The Killer Kats of Akron

I squatted down next to an old Nissan Sentra, the scent of salt-covered
pavement and black rubber filling my nostrils.  From my vantage
point I could see two wool-capped heads bobbing  in parallel
routes some fifteen yards apart between other rows of cars in the
parking lot.  At the edge of a row,  both Pyle and Williams
paused, squinted in the near-dusk light, and ascertained their
prey.  Pyle whistled once, high and sharp, and a second later he
blitzed from his position in a bent-forward scurry, ululating like an
Afghani warlord.  His prey hunched low for a split second, then
shot off in the opposite direction of Pyle’s flailing arms and
fluttering tongue–right towards Williams.   Williams dove
out from behind a minivan arms first, his oversized canvas jacket
clenched in his hands and opening like a net.  The creature tried
to dodge, but he jerked in a sleeve and tripped it up then quickly
smothered the hissing beast.  Pyle arrived a split-second behind
in mid-air, still shrieking like an asylum escapee, both feet jutting
out before him.  He landed squarely on top of the writhing mass
with practiced precision and then threw up his arms and puffed out his
chest, Olympic gymnast style.

“Stuck the landing!” he said, then crowed wildly.  He lifted one foot then the other.

“Is it dead?” I asked, moving out from my hiding spot.

“We’ll see.”

Williams unwrapped his jacket and pulled it away.  Revealed there
on the cracked blacktop was a large cat with a broken spine.  It
was black and tan and one bright orange eye rolled up to look at us
with intense spite.  It had no tail, and its front two paws
twitched like a newborn’s fist, claws extended toward us.  Even
with the life slowly evaporating out of its mangy body it wanted to
kill us, or at least snatch something from our pockets.

“The fucker, the son of a bitch.  The bastard.  The
pink-tongued little shit.”  Pyle was pacing, staring down into the
cat’s one eye.  “Dying now, arentcha?  How’s that feel?
How’s that feel to lo-oose?”

“He’s the biggest one yet,” Williams said.

“He’s big enough.  C’mon, get this over with and we’ll skin ‘im.”

“Sure, sure.”

Williams knelt beside the cat, and it’s one eye spun inside its
hateful, mud-caked face, watching his hands reach towards it.  One
hand on the head, another about the shoulders.  One good wrench
and Williams killed another killer.

***

You shouldn’t worry about these felines.  Well, you should, but not in a sympathetic or pitying way.

“Pull that lamp closer.”

These aren’t your pedestrian, everyday strays.  These are a lot
bigger for one thing.  About one and a half feet tall.  Three
feet from nose to tail, maybe.  Whiskers like wire.  Rotten
green copper wire.

“Pass the hacksaw.”

They invariably have one eye and no tail.  The ears are almost
always rotated and laid back.  Their fur is multi-colored or
twilight.

“Hold that there.  Good.”

They have no sweet meow, only a hiss.

“Ready?”

There is more than one way to skin a cat.

“Ready.”

Pyle’s and Williams’ method is actually quite surgical.

“Go!”

Pyle starts to saw the head off, slicing between two upper
vertebrae.  As the wound starts to open, Williams stuffs it with
gauze and tries to keep the mess to a minimum.  After the last
visceral strand has been severed, Pyle rolls the head across the table,
guiding it with the saw.  He lays the saw down and picks up a tool
that is like an extended, narrow shoehorn, a tool he made
himself.  He grasps the cat’s head with one latex-wrapped hand and
with a quick, expert motion, uses the tool to pop out the cat’s
solitary eye.  The bright red-amber of its iris still catches the
light and gleams.  He holds up the prize.

“Thiefy.  Very thiefy, this one.  I’d bet a hundred on it.”

Meanwhile, Williams strings up the body over a bucket surrounded by taped-down copies of the Akron Beacon-Journal.
As far as supernatural creatures go, these cats are pretty
concrete.  They don’t ooze green blood; there isn’t a reservoir of
unholy light confined inside their bodies’ dark cavities–normal blood,
but it smells like newly melted rubber.  I watched for a second as
the body started to drain, a steady flow of blood funneled through the
neck hole and spit-spatting into the old, stained bucket.

I turned to watch Pyle as he dipped the eyeball carefully into a
preservative–also one of his own concoctions–that would harden the
eye.  Before setting it down to dry, he skillfully skewered it
with a kabob stick.

“For easy threading later,” he said.

“We’ve got a while to wait,” said Williams.  “Let’s grab a beer.”

***

We left Pyle’s and Williams house and its weird basement cum
laboratory and walked down Market Street towards the Lime Spider.
It was late afternoon, and the streets were mostly empty except for the
occasional passerby who kept their eyes on the chipping concrete
sidewalk.  The sky was Akron gray, as usual, and the cold was
sneaking down my neck.

I’d come here for a long weekend, thinking to mainly spend my time with
friends and maybe get up to the art museum in Cleveland, but Ernesto
had told me about these two hunters he’d met awhile ago and I decided
to arrange a visit.  Luckily for me, they were on the prowl this
weekend and invited me and my tape recorder along.

We sat down at a table against the wall, each with a Pabst and a
cigarette.  Pyle is thin but compactly muscular; his friend is
scrawny with wild eyes and a sawtooth smile.  Williams grew up
with several siblings, paid his way through high school with factory
jobs, inhaling glass dust and carbon monoxide.  Once he got to
college he never had enough money to pay for an orthodontist to remove
his braces–so he did it himself one night with a pair of pliers and a
bottle of Johnny Walker for a novocain substitute.  Despite their
surroundings and backgrounds, they still smile constantly and their
bodies emanate a foreign kind of heat.

Pyle is a graphic artist and Williams an experimental
mathematician.  These are the kind of people you rarely find in
Akron anymore: motivated dreamers.

“We’d seen the cats before,” Pyle explained, “but we’d always given
them a wide berth, y’know?  I always thought they were the
occasional freak of nature, but then when I started to notice them more
and more often, I got the shivers.  I had dreams about them,
nightmares.  Even then something inside me knew what they were
before I even investigated.”

While Pyle and Williams talk, they both finger and fidget with the
necklaces around their necks: a simple hemp cord threaded through a
catseye pendant.

“These are what we’re after,” Pyle said.  This is what they use against us and what we use against them.”

“It’s kind of simple in a weird way,” said Williams.  “These
cats.  They can look into your soul, or, if you don’t believe in
the soul, at least your mind.  These are creatures who can steal
your thoughts.” He said it so matter-of-factly that I don’t even
balk.  He took another drag of his Basic Light then
continued.  “Not just your thoughts.  Your dreams.  Your
aspirations.  For some reason, these creatures evolved, maybe even
spawned up out of the overflowing dumpsters–pure mindkillers.
They feed on rats and rotten milk, but they subsist on human
dreams.  It’s their drug.  They go crazy for it and they’ll
hunt you down.  And here in Akron…they’re thriving.”

Akron, Rubber City.  A Depression-era boomtown that, since the
eighties, has become a Boom-era depression.  The Goodyear chimneys
still cough up their black smoke, but the people here, like the smoke,
drift and evaporate, waft through their lives and smell up the
air.  They are a hungry people with no aspirations beyond bread
and water.  They are a tired people with no sense to lie
down.  The ones that have work are so grateful to have pay that
they don’t mind the labor that grinds them down, and the unemployed
don’t move beyond their front porches, much less out of town.

It’s the same story in a hundred other US cities, but no one has ever
wanted to ask why.  No one has wanted to investigate the
circumstances.  To the inhabitants inside these cities’ walls,
that’s just the way things are.  Buffalo.  Youngstown.
Kernersville.  Wheeling.  Dark…dark in the daytime.

“They look into your eyes,” says Pyle.  “And they hiss.
That’s all there is to it.  They don’t have to bite ya or claw ya,
they just have to sit in the alley in the dark, and when some fool
walks by–maybe some student on their way to class or maybe some guy
hitting the bricks looking for a new job or maybe even some
stay-at-home momma carrying groceries back to her kids–all the cat has
to do is wait for them to look down that alley either out of boredom or
fear and he catches their eye with his bright red stare.”

“They don’t even feel it,” Williams says.  “It’s shocking to me
how easy it is for these creatures to do it.  How you’d think
something like this would cause you to have a seizure or go dizzy or at
the very least give you a vague sense of dread, but there’s no emotion,
no primal nervous response when it happens.  I know.  It
happened to me.”

Pyle leaned forward.  “So then it starts.  You go home and
then you find yourself doing things you don’t really think about
doing.  Little scraps of paper that you jotted ideas on, doodles,
sketches, three word notes, whatever…you throw them away.  If
you find one in your pocket or on the fridge under a magnet, you just
take it and throw it in the trash.  You lose interest in books or
photographs.  If you do get up the strength to open a book, the
words are jumbled, you can’t concentrate.  So you’re cut off right
there.  A lot of people, they’re inspired, you know?
Inspired by other people’s words or pictures to do something
theirselves.  The cat’s eye burns out yours.”

Williams cuts in, talking excitedly.  “Cat’s got your
tongue.  You heard that, right?  Everyone knows that.
But where’d it come from?  This is it.  There is no longer
any urge to communicate, much less explore, to expand the borders of
your knowledge.  So the victims stop talking to other people, they
stop singing in the shower and even become sheepish when faced with
authority whether its the cops or even a boss.  They question
nothing.  They accept everything that happens to them.  And
when you get enough people like that, the entire civilization starts to
suffer.  You get cities like Akron, mired down in unthinking,
unflinching ennui.  Dreamless apathy.  A cold, hard bitch of
a town where even the hunters like ourselves find it hard to get up in
the morning.”

So what can you do?

Pyle smiles wide.  “Talisman.  This little red-eye trinket
will protect you.  The cats don’t associate with each other.
They’re all loners, strays…God knows how or what they fuck, but its
not each other.  They can’t stand to see another thiefy eye
looking back at them, so we take these and hand them out.
Obviously there’s not enough for the entire city, so you gotta come to
us for one.  It sounds a little harsh, but we have to be
selective.  We get the word out.  If you’re skeptical, don’t
bother then.  But those who do want to protect their artistic
sanity or even just their unrealized dreams…they make the
effort.  They’ll come get one.  Until the day we wipe all the
fuckers out…we just gotta play it close to the vest.  Give ’em
to the people who can do the most good.  Aside from that, though,
we can still help the others who’ve already been robbed.”

***

Back in the basement, Williams and Pyle busily made preparations.
The cat’s body was now drained of blood and slightly shrunken.
Pyle cleared off the second-hand stainless steel table that dominated
the center of the room, and Williams took the carcass down and laid it
on the table.  The two of them scrubbed down the cat’s corpse and
shaved it quickly but thoroughly, the long, coarse hair coming off in
mangy clumps, revealing gray-pink flesh beneath.

Williams spread-eagled the cat and anchored down its four legs with
straps.  Pyle used a thick scalpel to slice across the belly of
the creature.  After making his incisions, he slowly peeled the
skin away from the muscle tissue, working with tweezers and a wooden
tongue depressor.  The whole process took about fifteen minutes,
and what he finally pulled away was a large flag of skin which he held
up for me to see.

Covering the inside layer of the skin was a crazy layout of jumbled
tattoos, a mosaic of words, sketches, and symbols all wrought in a dark
blue-green like ink. At the edges, where the cat’s belly was, the words
and symbols overlapped each other so many times that it was hard to
make out anything, but the mass gradually separated into identifiable
language as it reached towards the skin that clung to the cat’s spine.

What could be read there were half-formed lines of poetry, thumbnail
sketches of nude figures, and small squares of schematic designs.
There were mathematic equations partially solved, punch lines to jokes,
and sporadic lines from mental diaries.  One line struck me in
particular as I turned my head this way and that to examine the entire
labyrinth of printed thoughts:

“Once upon a time…”

I couldn’t say anything.

“Like I said,” smiled Pyle.  “Thiefy.”

***

We went up the stairs through the house and then climbed out of Pyle’s
bedroom window onto the roof.  Up there he had several old skins
stretched out and tacked down with tenpenny nails.  They were all
in various states of decay, some more gray than pink, and the oldest
ones were the ones with the least amount of writing on them.

“We don’t know what happens,” Williams said. “If you watch them,
nothing disappears.  It’s always overnight and only if no one’s
around.  The tats fade and evaporate, back into the atmosphere.”

“Back into Akron’s aura.  If there is such a thing,” says
Pyle.  “I think so.  More and more often I am overhearing
people.  They say, ‘Oh, I just thought of something,’ or ‘I just
remembered…’  It’s great.”

Before I left, Pyle handed me a necklace.  It was the eye of the
cat we just caught that morning.  “Take it,” he said with a
wink.  “And if you ever see one of these fuckers in your city,
call us up.  We’re training new hunters all the time.”

I put on the necklace and felt the eye resting right below my Adam’s
apple.  Strange protection, but necessary in a city like
this.  I called up Ernesto, and the two of us went back to playing
music.