Fangs Out

by David Freed

  “But you did used to work intelligence assignments, correct?” Hub said.

  I shrugged.

  “Well, that means in my book you were an investigator. And I got an inclination that if you were as good at investigating as you are flying, it’ll be money well spent.”

  “Come down to San Diego,” Crissy said. “You can stay with us. We have a very nice place in La Jolla. Bring your wife. I’m sure she’d enjoy a little vacation.”

  “I’m not married.”

  “Well, you must have a girlfriend.”

  I shook my head.

  “Boyfriend?” Walker said with one eyebrow raised.

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” Crissy quickly added.

  “What I have is a cat. And that relationship is definitely on shaky ground.”

  “Sounds to me like what you need is The Cat Communicator.”

  I looked at her.

  “It’s a reality show,” Crissy said enthusiastically. “He’s like The Dog Whisperer, only he deals with badly behaved cats. People call him up when they’re having problems with their kitties. He comes over and straightens them out.”

  “The Cat Communicator. Can’t say I’ve ever seen it.”

  “That’s because it’s still in development. That’s what I do. I’m a TV producer—trying to be, anyway.”

  I wondered how many episodes of The Cat Communicator would involve issues such as retaliatory scratching and urination.

  “Here’s the deal,” Hub said, “Larry told me you’re short on flight students right now. We both know you could use the money. Plus, it’d be a way for Crissy and me to pay you back for all that you did for us today, helping us get through that cloud deck and all.”

  A quote from Thoreau bubbled up from the tar pits of my brain, an artifact from my Air Force Academy days. The first time I’d heard it was during my doolie year, when a fourth-year cadet upbraided me in a hallway after I deigned to point out that being a military pilot afforded certain privileges, not the least of which was earning a livable wage. Leaning in close, his nose squishing mine, the upperclassman reminded me that one joins the armed forces of the United States to serve his country, not to service his bank account. “Money,” he seethed, “is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.”

  Maybe not. But money is required to cover the bills, of which I unfortunately had plenty.

  Hub Walker jotted down his cell phone number on his wife’s cocktail napkin and slid it across the table. I said I’d sleep on his offer and get back to him in the morning.

  KIDDIOT, THE world’s dumbest cat, sniffed his dish as if the chow I’d just served him had been stored in a Cold War-era fallout shelter.

  “Ten million cats starving to death in China, who would all kill for a can of Savory Salmon Feast in Delectable Gravy, and you act like the health department’s gonna come barging in here any minute and arrest me on code violations.”

  Kiddiot flicked his orange bottlebrush tail like he was annoyed, which was his default state, and climbed out his cat door, departing the converted two-car garage apartment that was our home. I couldn’t much fault his disinterest in the plat du jour. My eighty-eight-year-old landlady, Mrs. Schmulowitz, a retired elementary school P.E. teacher, frequently served him chopped liver with fresh Nova Scotia lox—on fine china, no less. I probably would’ve turned up my nose at canned Savory Salmon Feast, too, gravy or no gravy.

  I showered and shampooed, flossed and brushed, trimmed my beard, eased into bed, and turned off the light. Mindful of my breathing, I tried to relax my mind, to reach that elusively transcendental state of enlightenment that real Buddhists are always clucking about, the one I’ve never come close to reaching, the one that would’ve allowed me to consider Hub Walker’s offer of employment with complete, objective clarity. That was the plan, anyway. I was asleep before I knew it, dreaming about the only man I ever stabbed to death.

  He was toking on a hash pipe, standing outside the alley entrance of an Amsterdam brothel where two Algerian brothers, both al-Qaeda financiers, were enjoying an evening out. To eliminate the brothers, my Alpha team members and I would first have to dispatch their bodyguard. I drew the job. My heart pounded in my ears as I eased in from behind and crooked my arm around his chest to stop him from reaching his shoulder holster, then thrust the tip of my blade into the side of his neck, slicing outward to hopefully avoid the blood spray and prevent him from shouting out. I was lowering his limp body to the ground when my cell phone rang me awake.

  “You asleep?”

  Groggily I glanced at the digital clock sitting on the wooden orange crate that doubled as my nightstand. It said 3:30 A.M.

  “Who sleeps at this hour, Savannah? I’m out clubbing. I’m dancing the rumba.”

  “You don’t dance, Logan. If dancing were any easier, it would be called football. Isn’t that what you told me once?”

  “Possibly.” I rubbed my eyes. “You doing OK?”

  “Fine.”

  “Then why are you calling me at 3:30 in the morning?”

  “Just to talk.”

  “We talked all weekend.”

  “That wasn’t talking, Logan. I believe that would be defined as ‘heated debate.’ ”

  “I stand corrected.”

  Our weekend together, in which we’d agreed beforehand to sleep separately in the exquisite villa Savannah’s father bought for her high in the Hollywood Hills, most certainly had its moments. We smiled over tender memories. We exchanged a few soulful gazes over candlelit dinners at her kitchen table, the kind that can prod a man’s glands to action without it even dawning on him that he has glands. Our hands brushed. We may have even come close to kissing once or twice. But mostly we bickered, hurling accusations and occasional insults at each other like so many pie tins.

  You left me for another man.

  You left me no choice. You checked out on me emotionally long before I ever packed my bags.

  Gum surgery would have been more pleasant.

  Nearly seven years had lapsed since the end of our marriage. Not a day had gone by since when my stomach did not grind over the realization of how big a mistake I’d made, letting her go as easily as I did. Savannah Carlisle Logan Echevarria was intelligent, compassionate, and indisputably beautiful. There were times when I could not look into her depthless mahogany eyes for fear that I was not worthy of such a view. Plus her wildcatting oilman father was obscenely wealthy. She was, in other words, the ultimate catch, the proverbial total package.

  Don’t get me wrong. The total package was not without its flaws. At forty-three, Savannah could be strong-willed beyond all reason and argumentative just for the hell of it. There was also that small matter of her having dumped me for my former Alpha team leader, Arlo Echevarria. True, as she complained, I’d grown increasingly distant back when I was working for the government; I was no longer “there” for her and Echevarria was. That alone should’ve canceled out all of her awesomeness in my memory. And yet, somehow, it didn’t. I kept hope alive that someday, maybe, we would find ourselves together again. My desire to recapture what we once enjoyed was a feeling to be both savored and loathed all at once—savored because it reminded me of a time in my life when I was never happier; loathed because it was a time in my life when I was never more vulnerable. The yin and the yang. I wondered if Savannah didn’t suffer the same ambivalence.

  “I’ve been thinking it over,” she said, “and I think I know what our issue was this weekend.”

  “I happen to dislike bananas and you love them?”

  “Not bananas.”

  “Fruit should be round, Savannah, not shaped like phallic objects. I’ll just let it go at that.”

  “I’m trying to be serious here, Logan.”

  “OK, what was our issue?”

  “Location. We were in my house. I used to live with someone else in this house. So, naturally you were going to be on edge, which put me on edge. By reenacting our perpetual relationship gridlock o
n an unbalanced stage, we fell into antagonistic patterns of communication. Clearly, it was a recipe for disaster.”

  “That’s very impressive psychobabble, coming from a fashion model.”

  “I don’t model anymore, Logan. I told you. I’m a life coach.”

  “A life coach. How does that work exactly? You send off for some mail-order certificate that gives you license to tell people how to manage their lives?”

  “I didn’t send off for some certificate, Logan,” she said, the rising agitation in her voice hard to miss. “I earned a master’s degree in psychology from UCLA. I’ve also done extensive postgraduate reading.”

  “I could check out every book at the library on rocket telemetry. It wouldn’t make me Wernher von Braun.”

  Cold silence filtered from the other end of the line. I’d overstepped. Yet again.

  “I’m sorry, Savannah. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “Like hell you didn’t. That’s always been your problem, Logan. You think you can say anything to anybody and get away with it. Is that who you are deep down? Somebody who enjoys hurting people for no reason?”

  “Not usually. Having a reason helps immeasurably.”

  “You’re so full of crap, you know that? I don’t even know you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.”

  “You knew me.”

  “Nobody knows you, Logan. They only know what you want them to know. You put up walls. You let no one in. We were married for eight years, eight years. I never even knew what you did for a living, what you and Arlo really did—and I was your wife, for god’s sake.”

  “We’ve been over and over this, Savannah.”

  “Have you considered seeing a therapist? Therapy would do you a ton of good.”

  “Pay some guy two hundred bucks an hour so he can tell me my problem was that I wasn’t breast-fed? Thanks, I think I’ll pass.”

  “You have trust issues.”

  “I have trust issues. Gosh, Savannah, do you think it could possibly have anything to do with my wife having dumped me for my best friend?”

  She said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  Check and mate.

  I’d undergone regular psychoanalytical assessments as a member of the military. When the government of the United States authorizes you to kill other human beings, it wants to be assured that you’ll be reasonably selective when doing so. Sitting across the desk from a military shrink, you learn quickly what answers he or she is looking for, how to game the exam, because you both know that too much has been invested in your training, and that you’re too lethal a weapon to be shelved. I kill because it’s my duty, Doctor, not because I’m addicted to the hunt. Do I see them in my sleep, the dozens whose lives I’ve extinguished, some more gruesomely than you could ever imagine? Sometimes. But who doesn’t have an occasional nightmare? Nature of the beast, right, Doc? I passed every mental evaluation I ever took. But that didn’t mean I didn’t give serious consideration to Savannah’s suggestion.

  Though she didn’t know it, I’d actually gone to a psychiatrist when our marriage was foundering. I’d selected him randomly from the Yellow Pages, a corpulent, middle-aged man who maintained his practice on a houseboat in Sausalito and whose hands trembled all the time, like he was living atop the San Andreas Fault. He spent forty-five minutes asking me how I felt about having been abandoned at birth by my heroin-addicted teenaged mother, and how I felt about having been brought up mostly by strangers, bounced among more foster homes than I cared to remember. I told him I was fine with all of it. You can’t change the past, I said. All you can do in life is move forward. The shrink recommended we commence twice-weekly counseling sessions immediately. I never went back.

  “What if we met on neutral turf next time?” I told Savannah. “Some place that doesn’t remind me so much of Arlo.”

  “Somewhere that doesn’t engender ingrained resentments. That’s an excellent idea, Logan. Any place in particular you have in mind?”

  “What about Costco? I’m running low on cat food. We could meet at the one in Burbank. That’s pretty close to your house, is it not?”

  “You want to talk about reconciliation at Costco. Can you be serious, Logan, please, for once in your life?”

  “I am serious. I don’t feel at all resentful at Costco. In fact, I usually feel pretty great at Costco, especially when they’re handing out lots of samples. You know the expression, ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch?’ Whoever said it has never been to Costco.”

  “I’m hanging up now, Logan.”

  And she did.

  I tried going back to sleep but I couldn’t. The fog had dissipated, giving way to a dinner plate moon that bathed Mrs. Schmulowitz’s small, perfectly tended backyard in a creamy luminance no mini-blinds could filter out. The coyotes were yipping up in the hills above town. Sometimes, they ventured down to prowl Rancho Bonita in search of four-legged midnight snacks. I debated going out and trying to convince Kiddiot to come inside, but I knew he’d only blow me off.

  We’d first met one morning when I went outside to get the newspaper and found him curled asleep on the hood of my truck. When I tried to pick him up to put him on the ground, he growled softly without bothering to open his eyes. So I left him there. He was doing no harm, I figured. I came back out a half-hour later to head up to the airport and he was gone.

  That evening, I was reading—Bertrand Russell, if I remember correctly—when something banged loudly against the wall of my converted garage apartment. I put down my book, grabbed my revolver, flung open the door, and found Kiddiot sitting there in all of his oversized orange glory. He trotted in as if he owned the place. I poured a little milk into a mug and offered him part of a leftover chicken burrito. He approached, sniffing them like they were both radioactive, then hopped up on my bed, stretched out, and went to sleep on my pillow with his tongue hanging out. He wouldn’t leave after that.

  I posted “cat found” notices around the neighborhood, but no one ever called. Where he came from, I couldn’t say. I dubbed him Kiddiot because he seemed unwilling to comprehend anything, including his new name, even though I am certain he understood everything I ever said to him. Mark Twain once said that a man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. I learned that Kiddiot didn’t give a damn what anybody thought. He led life on his own terms, wholly and unapologetically. You’ve got to admire that.

  He’d be fine, I told myself.

  I punched my pillow and flopped from my left side to my right, trying to find a comfortable position, but sleep eluded me. My insomniac thoughts swirled around Savannah, as they always did. Maybe on neutral turf, we could work toward something approaching what we once had. I thought about the temporary employment Hub Walker had offered me. Getting paid to roam around San Diego for a few days while getting reacquainted with Savannah? The idea grew on me.

  I called her back.

  “Forget it, Logan. I’m not going to Costco with you.”

  “OK, forget Costco. What about San Diego? I’ve been offered a gig down there. Should take less than a week. We could hang out.”

  “Could we go to SeaWorld? I’ve never been there.”

  “If that’s how you want to spend your time.”

  “What’s wrong with SeaWorld?”

  “Who said anything’s wrong with SeaWorld? SeaWorld’s fine.”

  “It’s just that you don’t sound too excited about the idea of going.”

  “Did you not just hear what I said?”

  “If you don’t want to go to SeaWorld, Logan, tell me. It’s not like you’re going to hurt my feelings. I just thought it would be something fun to do together, that’s all. See Shamu. Pet the dolphins.”

  As evenly as I could, I said, “I’m in.”

  “When are you planning to go? I’d probably need to reschedule a few clients.”

  “As soon as I find out, I’ll let you know.”

  “Fine.”

  “Good.”


  Awkward silence.

  “Sweet dreams, Logan.”

  “You, too, Savannah.”

  The line went dead.

  I lay back, my hands behind my head, feeling pretty special about the aspiring Zen me. There are three fundamental rules in Buddhism. The first is that nothing is fixed or permanent. The second is that change is possible. I’d exercised the first rule by my willingness to shelve whatever lingering resentments I harbored toward my divorce, and the second by proposing to Savannah an alternative path toward reconciliation: we would go to SeaWorld. But as I closed my eyes, trying to get my brain to call it a night, I forgot all about the Buddha’s third tenet: Actions inevitably have consequences.

  Three

  The fog and low clouds had returned by the time I rolled out of bed that morning. Kiddiot had not.

  Nothing to be worried about, I assured myself as I did my requisite ten minutes of push-ups and abdominal crunches. Cats go missing all the time and Kiddiot was definitely a cat. He would often vanish for the day, venturing who knows where, returning that night as stealthily as he’d disappeared. I would come home to find him dozing on his favorite branch of Mrs. Schmulowitz’s oak tree, the one overhanging my hammock, or atop the purple-colored refrigerator in our garage abode. In fact, all of the fixtures in our apartment were purple and secondhand. They’d once been owned by a fading rock star, one among many who reside in and around Rancho Bonita. His career had gotten a big bump after appearing on one of those celebrity rehab shows, allowing him to remodel his McMansion. Mrs. Schmulowitz snapped up his funkadelic hardware for next to nothing at a yard sale.

  “You don’t see colors like that in nature,” Mrs. Schmulowitz marveled as we watched the movers she’d hired unload the toilet and kitchen sink in the alley that day. “They were practically giving them away. Can you imagine?”

  I could. Easily. Anyone could have, with the possible exception of Mrs. Schmulowitz, who was recovering from cataract surgery at the time.

  I finished my exercises, threw on a clean white polo shirt emblazoned with my flight school logo, laced up my Merrells, and went looking for my cat. There was no sign of him anywhere in the neighborhood.