Roosevelt nodded solemnly. “And it is. For her and others. From what I hear, these bastards will try to control you by killing people you love until you agree to cease and desist, until you forget what you saw and just get on with your life.”
“People I love?”
“Sasha. Bobby. Even Orson.”
“They’ll kill my friends to shut me up?”
“
Until
you shut up. One by one, they’ll kill them one by one until you shut up to save those who are left.”
I was willing to risk my own life to find out what had happened to my mother and father—and why—but I couldn’t put the lives of my friends on the line. “This is monstrous. Killing innocent—”
“That’s who you’re dealing with.”
My skull felt as though it would crack to relieve the pressure of my frustration: “Who
am
I dealing with? I need something more specific than just the people at Wyvern.”
Roosevelt sipped his coffee and didn’t answer.
Maybe he was my friend, and maybe the warning he’d given me would, if I heeded it, save Sasha’s life or Bobby’s, but I wanted to punch him. I might have done it, too, might have hammered him with a merciless series of blows if there had been any chance whatsoever that I wouldn’t have broken my hands.
Orson had put one paw on the table, not with the intention of sweeping his biscuits to the floor and absconding with them but to balance himself as he leaned sideways in his chair to look past me. Something in the salon, beyond the galley and dining area, had drawn his attention.
When I turned in my chair to follow Orson’s gaze, I saw a cat sitting on the arm of the sofa, backlit by the display case full of football trophies. It appeared to be pale gray. In the shadows that masked its face, its eyes glowed green and were flecked with gold.
It could have been the same cat that I had encountered in the hills behind Kirk’s Funeral Home earlier in the night.
23
Like an Egyptian sculpture in a pharaoh’s sepulcher, the cat sat motionless and seemed prepared to spend eternity on the arm of the sofa.
Although it was only a cat, I was uncomfortable with my back to the animal. I moved to the chair opposite Roosevelt Frost, from which I could see, to my right, the entire salon and the sofa at the far end of it.
“When did you get a cat?” I asked.
“It’s not mine,” Roosevelt said. “It’s just visiting.”
“I think I saw this cat earlier tonight.”
“Yes, you did.”
“That’s what it told you, huh?” I said with a touch of Bobby’s scorn.
“Mungojerrie and I had a talk, yes,” Roosevelt confirmed.
“Who?”
Roosevelt gestured toward the cat on the sofa. “Mungojerrie.” He spelled it for me.
The name was exotic yet curiously familiar. Being my father’s son in more than blood and name, I needed only a moment to recognize the source. “It’s one of the cats in
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,
the T. S. Eliot collection.”
“Most of these cats like those names from Eliot’s book.”
“These cats?”
“These new cats like Mungojerrie here.”
“New cats?” I asked, struggling to follow him.
Rather than explain what he meant by that term, Roosevelt said, “They prefer those names. Couldn’t tell you why—or how they came by them. I know one named Rum Tum Tugger. Another is Rumpelteazer. Coricopat and Growltiger.”
“Prefer? You make it sound almost as if they choose their own names.”
“Almost,” Roosevelt said.
I shook my head. “This is radically bizarre.”
“After all these years of animal communication,” Roosevelt said, “I sometimes still find it bizarre myself.”
“Bobby Halloway thinks you were hit in the head once too often.”
Roosevelt smiled. “He’s not alone in that opinion. But I was a football player, you know, not a boxer. What do you think, Chris? Has half my brain turned to gristle?”
“No, sir,” I admitted. “You’re as sharp as anyone I’ve ever known.”
“On the other hand, intelligence and flakiness aren’t mutually exclusive, are they?”
“I’ve met too many of my parents’ fellow academics to argue that one with you.”
From the living room, Mungojerrie continued to watch us, and from his chair, Orson continued to monitor the cat not with typical canine antagonism but with considerable interest.
“I ever tell you how I got into this animal-communication thing?” Roosevelt wondered.
“No, sir. I never asked.” Calling attention to such an eccentricity had seemed as impolite as mentioning a physical deformity, so I had always pretended to accept this aspect of Roosevelt as though it were not in the least remarkable.
“Well,” he said, “about nine years ago I had this really great dog named Sloopy, black and tan, about half the size of your Orson. He was just a mutt, but he was special.”
Orson had shifted his attention from the cat to Roosevelt.
“Sloopy had a terrific disposition. He was always a playful, good-tempered dog, not one bad day in him. Then his mood changed. Suddenly he became withdrawn, nervous, even depressed. He was ten years old, not nearly a pup anymore, so I took him to a vet, afraid I was going to hear the worst kind of diagnosis. But the vet couldn’t find anything much wrong with him. Sloopy had a little arthritis, something an aging ex-linebacker with football knees can identify with, but he didn’t have it bad enough to inhibit him much, and that was the only thing wrong. Yet week after week, he wallowed in his funk.”
Mungojerrie was on the move. The cat had climbed from the arm to the back of the sofa and was stealthily approaching us.
“So one day,” Roosevelt continued, “I read this human-interest story in the paper about this woman in Los Angeles who called herself a pet communicator. Name was Gloria Chan. She’d been on a lot of TV talk shows, counseled a lot of movie people on their pets’ problems, and she’d written a book. The reporter’s tone was smart-ass, made Gloria sound like your typical Hollywood flake. For all I knew, he probably had her pegged. You remember, after the football career was over, I did a few movies. Met a lot of celebrities, actors and rock stars and comedians. Producers and directors, too. Some of them were nice folks and some were even smart, but frankly a lot of them and a lot of the people who hung out with them
were
so bugshit crazy you wouldn’t want to be around them unless you were carrying a major concealed weapon.”
After creeping the length of the sofa, the cat descended to the nearer arm. It shrank into a crouch, muscles taut, head lowered and thrust forward, ears flattened against its skull, as if it was going to spring at us across the six feet between the sofa and the table.
Orson was alert, focused again on Mungojerrie, both Roosevelt and the biscuits forgotten.
“I had some business in L.A.,” Roosevelt said, “so I took Sloopy with me. We went down by boat, cruised the coast. I didn’t have the
Nostromo
then. I was driving this really sweet sixty-foot Chris-Craft Roamer. I docked her at Marina Del Rey, rented a car, took care of business for two days. I got Gloria’s number through some friends in the film business, and she agreed to see me. She lived in the Palisades, and I drove out there with Sloopy late one morning.”
On the sofa arm, the cat was still crouched to spring. Its muscles were coiled even tighter than before. Little gray panther.
Orson was rigid, as still as the cat. He made a high-pitched, thin, anxious sound and then was silent again.
Roosevelt said, “Gloria was fourth-generation Chinese American. A petite, doll-like person. Beautiful, really beautiful. Delicate features, huge eyes. Like something a Chinese Michelangelo might have carved out of luminous amber jade. You expected her to have a little-girl voice, but she sounded like Lauren Bacall, this deep smoky voice coming from this tiny woman. Sloopy instantly liked her. Before I knew it, she’s sitting with him in her lap, face-to-face with him and talking to him, petting him, and telling me what he’s so moody about.”
Mungojerrie leaped off the sofa arm, not to the dinette but to the deck, and then instantly sprang from the deck to the seat of the chair that I had abandoned when I had moved one place around the table to keep an eye on him.
Simultaneously, as the spry cat landed on the chair, Orson and I twitched.
Mungojerrie stood with his hind paws on the chair, forepaws on the table, staring intently at my dog.
Orson issued that brief, thin, anxious sound again—and didn’t take his eyes off the cat.
Unconcerned about Mungojerrie, Roosevelt said, “Gloria told me that Sloopy was depressed mostly because I wasn’t spending any time with him anymore. ‘You’re always out with Helen,’ she said. ‘And Sloopy knows Helen doesn’t like him. He thinks you’re going to have to choose between him and Helen, and he knows you’ll have to choose her.’ Now, son, I’m stunned to be hearing all this, because I was, in fact, dating a woman named Helen here in Moonlight Bay, but no way could Gloria Chan have known about her. And I
was
obsessed with Helen, spending most of my free time with her, and she didn’t like dogs, which meant Sloopy always got left behind. I figured she would come around to liking Sloopy, ’cause even Hitler couldn’t have helped having a soft spot in his heart for that mutt. But as it turned out, Helen was already turning as sour on me as she was on dogs, though I didn’t know it yet.”
Staring intently at Orson, Mungojerrie bared his fangs.
Orson pulled back in his chair, as if afraid the cat was going to launch itself at him.
“Then Gloria tells me a few other things bothering Sloopy, one of which was this Ford pickup I’d bought. His arthritis was mild, but the poor dog couldn’t get in and out of the truck as easy as he could a car, and he was scared of breaking a bone.”
Still baring his fangs, the cat hissed.
Orson flinched, and a brief keening sound of anxiety escaped him, like a burst of steam whistling out of a teakettle.
Evidently oblivious to this feline-canine drama, Roosevelt said, “Gloria and I had lunch and spent the whole afternoon talking about her work as an animal communicator. She told me she didn’t have any special talent, that it wasn’t any paranormal psychic nonsense, just a sensitivity to other species that we all have but that we’ve repressed. She said anyone could do it, that I could do it myself if I learned the techniques and spent enough time at it, which sounded preposterous to me.”
Mungojerrie hissed again, somewhat more ferociously, and again Orson flinched, and then I swear the cat smiled or came as close to smiling as any cat can.
Stranger yet, Orson appeared to break into a wide grin—which requires no imagination to picture because all dogs are able to grin. He was panting happily, grinning at the smiling cat, as though their confrontation had been an amusing joke.
“I ask you, son, who wouldn’t want to learn such a thing?” said Roosevelt.
“Who indeed?” I replied numbly.
“So Gloria taught me, and it took a frustratingly long time, months and months, but I eventually got as good at it as she was. The first big hurdle is believing you can actually do it. Putting aside your doubt, your cynicism, all your preconceived notions about what’s possible and what isn’t. Most of all, hardest of all, you have to stop worrying about looking foolish, ’cause fear of being humiliated really limits you. Lots of folks could never get past all that, and I’m sort of surprised that I got past it myself.”
Shifting forward in his chair, Orson leaned over the table and bared his teeth at Mungojerrie.
The cat’s eyes widened with fear.
Silently but threateningly, Orson gnashed his teeth.
Wistfulness filled Roosevelt’s deep voice: “Sloopy died three years later. God, how I grieved for him. But what a fascinating and wonderful three years they were, being so in tune with him.”
Teeth still bared, Orson growled softly at Mungojerrie, and the cat whimpered. Orson growled again, the cat bawled a pitiful meow of purest fear—and then both grinned.
“What the hell is going on here?” I wondered.
Orson and Mungojerrie seemed to be perplexed by the nervous tremor in my voice.
“They’re just having fun,” Roosevelt said.
I blinked at him.
In the candlelight, his face shone like darkly stained and highly polished teak.
“Having fun mocking their stereotypes,” he explained.
I couldn’t believe I was hearing him correctly. Considering how completely I must be misperceiving his words, I was going to need a high-pressure hose and a plumber’s drain snake to clean out my ears. “Mocking their stereotypes?”
“Yes, that’s right.” He bobbed his head in confirmation. “Of course they wouldn’t put it in those terms, but that’s what they’re doing. Dogs and cats are supposed to be mindlessly hostile. These guys are having fun mocking that expectation.”
Now Roosevelt was grinning at me as stupidly as the dog and the cat were grinning at me. His lips were so dark red that they were virtually black, and his teeth were as big and white as sugar cubes.
“Sir,” I told him, “I take back what I said earlier. After careful reconsideration, I’ve decided you’re totally awesomely crazy, whacked-out to the max.”
He bobbed his head again, continuing to grin at me. Suddenly, like the darkling beams of a black moon, lunacy rose in his face. He said, “You wouldn’t have any damn trouble believing me if I were
white,
” and as he snarled the final word, he slammed one massive fist into the table so hard that our coffee cups rattled in their saucers and nearly tipped over.
If I could have reeled backward while in a chair, I would have done so, because his accusation stunned me. I had never heard either of my parents use an ethnic slur or make a racist statement; I’d been raised without prejudice. Indeed, if there was an ultimate outcast in this world, it was
me.
I was a minority all to myself, a minority of one: the Nightcrawler, as certain bullies had called me when I was a little kid, before I’d ever met Bobby and had someone who would stand beside me. Though not an albino, though my skin was pigmented, I was stranger, in many people’s eyes, than Bo Bo the DogFaced Boy. To some I was merely unclean, tainted, as if my genetic vulnerability to ultraviolet light could be passed to others with a sneeze, but some people feared and despised me more than they would fear or despise a three-eyed Toad Man in any carnival freak show from sea to shining sea, if only because I lived next door.