Carole douglas - Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

He had often stood over a coffin propped upon its support mechanism over the open grave and intoned the sonorous Biblical line made for ministers, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." That ancient formula had always made him think, had always seemed new and poignantly specific for each departed soul he had ceremoniously wished godspeed.

And now, Cliff Effinger. A man mourned by no one. A man survived by himself, and his mother. A man ultimately impotent in his anger and the anger he turned on others.

To the end of bitterness, to the lightness of ashes, to the pittance of mineral and bone we all are.

Matt pulled the stopper from the bottle, let the genie of death out.

A thin gray veil blew onto the desert air, lifted, swirled, dispersed in a heartbeat. So many years, eddying away. So much weight and hatred, lofting like butterflies in passage.

Some motes would crash into the swift walls of windshield swimming down the highway.

Some would rise hawk like to hunt the upper currents until they snagged on an outcropping.

Some fell to earth, for the scorpions and lizards to scuttle through.

Gone. The past. The pain. Gone. Ready for the future. The power and the glory. The pain.

Nothing much changed, except how you felt about it.

And that, as the poet said, is all the difference.

Tailpiece

Midnight Louie Admits to Nothing

I suppose I am lucky that the officials present at my rescue were more concerned about crimes against humans, such as kidnapping, than crimes against cats.

A close inspection of my condition that night might have revealed that I was still under the influence of an illegal substance, aka Panama Purple.

You can bet that I will not forget the treacherous Hyacinth and her even more sneaky mistress, Shangri-La. And I would be willing to bet that they will not forget me and mine, more's the pity.

Anyway, despite the usual danger and deception, I would think the human dramatis personae would be pretty pleased with themselves after this adventure. Mr. Matt Devine has seen the last of his evil stepfather, and somebody other than himself has done the dirty deed and removed the oaf from the planet. Miss Temple Barr has seen the two thugs who assaulted her a few cases back in custody and under arrest for drug-running as well as suspicion of murdering the late unlamented Cliff Effinger. Lieutenant C. R. Molina has seen the Mystifying Max face-to-face and even has pinned him down (almost literally) for a long-desired, albeit brief, interrogation. And Mr. Max Kinsella has seen fit to play hero of the hour, using his magical skills to uncover a shipment of illegal drugs and a couple of unwilling drug users: myself and Miss Temple Barr.

There is ample cause for celebration at this juncture, and the delicious scent of more mysteries to be solved as recent events resolve even more.

So why is everybody so glum and acting like nobody has what he or she wishes?

Call it the human condition.

You certainly cannot call it the feline condition. My kind is known to be much easier to please.

But I suppose my human companions are suffering from what I would describe as a surfeit of Free-to-be-Feline. The exotic dressing on the top does not seem sufficient to disguise the inadequate sustenance underneath.

What do these humans want? Spoon-fed cod-liver oil?

Hmmm. Miss Temple has never tried that on my Free-to-be-Feline. I must find a way to drop a few hints....

Very best fishes,

Midnight Louie, Esq.

P.S. You can reach Midnight Louie on the Internet at: http://www.catwriter.com/cdouglas To subscribe to Midnight Louie's Scratching Post-Intelligencer newsletter or for information on Louie's T-shirt, write: PO Box 331555, Fort Worth, TX 76163.

Carole Nelson Douglas Admits to Confabulation

A reader who has lived in Las Vegas for thirty years wrote to compliment my accurate description of local landmarks.

It's nice to take a bow, but I don't live in Las Vegas; I only visit there (and not as often as I'd like). Also, although I try to describe the environment accurately, I have an easy out around the edges. From the very first, in penning Louie's Las Vegas adventures, I've added fictional structures that are my very own to embroider as much as my heart desires.

Las Vegas, from the founding of Bugsy Siegel's first Flamingo Hotel, has always celebrated making something out of nothing, so it's the perfect setting for fiction.

The Circle Ritz condominium/apartment building, for instance, is an actual building, all right, but imported from Corpus Christi, Texas. I saw it in the mid-eighties and became instantly enamored of its round exterior, which created pie-shaped rooms, and its light-warping arched ceilings. Although built as a coastline pied-a-terre for Corpus Christi's wealthy families, its perfectly preserved fifties decor struck me as perfect for Temple's Las Vegas pad. Another Las-Vegas-dwelling reader recently volunteered that she knows many such buildings in the city.

I invented the Goliath Hotel (Vegas's biggest and most vulgar hotel) and its antithesis, the Crystal Phoenix (Vegas's most tasteful hostelry), over a decade ago for the first series of Midnight Louie novels, now out of print. The idea was to avoid lawsuits by existing hotels on the subjective matter of taste, and also to take Las Vegas to even more extremes than it then seemed capable of.

But since my first visit in 1985, the expanding Strip has overreached even my imagination: the Goliath lobby's "Love Moat" has been echoed several times as new "Goliath Hotels" have sprung up.

Another artifact that brings reader queries is the Hesketh Vampire motorcycle that has belonged to the Mystifying Max, Electra Lark, and now is in the custody of that uneasy rider, Matt Devine.

Bikers have written to ask if it's real. The Harley clubs know nothing about it. Oh yes, Virgil and Virginia, it's real right down to the surly crowned chicken logo on the sleek silver fairing (the front hooding).

This is one case where constructing a character allowed authorial ignorance and the reality of research to fuse. A reference book on V-twin motorcycles covered the field from 1903 to 1985. I browsed through the pinup pictures of these alien machines, looking for one that had Max Kinsella's fingerprints all over it .

Besides gravitating to the sinister model name, trust me to find the only bike in the book that looked like it was speeding while standing still. The Hesketh Vampire was only made from 1980-84, and custom-made for each purchaser. This Rolls-Royce of a gentleman's motorcycle looks like a sterling-silver lightning bolt; its sleek fairing was designed in a wind tunnel. The engine's thick metal walls can take ten reborings; which amounts to a life of millions of miles.

And the primary drive does indeed howl. A virtually immortal motorcycle named Vampire: one fact no fiction writer could resist.

Luckily, the real world overflows with just such juicy and obscure facts, along with many much more common permutations on the human (and feline) personality. So the imaginative blend of fact and fiction is an ever-renewable resource.