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 pièce de résistance.
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.
Okay, okay, who am I to hesitate when it comes to Them.
I took off from the bedroom window and slowly gained altitude, my breath coming hard, my wings redlining it, what with the goddamn low humidity. At a couple of hundred feet, I leveled off and circled the lake, let the wind do its work. The gawkers were gone, so I didn’t have to pretend I was a Canada goose or an overweight seagull.
Finally, I saw Brian’s SUV turning on East Lakeshore. Before Gale’s house, there was a sharp curve and a twenty-foot drop to the lake, and he was going way too fast. Perfect.
Wings flapping, I climbed higher, then banked and dove. I was going to come in straight for him at eye level, figuring he’d react instinctively, jerk to the right and drive off the cliff as I veered over the top of his car, home free, but I fucked up and came in too low.
He didn’t even see me. I hit the ground ten feet in front of his Expedition, and he ran over me. If I’d been a human, I’d be dead. Instead, I got up, brushed myself off, and trudged for the house, humiliated by the tire tracks on my wings. They looked like something a tattoo artist on meth would do.
When I got back to the house, Brian was already inside his apartment. Jazz was mewling from his entertainment center, and I imagined him kicked back with a vodka martini. Pissed off, I went in the house, banging the kitchen door.
“Joe?” said Mrs. Jordan.
“No,” I replied, “not exactly.”
She shrieked at my angel body and beat-up wings, her hand going to her mouth. I figured she was dumbfounded that I didn’t have rosy cheeks, as well.
I brushed past her and went to the sofa, swept the cat off, my wings feeling surprisingly strong. Annoyed, Leroy hissed at me, but I ignored his puff-ball threat and kicked his ass out the kitchen door.
He paused and blinked at the late-afternoon sun, but finally seemed to get what I had in mind. Tail switching, he trotted down the steps, stretched at the bottom, shook himself, and was ready. He looked up at me: What did you have in mind, anyway? Consider Brian King a two-legged rodent or a cockroach, whatever you’re in the mood for, I responded.
I knocked on Brian’s door with my head.
He opened it and was surprised. “What the hell?” He stepped back. “Ain’t no costume party here, kid. You got the wrong address.”
Leroy bolted in the apartment.
“Hey!”
The cat leaped on top of the entertainment cabinet, a good seven feet off the carpet. (Well, goddamn, the cat can fly, too.) Centered on it was Brian’s huge seventy-five-inch Samsung TV.
“Hey, get outta here!”
He went for the cat, and using the old two-against-one maneuver, I dropped on my hands and knees behind Brian.
Leroy dropped on Brian’s head and dug in his claws. Brian shouted in pain, stepped back, tripped over me. The cat sprang off, and I was up fast and used my wings to push the TV off its shelf. All seventy-five inches of scre
en and plastic came crashing down on Brian, pinning his arms.
Leroy sprang onto his face, and in the seconds that it took Brian to free his arms, the cat ripped out one eye, was digging at the other when finally Brian pulled him off and threw him across the room.
Blood poured from his face. He got up screaming and staggered after the cat, cornered him under the cabinet and started kicking him. The cat yowled in pain.
I figured it was as good a day as any to die—or at least get seriously hurt—so I threw myself between Brian and Leroy. He swung. I ducked and head-butted him in the balls. He yelped and doubled over. I was laughing triumphantly when his second swing caught me full-on in the face, slammed me against the wall. Out cold, I crumpled to the floor.
A gunshot woke me up. I lifted up on one wing just in time to see Mr. Jordan switch the AK-47 to full auto and empty it into Brian’s back. Like a puppet cut loose from his strings, Brian flailed and jerked, then fell into the cabinet, dead.
As Mr. Jordan absorbed what he’d done, I automatically looked around for Leroy. Not seriously hurt, his attitude back, he remained under the cabinet, chewing on Brian’s eyeball. Damn cat will eat anything.
Time for me to bail. (Avoidance therapy.) I jumped on the kitchen counter and went out the window. I lifted off and flew up blindly, but didn’t see the power lines until the last second. A quick and desperate maneuver: I backstroked, did a somersault intending to glide under the high voltage, and almost made it except for the oak tree.
I flew into its top branches, flailed mightily, but fell anyway, ricocheting between the limbs, wishing I was a shroud again. I hit the ground hard, was down and out for the second time in minutes.
This time I woke up to the cat licking dirt off my face. Instinctively, I rolled away in case he’d developed a taste for eyes. He purred and rubbed against my wings, which I guess was his way of saying thank you, brother, even though he’d been the point man in the assault and Mr. Jordan, the artillery.
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