Population: 485

by Michael Perry

  There are times, when the black dog has me backed deep in the cave, that I hope—this is ignoble—the pager will go off. Like the bobber on the water, the call gives you something to focus on. It is a mind-altering excuse to dismiss everything but the emergency at hand. Vindictive or weepy lovers, divorce lawyers, credit card balances, the ghosts slow-dancing with the skeletons in your closet, they all disappear at the sound of the tones. I have driven to fires with guys whose wives are leaving them, wives whose husbands are leaving them, guys who are facing liver surgery, guys who are facing bankruptcy, and the fire sets it all aside. A man is trapped in his car after a head-on with a semi, and when I run toward the vehicle, the halogen scene lights have created a magical tunnel in the falling snow. I run down the tunnel and am surprised how peaceful it feels in that car. I spent the week caught in the crossfire of a friend’s child-custody case, for which I am a witness. My guts are tattered. It is searingly cold, and we have to slide the man out over the waist-deep snow on an inflatable sled. We are struggling with straps and cutting tools and keeping track of the man’s vital signs, and I find myself perversely grateful to him, because he has given my sour guts a reprieve.

  My brother John is a bearded, backwoods-looking fellow. Lives in a log cabin, owns his own dump truck. He was on call up in Chetek last summer when he got paged out on a LifeLine call. The LifeLine is a big button attached to a bracelet or necklace and worn by elderly or infirm patients. In an emergency, they just punch the button, and their address pops up with an alarm at the dispatch center. Then we get paged out. Even more than your average call, you don’t know what you’re getting into with LifeLine pages—all you know is someone has pressed the alarm. The call was out in the country, and John and his partner, Sharon, made good time, lights and sirens all the way. It was a hot day. When they arrived at the address, a lady was sitting in the yard on an electric scooter. Beside her was a prostrate goose, covered with Frisbees. It seems the goose had passed out in the heat. The frisbees were for shade. “I can’t pick him up,” said the lady. “And I need to get him in the shed, where it’s cool.” Moving carefully, my brother picked up the goose and placed it in the shed. He says it didn’t look good for the goose. In the meantime, the deputy sheriff who had responded tried as gently as he could to explain to the lady that this was not appropriate use of the LifeLine. John and Sharon drove back to the hall and entered the run in the logbook. Under “Nature of Call” John wrote “goose weakness.”

  Over the years, your calls tend to conflate. Time presses singular events into the thin strata of history. We accumulate a body of calls like an artist accumulates a body of work. It becomes difficult to recall specific works. Some, like the goose weakness, stand out; most recede to latent memory. You have to remind yourself sometimes, then, that with the exception of a few frequent flyers, your arrival at the end of the driveway is a significant event in the lives of those who call for help. It is not just another call. It is a moment likely to be incorporated into family lore as “the day the ambulance came.”

  You try to act accordingly. To meet the expectations. To—simply—help. You won’t always live up to the hype. “What we’re going to do…,” I was saying, when the woman on the couch interrupted me. “Oh, I know,” she said, “I’ve seen Paramedics.” This is like telling your Little Leaguer you expect him to yank a Randy Johnson fastball over the left-field wall. We are basic-level emergency medical technicians. We have skills, but they are basic. We can’t always match what you see on TV. But people are generally kind. A week after John carried the goose to the shed, a painstakingly scribed note arrived in the mail:

  Dear Abalane Driver with Beard

  I am sorry I just wanted you to help my goose. Thank you for your help putting him barn She was in 30’s year’s. She died at 1 pm That day. On E.R. they fix animls. The policeman made me Feel Bad I will not wear LifeLine any more. I did not call Police Man.

  Thank you For helping

  Ramona

  He died

  with his wings out

  He went

  to heaven.

  10

  CAT

  EARLY LAST SPRING, my neighbor called and asked if I had ever killed a cat.

  I had not.

  But I had heard stories, and was inclined to believe they took some killing.

  Trygve Nelson owns a computer company. We have an arrangement, heavily weighted in my favor, in which he provides various services, including virtual handholding, hard-drive voodoo, digital exorcisms, and extended sessions of commiserative tut-tutting. I, in turn, proofread his business cards. To hear Trygve talk me through computer trouble is to hear an indulgent father reassuring his blubbering, dimwitted toddler that the ankle-biting monsters under the bed are gone bye-bye. I fear the effects our long-term relationship may have on his mental health. Every time I solicit his advice on a new program or piece of hardware, the poor man is forced to execute a reverse drop-shift to dumb-down gear so violent it smokes his intellectual clutch plates. Imagine Einstein forced to explain the theory of relativity to a classroom of second-graders using only a Ping-Pong ball, a spoonful of custard, and a bag of lint. Without Trygve, I would be scribing in the dirt with a stick. He is my technosavior.

  But when it’s time to get fundamental, guess who he calls?

  “This stray cat’s been hanging around, and it’s getting sicker. It’s coughing. Hacking up stuff. Sandy’s in her rescue mode, but this cat is miserable.”

  Sandy is Mrs. Nelson. She spotted the cat moping in the hostas a day earlier, but today it had collapsed on the deck and was too weak to meow. Its eyes were crusted and pus oozed from each nostril. Its coat was matted and foul. She helped it lap at some water and called the vet. The vet was out, so she left a message and called the humane society. The woman there told her to call the local constable. She dialed the number and explained the situation to the man who answered. His reply was gruff.

  “You got a gun?” The constable didn’t sound as if he intended to leave the recliner.

  “Well…yesss…but is it legal to shoot something in your backyard when you live in town?”

  The constable remained focused on the cat.

  “It might,” he rasped, “have the rabies.” He pronounced it rabbies, as in tabbies with rabbies, that sinister, prefatory the insinuating certain ominous eventualities.

  “It’s awfully sick,” said Sandy.

  “Just have your husband shoot it.”

  There is a way of thinking out here—it has its roots in farming—that when an animal is past the point of recovery, you put it out of its misery. I came home from school one day to find that my father’s little flock of sheep had been savaged by two neighborhood dogs. Several ewes were dead. Others were horribly wounded, wool dangling at their necks in bloody fluffs, the meat ripped from their haunches. In a blood frenzy, the dogs tore at the sheep even as they dragged themselves forward. My father went to the house for his deer rifle and then, alone in the pasture, walked among the fallen sheep, shooting them one by one. Unable to amend the suffering, he ended it.

  “Well, not everyone can just shoot an animal,” said the vet, returning Sandy’s call. “But there are so many feral animals…you really shouldn’t expose them to your own cats.” She’s all but saying the cat should be euthanized. Still, taking the cat to the vet for euthanasia, the blue juice, as we call it ’round here, isn’t free. And so now I have Trygve on the phone.

  “I know a place,” I say. “I’ll be over in a little bit.” Hanging up, I already feel a little light in the gut, a little tight around the mouth, the way I always get when I figure I’m about to see something nasty. I’ve seen so much blood and mess up to this point, why would the death of a bedraggled cat bother me?

  Because I know exactly what we’re in for.

  Trygve and I are driving north. In the trunk we have a cat in a box, a shovel, and a rifle. When I got to Trygve’s house, the cat was so far gone it was tipping over. It opened its mouth to meow,
but raised no sound. I took a pair of bright blue latex gloves from my medical kit and slipped them on, what with all the pus, and wrapped the cat in an old towel. I volunteered at the animal shelter for a week every summer when I was a child, and one of my jobs was to retrieve the cats and dogs whose numbers came up on the euthanasia list. A dog might sit still for the needle, but the cats you had to roll in a towel or you’d get slashed. I remember speaking gently and petting each animal until the air eased from its lungs.

  We are driving to the hidden patch of land where my brother lives. A dirt track leads off the main road through a stand of jack pines to his cabin. Trygve turns up the track and drives until we reach a swale that opens into the creek bottom below. I carry the box down the swale and set it on last year’s marsh grass, pressed and brown after a winter beneath snow. Trygve follows with the shovel and rifle. There is some sun, but the sky is pale, and the air is cold. Trygve digs a small hole. I take the cat from the box.

  The spade cleaves a neat wedge from the peat, and the cat sways on the flat grass. In an empty trailer house at the foot of a Wyoming mountain many years ago, I was thumbing through a discarded Newsweek and came across a series of photos in which a man in South America dug a shallow grave, lay in it, and was bayoneted. The trailer tin ticked in the high-noon sun, and I went cold. I was queasy for a week. I get the same sickly flush whenever I see the horrific black-and-white footage of Nazis shooting Jews in trenches. And now, there was that cat, waiting by the hole.

  What a warm fuzzy story this would be if we had taken the cat in, plied it with eyedroppers of warm milk and medicine, spent the next few weeks nursing it back to health. I tended my share of shoebox hospitals as a child, standing vigil over limp baby birds, or baby rabbits dragged into the yard by our old calico cat. When one of our sheep refused a lamb, my father would swaddle the lamb in rags and place it on the heat register, and we would take turns coaxing it to suckle milk from an old ketchup bottle capped with a rubber nipple. I once watched my mother resuscitate a newborn calf, blowing air down its throat and pressing on its ribs until it shook its head and opened its eyes. But this cat we have decided to kill.

  We are not making the decision lightly. There are people in this world who quite happily stuff healthy cats in a bag with a rock and toss the whole works in a lake. There are people who will swerve across the road in order to pin a cat’s spine to the centerline. Trygve and I, on the other hand, have given consideration to the cat’s condition and decided it would be better off out of its misery. To say the least, this is a judgment call, based on cloudy anthropomorphism. The responsibilities of being human are various. We were not feeling good about it out there on the dead grass. I’ll say this for Trygve. He was quick, and he was true. He put down the shovel, took up the rifle, a walloping Blap!, and it was done.

  Trygve looked at me. “Well, he didn’t feel that.”

  The rifle was loaded with 240-grain .44-caliber hollow-points. Shooting a cat with armaments like that is roughly equivalent to swatting a mosquito with a spade. I was standing just off his left shoulder, and at the sound of the report, a clutch of white fur flew past my head. A peanut-sized wad of phlegm hit me in the leg and clung to my jeans. There was blood on my shirt. Trygve toed the remains of the cat into the hole. We tipped the peat wedge back in place, tamped it down with the shovel, and drove home. I went straight to the basement. Standing beside the washing machine, I removed all my clothes and started them immediately on the heavy cycle.

  Humans possess no monopoly on the powers of preservation and destruction. Our ability to wield these powers with sustained intent, however, is unmatched on this earth. Nature can trump us in an instance or over millennia, but in the day-to-day main, humankind has developed a preponderant ability to fiddle with destiny. More than any other natural force or creature, we decide what will go and what will stay: the rainforest, an old building, a sickly cat…ourselves.

  When they tore down the old Farmers Store, I swore I wouldn’t write about it. Last thing the world needs, really, another elegy on a pile of bricks. But then the first wall tumbled, and the vibration transmitted itself through the dirt, resonating in the foundation of my house half a block away. Upstairs, my writing desk trembled and shook the lamps. The electric letters on my computer monitor went jittery, and concentric ripples flared in and out of phase inside my coffee cup. The destruction became difficult to ignore. I made some notes. As I typed, the shudder of falling bricks was perceptible through the keys.

  The Farmers Store building went up in 1905. The concept behind the store originated in 1891, when a small group of locals pooled their resources to buy goods in quantity at wholesale prices. Their initial order consisted of a barrel of sugar, a barrel of molasses, a barrel of crackers, some vinegar and seasonings, and a bolt of calico. A year later, the venture had become so popular that the group incorporated, and commenced to building community stores. The New Auburn store was outfitted with plank floors and pressed-tin ceilings. Hand-sawn oak stairs led to the second floor, and the building was fronted with a bank of plate-glass windows. In vintage photographs, the wooden sales counters are glassed in and ponderous, docked against the wall like barges. The men behind them are kitted out in ties and aprons; the women wear their hair in a bob. Behind them, dry goods are packed to the ceiling on shelves running the length of the store and accessible by a rolling library ladder. Out on the main floor, vast wooden tables are stacked with hats and lace-up shoes. Another photograph, taken from the center of Main Street in 1908, shows a cluster of locals standing on the plank sidewalk beneath a pinked canvas banner that reads FARMERS STORE COMPANY. The planks shine with rain, and a man with an umbrella blocks the doorway. A padded wooden rocker and a dining room table with slim Chippendale-style legs are visible in the display windows. A buggy is parked front and center, with a steer hooked in the traces. Along the lower left-hand margin of the photograph, some wag has written Quadrapedmobile.

  The New Auburn Farmers Store ceased operations in 1966, the year my family began farming north of town. I was in the building a handful of times. I remember the creak of the wooden floors, the polished dark rail along the stairway, and warm summer air coming through the open twin doors where the man with the umbrella stood. A series of enterprises sprang up and died in the old building over the years. About the time I was in eighth grade, the store was known as Don’s Discount, and was filled with day-old bakery and crates of castoff merchandise. I riffled through boxes of vinyl records, and bought the only song I recognized, a 45 of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song.”

  Sixteen years later, I returned to town and found the plate-glass windows blocked with plywood. The double doors were enclosed by a cobbled-up wooden vestibule that had begun to shed pieces of siding. The day before they knocked the whole works flat, I wandered up and took some pictures. A homemade sign hung from a pipe extended over the entryway. The Farmers Store’s latest incarnation was posted in hand-painted letters:

  MAIN STREET

  STORE

  The script was cramped and thin. Below, in a willy-nilly arrangement of stenciled letters so small as to be indecipherable from Tugg’s Bar across the street, the scope of the final venture was defined:

  GROCERIES

  DISCOUNT ITEMS

  BAITS

  CLOTHING

  ICE CREAM

  PIZZA

  BOLTS

  KNICK KNACKS

  COLD POP

  CRAFTS

  HARDWARE

  WORM’S

  MINNOW’S

  SNACK’S

  BEST B.S. IN TOWN

  “I hate to see it go,” I said to one of the old-timers who watched the excavator push the store down.

  “Well, it served its purpose,” he said.

  Hugh Ruud was born on May 1, 1922, in the second story of a house overlooking Main Street, across from the Farmers Store. The house still stands—I can turn in my desk chair and see the upstairs windows. Little Hugh hit the air bawling, and squall
ed all night long. His father took him in his arms and paced the floor. “Snookie,” he murmured, “what am I gonna do with you?” Eighty years on, and Hugh Ruud won’t even turn his head at “Hugh.” He is Snook around town, he is Snook in the phone book, and if I turn my desk chair again, I can see a yellow sign hanging over the door of a little brick building kitty-corner from where the Farmers Store stood, and the black letters say, SNOOK’S STORE—HOMEMADE SAUSAGE & BACON.

  “That sign come all the way from California,” says Snook. I have gone to his house to visit. To try to sort out some local history. We are at his kitchen table, having coffee. His wife, Betty Lou, has cinnamon rolls in the oven. Snook sold the store in 1988, but that name was too good to let go, and so the new owners kept the sign up. “We paid five hundred dollars for that thing,” says Snook. “But it was a nice sign. Lit up nice.”

  Snook’s health has been a little hit-and-miss lately. For a while last summer, his heart got so bad his daughter was certain they were going to lose him. He got pretty down, and there was a stretch in July when he really didn’t care if he lived or died. But today he’s all grins and stories. I’m just basking in his rambling. He cusses delightfully, and the village he describes is magical. When he talks, the blacktop and aluminum siding and satellite dishes evaporate, the streets fill with storybook folk, and the old buildings resurrect. I just let him go.