Declawed
By Brandi Wells

I remember Mr. Canter telling my parents that our cat was ruining the paint job on his truck. “It gets up there and drags its claws around like it wants to use my hood as a scratching post,” he told them.

There were a few small scratches on the hood of his white and blue Chevy pick-up, but they were probably from the squirrels he was always complaining about.

He used to set traps for the squirrels.

“They eat all the birdseed,” he told me.

He left dried apple slices inside a wire cage and when squirrels ran in, a little door snapped shut behind them. They thrashed around, darting from one end of the cage to the other, until he shot them. He pulled their limp bodies out with a gloved hand and threw them in the garbage can at the corner of his house.

“I’m gonna drop that cat off in the country somewhere,” Mr. Canter told my parents.

He meant it, we knew, because he did the same thing to the neighbors on the other side of him. Their cat came home a few weeks later. Its fur was dirty and matted together and you could see its ribs. The morning after it came home, they found it dead, just a lump of fur, underneath the trampoline in their back yard.

“We’ll take care of it,” my father assured Mr. Canter.

The next morning, my father called and made an appointment at the vet’s office.

The way they de-claw cats is inhumane. Instead of digging their claws out, or ripping them out, the vet cuts off the end of each paw. Imagine someone cutting off the ends of your fingers, just before the nail starts. It’s something like that.

My dad brought the cat home that afternoon and its paws were wrapped in white bandages with red soaked through. It scooted around, leaving red streaks across the kitchen floor and beneath the dining room table. The vet was cheap, or didn’t do a good job, or that’s just the way it works: I don’t know.

My mother didn’t speak to Mr. Canter for three weeks. The old man sat in a fold-up chair in his front yard, drinking canned tea and reading the paper, staring at my mother every time she went outside to the laundry room.

My mother and Mr. Canter used to go walking every day. A dirt road looped from one side of our house to the other. It was almost four miles and there were woods on either side of the road. Honeysuckle, blackberries and blueberries grew in the ditches, depending on the season. Sometimes they took me with them and I rode my scooter behind them, running off into the ditch when my mother wasn’t looking.

On this particular walk I stayed home. I was playing with my friends or was I watching cartoons. I guess it doesn’t matter.

My mother put on her walking shoes and an old pair of shorts she sometimes wore when she washed the car. Like always, she met Mr. Canter at the end of his driveway. They didn’t talk, only walked, quickly because my mother wanted to burn calories. They stayed on the left side of the road and Mr. Canter walked closest to the ditch.

They got to the half-way point and there were two guys standing on the side of the road, smoking a blunt.

Mr. Canter stopped a few yards from them and told the boys to get back to their house. He told them, “It’s because of people like you that the neighborhood is going to shit.”

He was probably right. Our car was broken into twice that month. My father’s pistol and a stack of Ricky Nelson tapes were stolen. Right after it happened, my father arranged to have a streetlight turned inward so our entire front yard was illuminated.

Mr. Canter stood there, arms crossed and staring at the boys. He was in the middle of the road, facing them like he was some kind of goddamn audience.

My mother kept walking, arms swinging, tight fists, staring straight ahead.

One of the guys pushed Mr. Canter into the ditch. He probably meant to leave it at that, walk away, maybe pick up his blunt and finish smoking it. Then the other guy kicked him hard, across his ribcage.

After that, it was easy. Once you begin something, like beating a man until he is unconscious and bleeding in a ditch, it is harder to stop than to keep going. My mother heard Mr. Canter yelling that day, but she kept walking. She went home, folded the laundry and swept up kitty litter.

Our cat’s paws healed in about a month. It didn’t run around as much, but other than that it seemed okay. We worried about leaving it outside overnight because it couldn’t defend itself anymore. Sometimes it came home with a gash in its side or a chunk of hair missing on its face.

It never caught another bird or climbed a tree, but it still sleeps on Mr. Canter’s truck.

Brandi Wells is a student at Georgia Southern University, soon to graduate with a BA in Writing and Linguistics and a BA in English. Her fiction is forthcoming or may be found in The Saint Ann's Review, Hobart, Wandering Army and Eclectica.