathed out a long, aggrieved sigh. “Hello,” he said, and moved sideways to make room for Hooter under the blanket. When they were touching, Dampy whispered into Hooter’s ear, “Don’t say anything in front of him.” With a meaningful look in the direction of Mr. Fairfield, who had taken out a brown paper bag from the glove compartment of the pickup.
Hooter knew from his first whiff of the opened bottle that Mr. Fairfield was another secret drinker, like Reverend Drury, the pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church. Hooter had often been the companion of the Reverend’s secret libations in the church basement, and when he didn’t polish off his half-pint of peppermint schnapps at one go he would often leave it in Hooter’s keeping, in the FREE box of broken toys and stained toddler clothes. Now here Hooter was in the same situation again, an enabler.
“Here’s to the two of you!” said Mr. Fairfield, starting up the engine of the pickup and lifting the bottle of alcohol towards Dampy and Hooter. They looked at each other with a sense of shame and complicity, and then the pickup moved out onto Route 97.
“I seen you before, you know that,” Mr. Fairfield said. “At the Saturday garage sale. I noticed you there on the FREE table. For weeks. They can’t give away that ugly little fucker, I thought. So, when I saw you again tonight I thought—I’ve got just the place for him. The perfect little dork of a buddy. Right, Dampy?”
Dampy was mum. It was a cruel and provoking thing to have said to the poor little owl, who was a homely bedraggled creature, to be sure. Dampy was used to having his feelings hurt. He was numb to such abuse. But poor Hooter must have been close to tears.
Mr. Fairfield seemed to pick up on that thought. “Hey, I guess I’m no looker myself. You got that beak, I got this gut, and Dampy there is a goddamn basket case. Dampy has got more problems than Dear Abby. But Dampy don’t talk about his problems. Not to his family anyhow. But maybe he will to you. What do you say, little fella?”
Neither Dampy nor Hooter said a word.
Mr. Fairfield took another hit from the bottle and they continued the rest of the way in silence.
When they arrived home, it was Mr. Fairfield who introduced Hooter to the new Mrs. Fairfield. “Look, honey, we got another member of the family.” He dropped Hooter into Mrs. Fairfield’s lap with a loud but not very owlish Whoo! Whoo!
“Isn’t he a darling?” said Mrs. Fairfield without much conviction. “Isn’t he just the sweetest thing?” She took a puff on her cigarette and asked, “But what is he, anyhow?”
“What bird goes Whoo! Whoo! He’s an owl. Look at him. He’s got a beak like an owl, and those big eyes. Got to be an owl. So we called him Hooter.”
“But he’s got teddy-bear-type ears,” Mrs. Fairfield objected.
“So? No one’s perfect. He’s a fuckin’ owl. Give him a kiss. Go ahead.”
Mrs. Fairfield put her cigarette in the ashtray, and sighed, and smiled, and planted a delicate kiss on Hooter’s beak. Hooter could tell it was a real kiss, with feelings behind it, and so he knew he was a member of the Fairfield family from that point on. He, who’d thought he’d never belong to any family but just spend the rest of his life in a box in the basement of the Dutch Reformed Church.
“Okay?” said Mrs. Fairfield, turning to her husband.
“Now tell him
you love him.”
“I love you,” said MR. Fairfield, still looking at Mr. Fairfield in an anxious way.
“Okay then,” said Mr. Fairfield, rubbing his hand across the fur on his own head, which was the same color brown as Hooter’s but much longer. “We got that settled. Now you all better hit the sack. I’m outa here.”
Mrs. Fairfield looked disappointed, but she didn’t ask where he was off to or whether she could come along.
Mrs. Fairfield was basically a stay-at-home type, and Dampy and Hooter took after her in that respect. They might spend hours at a time on the love seat watching TV with Mrs. Fairfield, or playing Parcheesi by themselves under the dining room table with its great mounds of folded clothes waiting to be ironed. Rarely did they go out of the house, for they knew there was good reason not to. The woods were just behind the house, and Mr. Fairfield told fearful tales about the woods. Most animals that did not have human families to live with had no home but the woods, which could be a dangerous place, even for owls. Owls are predators themselves, and hunt for mice and smaller birds, but they are preyed upon in turn by wolves and bears and snakes. As for young pussycats, Mr. Fairfield said, the woods meant certain death. Dampy must never, never go into the woods by himself, not even with Hooter, or they would certainly be eaten alive by the predators out there.
Dampy would listen to these stories with a shiver of dread. Hooter, however, sometimes wondered if Mr. Fairfield was not exaggerating about the woods. Of course, the woods were out there. You could see them through the windows, and you could see the woodland creatures too, if you were patient—the deer and the two nice groundhogs and all the different kinds of birds, some of whom Mrs. Fairfield could identify, the crows and robins and chickadees, but most of the rest she had no name for. At sunset, in the summers, there were even bats, with their squeaky, unpleasant songs. But were all these woodland creatures as unfriendly and dangerous as Mr. Fairfield made them out to be? Hooter was not convinced.
And—another question entirely—was Dampy really a cat? Mrs. Fairfield had said once that he looked to her much more like a koala bear. She pointed out that he had ears like the koala bear in the advertisements for Qantas Airlines. Qantas was based in Australia, where most koala bears live. And Hooter thought she had a point. Even without a nose, Dampy looked more like a koala bear than a cat.
But Mr. Fairfield was adamant. Dampy was a cat. To prove it he sang a song. The song went like this:
The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat.
They took some honey and plenty of money.
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!
“Dampy is not a girl,” Hooter objected. It was the first time he’d ever contradicted anything Mr. Fairfield said, and Mr. Fairfield gave him a sour look and then a swat that knocked him halfway across the room.
“If I say he’s a girl, he’s a fucking girl. And if I say he’s a Pussy, he’s a Pussy. You got that?”
“Harry, please,” said Mrs. Fairfield.
“Harry, please,” Mr. Fairfield said in a whining tone meant to mock his wife, though in fact it didn’t sound at all like her.
“I guess cats are always females then,” said Mrs. Fairfield to Hooter. “Dogs are boys, and cats are girls.”
No one went to help Hooter until Mr. Fairfield had left the room, but Dampy exchanged a look of sympathy with him, as sad as could be.
Later, when they could talk without being overheard, Hooter protested (in a whisper, with the sheets over his head): “Is there nothing we can do then? Are we just trapped here, and have to suffer every kind of abuse?”
“He can be very mean,” Dampy agreed.
“And just as mean to Mrs. Fairfield as he is to us.”
“Meaner, actually. Last year, about a week after New Year’s, he sent the first Mrs. Fairfield to the hospital emergency room and she had to get seven stitches in her head. You could see them when she took off the bandanna she had to wear.”
“Why would he do that?” Hooter asked, aghast. “And what did he do?”
“Well, they’d been singing this song that he likes. Over and over. And finally she said she was too tired to sing anymore, and he just sat there where you’re sitting now, staring at her, and then he got up and smashed his guitar right over her head. And do you know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think it was really the guitar he was angry with. ‘Cause he never played it very well. But no one ever complained, not with him. But it was a big relief for him not to have people hear how lousy he played his guitar. And he never got another one to replace the one he smashed.”
“He’s not a nice person,” said Hooter gravely.
“He’s not,” Dampy agreed. “But we should try and get some sleep. Tomorrow is another day.” He put his arms round Hooter, and they snuggled.
In such a small household, in a lonely part of the country with no neighbors close by, it was inevitable that Dampy and Hooter would spend much time together and become the closest friends. From Hooter, Dampy learned all about the Dutch Reformed Church and Reverend Drury and the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Of Hooter’s life before he became a church owl there was not much to be told. He’d been a prize at the ring toss game at the Grand Junction Centennial Street Fair, but the teenage girl who received Hooter from the winner of the ring toss donated him almost at once to the Dutch Reformed’s weekly garage sale. Hooter often felt, he confided to Dampy, like one of those Romanian children you hear about on “All Things Considered” (a program that Reverend Drury listened to every day) who have spent their whole childhood in an orphanage and later have trouble relating to their adoptive parents.
To which Dampy had replied, “I’m not so sure that that would be altogether a bad thing. Some parents you might not want to relate to any more than absolutely necessary.”
“You mean … Mr. Fairfield?”
Dampy nodded. “And not just him. She was just as bad, the first Mrs. Fairfield. Our life here is actually an improvement over what it used to be, with her.”
“You’ve never said that much about her before. Was it she who …” Hooter touched the stub of his wing to the end of his beak to indicate the same area on Dampy’s face.
“Who pulled off my nose? No, that happened at the Day Care. There was a boy there, Ray McNulty, who kept pulling at my nose, and pulling and pulling. Miss Washington told him not to, but he wouldn’t listen. Then one day when everyone was supposed to be napping he just ripped it right off. But that wasn’t enough for Ray McNulty! Then he took a pair of scissors and opened the seam at my neck.”
“And no one’s ever tried to sew it up again?”
Dampy went up to the mirror mounted beside the front door and looked at himself morosely. His neck was slit open from the front to just under his left ear, which gave a sad, sideways tilt to his head and meant that you had to listen very intently when he spoke. “Once, yes. Once, Mrs. Fairfield tried to mend my neck—the new Mrs. Fairfield. She means well, but she’s hopeless with a needle and thread. I’m used to it now. I don’t mind how it looks.”
Hooter went up to him and tried to push the stuffing back inside the wound in his neck. “It’s such a shame. You’d look so handsome with just a bit of needlework.”
Dampy turned away from the mirror. “That’s nice of you to say. Anyhow, I was telling you about the first Mrs. Fairfield.”
“Was she like him?” Hooter asked. “I mean, did she drink?”
“Yes, and when she drank, she became violent. They quarreled all the time, and she liked to break things. She broke dishes. She threw an electric skillet through the kitchen window. She poured a whole bottle of red wine over him when he wa
s lying drunk on the rug, and when the ants got to that, oh boy! And then, if he reacted, she called the police. She had him sent to jail twice.”
“So what finally happened? Did they get a divorce?”
Dampy’s reply was almost inaudible. Hooter had to ask him to repeat what he said. “She died,” he said in a hoarse whisper. This time he added, “And it was no accident either.”
He was reluctant to supply any further details, and Hooter knew better than to pester him with lots of questions. In any case, there was a more important question pending:
Dampy had asked Hooter if he would marry him!
Hooter had objected that they were the same sex, but Dampy pointed out that same-sex marriages were discussed all the time on the news, and while they weren’t allowed among Southern Baptists and Catholics and Orthodox Jews, the two of them were Dutch Reformed if they were anything. Besides which, according to Mr. Fairfield, Dampy was a girl, not a boy, so it wouldn’t be same-sex. The important thing was did they love each other and would they go on loving each other to the end of time or death did them part. At last, Hooter had answered, in the words of the song, “O let us be married! too long we have tarried: but what shall we do for a ring?”
In the poem the owl and the pussycat sail off to a wooded island where a pig sells them, for a shilling, the ring that’s in his nose, but in real life finding a ring was a lot easier, for Mrs. Fairfield had a jewel case containing as great a variety of rings as you might find in a jewelry store. There were rings with rubies and emeralds and two with amethysts (the new Mrs. Fairfield was an Aquarius, and the amethyst is the birthstone for February), but the ring they finally selected was a four-carat facsimile zirconium diamond mounted in 14-karat gold from the Home Shoppers’ Club.
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