Джо Горес: Dead Man

Eddie climbed the exterior front stairs and rang the old-fashioned doorbell. He was carrying Shenzie in the plastic cat case. Randy opened the door and stepped back so Eddie could enter by him.

“The famous Shenzie, huh?” He’d been hearing a lot about the kitten on the handball courts during the past two weeks.

“Himself,” said Eddie, as he put the carry case on the couch and started to open it.

The living room was beautifully furnished in an African motif. An elongated ebony head four feet tall, carved by the Pare in Tanzania, dominated one corner; across from it was a ‘Kamba drum made of stretched zebra hide, the cords that kept it taut made from thin rolled strips of antelope hide. Graceful cranes carved from Masai cattle horns stood on top of the TV cable box; there were Kisii stools carved from rounds of tree trunk with tiny bright beads pounded into the soft wood in intricate patterns. On a clear wall was a long Kalenjin spear and a handmade knife in a red hide scabbard.

Eddie gazed around, impressed as he always was, while getting the carry case open. Delicate puss-in-boots Shenzie leaped out with a pissed-off meow! Randy shook the windows with his laughter and, quick as a synapse, scooped the tiny furball up in his arms to cradle it upside down against his chest.

“Shenzie, my man, we gonna cook you for supper!” But Shenzie, knowing a soft touch when he felt one, merely purred. Randy laughed again and stooped to set him right side up on the floor, asking Eddie, “Got time for a beer?”

“Marie and Albie are down in the car.”

Shenzie was twining himself back and forth around Solomon’s ankles. Randy laughed again.

“Guess me an’ old Shenz’ll get along just fine.”

“Thanks for taking him, Randy — I mean it. I’ve written out the direction to the place at Point Reyes if you think you can get away for a weekend—”

Solomon snorted as he crumpled up the directions. “Listen, the way people are killin’ each other off in this city, I ain’t gonna get any time off. An’ if I did, I’d spend it chasin’ gash rather than snipe or some damn thing at the seashore...”

He started walking Eddie to the door, then stopped, suddenly serious.

“Truth be told, Sherlock, I’m worried about this case of yours. You’ve sorta halfway convinced me that maybe somebody did make old Grimes’s boat blow up. If you’re right, we’re talking murder for hire here.”

“I sincerely hope so,” grinned Eddie.

“Ain’t funny, Hoss. If—”

“If I turn up a hitman where you guys and the underwriters and the fire department thought there was just an accident, I’ll be the hottest eye in town.”

“Or the deadest. You’d best remember what a hitman does for a living.”

“He won’t even know I’m there,” grinned Eddie.

“Aw, hell, you’re impossible.” Randy laughed and stuck out a big paw for Eddie to shake. “Just don’t make any moves while you’re at Point Reyes, okay? Wait until—”

“We’re not even taking the laptop. Total downtime. But when we get back — watch out!” He started out, then turned back again. Shenzie was atop the TV, sniffing one of the horn birds with brow-furrowed suspicion. “Anyway, Randy, hitmen aren’t supermen — just guys with strange ideas about a fun time.”

Randy stood in the open doorway at the head of the stairs with a worried look on his face, watching Eddie bound back down to his car with the bike rack and two mountain bikes on the roof. He waved at Marie through the window, she waved back. He could see little Albie in his car seat in the rear.

He sighed and went back into the house. Shenzie was waiting to ambush his ankle. “Hey, crazy cat!” he exclaimed. “You’re bitin’ the foot gonna kick you you keep it up!”

Shenzie didn’t care. Eyes bugged out and wild, flopped on his thin black side, he sought to disembowel the side of Randy’s size 13 leather shoe with pumping back feet while holding onto the highly shined and therefore slippery toe with his front feet.

By definition Shenzie was, after all, nuts.

But Randy loved it. He laughed so hard he almost fell on the floor. He dug the little mulatto dude. Mulatto — black and white. Get it?

Maybe he’d get himself a cat like this Shenzie one of these days. They sure were a lot more fun than he’d expected. Since his wife had left he hadn’t been having a whole lot of fun. Just working, fucking when he could, with maybe a little moonlighting thrown in on the weekends for some extra cash.

Life in the rustic cabin at Point Reyes quickly fell into wondrous routine. Wake up spooned together for warmth in the old-fashioned double bed, whisper lazily until curious hands and mouths found familiar pleasure points, then the rising arc of passion until they fell back panting to the sounds of Albie stirring on his little bed in the next room.

No phones to answer. No computers to work. No friends to visit. No television to watch. Just books to read. Incredible salt marshes to tramp through. Sometimes at dusk as the fog rolled in, a driftwood fire on the beach in the lee of a washed-up log, trying to identify night noises out of the darkness.

“I think it’s a... big bird!” Albie might exclaim.

“Tree frog,” Marie, raised on a ranch in the California coastal zone, would say with great authority. She would hold finger and thumb half an inch apart. “About that long.”

“But it makes a bigger sound than that!”

Once they heard a dog bark, but Marie said it was a fox — a gray, you didn’t find reds down by the ocean. Next morning, Eddie, up before dawn, saw the animal’s tracks: dainty little pawprints hardly larger than those Shenzie might make. Fox.

Other nights, Albie asleep and the wind sighing in the trees behind the house, they would yawn over the chessboard until finally falling into bed themselves. Only to feel fatigue drop magically away for velvet moments in the dark of the night, soft cries of completion that never woke their son.

Perfect vacation days, with Marie’s birthday the most perfect of all. It dawned clear and warm and bright, without a wisp of fog, and Eddie bare-legged in front of the open fridge calling out items for the grocery list.

“I think we should have steak tonight in honor of the occasion. And baked potatoes—”

“No oven.”

“Okay, write down aluminum foil for the potatoes so we can stick ‘em in the coals. And corn on the cob if that little grocery store is up to it—”

“And whatever crucifer they have fresh there.”

Eddie turned to his son, who was waiting for the piggyback bicycle ride to the store. “Eat-your broccoli, dear,” he said.

“I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it,” said Marie like the little boy in the old New Yorker cartoon. They laughed, and Albie crowed; though he didn’t understand it, he loved that one for some reason, almost as much as he disliked crucifers.

Eddie shouldered him and his outsized crash helmet, almost as big as he was, for the four-mile wobbly ride to the little corner store. And told Albie that he had only one year left.

“Year for what?” the boy asked the top of Eddie’s head.

“Before you compose your first symphony. That’s what Mozart did when he was four.”

Albie thought about it. Not knowing what a symphony was, he finally said, “I’ll wait.”

When Eddie got back, Albie still on his shoulders and the food in saddlebags over the rear wheel, they all went exploring through the salt marsh to the beach. The narrow trail led down into a big area of pickleweed, a lanky plant whose woody segments held water the way ice plants do.

A shadow shot across them, making both Marie and Eddie duck. It struck the ground thirty feet away with a thump, extended claws first, then flapped up again with a tiny rodent wriggling in its talons. It was a foot-long handsome bird with hooked beak and heavily barred tail.