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By Root 6897 0

the opposite of polite. Walter had apparently spent the entire summer documenting bird deaths on his property. Each picture (there were more than forty of them) was labeled with a date and a species. The Canterbridge families who didn’t own cats were offended to have been included in the leafleting, and the families who did own them were offended by Walter’s seeming certainty that every bird death on his property was the fault of their pets. Linda Hoffbauer was additionally incensed that a leaflet had been left where one of her children could easily have been exposed to traumatizing images of headless sparrows and bloody entrails. She called the county sheriff, with whom she and her husband were social, to see whether perhaps Walter was guilty of illegal harassment. The sheriff said that Walter wasn’t, but he agreed to stop by his house and have a word of warning with him—a visit that yielded the unexpected news that Walter had a law degree and was versed not only in his First Amendment rights but also in the Canterbridge Estates homeowners covenant, which contained a clause requiring pets to be under the control of their owners at all times; the sheriff advised Linda to shred the leaflet and move on.

And then came white winter, and the neighborhood cats retreated indoors (where, as even Linda had to admit, they seemed perfectly content), and Linda’s husband personally undertook to plow the county road in such a way that Walter had to shovel for an hour to clear the head of his driveway after every new snowfall. With the leaves down, the neighborhood had a clear view across the frozen lake at the little Berglund house, in whose windows no television was ever seen to flicker. It was hard to imagine what Walter might be doing over there, by himself, in the deep winter night, besides brooding with hostility and judgment. His house went dark for a week at Christmastime, which pointed toward a visit with his family in St. Paul, which was also hard to imagine—that such a crank was nonetheless loved by somebody. Linda, especially, was relieved when the holidays ended and the crank resumed his hermit life and she could return to a hatred unclouded by the thought that somebody cared about him. One night in February, her husband reported that Walter had filed a complaint with the county regarding the deliberate blockage of his driveway, and this was somehow very agreeable for her to hear. It was good to know he knew they hated him.

In the same perverse way, when the snow again melted and the woods again greened and Bobby was let outside again and promptly disappeared, Linda felt as if a deep itch were being scratched, the primal sort of itch that scratching only worsens. She knew immediately that Walter was responsible for Bobby’s disappearance, and she felt intensely gratified that he’d risen to her hatred, had given it fresh cause and fresh nourishment: that he was willing to play the hatred game with her and be the local representative of everything wrong with her world. Even as she organized the search for her children’s missing pet and broadcast their anguish to the neighborhood, she secretly savored their anguish and took pleasure in urging them to hate Walter for it. She’d liked Bobby well enough, but she knew it was a sin to falsely idolize a beast. The sin she hated was in her so-called neighbor. Once it became clear that Bobby was never coming back, she took her kids to the local animal shelter and let them pick out three new cats, which, as soon as they were home again, she freed from their cardboard boxes and shooed in the direction of Walter’s woods.

Walter had never liked cats. They’d seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals’ lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He’d never seen anything in a cat’s face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy