Sometimes Weird Stuff Happens.

Thanks for all the suggestions, please do keep them coming.

I can’t believe I forgot the Viking funeral of God-Emperor Kwai Chang Cain. (Which, btw, eventually morphed into this short story.)

By way of thanks for the prompt help, here’s a first draft of the chapter “Sometimes Weird Stuff Happens.”

You know the jokey old saying, “When the going gets weird, the weird go pro?” Well, for a while after T died, things got a little weird. Nothing anybody did was absolutely guaranteed to make a lot of sense in hindsight. We just sort of rolled with it.

This particular incident occurred only a few days, maybe a couple of weeks after T’s funeral. He knew he was going to die eventually and left specific instructions about how he wanted the funeral to go. That marker with its vulgar annotation? His idea. He also wanted his animals buried around him.

Of course his animals were still alive, so we figured there was no rush. But one, maybe the most important, didn’t stay alive long. That is a very weird story.

At the time there was quite an assortment of dogs and cats and I’ve only mentioned a few. There was Magnus the mutant Retriever, Fritz the hyperaggressive Shepherd, Ghost the very independent brown dog and a fabulously gay Aussie named Copper. There was a matched set of murderous tabbies named Point and Click and two Himalayans: A reclusive and apparently immortal female of no particular interest – to be honest I’ve simply forgotten her name – and then there was God-Emperor Kwai Chang Cain.

No, seriously, that was his name. If you met him you’d understand.

Kwai was very old and very large and very imperious. There was no question in anyone’s mind who was in charge – least of all his. He had ruled the dogs with a paw of iron since they were puppies, and they wished it no other way. The dogs liked cats – they were conditioned to. There was one and only one human being on earth that Kwai gave a damn about, and that was T.

Kwai survived T by only a short span, and to this day we debate whether his death was a bizarre accident or suicide. I don’t really believe it was suicide: I don’t think it’s psychologically possible for a cat. Especially not this cat. But honestly, that’s what it looked like at the time.

A little scene-setting is required here: Bear with me. It was early-middle 2008 and there were no houses built at the Gulch yet. Housing consisted of a number of travel trailers, in various stages of decay, which Landlady had grown to loathe. The first and smallest of these was named Serenity for reasons which remain obscure.

Yeah, it’s still around. I hauled it elsewhere to get it out of Landlady’s view, but it makes a dandy reloading shack. In those days Landlady’s son from a previous marriage was in his late teens and still lived at the Gulch. Serenity was his bedroom. The cats were encouraged to come and go as they pleased for rodent control, so one of those small windows was kept open with a table beneath. But Kwai rarely left his own domain, the main RV, a big fifth wheel.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I have no driver’s license. This fact had unfortunately become known to the local cops, which made it difficult for me to get to and from work in town. This is one of the unexpected disadvantages of life near a very small town, but I must not digress. I mention it only because I’d been catching rides with Landlady’s son, who also had a townie job at that time.

We had just gotten back to the Gulch and I had returned to my own little trailer when I heard the kid yell “Joel!” in a high, very strange tone. I went to see what was the matter and there, hanging outside Serenity’s little window by his neck from a tattered curtain, was Kwai. Very dead.

Apparently he had inadvertently put his head through a tear in the curtain while exiting the trailer, jumped down, and never made it to the ground.

That’s a pretty odd way for a cat to die. It was made even stranger by the fact that, as I said, Kwai almost never left his own trailer.

T had been buried and Landlady had returned to the city. When her son called and told her about Kwai’s death, she gave him what he told me were detailed instructions on the interment. She later claimed those instructions had become somewhat garbled upon transmission to me.

To me, they seemed very strange. But I had already fallen into a nearly-feudal attitude toward Landlady and T: Whatever they wanted, within certain limits, they got. Odd as these instructions were, they didn’t violate the limits. See, what I was told (and I’m not claiming this is what Landlady actually said) is that we were to bury Kwai’s ashes at a particular spot on Boot Hill in relation to T’s grave. She later said there had been no mention of ashes. T had been cremated before we buried him on the place on the property that became Boot Hill, and Landlady’s son may have simply assumed that meant any body buried there must first be cremated. Maybe he just thought it would be a fitting sendoff for a god-emperor. Honestly, I never asked.

I was, as I have already admitted, not really back on an even keel after T’s sudden death. It has occurred to me since that nothing stopped me from questioning the instructions I received, but I did not. I was told to bury ashes, so ashes were what would be buried.

In the course of a long life, I have buried a body or two. I had never cremated one first. It seemed an interesting challenge. Since I was at work in town at the time, I had Internet access and spent part of the day researching the burial practices of India, where do-it-yourself cremation is not unknown. By the time we got back to the Gulch, I had a plan.

The grave was to be located as a specific spot, and I saw no reason not to perform the cremation there. So we dug an unreasonably big pit for the interment of a cat. I cut a whole bunch of dead juniper, built a pyre, soaked it with gasoline, and laid Kwai on top. With so much dry stuff around we’re always careful about fires and this was going to be a big one. But it wasn’t a particularly windy evening so everything worked out all right.

Yeah, we lit him up. We let the pyre burn until it collapsed into the pit, then piled a bunch of wood in and let it burn hot for hours. After a while we stopped smelling roast cat. When we let the fire die down, there was no sign of him in the pit.