Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

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 to see where its true heart lay. Until he came to live in his mother’s house, however, he’d had many worse evils to contend against. Only now, when he was responsible for the feral cat populations wreaking havoc on the properties he managed for the Nature Conservancy, and when the injury that Canterbridge Estates had inflicted on his lake was compounded by the insult of its residents’ free-roaming pets, did his old anti-feline prejudice swell into the kind of bludgeoning daily misery and grievance that depressive male Berglunds evidently needed to lend meaning and substance to their lives. The grievance that had served him for the previous two years—the misery of chain saws and earthmovers and small-scale blasting and erosion, of hammers and tile cutters and boom-boxed classic rock—was over now, and he needed something new.

Some cats are lazy or inept as killers, but the white-footed black Bobby wasn’t one of them. Bobby was shrewd enough to retreat to the Hoffbauer house at dusk, when raccoons and coyotes became a danger, but every morning in the snowless months he could be seen sallying freshly forth along the lake’s denuded southern shore and entering Walter’s property to kill things. Sparrows, towhees, thrushes, yellowthroats, bluebirds, goldfinches, wrens. Bobby’s tastes were catholic, his attention span limitless. He never tired of killing, and he had the additional character flaw of disloyalty or ingratitude, rarely bothering to carry his kills back to his owners. He captured and toyed and butchered, and then sometimes he snacked a little, but usually he just abandoned the carcass. The open grassy woods below Walter’s house and the surrounding edge habitat were particularly attractive to birds and Bobby. Walter kept a little pile of stones to throw at him, and he’d once scored a direct aqueous hit with the pressure nozzle on his garden hose, but Bobby had soon learned to stay in the woods in the early morning, waiting for Walter to leave for work. Some of the Conservancy holdings that Walter managed were far enough away that he was often gone for several nights, and almost invariably, when he returned home, he found fresh carnage on the slope behind his house. If it had only been happening in this one place, he might have stood it, but knowing that it was happening everywhere deranged him.

And yet 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.