Fat Jack has been sulking under the back porch for most of the morning, refusing to come out and even look at the plate of tuna that I have left for him. He imagines that I am still mad at him for bringing the dead bird around this morning, leaving it's small coal black body on the welcome mat where I could not help but notice it when I went out for the daily paper. For a cat he is not very intuitive. He pays little attention to my moods for the most part, prefering to live as if I were an impediment, a piece of moving furniture. He reacts to me for reasons known only to himself. Occasionally he will, for no apparent reason, jump out at my legs in full attack, claws and fangs flashing in earnest and leaving bloody weals on my ankles and calves. He finds reason to resent my tone of voice and stays in a funk long after I have forgotten any misbehavior on his part. He is just a cat, I tell myself. He is not capable of long term memory nor of harboring a grudge. That is what I tell myself because I read it someplace once and that memory, like a long healed scar, remains with me always.

But I know otherwise.

What bothers me in actuality has nothing to do with Fat Jack. I know that he didn't kill the bird left laying on the welcome mat. He is too lazy and complacent to actually hunt anything wild, although the instinct to do just that never lies far from the surface. I have known him to watch the squirrels out back for hours on end, his tail snapping like a whip on the kitchen table while he stares fixedly through the thermo-pane windows, his voice chirping and cracking like an adolescent boys. I know that he retrieved the bird from somewhere else and brought it to me as an offering, in some catlike effort to balance the scales of what is given and what is received in our communal alliance.

What bothers me isn't the bird.
When I opened the door this morning and found it lying there with it's black feathers smooth and shining in the morning air, I knew that she was back.

It began with a bird the first time. I was not the type of man who had ever paid much attention to the details of life beyond my own front walk. I hadn't realized back then, until the body count grew, that what was happening in my new found neighborhood was anything out of the ordinary. That was in 1970. I was living by myself in a small cottage along the banks of the Delaware river in the first of many places that were to eventually follow. I had just gotten out of the Army and had taken a job working construction with the Department of Highways. It was summertime and I was in great shape, spending my days tying iron rebar in the hot sun or building plywood forms for the concrete crews that followed along behind us on the project. I was free to spend my evenings the way that I wanted and at the end of every second week the forman would hand me my check for the work that I had done and it was plenty. I lived in that little cottage on the river and I didn't have to share it with anyone else. I was free from the life of an ex-soldier; free to come and go as I pleased and to wear whatever I felt like. When it rained I would stay at home and sit at my little table by the window looking out at the river as it flowed and rolled along, drinking cup after cup of strong black coffee and working on puzzles. And there were stretches when I spoke with no one for days at a time.

That summer passed by me in a slow dream. The road grew longer every day, the money that I saved in a coffee can grew and the nights became quiet as the ascending chitter of the cicadas fell silent for the season. By the second week of September the children had disappeared from the banks of the river to return to their schools and even the air changed color. The leaves on the trees began to take on a different look, going greener still, yet at the same time as if some other, sadder hue lay just beneath their surface. I stalked to few people other than the men at work and the waitress at the diner where I took my meals. I didn't even realize that I had been alone until I met Corrine.

She took me by suprise one morning as I packed my lunch in the darkened kitchen. I stared out of that window often, looking at the heavy brown river as it swirled seaward past my cottage. There was not a whole lot of yard out back before the riverbank fell away, the trunks of the elms that grew from it looking like the legs of elephants from my window. I almost didn't see her at all, to tell you the truth, the way that she blended into the pearlescent, predawn air. You could actually see the water vapor as it moved like the river in an endless flow around me, away from me. She was sitting on the grass near the bird bath, an ancient grey thing that looked as if it had stood in that exact spot for over a thousand years. She was staring at the cottage, right through the window to where I stood spreading cheap peanut butter on slices of day old rye bread. The air thickened and momentarily obscured her figure. I remember stopping for an instant, the butter knife paused above a jar, a slice of bread held in my other hand, wondering if I had seen anything at all, wondering if I were perhaps hallucinating from lack of sleep or seeing a ghost, when she stood up and walked to the door.
She was young and thin and her milky white skin was nearly transparent, a faint tracery of bluish veins fanning like spider webs beneath its surface. Her long dark hair hung staight down her back as if it had been ironed. Her eyes were as large and pale and her lips were small and dark.

I don't know if I asked her to stay or if that's just the way that I remember it now. I do know that by Halloween I was in love with her.

She told me that her name was Corinne and that she was eighteen and that if she could stay for just awhile, just long enough for a nap, that's all, that she would do whatever I wanted her to do. I stuttered looking for the words. I told her that I was in a hurry, that I needed to get to work and that I didn't think it would be a good idea for her to be here when I got home. I said that there wasn't any room to speak of, only the single mattress on the floor and an old Army blanket. I said all these things as I fixed her breakfast. I told her that I would be gone for the day and that she could stay until I got home but no more. I said these things as I got her a towel and a washcloth, and pointed out the bathroom and the bed on the floor. I even laid out some old jeans, white cotton socks and a soft flannel shirt for her to wear. I knew that what I was saying and what I was doing were an obvious contradiction, so I grabbed my lunch bag and ducked through the door into the early light of morning, mumbling my good-byes.
All day I thought about that girl alone in my room. I thought that she would probably steal my money and my radio, leaving dirty towels and upturned drawers on the bedroom floor. I found it impossible to keep my thoughts on the job at hand, and twice I had to undo what I had worked on for an hour or more. I lost my cutters in the gravel and forgot where I put my lunch bag. I spoke to no one at all, and I fantasized about Corinne, imagining her in my shower, using the same soap that I had used to wash herself. I hoped that when I got home she would be gone, and at the same time I prayed that she would still be there.

The stretch of highway that we were working on was to the east of where I lived and all day I would raise my head absently and sniff at the wind, as if there were some chance that I would catch a scent of her following the river to where I stood. At lunch the foreman turned on the radio in his truck and we listened absently as the deejays blathered on about the thunderstorms that were certain to come by nightfall. The men talked while they ate and the hot air pushed up columns of dust from the road bed, looking like tornados that danced and then vanished in the hot air. When they finished eating everyone grew silent, absorbed by whatever thoughts they may have had, as all men do in the field.
The afternoon dragged on forever. Near three o'clock the clouds ganged up on the horizon and began to soar straight up, thousands of feet into the air as if hitting an invisible wall. The great dome of sky itself was an impossible blue, three dimensional and alive, while in the distance an army of clouds marshalled their forces. I remember rising slowly, shading my eyes and looking down the red shale of the roadbed, gaping like a fresh wound in the earth. The other men stood up too, a platoon of prarie dogs in toolbelts and work helmets. Above the farthest treeline the deep grey-green sky moved foward beneath a mountain of clouds and everyone watched as the storm came at us. You could feel the wind snapping past like a scout as the temperature began to fall. Everyone moved at once, rushing to store the equipment and gather up the tools before it hit. There was a smell in the air that told you what was coming and it smelled clean but some how strangely sour, too. The sky trembled and flickered from the far off lightning and you could hear the throaty rumble of it's report deep inside your bones.
I had my hand on the door of the truck when I tilted my head back to watch a piece of paper ripping past me on the wind. I remember closing my eyes for an instant when the first fat raindrop struck my cheek with a warm splash, feeling for all the world, like a tear on my face.
We jumped inside the cab and slammed the doors behind us on the storm.
The rain came down so hard that inside the truck you had to yell in order to be heard above the din of the rain's tattoo. The windshield looked like liquid silver as it water ran down in sheets that the wipers could not tame, so that each pass of the blades exposed for just a second, a sliver of the real world that vanished in the flow of ceaseless water behind it.
There was an urgent fury in the way the rain came down, pounding and relentless, undoing so much of the work that we had just done. The foreman chainsmoked cigarettes and I began to doze, hypnotized by the rythmic thrumping of rain on the roof. Within seconds I began to dream.

This was the dream.

I was leading my old squad to an area where a Ranger team had last been heard from. I had Leavey on point because he knew what the hell he was doing and I knew that he wanted to go home and he would make good time. I was about ten yards back with my RTO Wilson, and the rest of the squad was staggered back along the road behind us. When we come around the bend we could see their bodies lying on the dirt, their blood in the sand next to them like wet shadows. It was eerily quiet as we paused in our tracks. Suddenly, from behind us the sixty started to bark like an angry dog. Instantly the air was alive with the smell of cordite and the whisper of a thousand whickering fragments of steel, molten bees searching for flesh. I tried to shoot back but I couldn't find the trigger or the safety even get a grip on my rifle at all because it was slick with sweat and... Oh God, I am wounded now and the pain hits me like a rake, stunning and clear. My men are falling all around me, screaming in terror, firing back at the ambush around them, first their rifles and the sixty and finally as they all but lay in the dirt of the road, they toss grenades and squeeze off the last of the ammo in their automatics. The din is deafening as it builds to a howl, punctuated by the crash of the artillery as it walks down the road in our direction, falling on top of us. They look to me to do something, to save them, or to tell them to break and run, but there is nothing that I can do in that maelstrom because I look down and realize that my arms are gone.

I woke up with a jump. The foreman gave me a look that said he wasn't so hot on having a jumpy vet with bad dreams stuck in his truck during a storm like this.
"It's okay." I said, cold sweat rollling down my neck. "It's cool."

When I got back to the cottage the lights were on in the windows and it looked, in the rainy woods, cozy and inviting. I had never seen it like that before nor thought of it in that way either. I walked down the path through the dripping yard, my boots making wet sounds with each step that I took and I think that I half wanted to go in and I half wanted to turn around and run, run for all I that I was worth until I could no longer see the cottage with it's cozy glowing windows or hear the river rolling like muffled thunder. Drops of rainwater fell from the branches overhead, catching the light from the windows like diamonds. When I reached the porch I could hear the faint sound of violin music, tinny and peppered with static as it drifted from the radio indoors. I could smell the rich scent of noodles boiling on the stove and something sweeter than that, something familiar but hard to pin down behind it all.
I stepped foward, my soaking, muddied boots leaving twin trails of red clay on each step. As I lifted my right foot foward to wipe it on the welcome mat I happened to see, laying there as if in sleep, the coal black body of a dead bird. I bent down slowly to pick it up and recognized that it was a grackle, the same kind of bird that I used to catch in a fish tank trap when I was a boy. When I touched it seemed as if it were empty. It looked as if it had just died, yet it was almost mummified. For a second I almost thought that it may have been left there by my cat Scootch, but then I realized that I hadn't had a cat since before I had joined the Army over five years before.
Scootch was an awesome hunter that had frequently left the half mauled bodies of mice and birds and other small mammals on the front stoop. As far as cats went he had a terrific personality and when my father had written to me in boot camp to let me know that he had been hit by a car, I cried like a baby.
That was a long time ago and I didn't own a cat now.
I tossed the bird into the woods to the side of the cottage and as it took it's last short flight, it caught for a moment on a branch sending a shower of waterdrops falling with it, earthward.
I opened the door without a key because I had never taken to locking it. When I stepped inside the room was alive with a dozen candles spread across the table by the window. The room smelled of whatever it was that was cooking on the stove and the smell of Corinne who lay sleeping curled in a ball on the mattress. I took off my boots quietly, leaving them just inside the door. I hung my toolbelt on a hook on the back of the door and walked as silently as possible to the kitchen and looked into the pots that were simmmering on the stove. Corinne had made up spaghetti sauce and flat noodles that were done perfectly. I ran the water from the faucets and set the collander in the bottom of the sink to strain the noodles, rinsing my hands at the same time. I remember looking over my shoulder several times to watch her as she lay there breathing slowly on the mattress, sleeping deeply.
I ate my meal at the kitchen table chewing slowly, savoring each bite of the food that she had prepared and the sound of her breathing in the closed air of that room. She never woke up that night, and after finishing my meal and taking a quick shower I pulled on a pair of old sweatpants and a T-shirt, and lay down on the floor next to the mattress to sleep.
My dreams that night were filled with images of dead birds littered across the roadway leading to the rivers edge. I remember following the trail of bird corpses to the cottage where they lay piled in mounds in front of the door.

When I woke in the morning, Corinne was standing in the kitchen making sandwiches. The smell of coffee was in the air and I couldn't keep my eyes off of Corinne as she worked at the counter, each movement like a part of a fluid dance.
"Good morning!" she said, pouring me a cup of black coffee. "I don't know how you take it but there was no cream, so..."
"Black's fine." I said, taking the cup from her small hands.
"Sleep well?" she asked sweetly.
"Okay, I guess." I was trying to ask her if she had anywhere to go or where it was that she was from but all that I could think of to say to her was, "Did you find everything okay?"
"Oh sure, no problem." she said looking away for a moment.
There was a pronounced absence of sound as she moved back to the kitchen and I stood up to stretch. It was still fairly dark and the sound of the river rolling outside punctuated the silence of that room. My heart was beating hard just having her there, and I thought that she would be able to hear it if I didn't leave the room. I stood there with my coffee cup in hand, staring at her back as she gazed out the window.
"I'll go if..." she began.
"Don't, please." I cut in.
She turned then and looked at me with the deepest most expressive eyes that I had ever seen. I felt my stomach turn flips as she smiled at me.
"I mean, feel free to stay awhile if you want. I can use my sleeping bag, it's okay. I'll leave you some money if you don't mind doing the shopping in town today, you know, so there's something to eat. I'm not a big shopper or anything..." I said in a rush as she crossed the room to me and placed her fingertips to my lips.
"Shhhh. I'll take care of everything." she whispered.
And I knew that she would.

Over the course of the next few months everything changed for me. I loved coming home at night to find Corinne busy in the kitchen preparing our dinner. I stayed up with her playing Scrabble and listening to symphonies on the new stereo that I had bought, and later we would make love on the mattress or the floor or on the big chair in front of the mirror where I would watch every detail of her body as she rode on top of mine. I remember how it felt to hold her close and stroke her long black hair with my thick calloused fingers while she moaned with pleasure. I went to work every morning with a smile and spent the entire day dreaming of going home to her. We never went out or spent any time with other people and that was fine with me. I would stop at the library on Fridays before going home and I would chose collections of short stories or classic novels to read aloud to her. She loved to lay on the bed with her head on my lap while I read to her, my voice following the thread of each tale as she fell silently into sleep. There were so many things that we found to talk about during those months that had nothing to do with why either of us were here, in this place, together. It seemed as if just being together was enough for the both of us.
I'm not sure now if it was the fact that she was there with me, but I could feel myself healing on the inside. The dreams of my men were becoming less frequent, and there were times when I forgot completely what had happened to me in that far off place. I still thought of the friends that hadn't come back; Tiernan and his endless habit of chewing gum and blowing bubbles, and Wilsons' huge open smile. When I thought of them now they were alive and laughing; ageless and filled with hope. I believed that it was for some reason that I alone had come back, and that reason was Corinne.
I wonder now if those who have been exposed to death at an early age are forever aware of it in all of it's varying shades. I know that I became increasingly conscious of the number of dead birds and squirrells that appeared near the cottage, laying on the carpet of leaves, and my thoughts returned Scootch. I thought that there must be a stray cat in the area who had adopted us without ever making her presence known. I took to leaving a bowl of tuna next to the front mat on my way out to work in the morning, not only to attract my unseen companion in the hopes of having a new pet, but more importantly because I wanted to save the legions of small mammals and birds that were being endlessly sacrificed by my unseen friend and left in offering on my front stoop. I also wanted to spare Corinne from anything that might have upset her in any way. She had grown comfortable with me and I wanted nothing to change that. Because of that I would hide the evidence of the predator every time that it appeared, those dozens of empty bird husks that lay about as spent as a pine cone on the leafy carpet of the woods.

Near the end of September I showed up on the jobsite early one Monday morning to find the chief engineer in a hushed conversation with a couple of men in suits. One of the tractor drivers came up to me and clapped me on the back with his big beefy hand.
"Congratulations, Sarge." he said.
"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked him.
"Looks like you're the new foreman on the job."
"How's that?"
"Those guys over there said that Eddie turned up dead this weekend."
I remember how sick I felt when I heard that simple statement. I had been back in the world for almost a year and I thought that I had left all that behind me; the dead and the dying. I wasn't interested in the foreman's job. I didn't want the added responsibility and I didn't want to get it that way.
"Are you sure he's dead? Are you sure he's not just missing?"
"Man, what did I tell you? They found him over at his place deader'n'shit. I heard from Dobie that someone slit his throat from ear to ear, drained him like a pi..."
"Shut up!" I snapped.
The men in the suits looked over to where I was standing with a strange look in their eyes. I could feel myself get hot all of a sudden and I had a terrible feeling that they thought I had something to do with it. The driver moved away from me without looking back.
"Jumpy fuckin' vet" he said as he walked away down the muddy stretch of roadbed.
Something inside me got all screwed up for a second. I wanted to rush home and bury myself in Corinne's arms but something else made me want to run. Run like hell. The men weren't looking at me anymore but I still felt uncomfortable with them standing so close by. I couldn't help but to picture Eddie lying dead someplace with his throat cut, as bloodless as the birds that had been showing up on my doorstep the past several weeks. Just like them.

All of a sudden I remembered something that I had said one night in bed with Corinne. We talked about the way it was for me at work and the only thing that made my life uncomfortable; the way that Eddie would ride me all the time, about my time in service, and how long it was taking for me to come around. I remember saying something stupid like how much easier it would be if he'd just stop bugging me, making me remember it all the time, if maybe he'd just go away then everything would be alright. I felt a little sick all of a sudden. I kept seeing the birds, their dried up empty little bodies lying all over the place like some kind of warning.
And then it came to me in a rush.
I wondered how I hadn't seen it all along. There never was a cat coming around the cottage. It was Corinne all along. Like a vampire or something, draining the blood from little animals and leaving them for me on the front step. It sounded unbelievable and all at once it seemed completely real. I was living with a monster and there was no one I could tell. The detectives were looking at me as if I had something to do with it while Corinne sat at home safe and unsuspected. I was suddenly so sure of the whole thing, all the little signs that she had left around for me to find, that I knew I had to act.
I remember grabbing up all my tools and jogging away down the road bed while the guys from homocide watched me disappear with my tool belt banging me in the back. If they hadn't had questions about me at that point there was no question what they were thinking now. I couldn't think about that, couldn't think of anything except the fact that she was sitting there in the room that I lived in, on the edge of the river, sucking the life from animals and ...

It took me almost an hour to reach the edge of the porch, wet leaves all bunched up in the corners of the door frame. The wind was blowing in little gusts that made the lights from the street look like they were alive. I was cold and exhausted, shaking in the damp, my legs cramping from the cold. And then I knew.
I knew it instantly. I knew that she was gone. That it would look as if no one other than myself had ever been in there, in that little cottage on the edge of the river in a place that was a million miles from the jungles and the men and the...

What?

The what?

I stood there, panting and trying to get my breath before I moved up onto the porch. There was the sound of the radio as there always was when I came home, I could hear it coming through the windows. I could smell the tang of spaghetti sauce on the stove.

But I knew.

I knew that he was gone.

And she was. There was no note for me to read, no photograph of that beautiful young girl as she smiled into the indefinite distance, while I read stories aloud to her. There wasn't the slightest indication that she had ever been there with me at all.
Not a trace. No candles, no stereo, just piles of unwashed clothing, the sharp tang of sweat and old dirt, crusted pots in the overflowing sink and feathers, thousands of feathers.

I sat in the cottage for an hour or more, crying softly to myself. Outside the river rolled on it's way toward the sea. I never even heard the detectives as they stood at the door tapping away until they finally tried the knob, letting themselves in.
They talked for a while and finally they led me away and I never saw that place again.

That was fifteen tears ago.

And now I am on my knees, again, scratching on the dirt to catch the attention of my cat as he sulks, back there in darkness unde the porch. Those eyes flash at me amber and gold. I think about Fat Jack and how he runs to me across the backyard every afternoon when I come home to my apartment at the base of these mountains, rugged and blue green behind me. I think about him and why he brought the bird to me but I know that it is not him up under the porch, it's not Fat Jack at all, but the eyes of someone else that I love.

And even though I know better, know it in my heart, I believe that she is watching me from under the porch and I have to go...