Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  "Everybody has troubles, man. What about yours?"

  "Minuscule."

  "Min-a-school. Where'd you get words like that?"

  "In a school."

  "Very funny, man. Say, when dullness walks in the door around here, it doesn't fool around."

  Bennie sipped from the mug of coffee constantly at his right hand. The mug's design commemorated Earth Day 1983. "Sheila still trying to get you to dial her line? I miss all the good stuff, being a substitute. It's like missing a week in a soap-opera plot; everything's different."

  Matt shook his head. "Not here. Sheila's still working here, but that's about it."

  "Still working on you, I bet. Man, when I was young, chicks were prettier and people knew how to groove."

  "It was safer then too."

  "Naw. We just thought it was. The power of positive thinking kept us from bad trips and ugly consequences, that's all. We were just lucky."

  Matt nodded. Ignorance was bliss, he understood that more every day, as his ignorance inched away as subtly and irrevocably as Bennie's hairline had retreated. Growing old but not up. Bennie would snort to hear that Matt felt that way at thirty-three, but every generation had its twisted time frame and its own values.

  "You still live at that far-out Circle place?" Bennie asked.

  Matt nodded.

  "Man, that must give you willies. Every room ends in a curve, the halls are curved ... I suppose the elevators go up in a curve too, huh?"

  "Not that we notice. You seem to know the building pretty well."

  "Did some work on it back in the seventies. The outside marble facing needed some spit and polish; that was when I still did construction work. Now I'm ree-tired."

  "So you volunteer to come in here nights and listen to sad stories."

  "Right. Doan wants miss what's happenin' out there. Besides, I'm a pretty good drug counselor." Bennie winked over the Santa Claus glasses. "Oughta be."

  Matt noticed that the fly had settled on a spot dead center of four holes to clean its face.

  Maybe he'd get some more coffee and--

  And answer the phone. His line. He pulled the earpad on his headset into place and let his focus on the fly fuzz out.

  "ConTact. Brother John."

  The idea behind pseudonyms was to guard the counselors' privacy. The use of "handles" also gave a stressed caller something to focus on, and personalized the counselors while still letting them keep the necessary distance. Matt's handle got a lot of initial reaction. It was more than a name, it implied a relationship. "Brother John" sounded like family.

  The caller must have thought so too.

  "Brother, can you spare a dime?" he began.

  Matt tensed as he recognized the strong, confident voice. He was used to hesitaters, or nervous "spillers," not to a man who sounded like he should be giving advice instead of taking it.

  "I thought you were through with us," Matt said.

  "With you, buddy, not the organization. But... I'm feelin' blue and like doing something foolish on a Sunday evening and I thought I'd better call my buddy at ConTact. Great name, ConTact. I have its card right here before me. See, you can take the name two ways: 'Contact,' as in connection . . . phone connection, personal connection, and 'Con' as in the Spanish 'with' and

  'Tact' as in knowing what to say, or maybe just knowing what people want to hear. Same difference, right? I do it all the time myself. Tell people what they want to hear. That makes us peas in a pod, I guess. So, you make up that name? 'ConTact.' "

  "I had nothing to do with it. Whatever thought went into it, happened before I got here."

  "Now, that's hard to imagine. I think of you always sitting there, eavesdropping on us lower Slobovians, like God."

  "You're feeling a lot of hostility tonight."

  "Yeah, I'm hostile. People think I'm joking all the time, and most of the time I am. They think that I'm all pose and no sincerity. They never ask themselves if that's not exactly the way they want me to be."

  "How do you want to be?"

  In the pause, Matt heard angry ice cubes rattle, as if they were being slammed into an empty glass.

  "The way I am, without everybody coming at me complaining."

  "What do they complain about?"

  "What I say and do, who I see. What they think I'm thinking."

  The ice-cube, feisty-castanet chatter softened to muted clinks, probably sinking under a potent sea of hard liquor. Since he began his phone nightlife, Matt had become adept at inventing faces and settings for his callers. He might be totally wrong, but it helped him sense their hidden messages, the heartbreaks they weren't mentioning.

  Only, with this caller, this frequent phoner, the imaging trick had backfired. The caller had used it on Matt, assigning him attitudes and a posture Matt didn't possess. People who had lost touch with their own inner burns and dodges often misinterpreted other people, usually those they were most closely involved with. That this particular caller would play this game with

  "Brother John" meant that Matt was perhaps closer to him than the man's intimate family, or at least knew more about his worries and weaknesses, even if he didn't particularly understand them.

  "What's the problem tonight?"

  "Tonight. Making it sound like I have problems every night. Well, I don't, Brother John. I don't need to call you like a whining puppy trying not to pee-pee on the rug. You're lucky I justify your job. First some little nobody treats me like I was the worst turd on the eighteenth floor.

  Then this old squeeze of mine gets huffy. Then my wife calls wondering why she couldn't reach me last night. Listen, I didn't have a wife longer than she's been alive! I don't answer to nobody!

  Especially not you."

  "No, you don't." Matt kept his voice calm, his manner cool in reverse proportion to his caller's heat. His own heart was racing with recognition. If "some little nobody" was quite literally Temple, the caller must be Darren Cooke, the man she had rejected earlier today. Matt wasn't supposed to know who he was talking to. That broke the rules, changed the balance, and maybe bothered him more than it betrayed the caller. He needed distance, to fight fire with its opposite element, ice.

  "Is there anything I can do for you? You could call one of those three psychiatrists'

  answering services, leave a message."

  "I don't want to leave a message! I don't want to be passed on like a dirty shirt. You sound high and mighty tonight. Tired of talking to me, are you, Brother John? Some brother! Haven't you ever had it up to here with women? You can't satisfy them, and when you do, they all come around wanting to be the only one. Even your own little kid. I wish I had a son. I'd teach him how to avoid the bad raps and the traps. We'd be buddies."

  Matt hesitated. He could hear the grind of escalating anger and depression, which always made a dangerous triumvirate with alcohol. Yet to suggest that Cooke ... his caller stop drinking would only infuriate him more.

  "I thought I was your buddy," Matt said soothingly, mirroring the man's own insecurity.

  "Hey, you are! Don't think for a minute because I bad-mouth you a little we're not pals. I'm just an ordinary guy like you. Except... I'm famous. So I have to act famous, act like some big wheel. I stop the act--and I crash, career and all. The act is all part of my act now, get it? I just had a rotten day, is all. And--"

  The line was suddenly silent. Matt sucked in his breath. Something was happening on the other end that he couldn't visualize. He didn't like it. The man was in a dangerous mood, to himself, and maybe to somebody else.

  Then he heard sounds again. A glass set down hard on a tabletop, the last brittle slosh of melting ice cubes. Motion. A man in motion ... using a portable phone, that was it.

  "Somebody's here," he sang out in a tone of slightly drunken playfulness. "Eleven-thirty.

  Must be the maid coming to get laid. Let's look through the peephole, huh, Brother John?"

  The phone sounded like it was underwater as the caller disengaged to view his
visitor.

  "Say, this could turn out okay. Sorry, BJ, but I'm gonna have to hang up now. I don't go for threesomes. Thanks for the listen. Talk to you sometime . . . Hel-lo, baby! Just what the doctor ordered. Come on in--"

  Matt heard a bolt click, heard the warm, strong voice at full, confident power.

  The line choked off right there, as if the lights had gone out on a play in midscene. Matt knew that, somewhere in the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas, a woman was walking into a man's room for what used to be called "immoral purposes" an eon ago.

  Was she a friend? A former lover? The woman who'd spurned him earlier coming back? A call girl some buddy of his had sent to cheer up his friend? Any or all of those scenarios were perfectly possible in Las Vegas, and in this man's busy, empty life.

  Matt felt cheated again, like an alcoholic's AA call-buddy who has to hear him fall off the wagon. He felt used, more used than that unseen woman would feel probably. Presumably she knew, or knew of, this guy. Knew what to expect. He had never claimed to be a one-woman man, not even to Matt.

  They were just one of hundreds of couples. It was a terribly common interaction, sometimes for money, sometimes for fun, rarely ever for love.

  Matt shook his head as he disconnected.

  "Lose him?" Bennie wanted to know from the adjacent booth.

  "Yeah. Lost him."

  Chapter 17

  Hats Off to Homicide

  After her semi-sexy, stressful and ultimately frustrating weekend, Temple fled back to the normal world of flamingos as fine art.

  Domingo's minions had shown up, a trendy ragtag bunch of earnest young snobs-to-be enjoying a brief adolescent rebellion before moving into the ranks of the twenty-first century's top museum curators. No wonder modern art was in retrograde.

  The entire project gave Temple the feeling of a student-assisted archeological dig on some remote foreign soil that hid the architectural bones of a vanished but mighty civilization.

  Except that Las Vegas wasn't very vanished and the mighty civilization to be unearthed was whatever flavor-of-the -month seeped out of the developers' bag of theme attractions.

  The last thing Friday, Temple had paved the way for the first of Domingo's flamingo flings: the site of the former Sands Hotel and Casino, a fifties icon recently razed because it simply couldn't keep up with the neighbors, like the Luxor's King Tut, Leo the MGM Grand Lion, the New York City skyline and other Nouveau Flash installations on the Strip. The old, softer romantic fantasies were literally falling one by one to the laser-edged hype of the New School of Stripography. Restaurant names told the story of Las Vegas development themes as succinctly and sourly as news headlines: good-bye, Sands Hotel and your old-style exotic Shangri-La and Xanadu restaurants, hello Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Cafe. Harley-Davidson on!

  For now, the former Sands square footage was only a construction trench from which a one-and-a-half-billion-dollar, six-thousand-room behemoth would shortly rise, like the movie monster Mothra leaving its unsuspected cocoon. Temple had suggested that a showy ring of rubbernecking flamingo-spectators would add an air of anticipation to the project. Domingo had liked the idea so much he now thought it had been his.

  Thus developers and Domingo were as one in their emerging ecstasy. The construction project would make history as the first local site to sprout its plague of flamingos. Domingo had a massive, flat canvas of desert scrub to impale with imported lawn ornaments, emigres from a Massachusetts plastics company.

  Even the modest origin of the inexpensive decorative birds made a statement, in Temple's opinion. She had done her homework. Half a million of the molded pink birds sold every year, dotting the landscape from the Canadian border to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, at only nine ninety-five a pair. You couldn't get two of anything for just nine ninety-five anymore, not even dish towels!

  Once Domingo's dream was giving media people nightmares, Temple had plans to import members of the Society for the Preservation of the Plastic Lawn Flamingo, as well as the flamingo manufacturer's flamboyant artist, whose signature is captured in molded plastic on every pink flamingo body: a guy named Don Featherstone, of all things. Despite a classical-art background, Featherstone managed to compete with his birds for popular attention, his wife and he having dressed exactly alike each and every day for twenty years. Perhaps marketing the flamingos in pairs was catching. Nor was Domingo the first on the conceptual-art scene to seize onto flamingos as a metaphor for what have you: a Maryland woman rearranges and attires thirty-four lawn flamingos every week, attracting a crowd of regular gawkers.

  So, in a sense, Temple was beginning to catch flamingo fever. Nature writers grew tongue-tied trying to describe thousands of the Greater and Lesser Flamingos of Africa settling on the salt flats like a mobile sunset. Mere plastic could not dim their inborn shrimp-pink luster.

  Flamingos en masse, and especially in plastic--accessible and indivisible to ail--really did have something to say. Further, Domingo was convinced that the visual statement of a flamingo infestation in Las Vegas, with its many social and psychological connotations, was far too rich a subject and effect to be ignored by anybody who was anybody, such as art critics, who were mostly nobodies outside the pages of their slick host magazines, anyway.

  And, of course, the tabloids--print and electronic--would have a flamingo field day.

  ****************

  "There is no middle ground," Domingo announced to his followers as they stood like explorers stunned silent by the equatorial sun as well as the blazing noonday emptiness of the land they surveyed.

  The vast vacant lot did resemble a bland, sand-blond blot amid the bright and lurid fantasy constructions of the Strip. "No middle anymore. Only top and bottom. Developed nation and Third World. Rich and poor. Wise and foolish. Cadillac and Kia. Gaming palace and plastic flamingo. Keep this in mind as you plant your subversive symbols."

  Domingo had studied the site over the weekend and drawn an elaborate master plan, a kind of Da Vinci cartoon for the major amassings of the flamingo flocks around the perimeter of the great empty hole from which Mothra would arise, girder by girder, glass wall by glass wall, laser-light by laser-light.

  In honor of the day's desert-expedition atmosphere, Temple had worn closed-toe canvas wedgies, a khaki suit (Bermuda shorts and safari jacket) and a hat against the noonday sun and any mad dogs and Englishmen who might take exception to her exceptionally red hair. It wasn't a pith helmet, since she didn't own one, but it was a sporty brimmed affair, also khaki, that looked quite at home on a blasted Las Vegas lot.

  "Very nice," said Domingo when he saw her. He snapped his fingers and his photographer groupie, a tall, stork-thin young man who was already turning pink in the warm November sunlight, came rushing over, clanking the cameras slung around his long white neck.

  "We will have a picture of me directing the team, with Miss Barr beside me." He raised his voice to a stentorian shout: "People, gather round for documentary photos. And you, keep those camcorders running at all times. I wish every aspect of the installation recorded."

  Domingo then proceeded to wave his arms as he indicated the master plan, while Temple nodded sagely in her savage-sun hat. The kids mopped their sweat banded brows or tossed their braided and ponytailed heads, looking like nothing so much as a herd of coltish wild horses dressed by Esprit.

  When they went to work, though, it was in an industrious flock. Three-foot-tall pink flamingos positively flew off of flatbed trucks and hit the sandy soil in tens and twenties, like so many oversize and gaudy thumbtacks.

  Temple had timed her arrival near the lunch break, so they soon transformed into a scratched, sweaty, dusty crew of fairly androgynous boys and girls gathered around the food They sat where they could: on parked vehicle hoods, a large and friendly rock that could keep their posteriors from the fire ants, on a couple of beat-up aluminum lawn chairs, on their haunches on the insect-infested ground.

  "This is the best time of year to do thi
s. Cooler." She had grabbed any old sandwich from the van and joined them in munching. Nothing united strangers like a common appetite, which was the behavioral fact behind everything from sports fans to twelve-step recovery programs.

  They nodded, chewing, as Temple found a dusty but unoccupied fender and tried to hop up on it.

  "Let me take that," another fender-sitter offered, relieving her of the wrapped sandwich so she could use both hands to boost herself up, as always. How humiliating!

  Once installed, she drummed her soft heels against the truck's side like everyone else and munched without comment. Behind her Kmart sunglasses (she was always losing them), she summed the crew up in the thoroughly wicked detail she could exercise when no one else could see her eyes.

  "What do you do for Domingo?"

  Temple couldn't quite tell where the question had come from, given a scraggly circle of fourteen or so workers, but she noticed sly smiles and heard snickers as she looked over the group.

  "You could call me a scout," she said finally. "I'm a Las Vegas PR freelancer, so I've been designated to ask potential flamingo beneficiaries for permission to adorn their frontage."

  "Beneficiaries!" The snorted word came from a lanky guy wearing the expedition uniform: loose T-shirt and shorts, sports socks and expensive tennis shoes. "That's putting whipped cream on a rotten banana. The only entity one of these shebangs benefits is Domingo International."

  More sniggers erupted among the burps as the crew downed soft drinks and beer.

  Apparently Domingo's loyal followers expected him to have liaisons with any and every woman around.

  "Really," she said. "An embarrassment of flamingos is great publicity for a coming attraction like this." She waved at the bare lot, large sign and cyclone fence that hailed forthcoming megaconstruction in Las Vegas. "But the established hotels can be ... unimpressed."

  "Unimpressed? By Domingo? Shame on them!" The speaker was a sharp'nosed and mushy*