Джо Горес: Dead Man

“I’ll call a cop,” said Eddie.

And he laughed and took a big bite of burrito, and, cool dude that he was, squirted brick-colored pinto beans and red sauce all down the front of his crisp white cotton shirt.

When Eddie crossed the Golden Gate to their modest two-bedroom bungalow in Marin’s Tamalpais Valley, he found the household in an uproar. Or at least found three-year-old Albie (christened Albert, in honor of Einstein) in an uproar. Marie was her usual placid self.

“A kitten,” she explained.

Marie was Eddie’s age and tall; barefoot, only four inches shorter than his six-one and as limber as he, with the supple, beautiful body produced in certain women by intense devotion to yoga. Her taffy-colored hair was worn long and straight down her back in defiance of current fashions, her very clear hazel eyes were too large and wide-set under stern brows for absolute beauty — but she also had the soft rounded cheeks and rosebud mouth of a fairy-tale princess.

“Kitten?” Eddie looked around the narrow kitchen as he stripped off his burrito-stained shirt. Albie was hanging on his pantleg telling him about it also. “I don’t see any kitten.”

“It shall return,” she said with placid resignation.

“How do you know, if—”

“Albie knows.”

He believed her. Marie was a very sensual being, in touch with her body and the bodies of those she loved. In bed they made each other come so hard and so often that he sometimes thought there must be something to her reincarnation musings: it seemed that a love this rewarding spiritually and this intense physically just had to extend back through several lifetimes.

But now, Wisking the burrito stain before putting the shirt into the hamper, he said, “If the kitten does show up again, we just can’t keep it. You know that, don’t you, darling?”

“I know.”

“If it’s a stray, it’ll be dirty and diseased—”

“I know.”

“Then we’ll just have to explain to Albie that—”

“I know.” Then she kissed him, a long kiss that made him want to get Albie to bed early. She stepped back and patted the front of his pants and made a silent whistle, and laughed, “Tell you what, big guy. You explain to Albie why he can’t have that kitten, and I’ll give you something nice later.”

“You cheat!” exclaimed Eddie with feeling.

But after supper, he and his son sat out on the redwood deck he’d built the year before, at the same time that he’d built an eight-foot-high wall between the driveway and the garage they’d converted to an office. The wall had a door that was locked, so Albie could play in the backyard while Marie worked at the computer and kept an eye on him through the office window.

The deck was low, ideal for sitting on the edge with your feet in the grass. Albie sat in rapt attention beside him, staring solemnly up into his face, swinging stubby legs as Eddie explained why they couldn’t keep the kitten.

“Even if he does come back, he probably belongs to someone who’ll want him to come home to them.”

“He’s black and white,” observed Albie.

“Or his mother was a cat gone wild. In that case he’ll be a feral cat himself and won’t want to live with us because—”

“His whiskers are white.” Albie held out demonstrative hands a foot apart. “Real long.”

“That’s long,” admitted Eddie. He shook his head in admiration. “But wild kittens have all sorts of diseases—”

“Mommy says he’s a puss-in-boots kitten. Black legs, white feet.” Then he added, in case Eddie was as dense about books as he was about kittens, “Like in the fairy tale.”

“Even a puss-in-boots sort of kitten would be...”

He trailed off because his son had jumped off the deck and was running on stubby bowed legs over to the wall. Thrust through the two-inch gap left under the fence for rainy-season runoff, a tiny delicate upside-down black arm with a white paw was making what looked like beckoning gestures.

“It’s him!” cried Albie. He squatted and patted at the paw with one hand. The tiny paw convulsed about his finger, held on without claws. The kitten started to mew. Piteously.

“Open the door, Daddy!” cried Eddie’s son. Piteously.

If he opened the door, Daddy knew, all was lost. If he didn’t open the door, Daddy knew, all was lost. So macho Daddy said forcefully, “But it has to stay in the kitchen until we can housebreak it. And it goes to the vet’s tomorrow and...”

Marie stood in the darkened kitchen, watching her husband cave in to her son about their new kitten and chuckling deep in her throat. So even though they had to make up a box with an old towel in it for the kitten to sleep on, and feed it, and of course hold it, when they did get to bed she gave Eddie something just as nice as she’d promised. More than nice and more than once, in fact, and then told him she loved him because he was a kitten freak in public while being a tiger in bed.

The kitten was little and skinny and black and white and full of fleas and scabs and rickety from lack of food, so for two weeks it was touch-and-go. It could keep down milk but then immediately had diarrhea, every time. Dysentery, distemper, a massive flea allergy, eye infections... All plans were put on hold pending its survival or the sad eventuality of its death.

Ten days later the dysentery was gone. The distemper was cured. Its eyes cleared up. It strode instead of wobbled. It meowed! instead of mewed. Suddenly it was a delicate demented huge-eyed black and white furball tumbling around the house.

The day they knew it would survive, they named it Shenzie. Shenzie was a Swahili word Eddie had got from Randy Solomon, meaning crazy — but crazy in a goofy, nutty, oddball, wonderful sort of way that fit the kitten perfectly.

His survival ensured, Shenzie would watch by the hour when they played chess, sitting on the edge of the coffee table where the board was permanently set up, his skinny black tail, white-tipped, loosely curled down around a table leg.

“Think he’s trying to learn chess?” asked Eddie.

“He’s studying the way it works,” said Marie firmly. “He wants hands instead of paws. He wants to be an engineer.”

Shenzie was Albie’s cat, of course, but on nights when Eddie was out in the field on his backlogged cases, and Albie was asleep, he would lie below the screen on the computer box while Marie worked, and go to sleep — purring. If she was reading, he would climb up on her chest and go to sleep — purring.

“He never does that with me,” said Eddie darkly. “Except for Albie, you’re the only person in the world he trusts enough to sleep on.”

“We can take him to Point Reyes!” crowed Albie.

But this time Eddie was firm. “No we can’t,” he said sadly. “It might be a little too tough on him — he’s still pretty shaky. Or he might get lost in the woods so we couldn’t find him again. You wouldn’t want that, would you, Tiger?”

“Well, no, but...”

“Or get all wet in the ocean and maybe get pneumonia?”

“No, but...”

“Uncle Randy’s going to take care of him while we’re gone,” said Marie with comfortable finality. “That way, you’ll have him to come home to.”

“Okay,” said Albie in charming capitulation. He kissed Shenzie on the nose and put him into the cat carrying case, a plastic one with holes, through one of which Shenzie’s black and white paw immediately came out to begin groping about. That patented paw-grope was one of his best tricks to date.

While his wife still had been tossing her paycheck into the pot, Randy Solomon had scraped up the down on a tall skinny Victorian on Buchanan just above Fell. Even after his wife left him (cops’ divorce statistics are horrendous), he managed to hang on to it and even get it painted and fixed up outside and in.