“Kitty, kitty. Come on fella, come and get dat old head scratched.”
But Chuck was unmoved.
From the back of the tow truck, Bubba got a thick rope and tossed its frayed end into the back of the car. He skillfully twitched and jerked and pulled it slowly over the seat. But Chuck just yawned and lay down on his paws. Growing impatient, Bubba looked around and spied a broom. He prodded the old cat with the handle but might as well have been poking a bag of sand for all the effect it had.
Now Bubba was stumped. He couldn’t get in the car and drag the cat out, and it certainly wasn’t coming out on its own.
“Okay, have it your way. It gonna be nobody’s fault but your own if you get sick.”
Leaving the door open far enough for Chuck to get out if he wished, Bubba got in the truck and drove off. He felt a bit guilty but told himself Chuck would be all right.
As the garage door banged shut, Chuck dropped onto the backseat. After turning in circles for several seconds, he put his chin on his paws, curled his tail over his nose, and drifted off to sleep.
Before long his left ear flicked and he whimpered. A trickle of saliva ran from his mouth and formed a small puddle on the seat. Abruptly, his eyes popped open. Their pupils, which in the dim light should have been widely dilated, were mere slits in the center of his rheumy green irises. Tiny hemorrhages dotted the thin rim of his dingy sclera.
The soft rumble of contentment that earlier had filled the car’s interior stopped and through quivering lips, he began to bark like a small dog. Oozing through the open car door, he went looking for the female Abyssinian with which he shared Broussard’s home. Under the T-Birds he went, moving slowly, the fur on his tail standing out like the bristles on a bottle brush. When he saw her with her head down, lapping at the water in the large plastic bowl that Broussard brought out when he would be gone for a day or two, the old cat dropped to his belly and began to slide over the floor, his feet barely showing. Whiskers quivering, he studied her for a few seconds, then moved slowly around the bowl.
When he was directly opposite her, he went down on his haunches, rocked from side to side a few times, then flung himself through the air. His weight drove her muzzle deep into the bowl. In her surprise, she inhaled a noseful of water. She struggled for her life, but Chuck was too big and his teeth and claws too sharp for her to escape.
The door to the kitchen opened. Broussard, back from his trip, gaped at the cats—then ran toward them, yelling and waving his arms. Chuck jumped aside, barely eluding a broadside from Broussard’s hand. The female came up coughing and sneezing and ran for the kitty portal to the yard. Chuck crouched low, his hind feet drawn under him like tightly wound springs, his ears flat against his skull. Broussard stared in wonder. He had once seen the cat Cuisinart a Labrador’s nose, but beyond that one incident, Chuck had always been gentle and good-natured.
Broussard leaned down, his hand extended. “What’s the matter fella? Not feelin’ well?”
Chuck’s lips drew back at the corners and he spit his answer. Fearing that the animal might be hurting from an undetected abscess like the one that had nearly killed him a year earlier, Broussard reached for the cat to examine him.
Suddenly the old pathologist was covered with snarling muscle. Fangs went into the fleshy fold under his chin. He grabbed at the burrowing head and got a handful of loose skin and an ear. He pulled the creature free and suffered three deep scratches to the side of his cheek from scrabbling claws. The animal’s mad struggle made him impossible to hold and he squirmed loose and dropped to the floor. But not before Broussard had seen the hemorrhages at the corners of his hate-filled eyes and the matted fur on his muzzle.
Broussard ran his hand over his cheek and looked at the blood in his palm. Chuck crouched again. Fearing another attack, Broussard took an uncertain step backward. He touched the back of two fingers to the fire under his chin and came away with more blood. Suddenly the old tom’s good ear stood straight up and he swiveled toward the work bay as though hearing a voice denied to human ears. In a single fluid movement, he was on his feet and headed toward the far end of the garage, Broussard following.
The cat slipped through the door to the work bay and jumped onto the Escadrille’s fender and from there to a shelf affixed to the wall, where he sat staring at the stub of the car’s vandalized antenna. From outside the work bay, Broussard tapped on the window, but the cat would look only at the jagged metal rod with the sharp point. Broussard was puzzled. What did the cat see that was so riveting?
Chuck shifted into a crouch and the muscles in his hind legs began to tremble. In an instant, it was done and Broussard put his hand over his eyes to blot it out. With his eyes covered, he saw Chuck as he had that first day on the porch, the tip of a steel-jacketed arrow pushing through the cat’s white ruff. The scene he had just witnessed was not so different, except now Chuck had fallen victim to a car antenna.
Not looking was not acting, and he reached for the door, the memory of the cat’s wet muzzle making him wonder whether Chuck had rabies, a prospect that held considerable consequences for himself as well. But then a different explanation hit him and he stepped back to the window. That was an Escadrille in there… with one door open. Had Chuck been inside it? If so… No! He was unwilling to believe that a cat had the intelligence to commit suicide. Yet Chuck had learned to fear sharp objects from his experience with the arrow. And there were other points that fit; the unprovoked attack, the hemorrhages in his eyes. Kit had been right about that. Because of her, he had gone over the records and had found several murder-suicides where scleral hemorrhages were present despite being contraindicated by the cause of death. But it all seemed so unlikely. He had suggested some tests on the car because that seemed prudent and proper. But he had not really believed they would prove anything.
He glared at the car. Kit had said that people with blood type O were particularly susceptible. He had type O. And the door to the car was wide open. It might be dangerous in there. He could hold his breath, but what if the toxin could enter through a wound? He looked at Chuck’s lifeless form impaled on the stump of the car’s antenna and could tolerate the obscenity no longer.
Taking a deep breath, he burst into the work bay, lifted Chuck gently into his arms, and carried him to the house where he laid him on the kitchen floor and smoothed his ruffled coat. Had Chuck been in the Escadrille? The question would not go away. He dialed the number of the impoundment station, and he and Bubba exchanged stories. Bubba wanted all the blame for what happened, but Broussard pointed out that there was as yet no proof that the Escadrille was responsible and if it was, the blame should fall on his own shoulders for leaving the door to the work bay open.
After washing the blood from his face and beard, Broussard changed clothes and set out for the morgue, Chuck wrapped in a soft towel next to him. Bubba’s account had made rabies a much less likely explanation, but for his own safety, he felt he should have Chuck’s brain examined for Negri bodies, the accumulations of virus particles typically found in the nerve cells of rabid animals. From the parking lot, he went directly to the autopsy rooms where he left Chuck with Charlie Franks and then went to his office to wait for the results of the frozen sections.
While he waited, he tried not to think of how shiny Chuck’s fur had looked lately and how he had such a small meow for such a big cat. He tried not to remember how Chuck liked to tunnel under the rugs when he was in a playful mood and how he would flatten out on the floor like a flounder when scolded. He tried to suppress the image of Chuck and Princess grooming each other.
Finally, the phone rang and Franks informed him that the sections were negative. That left the Escadrille. It was time for a hard look at that damn car.
There was a formidable amount to do before the testing could begin. But before thinking about that, there was another more pressing matter at home. On the west side of his house was a stand of dwarf lantana. In the summer when it was in full flower, Chuck could often be fou
nd, head stretched forward, nose against the blooms. Here, next to this plant, Broussard dug a small deep grave. It was inconceivable that a man who had lived daily with human death for over thirty years would cry at the passing of a cat. But he did… Not much, and wiped away quickly, but tears all the same.
*
By late that afternoon, the necessary equipment had been collected and the experiments on the Escadrille began. Because it had been designed to vent the fumes when spray-painting cars, the work bay had a ventilation system that turned the air over once every three minutes without creating a negative pressure. Not satisfied with this safeguard, Broussard had borrowed two respirators from the firefighting academy. Also on hand were three dozen mice from an inbred strain that, at Kit’s insistence, had been tested by the hospital blood bank and shown to resemble human blood type O the blood type of Barry Hollins and Freddie Watts. Another dozen were from a strain whose blood type resembled human type A, the type not present in any of the recent suicidal murderers. All the O-strain animals had been marked on each side with a yellow dot. Those from the A strain were marked in green.
“Still a shade out,” Broussard shouted, peering at the fuzzy image of the Escadrille’s front seat on the video monitor in front of him. In the work bay, a TV camera on a tripod was trained on the Escadrille’s windshield. Kit slowly twirled the focus ring and the blurred image on the monitor sharpened.
“Stop!” Broussard yelled.
Kit emerged from the work bay and pulled off her mask. “Pttttghh. This thing smells like the inside of a volleyball.”
Broussard plugged the monitor into the video recorder on the cart’s lower shelf. “I’m gonna start recordin’ just before you put ’em in,” he said. “I’ll point when I’m ready. Be prepared to yank that cage out and separate ’em if things get rough. If what might happen does, this tape will be seen by a lot of folks and I don’t want the animal-rights people on my back sayin’ we were stagin’ cock fights with mice.”
Kit strapped on her mask, pulled on a pair of rubber acid handler’s gloves, and picked up a wire cage. In the cage were two mice, one from each strain. She carried the cage into the work bay, went around to the driver’s side of the Escadrille, and pulled the door open. Through the window, she saw Broussard’s signal. In the next room, he clicked his stopwatch.
Their universe became the experiment. Kit ceased to smell the rubber in her mask. Broussard temporarily forgot his remorse over Chuck. Only the mice mattered. One marked in yellow, one in green. And nothing was happening.
The mice stood on their hind legs and wiggled their noses. They rooted in the wood shavings on the cage floor. Occasionally one would sniff the south end of the other.
“One minute,” Broussard sang out.
At one twenty-three, the mouse from the O strain seized the other animal by the throat. Broussard thumbed the stopwatch to a halt. Kit yanked the cage from the car and thrust her hand inside, the terrified squeals of the victim making her sweat even more beneath her mask.
Suspending the aggressor by his tail, she tried in vain to shake him loose from the other mouse. Something had to be done to stop that squealing!
With the joined animals dangling above the cage, Kit pulled the glove off her free hand with her knees and pinched the aggressor on one ear. His victim fell to the floor and scampered into a tail pipe that lay under a workbench. When Kit looked back at the animal she held, he was climbing his tail, presumably wanting a taste of her fingers. Despite Broussard’s earlier assurance that a mouse could never bite through the gloves, she yelped into her mask and dropped him.
Broussard heard her muffled cry, but the car blocked his view. “What happened?” he shouted.
“He tried to bite me,” Kit said, looking at her feet where the tiny ball of fur was tugging at her canvas shoe with his mouth. Again taking hold of his tail, she pulled him loose and carried him into the next room, using her loose glove to brush away further attempts on her fingers. Dropping him into the spare cage Broussard held out to her, she pulled off her mask. “He tried to bite me,” she repeated, knowing he couldn’t have understood her the first time. “That is one mean rodent. He went after my shoe just like he did his cage mate.”
Broussard held the cage up and brought it close to his face. “He’s salivatin’ like crazy. I wonder if that’s part of it? Let’s try it again.”
Kit reached into the cage holding the O-strain animals and was chasing another tail when there was a faint metallic clatter behind her.
“Look at this!” Broussard said.
She joined him at the cage holding their first subject. “Oh my…” Her hand went to her mouth as the little creature rammed headlong into the hardware-cloth enclosure with a twang that she could feel in her own nose. He backed up and charged again. Twang! His snout was driven nearly flat by the impact. Kit had seen enough. She reached into the cage and drew him out by the nape of the neck.
“Hold on, I’ll get somethin’ to stop that.” Broussard came back with a towel and used it to line the cage. Kit replaced the animal and together they watched him resume his bizarre behavior, but now without injuring himself.
“That remind you of anything?” Kit asked.
“Is there any precedent for believin’ that animals are capable of suicide?”
“It’s been argued for lemmings, and no one knows why whales beach themselves. But is precedent really all that important? Would its absence change the way Chuck died or alter the behavior of this mouse? We could be dealing here with a toxin that opens neural pathways ordinarily never used.”
“Mice, cats, and men,” Broussard mused. “Must be affectin’ an aspect of vertebrate neurophysiology as fundamental as dirt. I wonder how many of those cars are still on the road?” His eyes took on that distant look she had seen before, and he stroked his nose with two fingers of his left hand. Presently, he said, “We’ve got to issue a warnin’ about these cars. But before we do, we better have all the answers. If we get off on the wrong foot with this and the papers start to make a joke of it, it’ll take forever to set things right and more people may die. On the other hand, we can’t take forever to get our story together either or people may die. So let’s get movin’.”
He brought out more towels to protect other subjects that might try what the first one had, and the work went on.
They repeated the initial experiment with identical results except that Kit was able to intervene before any harm was done to the A-strain animal. As before, the O-strain mouse came out of the car drooling. “Looks like you were right about blood-group specificity,” Broussard said. “Somethin’ about havin’ the A antigen confers protection from the toxin. What’s your blood type?”
“If you had asked me yesterday, I couldn’t have told you, but I had the blood bank type me this morning. I’m an A.”
“Well, keep your mask on all the same when you’re in there. We don’t want to take any chances.”
“How do you suppose having the A antigen protects against the toxin?”
Broussard shrugged. “Tough question. That’ll be for somebody else to work out when all this is over.”
“What’s happening there?” Kit cried.
Together they went to the cage holding the first susceptible mouse tested and saw convulsions racking the animal’s little body. Then he lay limp and still. Kit lifted him from the cage and felt for a heartbeat. There was none.
“Jesus,” Kit said, looking up from the tiny form in her hand. “If the victims don’t kill themselves, they die like this.” A puzzled look spread over her face. “But what about Shindleman? He recovered.”
“Maybe mice are different in that regard. Let’s do some more and see if any recover.”
Of ten more susceptible mice tested, nine developed seizures and died. The third one in the series, however, recovered completely.
“There’s Shindleman,” Broussard said, pointing at the recovered animal. “A small percentage of affected individuals don’t progress to the las
t stage.”
“I’d like to know what part of that car is toxic,” Kit said.
“Will the owner allow us to take the necessary steps to find out?”
“I won’t know that until I make a phone call.”
“In the kitchen.”
She returned with the news that Daphne had given them permission to do whatever they wished with the car. She then asked Broussard whether he had any single-edge razor blades and got, instead, a scalpel he used to make radish garnishes. As he handed the instrument over, he anticipated her next question.
“There are some five-gallon cans in the work bay that should make good incubation chambers,” he said. “They’re big enough so that with the lid on, there’ll be plenty of air, and small enough so that any vapors from the pieces of fabric you’re gonna put in ’em should accumulate in sufficient concentration to be effective… if that’s the origin of the problem.”
Except for the lids, which fit so tightly that she broke a fingernail pulling them off, the shiny bronze cans were ideal. There seemed to be three possible fabrics to test: the roof liner, the carpeting, and the simulated-leather seat coverings, the door panels were covered in the same material as the seats, so they were not considered as a separate category.
With the scalpel, she removed a piece approximately six inches square from each of the three fabrics and dropped them separately into the three cans she had prepared. After spreading a towel on the Escadrille’s hood and placing a cage containing a nonsusceptible animal on the towel, she adjusted the video camera and focused it. An animal from the susceptible strain was then placed in the can that held seat-cover material and the lid was pressed firmly in place. After the animal had been in the chamber for five minutes, Broussard started the VCR. Kit plucked the animal from the can and dropped him into the cage on the hood.
Six dull minutes later, Broussard suggested that they move on to the carpet sample. It, too, turned up nothing. The roof liner, however, was a different matter. No mouse could have been more crazed than the one that came out of the last can.
Cajun Nights Page 14
