Spotted Cats

by William G. Tapply

  Dad. Joey never called me ‘Dad’. It was always Pop, or Old Man. And he’d called himself Joey, too. He hadn’t done that since he turned twelve. That’s when he became Joe. Joe Coyne. Tough, grown-up Joe Coyne. Gloria and I still called him Joey, of course, and he tolerated it. But to his friends and teachers—and especially to himself—it was Joe.

  Another thing about that brief phone message. No joke, no wisecrack, not even a hint about what he wanted. That, too, was uncharacteristic.

  I concluded that something was wrong, and a small wart of fear took up residence in my stomach. If something was wrong with my son, then something was wrong with me. Maybe I’d have a chance to call him from Jeff’s place. I expected to have plenty of loose time. It promised to be a long, boring weekend.

  There’s a big sign where you swing around the rotary on to the bridge. It says, ‘Desperate? Call the Samaritans.’ For all the weekend commuters, I guessed. I suspected the Samaritans did a big business in the summer, what with desperate traffic-jammed vacationers trying to drive off the bridge into the canal.

  I hooked on to Route 6A after the bridge, and it went faster, through salt marshes and over tidal creeks and past all the neat little authentic silver-shingled Cape Cod houses and antique shops.

  It took me three and a quarter hours that Friday afternoon in July to drive from my apartment off Atlantic Avenue on the Boston Harbour to Jeff Newton’s place on Quashnet Lane in Orleans, down at the narrow bend of the Cape’s elbow. I figured I averaged thirty miles an hour.

  I wound up the long driveway past several ‘Beware of Dogs’ signs and tucked my BMW under the canopied branches of a wind-twisted Cape Cod pine tree. The other car there was a white Cherokee four-wheel drive. It belonged to Lily Robbins, Jeff Newton’s full-time housekeeper. Jeff didn’t drive any more.

  I grabbed my overnight bag from the backseat and stepped out. Even on the hilltop, no sea breeze stirred the humid summer air. Somewhere in the shimmering afternoon heat a bobwhite whistled. In the distance off to my left stretched a silvery ribbon of the Atlantic Ocean, blurred in the afternoon haze so that the line between ocean and sky was fuzzy. Down the hill to my right huddled Thomas Jefferson Newton’s trout pond.

  Jeff’s little compound lay ahead of me, at the top of the hill at the end of a wide pathway. I clunked the car door shut, giving it plenty of emphasis. I didn’t want to take the dogs by surprise.

  I approached the gate, ten feet of heavy-gauge one-inch chain link wired on to steel crosspieces. The fence enclosed Jeff’s rambling unstained cedar-shingled bungalow and the three or four acres of grounds, the retreat from which he rarely ventured since he returned there, six years earlier, mangled in body and spirit.

  The two Dobermans crouched inside the gate waiting for me. They were sleek and black and thoroughly malign, with narrowed hate-filled eyes. When they spotted me, their lips curled back from their fangs. The muscles along their shoulders rippled with nervous anticipation. They wanted to rip flesh from my bones. Good clean doggie fun. It’s what they lived for.

  I reached for the pull rope and clanged the big brass bell to announce my arrival. That’s when the dogs began to leap.

  They hurled themselves against the fence. They didn’t bark or growl. They whined high in their throats, as if I was withholding their dinner from them, which I suppose is how they saw it. Savage, stupid, single-minded, again and again they attacked the fence, throat-high on a man, the claws of all four of their feet clinging momentarily to the mesh at each onslaught before they fell back, only to leap again. Their teeth snapped at the fence as they would have preferred to snap at my face.

  ‘Come on, guys,’ I said. ‘It’s me, your old pal, Brady. Cut it out.’

  The sound of my voice intensified their mindless efforts. The two of them crashed against the chain link, one after the other. Saliva dripped from their flashing teeth. I would have felt better if they had barked or at least growled.

  I approached to within a foot of the fence. ‘Tondo,’ I said softly.

  The first dog sat instantly, cocked his head at me, lolled out his tongue, and began to pant.

  ‘Ngwenya,’ I said to the other dog, slurring the consonants the way Jeff had taught me. The second dog, too, sat.

  Jeff had named his twin Dobermans after the African game he used to kill. He had patiently taught me how to pronounce their names, which served as passwords with the dogs. If you knew their names, you were their friends, and therefore immune from attack. Few people knew the dogs’ names. Few people entered Jeff Newton’s compound.

  Tondo was the African word for an old tuskless elephant, a fiercer, more aggressive critter than his ivoried counterpart. Tondo would not bluff. Tondo was grouchy, quicktempered, ruthless.

  Ngwenya was the croc. Jeff once told me that crocodiles polished off an average often human beings a day in Africa, making them the most prolific mankillers on the dark continent. When a croc’s jaws glom on to an animal, human or otherwise, it drags it to the bottom of the river and rams it into the mud under a log until the victim’s flesh ages to suit the croc’s palate. Jeff says he once saw a twelve-foot crocodile grab a two-ton hippo by the nose and haul it under water until the big stupid herbivore drowned.

  Jeff hated crocodiles. And he had no particular love for tuskless elephants, either. They had personalities to match his Dobermans. Jeff Newton did love his dogs. They were about the only living creatures he did love. Perhaps, in his own way, he loved Lily. He claimed to like me.

  Jeff despised himself.

  I yanked the pull rope again. The bell bonged. A minute later Lily came down the path. She unlocked the gate, pulled it open, smiled, and held her hand to me.

  ‘Ah, Brady,’ she said. ‘Boy, is it good to see you.’

  I gripped her hand. She pecked a kiss on to my cheek. ‘Himself’s been looking forward to seeing you,’ she said. She had a musky smell, a complex compound of clean sweat, salt air, and flower blossoms.

  ‘Can’t honestly say it’s mutual,’ I said, returning her chaste kiss. ‘But you are looking absolutely great.’

  She wore blue jogging shorts and the flowered bikini top of a bathing suit. Lily was a big girl, only a couple inches shorter than I, and meaty. But her meat was firm muscle, so that she gave the illusion of slenderness, especially in shorts. She had long legs, still shapely, and a heavy but solid bosom. Creases along the sides of her mouth and streaks of grey in her black hair betrayed her age. Fortyish, I guessed. She had been with Jeff for nearly fifteen years.

  A red bandana was wrapped around her forehead. She was, as usual, barefoot. Beads of perspiration stood out on her chest and forehead. ‘Oh, hell, I’m a mess,’ she said. ‘I was pulling some weeds from the rock garden out back when I heard the bell.’ She tucked a wisp of hair back under the bandana. ‘Well, come on in.’

  She took my overnight bag and grabbed my arm. We went through the gate. ‘Down,’ said Lily to the dogs.

  The two dogs stretched out their forelegs and lay down. They flattened their chins on to their knees and followed us with their eyes. I reached down and scratched the muzzles of each of them, muttering their names again. ‘Tondo. Ngwenya,’ I said, using my best ‘nice puppy’ tone. ‘You nasty sons of bitches. You should both be shot.’ They jiggled their little stub tails in appreciation.

  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. Exce
pt, 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.’

  CHAPTER 2

  JEFF 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.’