Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs

by Blaize Clement

  I said, “You’re getting bored, aren’t you? Your mom will be home soon.”

  In actual fact, Big Bubba had spent a lot of his life waiting for Reba to come home from the college, but I knew the house felt more silent to him than usual.

  I spent extra time playing with him on the lanai, and I gave him a shower. While he ran around squawking and flapping his wings to dry them, I put fresh seed in his cups. I vacuumed up all the flung-out seed hulls and hung a fresh millet branch in his cage. I threw away the soggy Cheerios and gave him fresh water. I made his world as clean and organized as possible, but I knew he wouldn’t be completely happy until Reba came home. We all rely on that special someone to make us feel secure.

  After I’d coaxed him back into his cage and chatted with him awhile longer, I covered his cage for the night and left him.

  It had become habit now to stop at Hetty’s house after I left Big Bubba, but when I got there I saw her and Ben on the sidewalk walking toward home. I parked in the driveway, got out of the Bronco, and leaned on the door and waited. Ben trotted along with the happy look of a youngster discovering the world. Hetty held his leash with enough slack to let him explore interesting rocks and plants alongside the sidewalk, but short enough to keep him focused.

  When they reached me, I knelt to scratch the spot between Ben’s shoulders while his tail did a delighted helicopter whirl.

  Hetty said, “Come in for a cup of tea.”

  She went toward the front door, snapping her fingers at Ben as she went. At least I thought she was snapping her fingers at Ben, but I guess she could have been signaling me to follow.

  Ben and I obediently trotted after her, and as I went in the door I noticed a dark sedan parked half a block away at the curb. It gave me a moment of paranoia because cars don’t park on the street in that kind of neighborhood. I told myself I was being silly and went inside the house.

  In the kitchen, Winston was asleep, stretched on his back on the windowsill with his front paws bent like a Japanese dancer. If humans slept as much as cats do, we might be as lovable as they are. Well, some of us might be.

  I sat down at the table, and Ben lay at my feet. Hetty effortlessly filled a teakettle and got out cups. She had taken off the elastic bandage.

  I said, “Did Jaz come back?”

  She shook her head. “She seemed so scared when she left, I’m afraid she won’t be back.”

  I said, “I followed her this morning, but she ran into the nature preserve behind the Key Royale. I think she and her stepfather are living there. If they are, I’m sure it’s temporary. The only explanation I can think of is that he’s a security guard.”

  “That would explain some things.”

  “It doesn’t explain why those gang members know her or why they’re looking for her.”

  Hetty shook cookies from a square plastic container onto a plate. “She said she didn’t know those boys.”

  “Do you believe her?”

  Hetty sighed and poured boiling water over tea bags in a pot. “No, I think she was lying.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Dixie, I’ve had kids, I’ve taught kids, I know kids. Jaz is a good kid.”

  “And her stepfather may not be working at the Key Royale. He may actually be a paying guest, and his money may come from gang involvement.”

  Hetty sighed again. “He did look like a gangster, didn’t he?”

  She poured two cups of tea and shoved one across the table to me.

  She said, “It seems like such a straightforward thing to ask. With anybody else, you can just ask, ‘Honey, what’s your stepfather’s name?’ and they tell you. They don’t jump up and run away because it’s a secret.”

  I took a cookie from the plate and bit into it. It was tasty, not too sweet, a little crisp. Had a peanut butter flavor and a hint of blueberry. I looked more closely at it. It was a doggy biscuit.

  I said, “Are you giving me doggy treats because I deserve them, or are you just trying to get on my good side?”

  She looked at the cookies, then did a double take. “Oops, wrong container!”

  “Never mind, I like it.”

  “It’s healthy too. Organic peanut butter and blueberry.”

  Ben raised his head as if he might offer a biscuit review, then thought better of it.

  As I walked toward my Bronco in Hetty’s driveway, the dark sedan that had been parked at the curb pulled into the street and sped past. A trick of the late sun’s angle cast a fierce spotlight on the driver’s face. It was Jaz’s stepfather. Hunched over the wheel, he gripped it with both hands like a man who’d been driven beyond his limit. The man had obviously been watching Hetty’s house. The question was whether he had been hoping to catch Jaz there against his orders, or if he had been watching to learn more about Hetty. As in gathering information to pass along to burglars.

  I pulled out my cell to dial Guidry. I got his voice mail, which was good, because my message was more anxious than informative.

  I said, “Jaz hasn’t come back to Hetty’s, but I just saw her stepfather. He drives a dark sedan, but I didn’t get a tag number. He was parked on Hetty’s street watching her house, and then he drove away.”

  I went back and rang Hetty’s doorbell. She opened the door looking worried. When I told her about Jaz’s stepfather, she looked even more worried.

  I said, “I called Lieutenant Guidry and told him, but just be extra careful. If you see or hear anything unusual, call nine-one-one.”

  I left Hetty’s house feeling glum and depressed. It wasn’t going to get any better, either. Paco was still God knew where and Michael wouldn’t be home from the firehouse until the next morning. My own cupboards were as bare as Mother Hubbard’s and my refrigerator was pitiful. If I ate out, I’d first have to go home and get cleaned up.

  Any other woman would have been able to call a friend who didn’t know a thing about Jaz or Maureen, and enjoy an evening of female talk. Any other woman would have been able to forget all about Paco being off on a dangerous undercover job while she laughed at another woman’s tales of the perils of dating. Without much hope, I ran down my mental list of friends who might have dinner with me. There weren’t any. Everybody I knew either had a family or a job or a lover that took up their evenings.

  I was the only woman in the entire world who didn’t have a list of friends she could call for an impromptu dinner. The only woman in the entire world who couldn’t drop in on a good friend and eat with chopsticks from cute little take-out boxes like people on TV do. The only woman in the entire world who couldn’t pick up spur-of-the-moment deli stuff to share with a close friend. Clever finger foods. Stuffed grape leaves. Delicate spring rolls. At least cheese fries.

  It was flat depressing.

  Thinking about the available friends I didn’t have made me think about the friends I’d once had. Which was probably why I made a sudden turn south toward Turtle Beach. I wanted to talk to my old friend Harry Henry.

  Okay, maybe I really wanted to find out what Harry knew about Maureen. What are old friends for if not to talk about another friend’s kidnapped husband?

  19

  Turtle Beach doesn’t have the floury white sand of Siesta Beach and Crescent Beach. Instead, its sand is dark and dense, the kind that turtles love to burrow into. Turtle Beach once led to a boat channel called Midnight Pass through which boats moved from the bay to the Gulf. But in a particularly boneheaded decision, the county tried to change nature’s intention by moving the pass, with the result that now there’s no pass at all, which pisses boaters off like you wouldn’t believe.

  It was near sunset when I parked the Bronco and walked out on the beach. A gray cloud cover had moved in to turn the light sepia, giving the beach and the people on it the look of an old photograph. A potbellied tourist threw bread at gulls while his companions, two women in lawn chairs they’d unfolded on the sand, looked in vain for the fabled sunset colors. The gulls squawked disdainfully at the man’s bread and circ
led away. Disgusted, the man flapped his arms against his square hips and glared at the women as if it were their fault his crumbs had been rejected.

  No doubt accustomed to taking the blame for life, they heaved themselves out of their chairs and refolded them. Slump-shouldered with disillusionment, all three trudged through the sand to their parking place, where they made a big to-do of brushing away the beach before getting in their sedan. The minute they drove away, the cloud cover parted and gulls swooped down and pecked at the bread. Clouds that had obscured the sun minutes ago now rode above the water like sky elephants with gilded backs. The sun slipped beneath the sea, leaving the sky shot with shafts of indigo and orange. Too bad those pessimists hadn’t been willing to watch a cloudy sunset.

  Harry wasn’t among the people watching the day’s spectacular end, so I walked down to the Sea Shack, an open-air seafood joint where beach bums and sun-browned fishermen drink beer and play poker.

  As far back as junior high, just hearing Harry Henry’s name had been enough to send me and my girlfriends into giggling fits, and not just because he had two first names and was movie star handsome. From the time his voice changed, Harry had been a babe magnet, and some of the babes were twice his age. By the time he was sixteen, already six foot three and eminently swoonable, he was rumored to have screwed half the girls in high school. He was also said to have been the reason for a hair-pulling fight between the English teacher and the math teacher.

  When he and Maureen got together, it had seemed almost inevitable to the rest of us. Maureen’s reputation for being promiscuous hadn’t been as well earned as Harry’s, but once she realized that her body caused men to grow mush-minded when they looked at her, she’d used it. Somehow she and Harry didn’t discover each other until our senior year, and after that they’d been inseparable. They were beautiful together too, with some extra quality that sets stars apart from ordinary people. All us less good-looking and less sexy classmates had expected them to stay that way, together forever, always set apart by their beauty. Somehow, the fact that they were both dumb as a box of rocks made them even more endearing to us. They were our high school’s golden couple.

  Then, before the ink was completely dry on our diplomas and our mortarboard tassels were still hanging from our rearview mirrors, Maureen had stunned us all by marrying a man none of us had ever heard of. Harry had taken it like a prize fighter who’d been dealt a major blow to the head. For a long time he’d wandered around in a bewildered daze, unable to comprehend that the girl he loved had actually married somebody else.

  If Harry had possessed acting talent or ambition, he might have headed to Hollywood or a career as a male model. Instead, he’d stayed on Siesta Key and worked on chartered deep-sea fishing boats. He’d never married, but lived alone on an old house boat at the Midnight Pass marina.

  I found Harry at the Sea Shack. It was that peculiar quiet time when the light takes on a translucent quality and the sea seems to hold its breath waiting for the evening tide. Harry was at a back table on one of the Shack’s benches. He was leaning against the sun-bleached wall, and he had a friend with him I’d never seen before—a long-haired dog with wide whiskers and a coat patterned like a tortoiseshell cat. The dog was sitting on the bench too, and it looked as if Harry was sharing from his plastic basket of fish and fries.

  I stopped a waitress and asked her to bring me the house special and a beer, and went over and sat down on the bench across from Harry, swinging my legs over and under to face him. He and the dog looked at me with identical expressions of mild curiosity.

  I said, “Harry, if that dog’s hanging out with you, he must have pretty poor taste.”

  He grinned. The dog grinned. The dog wagged its tail. Harry grinned some more, and I had a feeling he was mentally wagging his tail.

  He said, “I won him in a poker game. He’s not much to look at, but he’s one smart dog. I think he counts cards.”

  I said, “What is he, a Scottie and a Lab?”

  Harry ruffled the dog’s mottled fur affectionately. “Hell, Dixie, I don’t know who his ancestors were. I figure he’s an American dog, a little bit of every bloodline all mixed together. You don’t want to get too prissy about pedigrees. That’s the beginning of becoming a fossilized human being.”

  Harry was right. I had got so used to expensive dogs with pure bloodlines that I’d forgotten how much energy and intelligence nature invests in mongrels.

  I said, “I’m sorry, dog. I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings.”

  Harry said, “His name is Hugh Hefner. On account of he’s old, but he’s still chasing young bitches. I just call him Hef.”

  “Does he live in pajamas?”

  “Naw, Hef goes nude. And don’t get me wrong, Hef don’t actually get personal with the females he chases, he just likes hanging out with them.”

  The waitress brought my beer and a plastic knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin. The Sea Shack doesn’t go in for frills. As she left, she patted Hef’s head.

  I took a sip of beer. “I guess you’ve heard about Mo’s husband.”

  He looked out at the sunset-glinted water. “Kind of hard not to. She’s on the TV every hour.”

  “Harry, did you ever meet him?”

  “Who?”

  “Mo’s husband, Victor.”

  He grinned, and for a moment he looked young and handsome again, even with skin dried and crosshatched as an old leather boot.

  “Sure, him and me hung out together all the time. We was real jet-skiers together.”

  I was pretty sure he meant jet-setters, but I let it pass.

  “No kidding, Harry, did you?”

  A flicker of pain flashed across his face. “Why do you ask me that, Dixie? I’m not good enough for Mo, remember?”

  The waitress brought a red plastic basket filled with still-sizzling batter-fried strips of grouper and wide-cut french fries. Hef’s ears cocked forward while I lifted out the little paper cups of tartar sauce and coleslaw and arranged them next to my beer bottle. I reached for a bottle of Tabasco at the end of the table and sprinkled hot pepper sauce on the fish. I turned the basket so the fries were on the right and the fish on the left. It’s important to have your food at the right latitude before you eat it. I unwrapped my plastic fork and knife and smoothed my napkin on my lap. I forked up a bite of crisp grouper and put it in my mouth. I fanned my mouth and grabbed for the beer.

  Harry grinned. “You still like stuff hot, huh?”

  I gasped and drank some more beer. “Not that hot! Boy, that fish is right out of the fryer!”

  He nodded proudly. “They do it good here.”

  Hef looked proud too.

  I picked up a french fry with my fingers and waved it in the air to cool it.

  I said, “Harry, I’m wondering if Mo is really that broken up about Victor being kidnapped. I mean, the kidnappers told her they’d kill him if she told anybody, and she’s gone on TV and told it. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

  “It was my understanding,” he said—and he began to squint at me with red-rimmed eyes—“that she was going to leave him.”

  I tossed the cooled fry to Hef, and he caught it like a pro.

  “Leave him as in get a divorce?”

  He nodded with the exaggerated care of somebody not wanting to give away too much. “That’s what she said.”

  “When?”

  His squint got squintier. “When did she tell me, or when was she leaving?”

  “Both.”

  A pelican flapped to the railing by Harry’s side, and he turned and studied the bird as if it might have a message for him.

  “She told me that right from the beginning. She was always gonna leave him. She never said exactly when, though. One year it would be after Christmas because they were going skiing for Christmas, and for several years it was going to be after August because they always went someplace special in August. And a bunch of years it was going to be after her birthday because she always got a ne
w diamond on her birthday.”

  The pelican tucked its head back on its curved neck and went to sleep. Hef looked at the bird and cocked his ears. He probably wished he could fold his neck like that. I know I do.

  For a while I concentrated on the grouper and fries, with an occasional bite to Hef. Harry leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes. Below us, the sea made slushing sounds as it began to rock itself to sleep.

  I gave my last fry to Hef, drained the last of the beer, and tossed my crumpled napkin into the basket.

  “Harry, did you ever feel like Mo was just stringing you along?”

  His eyes opened and met mine, and for an instant the soft waning light made him look like the golden hunk he’d been in high school.

  “Hell, Dixie, she’s been stringing me along since the first day I met her. She holds up a razor, and I lick syrup off the edge.”

  I said, “And you’ve been seeing her ever since she married, haven’t you?”

  He glowered at me under sun-bleached eyebrows. “Like I said, Dixie, I’m not good enough for Mo. I haven’t seen her in two or three years.”

  I sat for a moment looking into his eyes, knowing that he was lying, but also knowing that I had all I was going to get from him. I decided not to call him on it.

  “Okay, Harry.”

  “Your brother okay?”

  “Yeah, Michael’s good.”

  “He’s a good fisherman, that boy.”

  I swung my legs over the edge of the bench and stood up. “Thanks, Harry. You take care.”

  I leaned over the table and ruffled the top of Hef’s head while Harry touched two fingers to the bill of his cap in a sardonic salute. “See you around, Dixie.”

  On the way out, I gave the waitress enough for Harry’s dinner too. I figured I owed him that much.

  The problem with sticking your nose into things that really aren’t your business is that you’re liable to find yourself face-to-face with a monster, and it’s not somebody else’s monster, it’s your monster and you have to deal with it. I’d known Harry Henry practically my whole life, and I knew all his mannerisms. I knew how his eyes danced to the side and his lips got a little almost curve at one corner when he told a whopper. And I knew damn well that Harry had lied when he said it had been two or three years since he’d seen Maureen. I was sorry I’d gone to see him. I was sorry I’d talked to him. I was sorry I hadn’t minded my own business and stayed out of it.