My Neighbor's Dog
When we first moved from Boston to Carlinville, Illinois, we brought with us four cats, later to become five when we lost one Bostonian but were adopted by two mid-Western natives. Each of our cats loved the outdoors, and each one, used to the crowded conditions of the Northeast, was determined to establish for itself as extensive a territory as possible.
Since our yard in Carlinville was rather small, even by the standards of the lower-middle-class suburban Boston we had come from, the cats of course decided to be imperial. They annexed the yards of our neighbors on either side, the alleyway behind the three houses, and as many of the yards beyond the alleyway as did not have resident dogs—and then they discovered that dogs in the heartland are invariably tied up, so even those yards were claimed as provinces, with the exception of the arc of territory governed by the pooches' teeth.
Most of our neighbors did not really mind the feline invasion. Our left-hand neighbor, in fact, welcomed the cats because they protected his not exactly weather-tight garage from field mice and other vermin. Others, already having to pick their way through fields of dog doo—the doggie pooper scooper is strictly an urban invention, we discovered—did not even notice the finicky cats, who were as careful to hide themselves as their feces.
The only exception to the generally laissez-faire reaction came from the right-hand neighbors. They were the kind of people who consider well kept yards the ultimate expression of civic pride. But for them a yard meant nothing more or less than the lawn itself. An untrammeled swatch of greensward was for them heaven itself. Any deviation from green, perfectly mowed blades was akin to sin. Trees have brown trunks, so of course they allowed none in their yard. Shrubs and bushes add a disquieting amount of verticality to a landscape, so the only shrub they had, a poor, lonely, non-deciduous (the Lord forbid that leaves should profane the ground!) hemlock, disappeared the first summer we were in Carlinville. Flowers tend to be all colors but green, and in any case weed eaters—these neighbors were, as far as I can tell, the only people in the entire block who owned a weed eater, or at any rate, who used one—cannot distinguish between weeds and flowers, so of course the neighbors had no flowers that might interfere with the machine or with their God-given right to make their property reflect their flat plainness as thoroughly as possible.
Picture, then, the horror with which the neighbors first saw our cats issue from our back door and, with little understanding of the niceties of meum et tuum, go into the neighbors' yard. The neighbors frowned, the neighbors scowled, the neighbors all but called the dog catcher: but there was nothing they could do. Imperialists though they were, the cats maintained the highest decorum in the way of hiding their poop; and since the yard was nothing but an expanse of grass, there was nothing at all that the cats could harm. Practically speaking, for the neighbors our cats were simply an affront to their pride of property. The town, however, had no laws to regulate the movement of cats—later a leash law for dogs was adopted, but cats were free to roam.
Tied though the neighbors' hands were, like the cats they too were free agents. Slowly their minds worked through the problem, and slowly their minds came up with a solution. They would buy a dog and chain it next to the property line, thus establishing a feline exclusion zone that the cats would be unable to penetrate. Furthermore, since the dog would be next to our yard, he would be likely to poop on our property rather than theirs.
The genius of the strategy was unfortunately not matched by brilliant tactics. The neighbors' first mistake was getting a puppy rather than a full-grown dog; their second mistake was getting a dachshund-sized dog; their third mistake was in getting an animal they did not like.
Each mistake contributed to the collapse of the feline exclusion zone and the backfiring of the poop-export policy. First of all, a puppy does not know that cats are his enemy, so the little dog, Barney by name, thought that our cats were his playmates and tried to entice the cats onto his owners' property. The cats objected to the attempts, but had enough acquaintance with the mysteries of dog-chains to know that they could lie down just outside the dog's reach and drive him mad. As we all know, dogs give voice to anger rather readily, so the silence of our back yards gave way to the agonized yipping of a frustrated Barney almost from the day the neighbors tied up the poor puppy.
Barney's frustration was increased because four of our five cats were larger than he, even at his imposing full-grown length of twenty inches. When he got loose, which was not often, and tried to enforce his friendliness, he invariably was scratched on the nose—so much so that he developed a permanent scar on his snout. The neighbors, in short, had not considered that cats, delicate though they seem to those who have never owned one, are feisty fighters, endowed by nature with a series of good, sharp arguments against enemies anywhere near their own size. Even had he wanted to do so, poor Barney did not stand a chance of enforcing the feline exclusion zone.
As time passed, Barney came to the conclusion that the cats were not about to take him up as a playmate, so he became a bit despondent. Adding to his depression was the fact that his owners never, but never, came out to play with him. It was clear enough to us that the neighbors had gotten poor Barney just to irritate our cats and us, and that the emotional welfare of the dog—a concept probably so alien to the neighbors that they would not understand what it meant—mattered to them not at all. But to us, Barney's welfare mattered a great deal. We happen to like animals of all sorts. So we decided that if the neighbors did not play with Barney, we would. Nor would we have to trespass in order to do so, for after all the neighbors had been kind enough to chain Barney so that he could come over to our yard whenever he wanted to. Of course, the intent had been to have Barney poop in our yard: but since we were the only ones who played with him, and we did so in our yard, Barney never did poop in our yard. The neighbors' yard, on the other hand, developed large patches of unsightly and smelly brown.
One day, when our landlords came to visit us, they told us a story that illuminated the pain that the neighbors had undergone just to get back at us for having free-roaming cats. It happens that out landlords used to live in our house before they got rich and moved to the big city. They too owned cats, and they too had the same reaction from the neighbors. But the landlords also owned a dog, which they allowed to run loose from time to time. And from time to time the dog would go to the neighbors' yard and do his duty there. Whenever that happened, our landlords told us, the neighbors would scoop up the poop and carefully place it on the front stoop of our house. The message was clear as a bell: keep your pooch to yourself and off our immaculate conception of a lawn.
The Fire This Time
The dog, Sheba, howled day and night. She was a gorgeous husky, with the fearsome blank eyes that huskies have, but in Sheba sharpened to pure emptiness by agony and loneliness. Good heartlander that he was, Sheba's owner, Loy, tied her up and never paid attention to her. Loy was in the spirit of the heartland, best defined by the neighbor, on the corner of our street, who had whittled dog ownership to its bare essentials: his dog was permanently fenced into a four-foot square of dog shit and dog food. The enclosure had no gate.
But that owner had thrown in a dog house for his pet. Loy, on the other hand, did not bother to provide housing for Sheba. Instead, she lived under an old, beat up truck in Loy's side yard, right under my bedroom window. When it rained, the hard-packed earth puddled the water and the white patches of Sheba's coat turned brown. For days after it rained she would lick and lick and lick until finally she had cleaned herself enough to look like a husky again. And then it would rain once more. At least when it rained Sheba had a guaranteed supply of water. Oftentimes, Loy simply forgot that the dog was there.
It was easy for Loy to forget the dog. He did not have to use the truck that was Shebas' home, after all. Loy had another truck, a handsome, black pick-up truck with running lights and flashy signals on every available surface. It bore a sign that explained the presence of the other truck in the yard:
LOY W——
SCARP COLLECTOR
The other truck was not a spare, only "scarp" metal waiting for the best offer to roll in.
In fact, Loy belonged to one of the odd subgroups in towns like Carlinville, which do not have municipal facilities for trash collection. As we found out when we moved to Carlinville and were faced with a choice of trash collectors, feudal warfare is a pale shadow of the wars of garbage. There were four different companies in Carlinville, a town that claimed to house fifty-four hundred souls, and each of the companies was wholly owned by a different branch of the same family, the S——. Indeed, we met Loy on the first day we arrived in town, when we were freshly moved into our house and he came over to advise us on the issue of trash collection. He warned us against the perfidy of the senior branch of the S—— and against the shiftlessness of one and the duplicity of the other of the cadet branches, and urged us to put our trash bags in the capable hands of the most junior branch, which also ran the local beauty academy from the same location. As a matter of fact, when we first drove into town, my wife and I saw and marked for further inquiry the sign for the S—— Beauty Academy and Trash Collection Agency. The wags of the town, we learned, called it S—— Beauty and Trash Academy.
One glance at Loy's trucks told us that his advice about trash collectors was not entirely disinterested. He was on the margins of the profession himself. He was a scarp collector. S—— Beauty and Trash Academy subcontracted the odd lots of trash, and Loy was one of their chosen, a villein. Loy's zealotry in the interests of his profession was legend, and his yard proved it. There were mounds of scarp everywhere. There were old refrigerators and old washers. There were several vehicles and many parts of vehicles. There were hundreds of empty plastic jugs. There were cans and bottles and automobile tires. In fact, my wife and I were living next to a junkyard, and Sheba was the junkyard dog.
It took us a long time to do something about Sheba. We stewed and we fretted and we felt guilty. There was no humane society for us to call, and the police would do nothing unless the animal were a danger to humans. But Sheba was so broken-spirited that even our cats found her pitiable and tried to befriend her. We were also worried that, if we caused trouble for Loy, Loy would cause trouble for us. He was not an entirely balanced man. There was, for instance, the brouhaha during our first Fourth of July in Carlinville, when suddenly our house came under a barrage of rockets launched, good-humoredly and in the American spirit of do all that you can do for a good time, by Loy, who couldn't understand why we were concerned about how to explain to our landlord the burn marks that marred the surface of the deck.
Finally, however, after a particularly wet season, when Sheba's howling finally broke our hearts as well as our sleep, we called the mayor. The mayor had been elected, before we came to town, on a good populist platform. She promised the voters that, if she were elected, the then-current drought would end. She was elected. The drought ended. The mayor was also known to be an animal lover. We called her and the howling ended. Some days later, as we drove by the mayor's house, we saw Sheba, in the company of the mayor's five other dogs, lolling in the shade.
Loy did not suffer depredations after he lost his dog. On the contrary, the scarp blossomed and bore fruit. One day, as I was washing the dishes in our kitchen, I casually glanced up to look at the fall colors of the trees in our back yard. It took me some seconds to realize that our yard, as well as Loy's, was on fire. I ran next door to rouse Loy. He came out in his underwear, said "Goddamn" under his breath, and strolled to his hose. As is the custom in the heartland, Loy had been burning trash, along with some rejected rubberized scarp, in his trash barrel. Autumn leaves around the barrel had caught fire, and the fire had spread from his yard to ours.
It did not take long to put the fire out. I turned a quizzical eye to Loy. All he said was, "Goddamn Sheba'd a let me know."
Venice in the Heartland
I think my wife and I emit a kind of survival pheromone, if such a thing exists: at any rate, stray cats know we're suckers, and they do not hesitate to prove our foolishness time and time again. From the time we moved to Carlinville in 1985, to the time we moved to Reading, Pennsylvania in 1989, we were adopted by three cats, each of them relatively bedraggled and ragged, but each resolute in its will to survive.
We usually know when we have a feline guest because our normal complement of cats resents any encroachment on its territory. The last adopted, usually also the youngest and feistiest of our cats, vociferates most vigorously against a newcomer. So when Macbeth—now about four years old, and a mighty murderer of sleep from his earliest day with us—began to yowl one afternoon, we went out to see what the fuss was all about. And there she was, crouching before Mac, so pitiable that we knew as soon as we saw her that we were her only hope of salvation.
We named her Venice in remembrance of all the semi-starved feral cats we had seen in that otherwise lovely city on the Adriatic. So emaciated and ill did she seem to be that, for the first time during our time in the mid-West we hesitated about letting a cat come in the house. Instead, we brought food and water out to her, and fed her on the front stoop. She ate a can and a half of food before she slowed down.
She seemed to be no more than eight or nine months old, a tiny little thing. And the more we looked at her, the more it seemed a miracle that she was not dead. Least of her problems was that both her ears were covered with patches of ring-worm. Her neck was so very thin that it seemed incredible that she could swallow any food at all. Between her shoulder blades was that ugly indentation starved cats have where well-kept cats have muscle. Her fur was patchy, dirty, unkempt. Most incredible, at least to me, was that she was either pregnant or had just had a litter. Her mammary glands were swollen, her nipples charged with milk. Had it not been for the bulk of her underbelly, she would have had no girth at all.
That night she slept outdoors, on our front stoop, with a bowl of water and another of dry cat food. The next morning we arranged to take her to the vet's, where an examination of her teeth led to the absolutely unbelievable conclusion that she was over one year old. Even the vet's assistant could not believe that a cat so very small could possibly be that old. But the vet insisted he was right. As to the litter, he suspected that all the kittens had died or been still-born. Certainly Venice was so malnourished that she could not possibly have had a normal litter.
The vet assured us that, besides the ringworm, Venice had no contagious diseases, so when we brought her back home, she came inside. Macbeth, of course, was not—and is not yet—very happy about the circumstance. He stalks Venice around the house, keeping her on edge all the time. Venice, however, is a survivor. Small as she is, she takes absolutely no nonsense at all from Macbeth, nor from either of the other two cats, Winkin and Artemis, that are left to us. Her hiss is mighty large, and frequent. However, there are times now when Venice seems to forget that she ought to hiss at the three enormous beasts that beset her. She would rather be able to relax, to forget the need for constant vigilance. She sleeps a great deal, and by now it takes more than Macbeth's stares to wake her up.
Unfortunately when she first came to us, Venice did not know about litter boxes. I discovered that fact one night soon after she arrived when, as I was watching television, Venice began to scratch the rug in the way cats scratch in their litter after they have used it. The patch of wet was discreetly small, but the odor was not. I blotted up as much of the urine as I could, sprinkled baking soda on the spot, used carpet cleaner after vacuuming the soda. It still smelled a bit.
My wife and I did not really mind, and the other cats soon enough got used to their new housemate—used enough to her to live together without constant fighting, at any rate. Even if they had not, however, there would have been nothing for us to do. Perhaps the neighborhood cats were right, perhaps it is a biochemical we emit that they smell and seek out: it is simply impossible for us to ignore the starving cat that asks for our help. That is why living in the heartland was so difficult for us. In Carlinville, when it comes to the treatment of cats, it is Venice in the heartland.
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