September 6, 2010; Eight-Paws

I like it when Skeeter talks about his childhood because it seems so far ago, as it is, and foggy (foggy from the fogey). I like to hear about family (especially now I'm looking for Ceecee). Not his family, fercrissakes!, 'cause as he ages he gets all maudlin and boring talking about them. No, I want to hear about my family: the great and noble clan of the Dogs.

Like yesterday. We were cuddling in the La-Z-Boy. It was a day off from the clinic and there was no appliance change and Boo-Boo was there in the morning, which meant Skeeter didn't have to get up "early" (ie: before noon) to walk me. He was content and when he is content I know he is nostalgic and I know I can hit him up for a story. "Tell me about your childhood dogs," I said. So he did. And didn't.

The dogs of my childhood were nice enough. But they weren't special—just there for us to ignore and my father to bitch about and adore. We had a pekingese named Kubie. We had a beagle named Mortimer. I don't have vivid memories of them. But there was a cat—

"—I don't want to hear about a fucking cat!—"

"—This one, yes."

I sighed and said, "Go on. I'll stop you if it gets tedious." He did.

When I was a little boy my father bought us our first house. It was in a brand new suburb and it was the first house in that suburb. The problem was that the subdivision's plumbing passed through where they also put the brand new city dump. We knew this for the first time because my older brothers and sisters were having a dance in our finished basement and one of their teenage friends went into the new bathroom down there and let out a scream like fucking Leatherface was behind the shower curtain. It wasn't a murderer; just a giant garbage dump rat swimming about in the toilet bowl. It was the first of many, many, many who began to show up and eat everything.

The rats were dangerous enough that in the morning my father had to get up and hunt and kill them with a broom before the rest of us dared put our toes on the floor. We had a dog, the peke, but it was as scared of the fucking rats as the rest of us. You could here them skitter in the walls and under the floor and their presence was in the ruins they left: eaten books and wood and even furniture. One day our pipes went down. When the plumber came he opened up the floor to get to the waterworks; he found a knot of drowned rats in the pipes where others had actually eaten a hole in the metal and gotten through and into the house.

Now my Dad was pissed. This problem was costing a lot of money. So off he went to the SPCA to get a cat. The problem was he brought my sisters with him and what they brought home was a cute little black and white thing that was gone so fast I don't even remember its name. Killed and partly eaten by the rats.

"Dead cats," I interrupted, "I like this story." Skeeter snapped me on my nose with his fingertips and went on.

Now my father was as enraged as I've ever seen him. He went back to the SPCA, without my sisters this time, and said to the good people there, "Listen to me: I don't want a kitty. I don't want anything cute. I have a rat problem. I want a ratter. So I want to see something that's up to the task." When they showed him what was in one cage, my father smiled. When he brought home the inhabitant of that cage and my mother saw it, she gasped and I think my little brother may have cried.

"Like Slicer?" I said.

"Slicer was a fucking little tot in a Catholic girls' school uniform, bobby socks and patent leather shoes compared to this animal," Skeeter said and went on with his tale.

It had a huge scar across it's face from fighting which made its whiskers go off in all directions. One of its ears was chewed off and the other messed up, also from fighting. On each of its four feet it not only had one huge paw but jutting out, a little above the walking paw, was another small—but fully-formed—paw. This meant that when it walked about it thumped about. When it met the peke, they both stared at each other and became good friends. My father thought the friendship was a bad sign but nevertheless, that night, he let, Sultan, the cat loose in the house and we all went to bed.

The first night, and for several nights after, it was like a motherfucking horror movie. That cat hunted. That cat caught. That cat tore apart. That cat feasted. That cat screamed as it did all of this and then shrieked with triumph after each kill and it was like a demon had been set loose; it didn't sound catlike, it didn't sound like an animal at all...it sounded like evil. And in the morning it joined the family at the breakfast table and stank up the place and then it played with the peke and then it slept. And then night would come again and, in fairly short order, Sultan solved our rat problem.

Then he broke into our new neighbours houses, through their basement windows, and one by one solved their rat problems as well. And then, one morning, after it had been away for a few days, my father opened the door to get the paper and there was Sultan, on the stoop, with some kind of cadaver of some wild animal no longer identifiable as anything that was once alive—Sultan was offering it to my father who now was head over heels in love with this insane being.

He stopped talking. What he described chilled my blood (this was, after all, a cat that could easily have killed me), but I wanted to know more. "What happened to him?"

"He just disappeared. There were still woods and wild fields not too far away, in those days, and I suspect he went into them and hunted to his heart's content. He was a good pet, but was never meant to be. Like Slicer. Sultan was something else."

"Indeed," I said and shuddered. Skeeter laughed and hugged me close like I was a terrified little girl. "It's the cold," I lied and he laughed again.

Then I fell asleep in his arms but the twat shrieked in my ear—an ungodly, hideous, guttural noise that made me leap up—and he laughed his fucking huge ass off and said, "That's a little what Sultan sounded like."

I heard that howl in my dreams.