Good Kids

If he is still alive—and there is no reason to think he wouldn’t
be—Reggie Laroque is probably close to thirty now. Maybe he still lives
here, in the same city with the rest of us, or maybe it’s Toronto now, or
Calgary, or Cleveland. “We get around a lot,” he told me once, when he was
seven and I was twelve.

When Reggie moved out of the house across the street, the students came
next and then it was the cats. A whole scraggly, night-scrapping pack of them
showed up one day and took over an abandoned car that had just been sitting there
for years, docked at the back of the driveway. The car was a four-door Chevrolet
Caprice station wagon with all its tires missing. It had belonged to another former
tenant, a long-haired guy who used to work on it in the evenings. One night, he
moved away too and that was that. No one ever came back to claim the car for
parts and nobody was going to pay to have it hauled off, so it just stayed there with
us, suspended in the air with its metal rims slowly grinding their way down into
four grey masonry blocks. It seemed logical when the cats moved in, almost like
the car was finally getting a second chance. Overnight it changed from a piece of
junk into a sort of shelter. It stopped being a station wagon and became more like
a cave, like something made of stone, a hole carved right into the earth that could
never be moved. We called it, obviously, the “cat car” and after about a week, it
became just another part of the landscape: a writhing, urine-soaked chunk of our
terrain—almost entirely covered in hair...