Midian Unmade (26 page)

The night wind had set me down atop yellow pollen on the pines at Twin Lakes, left me unhappy and afraid. I couldn't move without the wind, and the fucking sunrise already lit the top of the Sierras, changing me from all but invisible to iridescent. I find this annoying and wonder if it's the end for me or the beginning?

From the cabin below, I heard the black cat yowling. He was big and strong with a blaze of amber eyes, had a tail long ago broken at the end, but it was the utter despair of his yowl that got to me. I am a pushover for despair, having lived with it since the baptismal fires at Midian cremated me into a translucent rectangle of ash—a helpless shroud, yet a shroud filled with brain and purpose.
Don't disintegrate. Find a place for us.

So when the breeze picked up, I floated from the tree to the cat and insinuated myself into him as a guardian angel. His name was Leroy.

He was a mess. His owner, Gale Jordan, a trust-fund TV actress, had gone camping for a long weekend with her new boyfriend, Brian King, who had just moved into the garage apartment at the cozy Malibou Lake house her parents had bought for her three years ago.

She had insisted that the cat come along on the trip. Given her career choice, the cat was the most important and stable person in her life. Indeed, Leroy was a person to her, not an animal, someone to come home to after a failed audition or a day with an abusive director. Besides, she was certain that—like her—Leroy had never been camping before. He'd be the perfect bridge between herself and this new guy, but if she spent the whole time with Brian, like, hey, they had plenty of chipmunks and birds at Twin Lakes. The cat would not go wanting into this long weekend.

She didn't know that Brian resented the cat. He also resented Gale's ex-lovers, her wealthy parents, their suspicion of him because he was black, bald, and buff—or so he assumed. I mean, he wore a pricey suit to work at the Gersh Agency in Beverly Hills and carried a fawn-leather briefcase with a laptop. Of course, Gale's parents didn't know that he carried them as props. He was a receptionist. His job description began with answering the phone, saying “Gersh” with attitude, and ended with directing the call.

He had led Gale and her parents to believe that he was actually an agent—just one major client away from hanging out his own shingle. He figured that if he could score her, well, then maybe he could score financing from her folks. That she was on the rebound from a hot young cinematographer who had dumped her for an
Ebony
cover girl was no secret. That in him she might be thinking image as opposed to love or commitment was no secret, either. It never occurred to him that Vegas or even Tahoe might've been a better call for the weekend instead of a cabin at Twin Lakes, but Twin Lakes was where his daddy had taken him when he was a happy little kid and the whole wide world was before him.

So after two days of the fish not biting, after two nights of premature ejaculation and vodka, the trip had turned sour. During one last sad coupling on the rusty, squeaky springs, Gale joked that she couldn't get off because the bed was too loud and Brian smelled like night crawlers. True, he hadn't washed his hands after being out on the boat all day—hadn't washed them after stinking up the john or before cooking hot dogs on the grill. He hadn't appreciated her humor, either, and called her a frigid bitch.

When she told him to get a life, he became enraged and jerked her off the bed. She took it sexually and thought that finally he was going to do her right and true. As she spread her arms for him, he drove his left into her belly. Her breath whooshed out; she folded up. His right smashed into her pretty face, and then he grabbed her around the waist and rammed her back and forth through the window. The glass sliced her carotid artery, and she bled out before he came to his senses and found the courage to call 911, but then he lost it and hung up on them.

Brian went from panic into automaton mode. He bagged Gale's body in his blue fishing tarp, then cleaned up the cabin, tossed her and all their stuff in the back of his old Expedition, and took off.

He left the cat behind.

Leroy had witnessed the violence and its aftermath from beneath the cabin's gas heater, paralyzed with fear. After Brian bailed, Leroy knew on a primal level that the one being in the universe he cared about was dead and that he would forever hate the man who had killed her. What to do?

One coherent answer came into the cat's brain. Go home.
Go home
consumed his twenty-pound, short-haired, four-legged frame.

And I accepted that challenge as I wrapped his presence and blocked out an awful indifference from the universe. I, too, had a goal, and face it, as a shroud alone depending upon the whimsy of the wind, I was not likely to lead the Nightbreed to the promised land. I'd never been a cat person, but teaming up with this bewildered feline seemed both smart and honorable. I recalled Cervantes. No, I wasn't huge on reincarnation, but maybe somewhere I'd tilted at windmills before.

So the cat and I headed south toward Malibou Lake, the cat's home.

We traveled at night, and if a moonrise hurt my sensibilities, I would guide the cat into shadow, whispering for him to stay on soft ground and conserve the pads of his paws. Though he didn't want to stop, I made sure he found water and rested. I didn't want my ride dying from exhaustion. I made sure he ate, too. Having lived with vermin, I knew where they were.

We found the first one kicked back in a storm drain, all bushy and fat from a steady diet of roadkill residue on the highway. The cat cornered the rat, cuffed him senseless, and was about to finish him, but then a scheme came to me, and I made the cat pause. Yes, the cat was a brother, but not yet in the bond. In the cat's pause, the rat lunged, but bit into me instead of the cat, and my fragile, dusty balm flowed into the rat. Then I released the pause.

In seconds, the cat had shredded the rat, and ate it as if it were filet mignon, its special sauce, of course, the balm. Then Leroy cleaned himself, and we moved on. Leroy was now a blood brother, and I was triumphant, certain that like any other small community not yet sanitized by routine fumigation, Malibou Lake would have insects.
Silent Spring
redux.

With the cat averaging twelve miles a day, the trip took twenty-four nights. So strong was his sense of home, Leroy ran the last few miles, then as the sun rose over the Santa Monicas, trotted up the dirt driveway and yowled at the door for his dead owner. When the cat heard Brian moving in the apartment over the garage, he hid in the bushes and watched him look out the window, the man curious about a caterwauling he'd last heard some three hundred miles north.

Soon, Brian came out on the landing. He was half dressed, shaving cream on his face and head. He scanned the yard, finally peered down in the bushes, and was astonished to see Leroy, a reminder, a witness to Gale's brutal murder. Not that the cat could talk, but the feline's mere presence freaked Brian out. Scowling, he went back inside and wondered how to get rid of the cat. The answer came quickly—a variation on what his boyhood homeys had done to guard dogs when they wanted to hop fences and rob small businesses.

Brian got leftover raw hamburger from the refrigerator, mashed it flat on a plastic plate, then opened the china cabinet and looked for the pi
è
ce de r
é
sistance.

He set the doctored meat on the landing, thinking that cats were always hungry, so it wouldn't take Leroy long to find it. Then he finished dressing and left for work, actually looking forward to the hour-long drive and his boring, humiliating day. He didn't want be to around when the cat was puking blood and writhing in agony. Watching Gale die, he told himself, had put his sensibilities on overload.

*   *   *

No, I insisted, no way, don't touch it!

We were on the landing, and Leroy was sniffing the hamburger.

It's a glass burger, I told him. The motherfucker's left you a glass burger. You eat that, you die a horrible death, and I'm stuck in the goddamn bushes with no horse for my kingdom. Let's go find a field mouse.

The cat listened and obeyed. Within the hour, he had hunted down a sizable rodent under the house. We dined, then curled up and slept, the cat choosing a patch of sunlight coming in the door to the crawl space.

Gale's parents showed up a few days later in a leased Escalade, wondering what had happened to her. They unlocked the door and went inside, called out to an empty house. Full of trepidation, they crept from room to room afraid that they would find her body, were relieved to come up empty. They found her car in the garage, covered with dust as if abandoned. Next, they trekked up and down East Lakeshore Drive and asked the neighbors. Alas, no one had seen Gale. (No one kept tabs on Gale.)

Exhausted, they went back to the house, were overjoyed to find the cat yowling at the door. Mrs. Jordan let us in, hurried to the pantry and got a can of Fancy Feast, opened and set it down, then gave Leroy fresh water, going on and on about the poor, starving cat, Gale's best friend, and if only you could tell us where she's gone to. If this keeps up, I told Leroy as he wolfed the food, you're gonna lose your edge from a three-hundred-mile journey and become one obese fat cat.

Mr. Jordan opened the refrigerator, stepped back at the stench of rotting leftovers. Whew, and I thought the cat food smelled awful. He got a plastic bag and started slam-dunking the stuff, containers and all, then told Mrs. Jordan that they should go to the store, buy some food.

“We should call the police,” she said.

“We're not calling the police,” he replied, “not when the FBI wants to talk to me.”

Apparently, Mr. Jordan was suspected of major financial fraud. His company had guaranteed seniors a forty-percent return on their retirement accounts, then paid them with stock from a corporation that had no assets. He'd recently wired all his money to banks in the Bahamas, and the Jordans were moving from Connecticut to Costa Rica when Gale went missing.

“Gale's your only daughter!”

“You call the cops, I'm gone.”

Mrs. Jordan thought about that, and then decided to go to the store with her husband, making sure that he'd go to Gelson's and not LAX.

The window of opportunity had opened for us. I remembered the fire and my promise. I remembered the survival instructions, quite simply: Why, why not transmogrify? If you find a new Nightbreed turf, then no longer are we the scum of the earth. Why, why not transmogrify?

I pictured Leroy's bed—plush pillows in a wicker basket next to Gale's in the master bedroom—and he was there in a flash, having found his home within a home, very important for a cat who'd lost everything. I asked him to roll over a few times. When he did, me, myself, and I came off on the pillows and began shape-shifting into a dirty-gray angel. As I ballooned in size, I inadvertently dumped the cat on the floor. Unhappy, he growled and hissed at me, then headed for the sofa in the living room, his tail switching. Jesus, give a cat smelly food and a bed, and he gets an attitude.

I glanced in the mirror and snorted with disgust. I hadn't figured on reformulating as an angel and looked like one of Raphael's cherubs, my bad complexion suggesting cancer. Maybe the fire intended the new “me” as a symbolic gesture, except I had planned to arrive as a male humanoid so that I could take out Brian, and being four feet tall with excessive baby fat—well, taking out Brian was not likely.

The cat scratched his belly frantically, then started licking his balls, then went back to scratching. Oh, shit, of course. He'd brought in fleas. Bloodsucking fleas. Yet as an angel, so-called holy water ran through my veins, so I didn't have to worry. In fact, if I was an angel, why not try flying?

I did, and my wings worked fine. For once, it was nice to be up in the air without being held hostage by the wind. I gained some altitude—not to mention, attitude—and glided above the lake. Hey, everybody, I'm beautiful like an eagle, fierce and fearless—except deep down, I knew I resembled a flying pear.

Another circle above the lake—people were staring at me at and aiming their smart phones—so I had to zoom back to Gale's and make an awkward landing behind the house. When I came inside, the cat blinked at me, then the clock, and went back to sleep. Like he knew it was six o'clock and Brian would be coming home soon, and that made me a total loser, without a plan. I'd thought about leaving a note for the Jordans except I had no hands. I couldn't write.

Wait a sec. The refrigerator! Gale had those magnetic letters all over it. Using my wings, I arranged a sentence with them: “BRIAN KILLED GALE.” I'd wanted to write, “Dear Daddy, Brian killed me. Love, Gale” but I didn't have enough “D”s.

Then I curled up in a pious, self-righteous ball beneath the sofa and waited.

“Joe! Somebody broke in,” said Mrs. Jordan as her husband put the groceries on the counter.

“What are you talking about?”

She pointed at my message on the refrigerator.

Mr. Jordan frowned thoughtfully.

“Maybe a neighbor saw something and was afraid to tell us.” She dissolved into tears, mumbling about her precious daughter. “Will you call the police now?”

“I'll kill the son of a bitch myself.”

Well, okay, we could use the help.

Mr. Jordan went online and searched for sporting-goods stores and found three in the area that sold firearms, but Mrs. Jordan warned him that buying a gun would go straight to the FBI's network and set off alarms, not good for Joe Jordan in the age of GPS. So Mr. Jordan searched Craigslist and found a dude in Thousand Oaks who was selling an AK-47. He sealed the deal with a phone call, then told Mrs. Jordan to call him if Brian got back before he did. He took off.

Still angelic under the sofa, I resisted the urge to make small talk with God. Then—I don't know if it was Him or the fire—a message came through loud and clear:
The refrigerator isn't enough, boy. You can't rely on an almost-convicted felon, either. Get off your fat ass and do something. Brian King is on Lake Vista Drive—like right now.