Not every night, of course, was peace and quiet. Like many Vietnam vets, Bill lived a hard-partying life, and as often as not, his house was filled with loud music and people smoking and drinking beer. Call it self-medication, or youth, or what inevitably happens when you feel doomed to an early death, but ultimately it wasn’t anything more than a lifestyle. If the party got too rowdy, Spooky would wander into a back room and curl up on Bill’s hiking pack or inside his sleeping bag, but most of the time, Spooky didn’t mind the noise. He’d sit right on the back of the couch while the party whirled around him. Or he’d sniff the smoke. Or he’d slink along the floor and put his cold nose on someone’s exposed calf. That was Spooky’s trick. He’d sneak up on people and put his nose on the square of skin between the bottom of their pants and the top of their socks. That nose was like a sudden splash of water. It got their attention. They’d reach down and pet him, and if he sensed they were friendly, he’d hop on their lap. Spooky loved sitting on laps.
The cold nose of Spooky. It was his thing, his announcement of intention, his calling card. No matter what happened the night before, Bill Bezanson could rest assured he would feel his friend Spooky’s cold nose the next morning. At exactly 5:30 A.M. Like many cats, Spooky had an internal clock. He knew exactly when his food was supposed to be served, and he wasn’t going to wait a minute longer. No matter how badly he felt, Bill would pad out to the dark kitchen at 5:30 A.M. and give Spooky his bowl. “He was attached to me,” Bill would say, by way of explanation. He was attached to me.
And Bill Bezanson was attached to him, too. He wouldn’t go anywhere without Spooky. When Bill was home, Spooky was beside him. If Bill went for a walk, Spooky followed behind him, never more than a few feet away. There was no more hitchhiking alone. When Bill went out on the road, which he still did whenever the anxiety set in, Spooky went with him. A bowl, a bag of food, and they were free. While Bill thumbed, Spooky played in the grass, chasing grasshoppers or shadows or the tops of daffodils waving in the breeze. When a car slowed down, Bill shouted, “Spooky!” just once and Spooky came running, jumped in the car, and off they went.
Whenever Bill rode his Harley—the one he’d bought in Alaska—he tied Spooky’s carrier to the rack on the back. One day, he saw a man with a Chihuahua sitting on the gas tank of his bike, just behind the handlebars. Spooky would love that, he thought. Bill knew Spooky’s paws would slip off the metal tank, so he scrounged a piece of carpet for Spooky to sit on. He attached it with two-way aircraft tape, but when that didn’t work, he glued it down. As long as Bill went slower than twenty-five miles an hour, Spooky would squint, lay his ears back, and let the breeze glide through his hair. Once Bill hit twenty-five, Spooky would jump off. He wasn’t angry; he just didn’t like that much speed. He could ride in the carrier at any speed, but he could only take so much breeze sitting in the open on the tank. One year, Bill took the bike up to the Sturgis Rally in South Dakota—more than a thousand miles—and Spooky rode up front as Bill eased to a crawl down the main drag. People were whooping and hollering, drinking and making crude jokes, but Spooky didn’t care. He laid his ears back and cruised Sturgis like the world’s coolest pussycat.
Bill and Spooky went other places, too. They camped together in the forests of the west, hunting insects for Bill’s collection. They tromped through the Sierra Nevada mountains. They hitchhiked to Quartzsite, Arizona, for the big rock and mineral show. When Bill went to music festivals, Spooky sat beside him on the blanket. When he moved to a new house, which he now did every September, Spooky went along without complaint. Except for the bar and the job, they went everywhere together. Bill and Spooky. Spooky and Bill. They were a pair.
Then, in 1981, another addition joined the family: a woman. The house she had been living in was covered by ash in the explosion of Mount St. Helens, the big volcano in western Washington, and she ended up renting a room from Bill in Southern California. Bill was managing a beer bar; his female boarder was a bartender at a place down the road; they talked often but always through the bottom of a beer glass. Bill and Spooky were still moving every September, living an itinerant life, so when the woman went back to Washington after a fight, they followed her north. Before Bill knew what was happening, they were married. Bill took a job fabricating metal, settled into married life, and started drinking.
“It was all surface,” he would say later of his human relationships. Nothing deep. Nothing lasting. “Anything that had any depth of soul had to do with an animal.”
They moved again that September. And the next one, too. And the next. He never thought about that terrible September in Vietnam in 1968. It had been fifteen years, so he never made the connection. He just knew that every September he had the overwhelming feeling that he had to move. It was bigger than his wife, bigger than his career, bigger even than his friendship with Spooky. That fear, even all those years later, was the biggest thing in Bill’s life.
The marriage, needless to say, didn’t last. It was doomed at the wedding, when Bill stood up to say “I do” and thought, What am I doing here? It was crashing on the rocks when, about a year later, Bill woke up to his wife screaming. Spooky, who had been spending more nights in the forest, had brought them a present: a big fat garden snake. And it was writhing in the sheets.
“Get rid of that damn cat,” Bill’s wife demanded. “Just get rid of it.”
It was pretty clear how that relationship was going to end. In 1986, after a year apart and then another year back together, Bill and his wife officially divorced. Spooky moved back onto Bill’s lap and back onto the pillow on his bed. From then on, it was just the boys.
No, the snake wasn’t a message. There was no jealousy or loneliness or anything like that. Spooky didn’t need to be underfoot to know he was loved, because a true connection goes both ways. Comfort, that’s how I described it with Dewey. A belief in each other’s love. The snake? That was just Spooky being Spooky.
He was a quirky cat, the Spookster. He was always cooking up adventure. For a year, Bill and his wife lived in a ground-floor apartment on a lake. Each apartment had a balcony—Bill’s was a few feet off the ground—and every afternoon the woman upstairs threw handfuls of corn from her balcony to the resident ducks and Canadian geese. Spooky would stand at the sliding glass door meowing at the birds, his tail quivering with excitement. He was like that. He saw possibilities. He could never pass up an opportunity to play.
One day, Bill slid the door open. Spooky didn’t freak out. He didn’t charge onto the deck. Instead, he backed up to the far side of the room, ran as fast as he could, and hurled himself over the railing and right into the middle of fifty ducks and geese—all of which panicked, honking and flapping and running into one another as they tried to get away. Spooky stuck his tail up and his head in the air and strutted back to the door. He was so proud of himself. Every time the flock was outside after that, Spooky meowed and rubbed Bill’s legs until he opened the door.
Then one day, Spooky ran and jumped . . . and landed right on top of an enormous goose. The terrified goose jumped five feet in the air, squawked, and started running wildly in a rush of feathers, leaping and honking and trying desperately to take flight. Spooky, clinging desperately to the goose’s back, glanced back for a moment at Bill. They locked eyes, and Bill could see that Spooky’s were as big as saucers. Then the goose took off. He flew about ten feet before crashing and rolling in a pile of feathers, beak, goose feet, and cat fur. The goose immediately got up and started running for the lake. Spooky got up and sprinted to the apartment. He never jumped into the middle of the flock again.