Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

“That’s done all the time, particularly in Las Vegas. This ho ain’t God. She ain’t everywhere all the time.”

“No.” But sometimes it felt like that. The obsessed could be pretty pervasive.

“You can lose her and lose your virginity at the same time. I know you can.”

Matt eyed her soberly. One Bloody Mary-soaked celery stick wasn’t going to undo the condition. “Am I some sort of surrogate for you here?”

“You bet your sweet ass you are. Just let me know when the deed is done. Ambrosia’ll play something real special for you on the rah-di-o.”

DAD: Desiccated and Dead

I am happy to hotfoot it out of the feral territory. I am even happier to hop onto the back bumper of a bus downtown and get a ride almost all the way to my destination.

In another city, buses and traffic would be scarce as hens’ hangnails in the middle of the night. Here in Vegas, things are always jumping, from dice to bailees.

I have to catch a cross-town bus and there it gets tough. Beyond the Strip schedules slow down appreciably.

Still, the moon has barely bar-crawled past the top of the sky when I trot the last few blocks. I had never noticed this before in my travels about the old town, but I find myself suddenly beyond the three-story apartment complexes and one-story strip shopping centers that fan out from the famous Strip in all directions.

Instead I confront a ten-foot-tall wall of shrubbery, like oleander but bigger, thicker, and taller. The sort of testosterone-overdosed vegetation you expect to find comatose princesses behind. When I reach a cross street it is unmarked. It too is lined by an endless length of stone and iron fence, diminishing like train tracks in the distance.

Now this is definitely not the Las Vegas I know and love, and sometimes loathe. All the streets around here are the usual suburban sprawl, and Las Vegas has sprawled more than most urban areas, being that the landscape here is flatter than a tapped-out tortilla, so there is nowhere to go but up and out.

So I start ambling down the lane. The night is dark, but the moon is yellow and the leaves come tumbling down. Still, my built-in night vision is in fine shape. I notice that a lot of long green has gone into furnishing the grounds beyond the fence…not only the cash kind, as in long, green paper money, but long green grass. The upkeep on what the English call sward costs a bundle in this desert burg.

I know this is the right place because it is littered with small stone slabs, the upright kind that usually mark where a person is buried.

Strange that I have never before noticed an in-town plant-a-tarium, so to speak. That may be because my kind is so seldom interred. In fact, as I move down the road, I spot a pair of iron gates with the heavenly host on guard duty in the form of plaster statuary. On one of the big stone pillars is a brass plaque, and inscribed on the plaque in raised letters are the words “Los Muertos.”

Now, when you live in a city called Las Vegas, and there is another burg of the same moniker in New Mexico, which also has a town called Las Cruces; when, in fact, Los Angeles is just three hundred miles west of where I now stand, you tend to get used to Hispanic place names and do not think twice about what the words mean, although there is often a religious connotation. Las Cruces means “the crossroads” and Los Angeles means “the angels.” Even the early Spanish monks must have known Las Vegas was never going to live up to any Biblical ideal, except maybe Sodom and Gomorrah, because its name just means “the meadows” and there is nothing holy about that.

But Los Muertos …a few hours ago and in broad daylight I would have strolled by without a second thought. Now, though, I think. And it comes to me that muertos must have something to do with death, or the dead.

So I am in the right place, the Dead Place. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get into where nobody ever gets out.

I sit down under an overarching oleander bush and am rewarded by the hiss and sting of a venomous serpent on my rear end.

I bristle and leap around to face the attacker, which is a little too little too late, apparently. Ask not for whom Los Muertos is named: it is named for me. A sinking feeling in the pit of my pith tells me I may be done for. There is no antidote for snakebite way out here, alone, in the dark.

Unfortunately, I am not alone in the dark. I gaze into the chilling sight of a dark open maw with two world-class Dracula fangs bared for a second, totally unnecessary, lethal strike.

“You are sitting on my train, Pops,” the snake hisses. “Move or I will staple you to the nearest prickly pear.”

“Midnight Louise! What are you doing here?”

“None of your business,” hisses my darling daughter-not, closing her maw to reveal her piquant little black face, which is purely feline.

“It is my business if you nearly give me a cardiac arrest. I thought I had been hit by a rattlesnake with a contract to kill.”

“No one would sic a rattlesnake on you, Dads. You have not aggravated any feuding Mormons lately. Besides, you are a polygamist by nature. You would be kissing cousins with the early Mormon patriarchs.”

“Leave the Mormons out of this. I want to know what you are doing out here alone at this late hour.”

“Since when do you play the stern parent, Daddy Densest? The real question is what brought you here.”

“Business, which is none of yours.”

“So I guess we are even. This is what they call a Mexican stand-off. Unless you want a way in, which I can provide for a price.”

“And the price?”

“We are partners.”

The nauseous feeling in the pit of my pith lurches into a vomitous feeling. I sense the Mother of All Hairballs coming on.

“Throw up anything gross and you are on your own.”

“I am merely…gagging. So show me the way to San Jose.”

“Odd you should mention that. There is a handsome statue of St. Joseph just inside the gates, along with a raft of plaster-winged angels. And farther in, a quite nice grotto to Bastet.”

“Bastet! She does not get any respect here in Vegas!”

“Perhaps you underestimate our esteemed Egyptian goddess. Like me, she gets around.”

“The females of the species always do,” I grumble. “That is what is wrong with the species.”

“What? I did not hear you, Daddio Dearest.”

She has turned her back on me and is wiggling through the oleander thicket and toward a stone wall.

There is nothing like a dame for pointing out that she is younger, sleeker, and more limber than you, particularly if she is claiming to be your offspring.

I belly down and crawl right after the minx. Midnight Louie can do night recon with the best of them. Black berets are built in with us.

The oleander stalks prick like barbed wire and my dress blacks will be sadly disheveled, but I manage to push myself through the tunnel of missing stones to the other side.

I allow my innards to expand, shake out my outer coat, and gaze upon the moonlight grazing among the short grasses and tall monuments.

“This is a cemetery,” I complain. (I am too young to be in such a place.)

“ Hmmm ,” Miss Midnight Louise says thoughtfully, rubbing against my side.

Kissing up will not cut any crypts with this dude.

“So why are you here?” she asks.

That was my question, but it has been forgotten. “I am hunting Big Game.”

“You are always doing that, to hear you talk. I suppose you want a tender reunion with Butch and Osiris.”