Olja Savicevic - Adios, Cowboy

“Iroquois Maria can hit a bird’s eye in flight,” the boys said.

But I remember her most clearly in connection with our ginger Jill.

It was Daniel who brought us ginger Jill. When he was little, we often lost him in the labyrinth of streets. He would wander off or disappear from a game without saying a word. But the Old Settlement had natural boundaries, like every peninsula, and there wasn’t anywhere to go. Sea on three sides, on the other desert: the railway, brambles, and along the shore, dust. Now there’s a fresh grass carpet like a golf course and the glazed cubes of shopping malls.

That time we found Daniel on the slipway, as usual, behind a crane and the boats in dry dock, playing with young Jill. She was blind in one eye, covered in fleas, and she stank of wood preservative. The slipway always reeked of the rotten undersides of sick boats, between whose wooden ribs oil glistened in the stagnant seawater. Decay was the smell of my childhood; not even the sun managed to do much about that.

He tried to persuade us that ginger Jill had dropped out of the sky. There was no other explanation, Daniel insisted, because there weren’t any trees or buildings above the slipway from whose roofs she could have fallen onto the tarpaulin and fish crates, there was only the sky.

“She fell out of the sky,” he said. He had already entirely convinced himself of this story, so there was no point in getting cross with him.

Later it turned out that he had taken the kitten from the outlanders, that it had been Maria’s favorite.

Maria spent the whole day meowing, running across the field, calling the kitten, we discovered.

But by that time we had already taken the little animal to the vet.

Herr Professor examined the creature, rubbed an ampoule of anti-parasite stuff into the fur on her back, and explained something to Daniel with undisguised adoration.

Daniel turned up the sleeve of his pullover and scratched a scab on his elbow. There was something coquettish about him, now that I think about it, even when he was biting his nails or squatting on the toilet. And, like all genuine coquettes, he appeared entirely unaware of it.

“Dirty great pedophile,” my sister whispered of our neighbor as we stood at the door of his kitchen in which there was never any heat, even in winter.

Daniel, the strutting warrior, handsomer than anything you could find in the streets of the Settlement, helped him, soothing the brindled kitten with his dirty hands.

* * *

For my brother Daniel, who had just discovered video games, the cat was a space oddity, a furry projectile and little galactic trooper.

But my father, as soon as he saw her, said: “Well, just look at her, the little star, what a coat, what bearing, à la Claudia Cardinale!”

So she became Jill, as in Jill McBain from the Sergio Leone film Once Upon a Time in the West. We wanted to please our father.

Not long after, the Iroquois Brothers came into our street with their heavily armed, little halfwitted Maria to fetch their cat Mikan. My father easily persuaded them that Jill was Jill — that she couldn’t be Mikan, that she didn’t have balls, that she had fallen out of the sky, what else.

Later, nevertheless, that stone was hurled at my head — from the back I looked very like my brother.

My father bequeathed to his sorrowful amigo his leather belt, the parrot, and an old silver Colt — he had bought it specially for him, for his birthday, and it “had once been able to fire real bullets,” Daniel said. He roamed through the streets of the Settlement, got up like that, even after he emerged from his childhood years. He always walked in a diagonal, in an unpredictable tacking movement, trying to trick the murderer Liberty Valance or the greedy Pac-Man. Or to capture the cyber badge of the universe, like a cyber cowboy.

And the rest of us walked like that too, tacking, the aim of the game being to obstruct an invisible enemy sniper. There weren’t any snipers in the Settlement, but just in case.

The parrot didn’t interest Daniel much. She strolled along the top of the dresser, cackling. She was waiting for her master, our father, and then she forgot who or what she was waiting for, but she still went on standing up there, waiting.

Ginger Jill spent a long time stalking the crazy bird, lying in wait for it, the little hyena.

In the end all that was left of the parrot’s puffed-up pride were a few bloody feathers on the tiles and her untouched beak.

That all happened not long after Daniel’s funeral. No one was thinking about the unfortunate bird, which ought to have been shut up in a cage, out of reach, I recall.

Later, my sister cleared up the mess and turned with a broom, full of righteous anger, on ginger Jill, who was calmly licking herself with her pink tongue. Jill is a wily and elastic little beast and my sister assumed she had made herself scarce until the dust settled.

Later we went to look for her at our neighbor’s. She was lying on the floor tiles cleaning her tail just as she had been when we’d last seen her.

We adored ginger Jill, full of electric indifference under our stroking palms. It was easy to construe indifference as wisdom.

“Bloodthirsty sphinx,” said Herr Professor as soon as she had grown into a huntress.

Had ginger Jill been the size of a dog, I thought, she would have slit my throat as well. Sooner or later all cat owners come to believe that. But as it was, she had to accept my love and concern.

And like all cats with a modicum of self-respect, it seemed as though she was on the point of speaking and so we deliberately attributed several powers or inexplicable events to her.

I know something about cats, but neither the Cheshire Cat, nor Snowball, nor Simone Simon nor Natasja Kinski, nor the fiery Behemot, nor Louis Wain’s cat, not one of them had that elegance, that self-sufficiency and commitment of an actress in love, that no one could ever be sure whether they were just putting on. Probably, but that didn’t matter too much to the actors.

“Jill is devil-ificent,” said Daniel, looking at her.

“Why aren’t I a cat? That’s my real nature,” said my sister, watching Jill stretch.

And Jill was our household devil-ificence, but nevertheless, we would have coldly skinned her alive because of our father’s parrot had we caught her in the act.

I sat beside the fridge on the tiles with the dirty black grouting, absentmindedly peeling off a Fanta sticker, while my sister cleaned the bloody marks from the floor with Vim and a scrubbing brush, from time to time emitting shrieks of revulsion and fury, shooting a glance at me as though I was the one who had slit the bird’s throat.

Where had he been hiding all these years, that old guy we called Herr Professor, I wondered as I ambled toward the Settlement, through this town that never sleeps in summer. He must have gone a really long way away. He left without a word and all that reached us from him was a telegram of condolence, stunned, I’d say — three whole weeks after Daniel’s death. There was also a short letter, with no sender’s address, that we presume came from him. The letter was addressed to Daniel, and it arrived a week too late for him to have received and read it. It was postmarked Perm and the stamp had a picture of Laika the Astrobitch on it.

July was on the wane, the night heat bursting out of the ground, in protuberances of earth, bumps in the asphalt — there had been no rain for more than two months. I was still several kilometers from the house and it was several hours before morning. Behind me was Zagreb, distant, more distant than Perm, than Osaka and Juneau, and Santa Fe, the most distant city on earth.

“That’s what the towns where you abandon your failed illusions are like,” our favorite cowboy Ned Montgomery would say, riding off into the sunset with a cigarette between his teeth.