The Buckies

The Buckies

Attack

Throughout the sultry Sunday afternoon and into the dusky evening, the neighbors roll their garbage cans down their sloping driveways. Christy is always first. Her trashcan a perfect twelve inches from the curb. Three bags of branches spaced precisely from the can. 

Perfection. 

A target. 

They’re already plotting. 

It’s sometime past midnight before I startle awake. “Shit. Trash day.” I’m up and out of bed, feet in slides, dragging the can behind me before my eyes are fully open. I glance across the street, and in the faint moonlight I see destruction. Tree limbs scattered across the street with bits of shredded paper bag waving from beneath them. The trash can on its side, vomiting out a week’s worth of waste. The recycling bins tipped over and aluminum cans rolling down the street in the breeze. Broken glass sparkles like a million stars. Across the street, another can over and another. Standing in the moonlight in my sockfeet, I feel a sudden chill and start back up the driveway, dragging the trash can behind me. I punched in the garage code, looking over my shoulder, and rolled the can inside. In case they come back. Whoever they are. 

Thugs. Hoodlums. 

The city is more alive at night than we ever imagine. There’s a whole world besides the few sleepless out walking and the few partiers driving home and the first responders outside the elderly couple’s home. If you look and listen closer, lean in to the shadows you habitually hurry away from, you’ll catch glimpses of the wakeful underbelly milling and organizing and surging, striking out in seeming violent and random ways.

Before the sun’s up, the blue police lights are splashing on my bedroom ceiling. I peer outside, but the fence obscures my view, and I only see a black cat slinking by. Official voices crackling on radios, gigantic scraping and shoveling sounds. It’s impossible to sleep, so, like all the neighbors, I go outside. But unlike all the other neighbors, I am not shocked by the destruction. 

“Did they make off with your can, Miss?” a uniform officer asked me.

“I forgot to put my trash out,” I kind-of lie but then flush and feel guilty like maybe my neighbors think I’m the one who went on a rampage last night, overturning all the bags and bins. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it.” The officer jots something down--my address?-- and I hurry up the driveway,  face on fire. 

“This happened in Rolling Hills last week,” I overhear someone say. 

“Someone in Sequoyah Woods posted about something similar a month or so ago.”

“Parents need to keep their kids at home...hoodlums.”

I sigh in relief. No one really suspects me. I hope.

There’s another black cat--or maybe the same one--peering out at me from the bushes. He’s the only one who knows who did it. My character witness:  a stray black cat with a tattered ear. I stop abruptly and just watch him. He winks one grape green eye and streaks out across the yard and ducks down into a water drain.

I don’t think anymore about this mangy cat, but while I’m sleeping, a meeting of The Buckies is convened.

An Uneasy Peace

Next Sunday no one puts their trash out. We all follow the directive set out in our POA newsletter. Everyone’s rolling their cans to the curb at 6:10 am Monday morning when the trash truck swings around. We hold onto our cans until the orange claws grabs them from our grasp, swings them overhead, and dumps them into the truck’s putrid, cavernous belly. Collective sigh of relief. It’s easy--but never advisable--to take successful trash collection for granted. For a few weeks we’re all up at 6 am, but then the lazy ones--me and Brett--put our cans out at night, tempting fate.

 Christy looks at me balefully the next morning as I roll my emptied and unmolested can up the driveway and pause for a luxurious stretch. I’d slept past 8 am.

We hear rumors of other attacks across town, but months go by, and our guards go down.

The newsletter this week addresses another grave concern. Feral cats. Mean Miss Molly is up in arms.  She reports seeing several cats using her mulched garden beds as their own personal litter boxes. A few petunias were injured by careless claws. Christy hates everything, so this is definitely a cause she gets behind. Animal control makes frequent passes through our cul-de-sac. I clap and warn a cat, and he slips into the storm drain like a shadow. I’m on the side of the cats. Angie is too, but she’s trying to catch them all and get them sterilized, but these cats are savvy around live traps, and no cats are caught.

Counter-attack

It was the Sunday evening after Christmas, and every unprotected trash can bulged immodestly to the heavy-bellied sky. Bucky licked up the rim of uneaten wet cat food the civilian cats left behind. He slipped over a fence and crunched a few grainy chunks of dog food. He hit up one more house, knowing he’d need all his strength and was delighted to find a turkey carcass unguarded outside a sliding glass door. A few sinewy gnaws and a mouthful of meat, he let himself out the open gate. Dusk was falling, and the shadows rose up from the boles of trees and rushed across the yards to meet him. He slowed to a stroll, licked his front paw once, twice, and then he disappeared. 

From window ledges and under cars and behind walls of hedges, the cats streamed. “Bucky’s on the move,” they whispered, rubbing shoulders, tapping noses, twining tails. The Buckies moved in the storm drains, but less experienced cats--those newer to the force , those who trembled at the thought of meet a masked bandit head-on in a tight space--stayed above ground and loped from shadow to shadow, staring out from under cars, their eyes bright and glowing, before darting into the open again, across a quiet street, and nearer to my neighborhood. 

Mean Miss Molly felt something in her bones. She left her trash in the middle of the driveway and hurried inside. When John was taking his can out later, he rolled hers the rest of the way. He thought to knock and check in on her, but something in the air, something in the racing clouds, made him want to be indoors. 

I heard a crash, and looking up from the tomato soup on the stove, I saw a racoon’s face pressed against the skylight. His meaty palms were splayed wide, and his eyes gleamed down at me evilly. “Get out of here,” I yelled, flinging tomato soup around as I waved the ladle over my head. He snarled and slipped out of sight. 

I heard more crashes throughout the night as the wind picked up and sleet pelted the windows. The wind screamed with animalistic ferocity, and one loud crash convinced me the half-rotten maple had fallen. I switched on the porch light, and in glow I saw the black cat sitting on my front steps. His back was straight, eyes straight ahead. He glanced over his shoulder and shook his head once when I unlocked the door. I locked it back and looked past him at the dark street where shadows chased shadows and rolled and clawed at each other and screamed. 

Peace

The black cat sits on the arm of the wooden adirondack chair. He purrs throatily even when my fingers find a swollen abscess on his neck under his tattered collar. As I touch it, pink pus drips onto the chair. He’s still there when I come back outside with the med kit. I unbuckle his collar, and clean the wound. He licks at the antibiotic ointment a few times but soon settles back down and starts to purr. The name carved into the heart-shaped pet ID tag is covered with mud. It flakes off under my thumb. Bucky.