A Burned-Over District

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 16

  Lu was wearing a grim expression when Albert and I got home from Parnell’s place. “I found him curled up in the litter box,” she told me. “He peed, but he just didn’t bother to get out.” I handed over Albert and went to look. Lu had put Mervyn back in his heated cave after cleaning him up a bit. He was in there, facing the back with only his tail sticking out, somewhat crusty from the litter box, and didn’t even raise his butt when I petted him.

  “He’s just really tired.”

  “Simon, he won’t even eat any baby food,” she said.

  “We know he has these ups and downs,” I insisted. She didn’t answer, and we avoided the subject while we had dinner, did the dishes, got Albert ready for bed and put him down. Too bummed out even to grade papers, I slumped on the couch to watch an episode in the Soprano family’s convoluted moral universe while Lu got into her nightgown and sat in bed reading her book about the early Christians and the fall of Jerusalem, Bible on the covers next to her and open to the Gospels for ready reference. She disapproved of the Sopranos and of my watching them, but my matching skepticism about her Bible studies kept her at bay in that area. These differences formed deep fissures in the rolling plain of our marriage, and a number of unpleasant tumbles had taught us to skirt them carefully.

  Somebody didn’t get whacked yet to end the episode, and I got up to check on Mervyn. He didn’t seem to have moved at all. All I could see was his tail, its gray fur spikey with a coating of dried pee and speckled with crumbs of litter. I lifted him carefully out of the cave and spent a little time cleaning off the tail with a damp paper towel, then put him on the bed on his yellow towel and gave him the shot of Ringer’s. Lu watched silently over the tops of her reading glasses. Mervyn continued to lie, catlike, on the towel after the injection, with his paws stretched in front of him, and didn’t move to lick up the turkey baby food I offered him, even when I ran my hand encouragingly over his stegosaurus backbone. I got ready for bed, then got under the covers and positioned him between us. Lu took off her glasses and put them, along with her books, on the bedside table and turned off the light.

  For a while we lay there without speaking. Then I rolled onto my side and lifted up the blanket a little to look. I could see Mervyn’s blind eyes, their opaque surfaces reflecting the very faint radiance that always suffused the bedroom, no matter how dark the night. He was just waiting, as usual. But tonight it was difficult to avoid the sensation that he was waiting for me.

  “All right. Shit.” I got out of bed and started putting my clothes back on.

  Lu turned on the light. “I’ll do it if you want,” she offered. “But one of us has to stay here. I don’t want to wake Albert up. Or we could wait until tomorrow.”

  “No, no, it’s all right.” The idea of us lying in bed all night with the doomed Mervyn between us was intolerable; besides which, I had to teach in the morning. And in the morning I might not be able to do it. I’ve always had trouble making up my mind to jump into cold water. I went to the phone and called up Tadich Grant, there being no vet in town. He didn’t seem to be particularly surprised or annoyed to be called in the middle of the night. “Oh sure, Simon, bring him over,” he said. There was a 24-hour emergency vet in Fetlock, but I didn’t particularly want to make that drive. Anyway, Tadich and Mervyn were old friends. I thought that would be better.

  I carefully extracted Mervyn from under the covers and put the baby food in front of him again while I opened up his carrier and arranged the yellow towel inside it. He licked up the pureed turkey avidly, of course, while Lu stroked him sadly. “God damn it,” I said, annoyed that he was rallying again and oppressed by the futility of our ridiculous appetites, thinking how that useless turkey wouldn’t even make it to his intestines. I lifted him into the carrier when he was done eating and closed the little screen door. Lu had opened her books again, but was watching my preparations over the tops of her glasses.

  “I really can do it if you want,” she offered again. But what would I be doing while she and Mervyn were over at Tadich’s? I put my coat on, picked up the carrier, and went out into the darkness.

  The walk to Tadich’s house was short, as are all walks in Mildred. He answered the door as soon as I knocked, and ushered me in his mild-mannered way down the stairs to his windowless basement examination room. “I want it to be a different world, completely separate from the rest of the house,” he’d told me once. Despite its odd location, the examination room was like any other: a table covered with a fresh layer of white paper, a couple of chairs for post-exam consultations, glass cabinets filled with neatly arrayed instruments and potions lining the walls on shelves, a fluorescent light fixture recessed into the tiled ceiling. Tadich was a balding 45-year-old bachelor, said by the women of the town, including my wife, to be quite cute. “He has nice eyes,” Lu had told me more than once. He’d never shown more than friendly interest in any of the women, however, and with the recent celebrity of gay cowboys the inevitable casual speculations about his sexual orientation had intensified. I didn’t envy him if he was gay, the bachelor pickings around town being limited mostly to the likes of Don Swayzee. Whoever he liked to have sex with, I was grateful for his grave and kind presence.

  I took Mervyn out of his carrier and held him draped over my hand while I arranged the yellow towel on the examination table, then put him down on it. He stood quite firmly now, as though he’d never been sick a day in his life, moving his head around to listen and occasionally scratching his chin almost cheerfully on the edge of the cat carrier. He was still alive, still there. How could I be doing this? “He looks better now,” I said. “He even ate some turkey.”

  “It’s the adrenaline,” said Tadich Grant. “They always perk up when you bring them to the vet.” He wasn’t a vet, of course, but I’m sure the distinction was lost on Mervyn. Tadich showed me two syringes filled with different-colored liquids on a tray, like a small selection of desserts. “I think the best thing is to give him a little valium first, to relax him, and then the barbiturates will just stop his heart. It should be very quick.”

  Mervyn didn’t want to lie down, with good reason. The unexpected return of his will to live was making me a little crazy. For a moment all the contradictions inherent in my position seemed to be balled up in the effort to make him lie on his side, so Tadich could get at his hind leg with the needles. He finally surrendered. I stroked his age-coarsened fur while Tadich found a vein and slipped the valium in. His head sagged immediately; and without giving me any time to think about that, Tadich was on him with the other needle. Mervyn opened his mouth in surprise as the plunger was depressed, but he didn’t even have time to say anything. His red tongue stuck out between closed lips, as if he were a dead cartoon cat, and his gaze was already fixed, unblinking. I was astonished at how fast it was. Lifting him off the table, I realized what a difference there is between anything even remotely alive and something that isn’t. If his muscles had been slack before, they were completely missing now, and he hung over my hand like a rag.

  “OK Simon,” said Tadich. He took Mervyn away from me after a bit and wrapped him carefully in the yellow towel, then slid him gently back into the carrier. He knew enough not to try to make me talk. “There’s really no good time to do these things,” he told me as we climbed back up the stairs to the world of the living. He ushered me out with a pat on the shoulder.

  The oddest sensations came while I walked home through the silent streets. There had been a lot of trips to the vet, so the familiar weight of the carrier in my right hand kept telling me that Mervyn was still there, while my consciousness crashed over and over again into the realization that he wasn’t, that I’d done something irrevocable. Cognitive dissonance! My mind kept revolving, each futile cycle ending with the same snap, like what used to be called, back in the dark ages, a broken record. For some reason I was angry; or maybe anger was the only emotion I would allow to float up to the surface. I could feel my face locked into the sulle
n expression that Albert had been trying to mimic when I’d last visited Janet Blythe. I felt like groaning with every snap-back of the record, and in the solitude of midnight Mildred even indulged myself in a few small groans.

  Lu and I buried him in the back yard, under the ornamental plum tree, as soon as I got home. Unsympathetic coyotes yipped and yowled out on the desert while she held the flashlight and I dug a neat little hole. I arranged Mervyn in there, still wrapped in his yellow towel, covered him up with a blanket of sandy volcanic soil, and then laid a heavy stone on top to discourage the scavengers, worrying that it might crush the ribs that he didn’t need any more. Then, while Lu tried to go back to sleep, I spent an hour cleaning up and getting rid of all his stuff. I washed his dishes and put them out of sight, threw his blanket in the laundry, tossed out the remaining Ringer’s solution and needles and all his medications, bagged a few cans of catfood to be wasted on Madame Malesherbes’s frou-frou Siamese. The small damp patch of Mervyn’s final, hopelessly dilute urine in the litter box was heartbreaking. I tossed the litter out, rinsed out the box, and threw it in the trash, after which I was finally able to join Lu in bed. I had trouble sleeping, because I was thinking I shouldn’t have left him wrapped in the yellow towel for eternity; it undoubtedly had bad Ringer’s-solution vibrations. But it couldn’t matter to him, right? And now it was too late anyway. Now that I’d managed to get him in the ground, I certainly wasn’t going to dig him up.