Spotted Cats (3 page)

Lily laughed. ‘Did they behave themselves for you?’

‘Impeccably, as usual. They wanted to tear my throat out.’

She grinned. ‘You spoke their names.’

‘Yes. Magic words. Where’s Jeff?’

She jerked her head towards the house. ‘On the terrace. Staring off towards the ocean, as usual. As if he could see Africa if he looked hard and long enough.’

‘How is he?’

She shrugged. ‘No better than last time you were here. No worse, either, I suppose. Up and down, as usual. He sleeps. He stares at the sea. Sometimes manic, usually depressive. He looks forward to his doctor’s visit. The highlight of his week. Except, of course, when you come to call.’ She hugged my arm against her breast. She was strong. I couldn’t have resisted if I’d wanted to. Which I didn’t. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You always cheer him up. And the martinis are all mixed.’

She led me into the cool interior of the house. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave a long view of the ocean. I paused by the series of glass cases that were lined up on the table beside the fireplace.

‘The jaguars,’ I said. ‘God, they’re beautiful.’

Lily, standing beside me still holding my arm, nodded. ‘I never tire of looking at them.’

There were seven of them, each under its own glass dome. Solid gold jaguars with oval emerald eyes, fashioned centuries earlier in the crude impressionistic style of Mayan artisans. Each was sixteen or eighteen inches long from the tip of nose to tip of tail. They had been moulded in different positions—some crouched, some caught in mid running stride, some standing with their heads held high, as if they were sniffing the jungle breezes. I had hefted one of them once, and its weight had surprised me.

But mainly it was the eyes, those opaque, pale green eyes without pupils, that fascinated me. Primitive, deadly fire seemed to glow inside those eyes.

My friend Daniel LaBreque from the Museum of Fine Arts brought down his assistant, Maria Conway, who specialized in Mayan and Aztec artifacts, to appraise those seven cats soon after Jeff brought them home. They agreed that the fourteen emerald eyes alone put the value of the collection in the early six figures. Then there was the gold, primitively smelted yet as pure as the ingots that theoretically backed American currency. Nearly one hundred pounds of gold. ‘Fort Knox,’ Dan had said. ‘By God, this is Fort Knox gold.’

Dan estimated their worth at one-point-two million dollars. Maria put it nearer one-point-seven.

The value of the seven jaguars derived more from their provenance than from the gold and emeralds, however. They were pre-Columbian—fourteenth century, according to Maria—from the Mayan civilization of southeastern Mexico near the border of Belize, which was still called British Honduras when Jeff hunted real jaguars in the Yucatan. The seven gold jaguars had been gifts from a grateful Mayan Indian Chief to Jeff Newton, then an apprentice professional hunter, who had slain the cat that had eaten away the face and throat of the chief’s eldest son while he was urinating against a tree in the jungle. The gold jaguars had lived with the old patriarch’s tribe for uncounted generations. The tribesmen worshipped them, as they worshipped the living cats themselves. They were the ultimate reward for the man who had avenged the death of the heir to the tribal throne.

Although they were freely given to him, technically the jaguars did not belong to Jeff. They belonged to the government of Mexico. No pre-Columbian artifacts could legally leave the country after 1971. The United States government supported the Mexican law.

Jeff Newton didn’t care. He didn’t care what those jaguars were worth, and he didn’t care about the Mexican law. Had he wanted to sell them, he would’ve had a problem. But he didn’t intend to sell them. Jeff, I knew, loved those seven golden jaguars perhaps as much as he loved his dogs. Probably more than he loved any human being.

Dan LaBreque did care. He called Jeff a thief. Insofar as a law was being violated, I cared, too. But there wasn’t anything either of us could do about it.

Lily tugged at my arm. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘The great hunter is waiting. He heard the bell. He’ll be wondering what we’re up to.’

She led me through double glass doors on to the field-stone patio behind the house. Thomas Jefferson Newton lay on a chaise longue facing off to the east, his back to me. His thinning white hair grew close to his scalp. Pale urine-yellow streaks stained it. The back of his neck was thin. The two cords stood out in sharp relief. Even in the muggy Cape Cod summer heat, he had a blanket spread over his legs. His crutch was propped on the wrought-iron table beside him. The promised pitcher of martinis and two glasses sat on the table.

I turned to Lily and arched my brows at her.

‘Go ahead,’ she said softly. ‘I got some things to do in the kitchen.’

I shrugged and stepped out on to the terrace.

‘Jeff,’ I said.

He waved his hand without turning around. ‘Come sit down, Brady,’ he said.

I went over and perched on the edge of the chair beside his chaise. He turned his head slowly and peered at me through watery blue eyes. I was startled at his appearance. I had seen him dozens of times since he got out of the hospital six years earlier, but I still remembered him as the dark, powerful man who had gone to Africa. He was, I knew, barely fifty. He looked twenty years older. His skin glowed with the papery translucence of old age. It was patched with pink blotches as if disease was showing itself, except along the three parallel scars that began in front of his left ear and angled across his cheek, through his lips, and across his chin. The scars shone stark white.

He reached towards me. ‘Shitty weather,’ he said.

I squeezed his bony hand. ‘Summer on the Cape,’ I said. ‘It’s what you get.’

‘Traffic bad?’

‘As always. Route 3 was backed up to Marshfield.’

‘Cape’s going to hell,’ he said. ‘Just like the rest of the world. Pour us a martini. And fill the damn glass all the way up. Lily doesn’t know how to fill a glass with a martini.’

I poured from the pitcher into the glasses and handed one to Jeff. He took it and brought it to his lips. I noticed that his hand trembled, and when he sipped, some of the drink dribbled from the corner of his mouth. He swallowed, cleared his throat, and took another, longer swallow.

He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes to look at me. ‘You gaining weight?’ he said.

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I never bother weighing myself.’

‘Fatter in the jowls,’ he said.

‘Thanks.’ I lit a cigarette.

‘Those things’ll kill you.

‘Something’s got to,’ I said.

‘Stupid habit.’

I nodded and sipped my martini. ‘How are you feeling, other than mean-spirited and nasty?’ I said.

‘Piss poor. As usual. Nice of you to ask, as if you couldn’t see for yourself.’

He stared down at his legs, twin lumps under the blanket. One of them, I knew, was half the diameter of the other. Most of the thigh muscle had been torn away from the bone by the windmilling hind legs of the same leopard that had gouged his face and clomped its teeth through his shoulder and ripped at his abdomen. ‘The body’s as good as it’s going to get. I still dream about that hospital, those doctors mumbling in their deep voices, a dialect I didn’t know. They all looked like Magic Johnson.’

He smiled quickly at me, then drank again, emptying his glass. Without speaking he handed it to me. I refilled it and gave it back. He sipped, more slowly this time, and stared out towards the ocean.

‘I been thinking,’ he said. ‘When Jack Kennedy was my age, he was already dead.’

I smiled. ‘That doesn’t necessarily make you old.’

‘No. Other things make you old besides the passage of the years. You have any idea what it’s like to feel absolutely powerless? To have no control, to know what you want, to know it’s right, and to realize that there’s not a damn thing you can do except wait, even then knowing that it probably won’t happen the way you want it to?’

I shrugged.

He snorted a mirthless laugh through his nose. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t figure you’d understand. The only thing worse is to look back and see your mistake and know you blew it, and know what you should’ve done, and know you can’t ever go back and try it again, do it right, make it right, and you’ve just got to live with it, and you don’t know how you can, but you do, day to day, hour to hour, churning it around and around in your head.’

I looked out towards the ocean and said nothing.

‘So,’ he continued in his weak, moist, old man’s voice, ‘I screwed up the past and I can’t do a goddam thing about the future. So here sits Jeff Newton, professional hunter, twisted and broken inside and out. A poor excuse for a human being.’

‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself,’ I said. ‘You’re alive.’

‘More’s the pity.’

‘Jeff, for Christ sake,’ I said, ‘it’s been six years.’

‘The man died,’ he said softly. ‘His name was Walter McIntyre and he was a chemical engineer from Teaneck, New Jersey. It was his first trip to Africa. He was my client and
Nyalubwe
got him. I killed him.’

J
EFF REACHED OVER AND
put his hand on my leg. ‘I don’t usually talk about it,’ he said quietly. ‘But I think about it all the time. That instant in my life. It changed everything.’

‘Jeff, you don’t have to…’

He shook his head. ‘I remember that leopard’s breath. It was hot and rotten on my face. And the red. I saw red. Blood in my eyes. And the pain and the rush of adrenaline. The pain was only for an instant, and it seemed to be everywhere. But all that was the same instant of memory as the business I had to do, getting the muzzle of my gun against that cat’s belly and blowing him away. I wasn’t thinking of dying. Not then. I was thinking of killing. And I wasn’t thinking of Walter McIntyre, the poor silly son of a bitch. If he’d stayed in the hide he would’ve been fine. And so would I. I would’ve found that cat and killed him. He followed me into the tall grass after I told him not to.’ Jeff arched his eyebrows. ‘I keep telling myself it was his fault. And it was. But I was responsible for him.’

‘Can’t you just let it go?’ I said.

He gazed out towards the ocean. ‘No,’ he said after a long pause. ‘No, I guess I can’t. See, there was something else that happened. Another series of thoughts on a different, deeper, more abstract level. I was thinking that finally, this was it, what I had been waiting for. This was the moment I had wanted. Hand to hand with a leopard. Equal terms. His teeth and claws, my shotgun, strength against strength on the terrain that we both knew. This was why I had come to Africa. To kill or be killed. Before I went unconscious, when I still didn’t know which of us was the winner, I experienced this odd, wonderful sense of fulfilment, a kind of peace, as if it had all, finally, come together for me. At that instant I think I believed I was dead. And right then it was OK.’

He turned his head and stared at me. ‘See,’ he said, ‘it isn’t really guilt over Walter McIntyre. That would be simple. And it wasn’t death. I didn’t fear death itself. But it was death in that tall grass. When I was in the hospital I dreamed about it. I still do. Weird, terrifying dreams. In the hospital I think I would’ve welcomed a peaceful death, numbed by drugs and fever and pain. I hallucinated on images of all the animals I’d ever killed coming after me, goring me and trampling me and ripping at me with their teeth and tusks and claws. It was them that I feared, not death itself. So I knew. I couldn’t go back. A lot of hunters get hurt. They go back. I knew I couldn’t. That’s what’s so hard to live with.’

Jeff closed his eyes.

‘Is that why you wanted me to come?’ I said. ‘To share this with me?’

He turned his head slowly and opened one eye. He gave me a quick, ironic smile, then closed his eye. ‘Ignore me,’ he mumbled.

Jeff’s body healed as much as it was going to after he killed his last African leopard. The razor claws of that gutshot leopard had permanently reduced the big muscles of his left thigh to strings, but with the support of a crutch he was able to dodder around the bungalow. He had lost one testicle. His shoulder and his face healed. His soul never did.

He lived on the royalties from the books he had written about Africa and the films he had made. It was a living for him. Barely. But then, Jeff Newton himself was barely living.

On my rare trips to Orleans to visit him, I tried to persuade him to go out on to the pond with me in his canoe, or take a stroll through the wooded gardens inside the fence, or climb into my car for a drive to the ocean.

‘Another time, maybe,’ was his standard reply.

Once I suggested he write another book.

‘Can’t even begin to think of it,’ he said.

He read a little, watched some television. According to Lily, he mostly lay around with his eyes closed listening to Mozart tapes, and on especially nice days he let her persuade him to sit out on the patio to look at the flowers she was cultivating in the terraced rock gardens and watch the hummingbirds and sniff the salty breezes. He received company infrequently and unenthusiastically.

He still slept away more than half of each day. He continued to require medication for the residual infections and chronic pain. A local doctor visited him weekly.

At first, Lily had cooked elaborate meals for him. But Jeff showed no enthusiasm for her efforts and only picked at them, so after a while she gave it up. She fed him canned soup and sandwiches. He grew thinner and softer and more wrinkled.

Life, it seemed, was a condition to be endured until something better came along.

Now we were sipping martinis at the end of this Friday in July.

After a while, I said, ‘Did you want to talk business?’

He opened his eyes. ‘Why the hell else would I ask you to come down here?’

I smiled.

‘I want to rethink my will.’

‘Not much to think about, Jeff. You haven’t got a helluva lot to leave behind.’

‘I got this place. I got the movies and books. I got the jaguars.’

I shrugged. The place was mortgaged, the movies and books weren’t worth much, and I had long ago persuaded him to will the jaguars to the Museum of Fine Arts, knowing that they’d return them to the Mexican government.