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CHAPTER 1
The Cat
I sneak the shotgun. Load the three yellow cartridges printed with "Remington 20 Gauge." Snap the action shut. Aim at items in my room: the lamp, my baseball card collection, a picture of my parents. Finger the trigger.
I am alone. Fourteen.
I ease the stock down from my shoulder and turn the gun back toward myself. Stare down the barrel. Tap my index finger against the hollow, producing a sucking sound. I put my mouth over the barrel. Taste the metal, feel the air inside, the barrel's breath on my tongue. I relax my lips and close my eyes. I can smell the invisible beginnings of rust.
The voice is not there. But the hum is. It slides pitches higher, a rush of warm air, the electric collision of a storm front. I nod my head, taking the loaded gun with me. Up and down. I put my hands around the single barrel, closing my fingers, steadying the steel in my mouth, against my teeth, lips sliding on gun oil.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, eight years old, in the middle of the night. Awake. Watching the wall. The wall a machine. Ball bearings clink. Slide through chutes. Drop. The language of working metal. Rhythm in front of me, in front of my open eyes. A wall alive. I have a fantasy that a big dog attacks me. A Rottweiler. Its neck muscles are rolled telephone cables under the loose sweatshirt of its skin. Maybe I'll go to art school and become a painter like my mother.
I open my eyes. Ease the gun out. The sight catches on my two front teeth and clicks. The hum exhales. I can feel the release of nervous animal sweat, the drip underneath my arms.
My father is coming home from work, from the hospital. He'll check my math and science work. I unload the gun and sneak it back down. My mother is feeding applesauce to my baby brother, Ellis, in the kitchen. She doesn't see me.
Before I shelve the gun in the basement, I hold it one more time. Loaded shotgun and no mirrors. It doesn't matter that I am a fourteen-year-old homeschooled boy and five feet two inches tall, that I've never kissed a girl. It doesn't matter that I obey the voice.
By eighth grade, homeschool means that I teach myself. When I was younger, my mother spent hours each day teaching the four of us children what she called "cultural literacy" on beautiful twelve-by-twelve flashcards: the states; Central American countries, capitals, and chief exports; great works of European art; the world's inventors; birds of the United States; the bugs of the Southwest; French verbs and nouns. She named our school Hoffmeister Country Day, HCD, and we were required to wear uniforms. Sometimes. The rules always changed. But that was grade school. Now my mother doesn't teach me anything, and I don't have to dress any particular way. Other than my father checking my math and science homework, I manage my own education.
That spring, there was the cat. The alley cat. Orange and dirty as a public restroom, an abscess seeping around its collar. Its hair was darker behind its neck, wet with pus, clumped. Other than scaring him off our porch so he wouldn't steal our own cat's food, I never thought much of him.
My baby brother, Ellis, nine months old, looked as if his mouth were squirreling marshmallows, puffed cheeks and Michelangelocherub lips. He had fallen asleep in his car seat on the way home from the store, and my mother had pulled his seat out to let him keep resting in the shade of the garden while she weeded and spoke softly to her plants. My mother rubbed her fingers over the tops of her English Breakfast, saying, "Well, aren't you strong little guys. Yes, you are. Yes, you are." This was nothing new. I'd caught her reading Evelyn Waugh novels to her flowers.
She continued whispering and weeding as the alley cat crept up, climbed, and sat on Ellis's chest. Ellis woke to the cat on his face, to the smell of the wet abscess seep. He shrieked. And the cat reacted, slashed out. One claw caught under Ellis's right eye. The cut opened across his cheek, and he shrieked again, louder.
My mother lunged, but the cat got away through the boxwoods.
Because I manage my own school schedule, I've moved my math and science classes to later in the day, reading Lord of the Rings for three hours instead, curled in a living room wingback.
My mother lurches through the front door, yelling and swearing. She's holding Ellis against her shoulder as though he's a day old, cradling him as if his head might fall off.
Ellis cries in short little jerks.
"What happened?"
She says, "Shit shit shit shit ..."
I follow her as she runs into the kitchen.
She wets a paper towel and lowers Ellis to the counter. I see the cut on his cheek, not deep, but long and dark and bleeding steadily. My mother dabs at his cheek with the wet paper towel, thinning the blood as she thins her oils with turpentine. Dark red comes up through the watery pink.
"What happened?"
My mother presses on the cut. "It was a cat."
"What? What cat?"
"It was that mangy orange cat." My mother hardly moves her lips. She looks as if she's spitting coffee grounds between her teeth.
"What mangy orange cat?"
She brushes Ellis's cheek hard with the folded paper towel, brushes again, then holds it down. His cheek goes white from the pressure. My mother growls, "I've got to get this cut clean. Disgusting ..." She looks at me. "It was that orange alley cat that's always getting into fights on our back porch."
"Oh. The one with the neck rot?"
"Yes. That cat scratched my baby's face."
Ellis is crying still, but he's also looking at us now with his huge blue eyes. His pain is changing to curiosity.
My mother doesn't notice. She cradles Ellis back against her shoulder, rubs and pats his back. She looks at me. "Your father's at work. He can't help us with this. So you're the man of the house now."
I nod. "Okay."
"And I need you to take care of that cat."
I nod again, "Okay," but I don't know what she means. We don't have cat traps hanging from sixteen-penny nails around the house.
My mother directs me once more, this time with her index finger tapping my chest. "You're the man of the house now, Peter. So take care of it."
My mind goes through a series of questions. "Are you telling me to kill it?" The possibility of actually shooting the shotgun excites me.
My mother has already turned away, heading toward the base of the stairs. She says, without looking back, "Do whatever you need to do. Just take care of that cat."
In the basement, the tool room is exaggerated. The shelves. The guns. The camouflage case thicker than before, more padded, the gun heavier and the stock smoother. The cartridges brighter yellow and the copper bottoms turned to gold. I can smell the gun oil above the mold in the dank room.
I load the cartridges and snap the action shut as I walk out into the backyard.
I have some sense that I am in a city, three blocks from the University of Oregon, and I know that hunting a cat, house to house, down an alley and up a front street, is not a good idea. So I check the safety and lay my loaded gun on our deck railing. Then I go to find the cat, to bring it back to our own yard.
I search all afternoon, stalking quietly. I hop fences and creep up next to neighbors' back doors. I look under decks, in garages, behind cars. But I don't find the cat I'm looking for. There are smaller cats lounging on porches, on top of fences. Well-caredfor pets. They don't wear abscesses around their necks like wet scarves.
After two hours, I give up and climb back over our fence. Hungry and tired, I don't care about the alley cat anymore. I don't care about shooting the gun.
I walk through the backyard, up to the porch. When I get there, the gun is still on the railing, loaded and ready, with the safety on. And next to the open end of the gun's barrel, the cat is sleeping.
The alley cat I was looking for.
He is calm. When I walk up, he opens his eyes lethargically, blinking as if he has been napping for days. Waiting for me. One paw is crossed over the other, making a pillow out of his shoulder. He looks at me without lifting his head.
I can reach out and touch both the cat and the gun. But I do neither. Instead, I stand and contemplate the fact that the cat's body is three inches from the end of the barrel. I imagine what it would be like to push the safety button, to hear it click, knowing the trigger is set. Even though I've been told not to, I have dryfired the gun many times, and I know how far the trigger depresses before it catches. Less than an eighth of an inch. I wonder what a 20-gauge bird load would do to a cat at a distance of three inches. Entrance and exit. Bones and ricochet.
I know I can't shoot an animal like that, while it sleeps on a deck railing, with a shotgun lying at its side. So I reach out and pick up the cat. I avoid touching him near his collar, not wanting to feel the wet fur. My hands wrap around his soft belly instead. He is bigger than he looks, stronger, and I realize how well he eats. His skin is warm near his heart. I can feel his lungs opening and closing. The hair on his body is cold compared to the pumping warmth of his skin. I can smell the sweet rank of his abscess. I juggle him to readjust, holding him out like a sacrifice. I don't want to bring him anywhere near my body, don't want to hold him the way I hold my own cat.
I step off the porch and set him down in the grass, then go back for the gun. I tell myself that I've made my decision. I can't hesitate or change my mind because my father does not encourage indecisiveness.
It is quiet in the yard, and still. The sound of the safety clicking off is a loud noise. I have the gun at ready position, aimed at the ground in front of me, and now I shoulder the stock, wiggling it into the front of my armpit. Adjusting. Then readjusting. I have too much time. This is not at all like the hunting I've read about in my grandfather's Field & Stream magazines. This is not a reflex game. It's been two and a half hours since I was told to take care of the cat.
The cat himself seems to sense no danger. He tips back on his haunches. Straightens his front legs. Extends his claws and stretches. Then he arches over, bringing his back high in the air, looking like a caricature of a cat, something a kid might draw in the margins of a book. I smile despite the circumstances. Then I press my lips together, forcing a frown, forcing my resolve. I make myself say out loud, "You scratched my little brother, cat. You hurt my baby brother."
I take a step back to gain separation. Lift the gun and center the bead of the sight just behind the front shoulder of the cat, where I imagine the heart is. The target seems bored, leaning to stretch again, yawning, sauntering toward the fence. He looks like a teenage boy coming out of a 7-Eleven. Cocky.
The cat glances twice over his shoulder as he makes his way to the edge of the yard, a distance of fifteen feet. I take a side step to keep the bead of the gun on him, still following the line of his heart.
I can smell the hexanol in the cut grass as I hold my shotgun, right index finger touching the vertical grooves of the trigger. The cat angles left at the fence, perpendicular to me. In line. The cedar slats of the fence extend to the ground where they are crossed by two-by-fours, all freshly painted white. The orange cat stands out against the white background. I can see the ends of each hair.
The cat takes ten steps along the fence. Then stops. He turns his head toward me and stares. And at this moment, he seems to finally understand.
When I was a child, my father coined the simple phrase "Hoffmeisters don't quit." It was meant to apply to music practices, soccer and baseball games, cross-country races, or difficult schoolwork. But the phrase grew. The sentence became a mantra that my closest brother, Cooper, and I said to each other before jumping off of a second-story roof into a bush or taking turns trying to shoot out a far-off neighbors' porch light with a BB gun. We said it as we swam the river in winter or beat a carp to death with a stick.
I say the phrase now three times.
"Hoffmeisters don't quit. Hoffmeisters don't quit. Hoffmeisters don't quit."
The bead at the end of the barrel begins to shake as I pronounce the words. My left shoulder cramps, and I bring my elbow into my side. I settle my right elbow as well. The cat continues to stare at me, unmoving. I think of my mother saying, "You're the man of the house now, Peter. So take care of it."
I mumble, "Hoffmeisters don't quit," one final time.
I know I have a choice but I also don't.
The hum starts. There is no voice. Only the telegraph wire of the hum, the electricity.
I make myself picture Ellis's fresh blood on the paper towel, the water thinning the color. The concentric pink circles. I picture Ellis's tongue quivering as he cried, mouth open, two thin baby teeth coming from his bottom gumline.
I exhale and close my eyes. Then I whisper, "Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry, don't cry." I suck in breath and open my eyes. The cat is still there, fifteen feet from me, standing against the clean white fence slats.
I pull the trigger.
I tell myself that I killed the cat for Ellis, that I was protecting my baby brother. I say afterward, "It was a nasty alley cat anyway. He would've probably scratched more babies if I hadn't done it." This is how I justify.
I speak in self-defense when family members bring up the cat shooting in front of new friends or extended family. No one remembers that my mother told me to "take care of it" or that she called me "the man of the house." In my family, the motives are often taken out of stories to add conflict. According to my younger sister Haley's version of the story, the cat I killed was one of our own. But Haley doesn't know. She wasn't even there.
The story doesn't settle easily into people's minds. I am told that killing domesticated animals is often a precursor to human murder. I am played as the family psychopath. "That's just Peter," Haley says, "and he's crazy." My mother nods in agreement. I begin to wonder about myself.
I clean the fence with paper towels. I say nothing. Not aloud and not in my head. The hum is gone like a canyon broken open. Too dark to see the river.
I dig a hole under our willow tree in the soft ground, burying the remains of the cat. I don't pray for it. I don't know if I have the right to do that.
The gun is warm behind me, lying on the edge of the deck in the sun, two unused cartridges inside. I retrieve more paper towels and a spray bottle of bleach. I wipe the fence, smearing the bloodstain to a lighter pink. I leave extra bleach on the slats afterward, hoping the chemical will erase the color over time.
I give the alley cat a name and burn the letters into a homemade cross at my father's workbench. I don't know then that I will kill other animals over the next year. I will kill a family of possums with a pitchfork, a shotgun, and a shovel. I will feel nothing, even for the babies.
And, at seventeen, in only three years, I will plan the murder of an older boy.
I know nothing of that now. I only know that I cry, that I am crying as I pound the cat's cross down into the earth. I drive the wood with chopping blows, using the side of an old hammer, rusted at its edges.
I do not cry for the cat. I do not cry for his body torn nearly in half, for his hair and skin and flesh and nails, for his heart that is no longer whole.
CHAPTER 2
Family Science
I am six. Hillary, Cooper, Haley, and I are homeschooled, home all the time, and our mother doesn't take any medication. She is loose, as if some of her strings aren't tied correctly, lines that don't match up. This is our first year living in Tucson, having previously lived on the green tongue of an Oregon grass valley, and my mother loves the desert landscape. We comb the hardpan for her, find carcasses she can boil down into piles of bones, biologic fodder for her sculpting.
She stands in the bleach fumes in the kitchen, one of her stiff painting aprons tied around her waist, a wooden spoon dangling from her left hand like a paintbrush, telling us stories and creating names for hybrid coyotes that she'll create out of chicken wire and paper-mache.
"Aardvark and coyote: aard-ote."
"Cat and coyote: cat-ote."
"Snake and coyote: snake-ote."
She tells us that Picasso would've been just another Velázquez if he had been willing to stop at imitation. But he didn't. And Matisse extended the fauvist movement for half a century.
Our mother makes up songs with jingles and slant rhymes. She reads us children's books: Where the Wild Things Are, The Big Orange Splot, Bill and Pete. She reads classics as well: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Arabian Nights. She reads us the Bible. I love the way my mother reads. She does all the voices.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The End of Boys"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Peter Brown Hoffmeister.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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