“That’s the most amazing thing I ever saw” was all Bill’s father said when the raccoons finally disappeared.
That was the last Bill ever saw of Pierre LaPoop. The raccoon moved into the forest with his family and disappeared. He had just come out to say good-bye.
A few years later, Bill graduated from high school and said his own good-byes. He wasn’t going to veterinary school or forest ranger training. He wasn’t even going to college. It was June 1964, and Bill Bezanson was going into the army, infantry division, full volunteer. By July 1, he was on his way to basic training. Three years later, barely twenty years old, he was in Vietnam.
Bill was assigned to B Company, 123rd Aviation Battalion of the United States Army. The Warlords. Their job: air cavalry reinforcement, snatch and grab, reconnaissance, secret missions behind enemy lines. Twenty-one soldiers in the unit, seven per helicopter, plus two pilots and two gunners. If an infantry unit or bomber crew reported suspected enemy positions in the distant hills, the brass called in the Warlords. Their role was to sweep through the area, laying down as much fire as they could, to see what kind of return fire they would draw. Bill was the tunnel rat. His job was to drop into any nearby tunnels alone, no cover and no radio, to flush out any Vietcong holed up inside.
Needless to say, it was a messy, dangerous, and unpredictable job. The kind of job so dangerous and unpredictable that, after a few months, it made a man feel invincible just because he survived it. Bill had more running firefights in pitch-black Vietcong tunnels than he cared to count. After one mission, he and the guys counted more than a thousand bullet holes in the shell of their helicopter. There had been eight men inside. Several had holes in their uniforms, but not a single man had bled. That was the way it was for the Warlords. Minor wounds, “a little Purple Star and stuff like that,” as Bill says of his military decorations, but nothing major. Nothing lethal. For almost a year.
Then September 1968 hit the calendar. It started badly. One of Bill’s close friends—everyone in the unit was close, but they were closer—took a bullet to the head. Bill held the boy on his blood-soaked lap in the chopper back to the medical area, but the hole was so big that Bill could see his friend’s brain pulsing every time his heart beat. “I thought I’d never see him again,” Bill said. “But in 1996, I got a letter from him. He survived. He’d had complications all his life, but he survived.”
A few days later, the Warlords were flown up near the demilitarized zone, beyond an area known as the Rock Pile, near Khe Sanh, where earlier that year a Marine base had been pinned down for 122 days by enemy fire. They dropped as usual, but this time it was right at the edge of a major Vietcong encampment. Every Warlords mission had two gunships and a spotter helicopter for support, but when hundreds of guns opened up, the sky cleared in a hurry. The first gunship went down; the pilot of the second was shot through the heel of his foot. He managed to pull out of the spin and limp home, but the men on the ground were left behind. It took the 196th Infantry Brigade to extract them. By then, the Warlords had taken wounded, and Bill Bezanson had lost his best friend, Lurch (Richard Larrick, rest in peace), to a North Vietnamese bullet. He flew back to base, buried the whole month in his head, and went on with the war.
By the time he came home in November 1968, Bill Bezanson didn’t want to have anything more to do with the United States Army or the war in Vietnam. He didn’t want to be a veterinarian or a forest ranger. The big banner on the Michigan farmhouse said WELCOME HOME, SON, but he didn’t feel like he was home. He and his father went out bass fishing in the eight-foot pram the old man had built by hand. They had always talked on the lake. It was their sanctuary. But this time, they didn’t have much to say.
Bill wasn’t sure what to do. He didn’t know where he fit in. On the way home from a relative’s house, where he had gone to show them his dress uniform and medals, a cop pulled him over, looked at his uniform, and snarled, “So you’re one of those baby killers.” He was asked to speak at his high school, the hero returned, and gave an impassioned antiwar speech. When his mother found out, she was mortified. She was such a strict Catholic that she hand washed the church’s altar cloths. She loved her son, but he had changed. He was moody. He was sullen. He was drinking. And now he was antiwar. The war was for God and country and everything else America stood for and believed in, at least for his mother and the “silent majority” of American people who stood by their government on principle. After months of tension, Bill’s mother literally closed the door in her son’s face.
He hit the bottle hard for a while, then he hit the road. As an active member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he gave speeches at PTA meetings and churches, anywhere a group would welcome him. The stories of massacres by American troops were piling up, and a large segment of the public was turning against the war. He didn’t know whether his audiences would be for the troops or against them, but he told them all the truth: Even while he was killing for his government, he lost his faith in the war. He had seen too many deaths, too much destruction, too many burned-out villages and hollowed-out souls. He told them how he had pointed his M16 at a fellow soldier who had taken a female prisoner and told him, “If you cut that woman, I will kill you.” You don’t put a gun to a comrade’s head. Not ever. But especially not in a war zone, surrounded by the enemy. His fellow soldiers thought the woman knew something important. They had no proof, but they believed torturing her for information might save lives. Bill believed they were losing, day by day, the values they were fighting for, and he refused to blur the line between right and wrong.
“It was easy to cross a line out there,” Bill told me. “Good people lost their way.” What had Bill lost? I think he lost his faith not just in the war, but in life. He didn’t know what it meant anymore. He couldn’t tell the good from the bad. He didn’t want that to happen to any other good young men. He didn’t want any more parents to send their boys to Vietnam.
But beyond a few speeches, what could he really do? He drifted. He drank. He’d get a job, work it for a while, and then one morning he’d light out, hitching mostly, not sure where he was going or why. Often, he didn’t even know he was leaving until he was standing on the corner with his thumb in the air. He made friends, but they didn’t last long. There were always people moving into and out of his life, mostly with bottles in their hands. Sometimes he moved because he didn’t like his new friends; sometimes he moved because he liked them too much. He didn’t want to get close to anyone. One summer he found himself in Alaska, so he bought a Harley-Davidson and rode it back to the Lower 48. That was the stupidest thing he ever did, he said, because it was twelve hundred miles of potholed, washboard, washout dirt roads, and his eyes didn’t stop bouncing for a month.
But what difference did it all make? Bill Bezanson was twenty-five years old and he was absolutely convinced that he wouldn’t live to see thirty. That feeling had started in the war. He had carried it home along with his scars and his medals, but he didn’t realize that at the time. It just became normal to feel doomed. A lot of young men came home that way. Set adrift from the normal world, they found each other. It was all they talked about back then, that they were living on borrowed time.
But Bill didn’t die. He just kept going through the motions, day after day, until he found himself in his thirties, with the 1970s winding down, and at almost the same place he’d started twelve years before. The war was over and his anger had cooled, or at least retreated somewhere else to hide. He had narrowed his travels mostly to the sprawling suburbs east of Los Angeles, but he was still working odd jobs, still leaving behind his old life every few months, still hitting the bottle or the road whenever the fear closed in. He’d somehow managed a degree in forestry from Chaffey College in Alta Loma, but beyond that, he was free: no friends, no possessions, no place to be. By June 1979, he was living in yet another Los Angeles suburb, working for a small company that manufactured travel trailers and truck beds and whose name he can’t even begin to recall. He was
waiting at a stoplight on a nameless road on the edge of downtown San Bernardino, watching the early morning light burn off the haze of another California morning, when, out of nowhere, change came crashing into his life.
It hit like a concussion grenade, literally smashing down above his head. He heard the strike, then the echo, and instinctively he ducked. He waited, but the world around him was silent. He looked out over the dashboard. There were buildings along both sides of the street, but it was 5:30 in the morning and nothing moved. The alleys were quiet, the windows in the storefronts black. There wasn’t another car on the road. So Bill cracked his door and squeezed out to examine the top of his car. He figured teenagers had thrown something at him. Sure enough, there was a dent, with a black lump in the center. There were impact lines in the metal and liquid running out in several directions.
Then he realized the liquid was blood. And the lump wasn’t a bag. It was a kitten. Someone had thrown a kitten at his car. And from the looks of its broken body, it had been a long throw.
Bill scooped up the kitten and cradled it in his hands. It just lay in his palms, its eyes closed, its head collapsed to the side, its legs curled. The only sign of life was the desperate heave of its chest and a bubbling, rasping sound as it struggled for breath. Bill knew what that meant: a puncture through the rib cage and into the lung. He’d seen a lot of sucking chest wounds in Vietnam. The soldiers in his unit had stripped the plastic wrappers off their cigarette packs and kept them in their kits. Put the plastic wrapper over a sucking chest wound, cover it with a bandage, then a body wrap, and it might save a friend’s life. Bill Bezanson didn’t have a cigarette packet wrapper that morning in San Bernardino, California, so he did the next best thing. He put his thumb over the puncture to close the wound, swiped his other hand downward over the kitten’s face to clear the blood from its nose, and started looking for help.
There was a veterinarian’s office down the block. There were no lights on, but Bill was pretty sure he’d just seen someone enter the building. He left the car idling at the intersection and started running. When he reached the vet’s office, he started kicking the door. The kitten gurgled, covered with blood.
A man opened the door. Bill thrust the bloody kitten toward him. “Call the vet,” he said. “Tell him to take care of this animal. I’ll pay whatever it costs, but right now I have to get to work.”
The man took the kitten. Bill turned and raced back to his car, sped through the intersection, and arrived for his shift on time.
There’s a bond that is formed when you save an animal’s life. It can happen even with something as typical as rescuing a dog from the pound. For you, it is an exciting afternoon, but that dog knows he was trapped in a bad place, and you set him free. It happens with dogs when you take them off a choke chain or rescue them from a backyard where they have been abandoned without food and water. It happens with cats when you take them in—not just give them food until they refuse to go away but bring them inside when they are sick or starving and make them a part of your life. It certainly happened with Dewey when I pulled him out of the library return box in the winter of 1988. Like Dewey, most rescued animals never forget what you did for them. They cherish it. And unlike so many people who, no matter what you have done, find a way to turn their back on you, animals are forever grateful.
And if that animal is hurt and needs to be nursed back to health? Well, that just makes the bond stronger. Taking care of Dewey’s frostbitten footpads in the week after rescuing him was, as much as anything, the act that pinned us together. Dewey learned my kindness wasn’t just for a moment. I was committed; I would be there as long as he wanted and needed me. And I got to know him. That sounds trite, I know, but what else is there to say? After only a few days, I knew Dewey: his outgoing personality, his friendliness, his trust. I had seen him vulnerable, so I had seen his true self. I knew he appreciated me—you could almost say loved me, although we had known each other only a few days—and that he would never leave my side. I like to say we had looked into each other’s souls. And maybe we had. Maybe that was the hardwire that connected us for the next nineteen years. Or maybe we had just spent enough time together to realize we were both openhearted individuals ready for someone to love.
Something similar happened to Bill Bezanson. He didn’t love that kitten the morning he ran with it bleeding in his hands to the veterinarian’s office. That was an act of kindness from a softhearted man who always helped a fellow creature in need. It is probably a stretch to say that he loved the kitten when he stopped at the veterinarian’s office after work and discovered that, by some miracle, the little guy had survived. After all, Bill Bezanson hadn’t developed a deep, meaningful relationship with another living thing since September 1968. In fact, he had spent twelve years running from every meaningful relationship and hardening his heart against the entanglements of life.
It’s probably more accurate to say Bill Bezanson admired the kitten. He was small—only a few pounds and about six weeks old—but he was a survivor. The puncture wound in his lung was not, as Bill had assumed, the result of abuse or neglect. It was from the talon of a bird of prey. His forehead was badly torn, probably because the bird attacked him with his beak. At 5:30 in the morning, the only bird feeding would have been an owl. An owl doesn’t clutch a small animal and kill it later. An owl attack is designed to hit the animal with enough force to break its back. The kitten had survived the strike. It had struggled with the owl—thus the beak marks and torn face—and somehow in that struggle, the owl had lost its grip.
“This cat is very spooky,” the veterinarian—who happened to be the man who opened the door that morning—kept saying as he talked Bill through the kitten’s injuries. “He fell out of the sky and landed on your car . . . that’s very spooky. This cat is very spooky.”
“That was his name,” Bill would always conclude when telling the story later (and he told it hundreds of times over the years). “From that moment on, he was Spooky.”
Spooky stayed at the veterinary office for a week. The vet donated his time; the only charge was for the medicine, but there was a lot of that. Spooky needed serious attention and care. He was battling infection, a stab wound, and major blunt-force trauma. Every inch of his body was scraped and bruised, and he was so torn up inside that he couldn’t eat solid food for a month. Bill had to spoon-feed him every meal. Spooky had several stitches in his chest, where the owl talon had pierced his lung, and he wore a protective cone-shaped collar so he couldn’t bite them off. There is nothing more pathetic, I can imagine, than a little kitten head poking through the bottom of a big white megaphone-shaped collar.
But even with the collar, Spooky was beautiful. He was tiny, only a pound or two, less than two months old, but you could see the majestic cat he would become: lean and angular, with bony hips that stuck out from a wiry body. His face was long and lean, with an almost pantherlike thrust around the mouth. It was a regal face, calm and sophisticated with big staring eyes, like the cats in ancient Egyptian carvings. In ordinary light, he was black. But the sunlight, which he loved, would bring out a shimmering copper undercoat. He was a practical cat, not prone to fits of scampering, plaintive meowing, or manic bouts of pencil chasing, but that copper coat hinted at his internal heat. Spooky was never going to let anyone or anything beat him.
Did Bill Bezanson love Spooky after a month of spoon-feeding? If pressed, he would say yes, then he loved Spooky. But thirty years later, that’s hard to know for sure. At what point, after all, does admiration become love?
But it isn’t the right question anyway. The important thing to know is that Spooky the cat loved Bill Bezanson. Immediately and forever. The first thing Bill would do, whenever he moved into a new rental house or apartment, was cut a hole in a screen. That way, Spooky could entertain himself while Bill worked long hours on assembly lines and in fabrication garages. Spooky spent most of his day outside. But as soon as Bill came home, Spooky came running. If he wasn’t there at the f
ront door to greet him, all Bill had to do was step outside and yell, “Spooky,” and the little cat would come sprinting home. Often, he came running from four yards away. Bill could see him leaping fences at full speed. He’d come skidding right into Bill, weaving in and out between his leg, rubbing against him and almost tripping him. Bill would plop down on the couch with a beer, and Spooky would climb up on his legs, put his front paws on Bill’s chest, and lick him on the nose. Then he would stretch out on Bill’s lap. He didn’t care about getting back outdoors or having his own space; he just wanted to be with his buddy. Some nights, the two of them sat like that for hours.
It wasn’t just friendship. There was a kinship, a parallel in their lives that eased Bill’s discontent. Like Bill, Spooky had confronted the darkness of the world. Like Bill, Spooky shouldn’t have been alive. But he was. Spooky was alive and healthy and happy and somehow, in some way, that made Bill feel better about his own survival. At night, Spooky climbed into the bed. Bill always slept on his side, and Spooky would climb onto the pillow and lay beside him, his face pressed against Bill’s beard. He would wrap his paws around Bill’s arm and pull on it until Bill cradled him in the crook of his elbow. Even when he went to sleep without Spooky, Bill would wake up and find the cat curled on the pillow and his arm around its back. And it made a difference. After a decade of thrashing, Spooky’s presence calmed the nightmares. Bill knew, both consciously and subconsciously, that he needed to lie still. If he didn’t, he might hurt Spooky.