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The Wild Road

Page 12

by Gabriel King

The man knelt down and cuffed Sealink briskly about the head and neck.

  ‘You want to come in, Isadora?’ he invited.

  ‘Or,’ the woman added, ‘did you just come by to break our windows?’

  Sealink seemed to enjoy this. She purred loudly. ‘Stand aside,’ she ordered them. ‘Don’t be between me an’ them there anch-ohvies.’ To Tag she explained, ‘I met these guys four years back in San Francisco. When they come over here last summer, they said, ‘Hey! Cool! Here’s a calico cat, just like the one we knew back home!’ So they give me the same name and everything, say how like I am this other cat. They say, ‘Must be real good luck!’’ She laughed. ‘Isadora, huh? I drop in once a week, play with the baby.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll ever guess?’

  ‘Tag, human beings can be awful cute. But they ain’t known for their brains.’

  ‘I used to call mine dulls.’

  ‘They’re dull, but they ain’t all bad. Look at her! You going to call her it? She feels as much as you or me. Oh now, look at this…’

  Soon Tag and Sealink had a bowl each of pizza topping. ‘Heavy on the anchovies, heavy on the capers, heavy on the tomato.’ It was heavy, in fact, on everything. Sealink growled as she ate. Any moment, you were afraid, she would simply get down in the food and roll about. Though Tag approached more cautiously, he had to admit it was good. She made him switch bowls. ‘‘Cause I already remarked,’ she said, ‘that you ain’t keen on them hot chili peppers. Well, step aside, boy. Momma loves ‘em. Also, I left you a piece of that – you see that? – pepperoni. Honey, you’re gonna like that.’

  ‘Well?’ the man asked them later. ‘Can I cook? Or can I cook? Which is it?’ He examined the empty bowls. ‘I can cook,’ he concluded.

  ‘You could always cook,’ said the woman. She smiled quizzically down at Tag. ‘Was it good for you too?’

  ‘Not the green bits,’ said Tag, offering his head to be stroked. He said, ‘You can call me Tag.’

  ‘Look at the way he does that!’

  ‘Cute boyfriend, Isadora,’ said the woman. ‘Pity about the chewed ear. I’d fancy him myself.’ She grinned.

  Sealink said, ‘Roll the baby out, you two. I ain’t seen it in a week. After that, we got to run.’ To Tag, she whispered, ‘I love these guys, but they’ll keep you talking.’

  *

  By the time they got back to Coldheath, it was chilly again. Sunset was a pale rose and terra-cotta wash behind the houses. Above it, two stars and a bright new moon had already appeared in a sky shading from green to ultramarine. Out in the middle of the grass, in the pervasive, eerie light of the afterglow, Mousebreath and the tabby were playing a game of Cy’s devising.

  Tag began to descend. But Sealink, now a dark still figure watching alertly from the Summit of the embankment, cautioned him, ‘Wait!’

  In front of Mousebreath, Cy had arranged a collection of objects. Some of them Tag recognized: strips of silver foil with light clinging to them in the dusk, the bicycle spoke she had brought him to eat when he was ill. Others, he did not. There were some quite large things – part of a broken picture frame about a foot long, glimmering with gold and cinnabar paint; a deflated tennis ball, sulfurous yellow; and a shiny can without a label, which would later prove to contain one inch of clear water – and some peculiar ones. She had included a bunch of plastic anemones, the detached head of a doll complete with platinum-colored nylon hair, a white piano key.

  Mousebreath looked on uncomprehending. The tabby chattered excitedly. She dragged her bric-a-brac about in front of him, as if to settle it into a pattern he would recognize. Nothing. Irritably, she gave up. Then, after further thought, she began to run between the objects, slowly at first, then faster and faster – always taking the same course – faster still and faster, until she stopped being a cat at all and became a blur and seemed to be everywhere at once along her own path; and that path became a design, a symbol, or a knot that hung just above the ground in the now-darkened air.

  *

  Suddenly, she fell down and didn’t get up again.

  ‘Come on!’ cried Sealink.

  Tag just sat there. He felt agitated but unable to move. Sealink’s voice seemed to come from far off. Far off and some other day. It had been important then, but it wasn’t now. The symbol Cy had drawn in the dusk fluoresced as an afterimage on his field of view. But instead of fading it brightened to electric blue and at the same time grew until he could see nothing else. There! Had someone in the distance called his name? Someone he wasn’t sure he liked? Then, ‘Wake up, you fool!’ he heard, and Sealink batted him quite hard – ‘upside the head,’ as she would put it later – with one of those huge paws of hers. He shook himself awake and went bounding down the embankment beside her.

  They found the tabby unconscious. Curled up so motionless and tight into herself, she could have been a cat carved from an oval stone. Mousebreath was distressed.

  ‘Couldn’t see what she were about,’ he repeated several times. ‘Thought it were a gyme.’

  ‘Gyme?’ said Tag.

  Mousebreath shook his head angrily. ‘Gyme!’ he said. ‘Gyme a kitten plays.’

  ‘It wasn’t a game,’ said Tag, remembering the shape that had hung inside his eyes. He sniffed among the gathered things. They seemed warm. A breeze dispersed the silver foil, ruffled the platinum hair of the doll’s head. Mousebreath watched him miserably.

  ‘Couldn’t make it out,’ he apologized in his faded, cobwebby voice. ‘She slept most of the afternoon.’

  ‘Hey!’ Sealink chided him. ‘Lover, you done what you could. No one’s blaming you.’ Then she gave the tabby’s head a lick, and said to Tag, ‘This thing in her skull. It ain’t natural, that’s for sure.’

  There was a silence.

  Sealink gazed across the darkening field to the black bulk of the embankment. She shivered. ‘Mousebreath, honey, come and sit beside me. I got a bad feeling about this place.’

  Tag said, ‘I think we should leave.’

  ‘We’re gone from here,’ agreed Sealink. ‘Soon as she can walk.’

  *

  It was still dark when the tabby regained consciousness. She opened her eyes, made a sound like a badly tuned mowing machine, which the other cats took to be a purr, and said, ‘Jack’s here, and back flip! Look out!’ She wobbled cheerfully off into the dark and had to be fetched back so they could get up on the railway bank and start their journey. There was a small contretemps with her legs, which wanted to walk in different directions. Thereafter she gamboled on ahead, chasing the shadows of bats and branches down the charred perspective of the old roadbed, and calling out, ‘We’re off to see the wazzock!’

  Or to Sealink, in a curiously apt approximation of that cat’s deep queenly honeyed boom, ‘When does the voodoo start, podna?’

  Sealink shook her head indulgently. ‘See?’ she told her consort. ‘She ain’t taken no harm.’ And when Mousebreath still looked abashed, ‘Honey, you done well with her.’

  Cy cocked her head at Tag. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Cy. Cy for Sign Here. I’m the one with her head in a bag.’ She brought him two black feathers and one small stone. She danced with his shadow. Dawn found her walking by his side in a jerky, shortlegged imitation of his prowling stride, lowered head swinging left and right. She looked ridiculous. It put Tag on his dignity.

  ‘You aren’t a kitten,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Who cares?’ she said. ‘It’s nice out, and you’ve got shiny eyes.’ She said, ‘I love you like tigers do. You’re my kind sky pilot.’ She laughed and looked down coyly. ‘I’m shier than I seem, you know.’

  It was a dawn of wide cold beauty. White sky above a peach horizon. As the day advanced, black branches rattled in a chilly wind. From his new perspective, Tag watched the human beings settling to their employment in the streets below. They were hammering and banging. They were scraping a spade through wet cement or a trowel through wet mortar. There was a rattle of diesel engines like dice in
the palm of a hand. Shops and offices were opening. Bakery smells, fishmonger smells, greetings and laughter, flakes of ash: all of these sensations drifted up over the arches of the old railway and into the abandoned stations, where Tag’s nose and ears and eyes greeted them with trepidation. The human world was noisy and smelly and often frightening – and he wasn’t going to accept it all at once, whatever Sealink said – but at least now it had all come alive for him.

  Sealink, meanwhile, strolled benignly along as if she owned the day, naming things to right and left. ‘See that yellow hat, hon? Site helmet! Means he’s a builder – makes houses and all. See them toecap boots?’ That day, she said, it seemed as if the whole city were being rebuilt around them as they looked. She jumped onto the guardrail of a rusty bridge to look down at two roofers dragging steel poles off the bed of a truck while a third tended the tar seething in its iron barrel.

  The scaffolding tolled and rang. Sealink lifted her head and sniffed deeply. A great slow shudder of pleasure passed along her spine.

  ‘Just smell that tar down there!’ she said to Tag. And when he looked puzzled, ‘Honey, we got the morning. We got the weather. We got the roadbed. This here’s travel! New tastes, new smells. A new thing to see. Mornings like this you can feel so much yourself it outright frightens you. That much fun can be a scary way to live!’ She laughed. ‘But what way ain’t? Huh?That’s why we love it!’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ said Tag.

  ‘Come on. I’m hearing this from an animal who walked out into two lanes of rush-hour traffic with another animal in his mouth? Give me a break!’

  Tag said, ‘Oh, that’s different.’

  ‘You ain’t done learning, kitten.’

  ‘Is that the toughest thing I did?’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Back at Coldheath you said I’d left out the toughest thing I did. Was that it, to carry Cy over the road?’

  Sealink studied him. ‘No, honey,’ she said. ‘The toughest thing you did was to take that little cat on at all.’ There was something unfathomable in her eyes when she added, ‘That’s one of the toughest things you ever gonna do.’

  But I haven’t taken her on, thought Tag. Have I?

  Shortly after that, Mousebreath and Sealink conferred briefly, and Mousebreath disappeared into a thicket of leafless elders.

  Sealink sat down to wait. ‘‘Nice!’ she said.

  Tag looked around.

  Strips of plastic fluttered from the elder branches in the pale sunshine. Winter had bleached the couch grass to white. Rose briars were taking to themselves a washing machine, a discarded bicycle, a heap of mossy wooden balks. Tag watched Cy approach the bicycle cautiously from different angles and finally touch it with a paw. She leapt back. ‘Wow!’ she said. ‘I thought that tree was a dead horse!’ She wandered erratically off to lap rainwater from a chipped enamel bowl. Tag could smell the river again.

  A few minutes later, Mousebreath returned.

  ‘It’s here all right,’ he told Sealink. ‘We go down here.’

  Down here turned out to be waste lots piled with broken bricks. After that it was brand-new buildings – clean, windy piazzas called Pageant Stairs or Carib Dock. Then very old ones, weed-grown and commercial, with the names of vanished warehousing companies fading away high up on their graying brickwork. Then back to waste lots again. Wherever you went, it was silent, untenanted even by animals. There were deep wells of shadow, shafts of sun, sudden openings out where Tag could sense the great wide sweep of the river. Just after noon, this strange, apparently unused region gave way once more to life and habitation. Sealink led the way around a corner, and suddenly the whole rush of things was on them again. There was a broadway bustling with lunchtime shoppers. There was traffic, marshaled by the changing colored lights of a five-way intersection.

  Men were digging the pavement up.

  An irregular hole perhaps ten feet by three and two feet deep had filled overnight with pale brown water. Traffic cones lay tumbled about. There were piles of sand, jackhammer lines snaking everywhere, something Sealink called a pump with a fat hose and its own engine. The pump didn’t work. A man was bent over the hole, bailing it out with a plastic container. He had on a gray suit, green rubber boots, and a yellow site helmet.

  Cy was enchanted. Before Tag could stop her, she had rushed over to him, purring, and started sniffing shyly around the cones near his feet.

  At that moment, one of the other men got the pump going. Its motor clattered and chugged into life. Its fat hose bulged and pulsed like a live thing. A small spurt of water was ejected into the gutter. Cy took one terrified look at the hose’s behavior and jumped into the hole. Tag jumped in after her. Once in, he couldn’t seem to do anything but pedal about, trying to keep his head dry. The icy water took his breath away. It took away his ability to think. It had thrown Cy straight into a fit. When he found her at last, she clung to him and pulled him under. Her eyes were so full of fear he barely recognized her. As they sank she was trying to tell him something. Underneath, it was mad and dark, and you couldn’t tell which way up you were. The tabby slipped away. Tag thrashed about, full of anger. How could he help her when he could barely help himself? It was a nightmare. When he surfaced again he had lost sight of her. Sealink and Mousebreath were in the water now, swimming powerfully if rather aimlessly around, fur plastered to their bodies so that even the calico looked tiny and ratlike.

  Suddenly, Cy’s head popped to the surface. ‘As above, so below!’ she called. ‘Mercury, quick! I – Yes – yes, it’s that. It’s blackened walls in the sky. It’s in the can. Smoke signals? It’s in all those broken cymbals!’

  Before she could sink again. Tag grabbed her by the scruff. ‘Be still!’ he said.

  She wailed. She scratched. ‘I’ve seen all of it,’ she warned him. ‘I’m a queen too! Blue-gold beans from Lima! The red and white, and all those neat advertisements. Mercury, quick! Telegram from God’s store: Don’t buy now! – Cheap – Bye-bye now.’

  Bubbles came out of her nose.

  The man in the yellow helmet watched all this with a kind of detached astonishment. He bent down kindly and fished out Tag and Cy, one in each fist. Tag, heart thundering, looked squarely up into the big red face and bit the hand that held him. ‘Ow!’ cried the man, and dropped them both on a pile of sand, where the tabby flopped about, squalling. Tag grabbed her by the scruff and dragged her off down a side street. Behind him Mousebreath and Sealink were hauling themselves disgustedly out of the water.

  The man in the yellow hat watched them until they were out of sight, nursing his bitten hand.

  *

  They holed up for the afternoon under tumbled bricks on some waste lot. Things looked bad. Cy was covered in a paste of sand. Her seizure had burned out into unconsciousness and delirium. The other cats licked and licked at her to dry her fur. From out of her dreams she babbled of imprisonment, cages emptied once a day under a cruel white light. She flinched and mewed.

  ‘I don’t want the wires!’ she cried.

  She cried, ‘The Alchemist!’

  Sealink looked meaningfully at Tag.

  ‘I heard that name again and again from cats,’ she said, ‘cats all over the world.’

  *

  That afternoon the tabby was being drawn away from them, away from life. They huddled close. They tried to remind her how warm life could be. It was hard to feel that. They were wet too. Shivering fits passed through the little group in waves.

  ‘We’re in bad shape,’ said Sealink. ‘Come dark we got to move.’

  ‘This cat’s ill,’ said Mousebreath.

  ‘Honey, we got to keep warm. We got to find stuff to eat.’

  ‘She’s ill,’ said Mousebreath stubbornly.

  But in the end Cy woke again. This time, she seemed feeble and disoriented, but they were able to move on.

  Now that it was evening the river hinterland was coming back to life. Car doors slammed. Echoes rang across cobbled piazzas
that had been deserted since the morning rush. Music eddied from windows whose warm light seemed to make ripples on the waters of the darkened canals. A man in a white apron looked out of a brand-new fish and chip shop. Nervous with hunger, the cats raised their noses but kept away. They felt safer on the cracked and hollowed ground of deserted yards or in the shadows at the base of some unused building. They were a sorry bunch, Felidae under a yellow moon, slinking between cold waste lots and the river. Even Sealink was unnerved. They were not ready for what happened next. From a condemned warehouse somewhere between Carib Dock and Pageant Stair, they heard a plaintive miaou.

  Tag looked up dully. The warehouse towered over him, a bowed and blackened wall of brick straining against its ancient rusty iron ties. Once it had been filled with bale on bale of exotic rugs figured in red, black, and cream. Before that, it had been consecrated to porcelain, paint, and tea – China blue, China white, gunpowder green, Lapsang suchong. And before that, cocoa beans, dark new gold from the Caribbean! Its past was three vast sprawling floors of commerce and energy, loaded from the river. Its future was a waste lot. For now, it was dark and silent all the way to the top.

  Yet up there, behind the last blind row of windows, flickering lights came and went, green one moment, blue the next. And up there was the cat they had heard. Somehow it had slipped between reinforcing bars and broken glass and now patrolled a sagging window ledge fifty feet above the road. Moonlight glazed its eyes and raked its shadow across the crumbling bricks beneath, every angle sharp with fear. Seeing Tag and his little band, it stiffened suddenly and was still. It vanished for a second. They heard it speak excitedly to someone in the building. Then its head reappeared over the ledge, and it called down in a clear voice, vague but polite, ‘Excuse me! Excuse me! I wonder if you could help us?’

  It was a Mau.

  It was rose-gray.

  It was Pertelot Fitzwilliam.

  ‘Pertelot! Pertelot!’ cried Tag.

  She didn’t seem to hear.

  ‘We have to go in!’ he told Sealink. ‘We have to help! It’s the Queen!’

 

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