He was a thin, dapper fellow who preferred a suit and a vest to ordinary clothes. He neither drank nor smoked. I had heard that he had been gassed in the first war and had somehow gotten out of mortal combat early. My grandmother disputed this story and told me that Jack had been struck by lightning and never served in the Great War. When he wasn’t in his turkey-in-the-straw mood, Jack was a quiet, suspicious man preoccupied with his health. It was one extreme or the other with him, glaring, contrasting differences like the opposing colors of his two-tone shoes.

Buffmeir could swing into states of highest agitation, constantly pulling his watch from his vest pocket and flipping it open like a man who kept an urgent, variegating schedule. He was continually going to doctors. My grandmother was given to believe that his aches and pains were imaginary, but I wasn’t so sure. Because I was a kid, he seldom paid attention to me; I could observe his unguarded visage, which was often that of a man in severe pain. His face took on a sour countenance and he would sometimes buy packets of fizzing stomach powders, which he mixed in a glass under my grandmother’s kitchen spout. Like Napoleon in a white suit with a straw boater, he would insert his hand under his jacket and press it against his side, stoically waiting for fast pharmaceutical relief. Oyster positioned himself close enough to Jack so that he could look up at his master and gauge his moods while he stood vigilantly braced to defend the old man against a 360-degree perimeter of incoming evils.

Jack demanded complete and unwavering loyalty from the animal, yet he hardly bothered to feed the dog, and never once did I see him deign to kneel down and pet the animal or even bother to say a kind word. This lack of gratitude toward Oyster did not surprise me.

One cold day I stood out in front of the store waiting for the Aurora Beacon-News to dump off their afternoon bundle of papers, when I spotted a stray feral cat. I wanted a pet more than anything in the world, and I went for the tortoise-colored female. I managed to pick her up as she worked my face over with her front paws slashing like razors. She was a bundle of compressed fury, but I managed to stumble up the stairs with her, bust in the door, and drop her on the floor. The cat dashed off for the basement, and after my grandmother treated my scratches with Mercurochrome, I took a bowl of milk to the basement. I looked all over for the cat to no avail; but a cat can hide, and the basement was a warehouse of stock.