he was too softhearted and law-abiding to kill somebody’s pet. He thought of bringing in his brother Mitch to do the job, but Mitch’s existing criminal record argued against taking this chance, and Walter could see that Linda Hoffbauer would probably just get another cat. Only after a second summer of diplomacy and educational efforts had failed, and after Linda Hoffbauer’s husband had blocked his driveway with snow one too many times, did he decide that, although Bobby was just one cat among seventy-five million in America, the time had come for Bobby to pay personally for his sociopathy. Walter obtained a trap and detailed instructions from one of the contractors fighting the nearly hopeless war on ferals on Conservancy lands, and before dawn one morning in May he placed the trap, baited with chicken livers and bacon, along the path that Bobby was wont to tread onto his property. He knew that, with a smart cat, you only got one chance with a trap. Sweet to his ears were the feline cries coming up the hill two hours later. He hustled the jerking, shit-smelling trap up to his Prius and locked it in the trunk. That Linda Hoffbauer had never put a collar on Bobby—too restrictive of her cat’s precious freedom, presumably—made it all the easier for Walter, after a three-hour drive, to deposit the animal at a Minneapolis shelter that would either kill it or fob it off on an urban family who would keep it indoors.
He wasn’t prepared for the depression that beset him on his drive out of Minneapolis. The sense of loss and waste and sorrow: the feeling that he and Bobby had in some way been married to each other, and that even a horrible marriage was less lonely than no marriage at all. Against his will, he pictured the sour cage in which Bobby would now be dwelling. He knew better than to imagine that Bobby was missing the Hoffbauers personally—cats were all about using people—but there was something pitiable about his trappedness nonetheless.
For nearly six years now, he’d been living by himself and finding ways to make it work. The state chapter of the Conservancy, which he’d once directed, and whose coziness with corporations and millionaires now made him queasy, had granted his wish to be rehired as a low-level property manager and, in the frozen months, as an assistant on particularly tedious and time-consuming administrative tasks. He wasn’t doing dazzling good on the lands he oversaw, but he wasn’t doing any harm, either, and the days he got to pass alone among the conifers and loons and sedge and woodpeckers were mercifully forgetful. The other work he did—writing grant proposals, reviewing wildlife population literature, making cold calls on behalf of a new sales tax to support a state Land Conservation Fund, which had eventually garnered more votes in the 2008 election than even Obama had—was similarly unobjectionable. In the late evening, he prepared one of the five simple suppers he now bothered with, and then, because he could no longer read novels or listen to music or do anything else associated with feeling, he treated himself to computer chess and computer poker and, sometimes, to the raw sort of pornography that bore no relation to human emotion.
At times like this, he felt like a sick old fucker living in the woods, and he was careful to turn his phone off, lest Jessica call to check up on him. Joey he could still be himself with, because Joey was not only a man but a Berglund man, too cool and tactful to intrude, and although Connie was trickier, because there was always sex in Connie’s voice, sex and innocent flirtation, it was never too hard to get her chattering about herself and Joey, because she was so happy. The real ordeal was hearing from Jessica. Her voice sounded more than ever like Patty’s, and Walter was often perspiring by the end of their conversations, from the effort of keeping them focused on her life or, failing that, on his work. There had been a time, after the car accident that had effectively ended his life, when Jessica had descended on him and nursed him in his grief. She’d done this partly in expectation of his getting better, and when she’d realized he would not be getting better, didn’t feel like getting better, never wanted to get better, she’d become very angry with him. It had taken him several hard years to teach