I WAS TRAMPING ACROSS THE campus of the University of Colorado Boulder when I saw a guy in a tree, forty feet off the ground: a man in a dark Windbreaker and a red tie, tilted almost upside down, with a branch going through his stomach. I walked right under him. He was reaching out with both arms, and his eyes were open wide, like he was about to ask for help getting down. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how he’d gotten up there.
It was a cool, shady morning under the big, leafy oaks on the Norlin Quad, but you couldn’t fool yourself it was just any Sunday morning. A girl ran by me in a blood-soaked Josh Ritter T-shirt, sobbing her guts out. Who knew where she was coming from or where she was going? What might be the cause of her grief. What source of comfort she sought and if she ever found it.
There were shiny nails of finest crystal on the paths, broken windows in all the dorms, and dead pigeons littering the grass. The air should’ve been perfumed with the smells of late summer: roasted grass and blue spruce. Instead, though, there was a stink of jet fuel.
I didn’t see the helicopter until I came down a gloomy alley between buildings and had a glimpse through a stone arch into the outdoor theater they have there for Shakespeare and the like. There was a TV news copter that had gone straight down into the flagstones. The cockpit was a bashed-in nest of steel and shattered glass and blood. The whole craft looked shot up, holes and dents and dings all over it. So that was where the guy in the tree had come from. He had tried to jump when he saw he was going down. Maybe he’d imagined that the oak would break his fall. It had.
I came out onto Broadway, which is four lanes wide and cuts a straight line through that part of Boulder. When I emerged streetside, I saw for the first time how bad everything really was. There were abandoned cars as far as you could see, windshields busted in, all of them beat up, pocked with hundreds of dents, shot through with holes. Cars had swerved off the road and up onto the curbs. I spotted a ragtop that was just rags and a pickup that had parked in the lobby of a real-estate office, driving right through the plate-glass window to escape the storm. Someone else had run their Lincoln Continental into a bus stop, plowed it right into the long Plexiglas booth where people had crowded together to take shelter from the rain. There was blood splashed up onto the Plexiglas, but the bodies at least had been cleared away.
Two blocks down the road, there was a stopped Greyhound riddled with holes. The door was cranked open, and a guy sat on the bottom step, feet in the road. Rangy Latin dude in a blue denim shirt buttoned at the throat but the rest flapped open to show his bare chest. He held a fist to his mouth as if to stifle a cough. I thought he was mewling to himself, but that was the cat.
A horrid, skinny hairless cat was in the street, one of those things that is all wrinkles and big, batlike ears. This thing was dragging itself around by its front legs, turning itself in a slow circle, trying to find a way to get more comfortable. It had a nail through its haunches and another in its throat.
The big guy, his face framed by long, greasy hanks of hair, was crying almost silently. Silently and bitterly. His nose had been broken more than once, and the corners of his eyes were wrinkled with scar tissue. He looked like he’d been in a hundred bar fights and lost ninety of them. From his dark hair and deep reddish hue—a color like polished teak—he had more than a little vaquero in him.
I slowed, crouched down by the cat in the road. It gave me a bewildered, helpless stare with very green eyes. I am no fan of the hairless breed of felines, but you couldn’t help but feel dreadful for the sad thing.
“Poor little guy,” I said.
“S’my cat,” the big man told me.
“Oh, Lord. I am so sorry. What’s his name?”
“Roswell,” he choked out. “I was lookin’ for him all mornin’. Callin’ for him. He was under the bus. I half wish I hadn’t found him at all.”
“You don’t mean that,” I said. “You’ve been blessed with a chance to say good-bye. That’s more than most got with those they love. He is glad to see you, no matter how much pain he might be in.”
He glared. “You got a twisted fuckin’ idea of what’s a blessing.”
“I’m not a fan of that kind of language,” I said, “but I’ll give you a pass since you’re upset. What’s your name?”
“Marc DeSpot.”
“That isn’t a real name.”
“It’s my fightin’ name,” he said, and opened his shirt slightly to show the Gothic black X inked across his pectorals and abdomen, the crux right over his breastbone. “I am a professional MMA fighter. Right now I’m five and seven, but I been undefeated in my last four scraps. Who are you?”
“I’m Honeysuckle Speck.”
“Kind of name is that?”
“That’d be my fightin’ name.”
He stared at me in bewilderment for a moment over the fist he still held close to his mouth. Then misery overtook him, and his shoulders heaved with another sob, blowing snot and spit in the process. When movie stars grieve in the tragic third act of a love story, they always make mourning look a lot more beautiful than it really is.
Roswell peered from Marc to me and mewled in a weak, shivery voice. He was trembling. I stroked one hand along his smooth, downy flank. You never saw a creature asking for relief any more clearly.
“I don’t know what to do for him,” Marc said.
“There is only one thing left you can do for him.”
“I can’t!” he said, and another sob burst out of him. “Ain’t no way. We have been friends for ten years.”
“Ten years is a good life for a cat.”
“He has been with me from Tucumcari to Spokane. I had him when I didn’t have nothing else except the shirt on my back. I just can’t do that.”
“No. Of course you can’t,” I said. “Go on and pet him. He’s looking for comfort.”
He reached out one big, gnarly hand and rubbed at Roswell’s head, as tenderly as a man stroking the face of a newborn. Roswell shut his eyes and pressed his skull up into Marc’s palm and gave a soft, rattling purr. He was stretched out in a sticky puddle of blood, but he had the bright sun on his flank and his companion’s hand on his brow.
“Oh, Roswell,” he said. “A man never had a better pal.”
He drew his hand back to his mouth, heaving with fresh tears, and shut his eyes. I supposed that was as good a time as any, so I reached out and took Roswell’s head in one hand and his neck in the other and gave a good, firm twist, same as I would’ve done with a chicken on my father’s old farm.
Marc DeSpot’s eyes flew open. He stiffened, went rigid with shock.
“What’d you do?” he asked, like he didn’t know.
“It’s over,” I said. “He was suffering.”