Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

A rich rhumba of laughter emerged from the bright drum of her huge body. She cocked her gorgeous head with its decorated dread-locks to hear herself. “Then again, maybe not. Too much reverb for an anorexic.”

Matt couldn’t help smiling.

“Now that’s better, Mr. Moody Midnight. You keep smilin’. Remember, they hear it all in your voice. So what’s the matter?”

“You hear something in my voice?”

“I hear everything in your voice, baby. It’s nothing personal. It’s my job. I read voices. Yours has changed.”

“How?” He felt an irrational surge of defiance. If she could hear it, so could…anyone.

“Tighter, more cautious. Strained. If you were a singer I’d be worried. We got to get back that nice, easy open throat you were born with. So tell Ambrosia what’s the matter. Don’t think of me as your producer; think of me as that nice smooth-as-white chocolate voice on the radio.”

She shook with laughter then, picturing herself as white chocolate. In a way she was, thanks to radio. Ultraslim, no-calorie white chocolate.

Matt sighed, relieved to have nothing to hide behind right now. Letitia was indeed his producer. If she detected something strained in his performance, then it was her business. And…half the world confided in Ambrosia and felt better for it. Maybe he could share a bit of that magic too. God knew he had a lot to confide.

“So tell Mama.”

The admonition made Matt superimpose his mother’s image over the gaudy mountain of Letitia. Mira Zabinski was small, pale, constrained, lost like a pastel portrait by Degas against a lush Gauguin oil painting of the islands.

He felt a pang of disloyalty along with relief.

“When did you notice a change?” he asked.

She considered. “Around ’bout that time Elvis started calling you.”

“Letitia, it wasn’t Elvis —”

“Let me think it was Elvis. I’d feel better thinking it was Elvis. A lot of people would. He’s kinda a patron saint for the dysfunctional, you know.”

“I know! I heard that loud and clear from the callers back then. So I started going wrong then?”

“Wrong? Nothing wrong with you, then or now.” She stood up. “Let’s go get some fruity drink some place. I’m buying.”

Matt knew then that it was serious. He was slower to rise. Half of him welcomed a chance to share the trouble he’d doled out piecemeal to the people he knew over the past few weeks, partly to protect them, mostly to protect himself.

Protecting yourself was constant, lonely, back-breaking work, and he was tired of it.

They paused at the door to turn off the lights. Their familiar studio landscape vanished like a stage set. After Matt’s “Midnight Hour” program, the station went to satellite feed until regular programming resumed in the early morning. Only a lone technician kept the sound of music flowing over the air waves.

The hall was dimly lit and the tiny reception room seemed larger without people in it. Beyond the glass door, the almost empty parking lot looked like a staging ground for a UFO movie.

It was one-thirty in the morning, but in Las Vegas the bars were open twenty-four/seven.

Matt opened the door for Letitia, then followed her into the lukewarm night.

They’d dawdled inside long enough that the small gaggle of fans who usually waited for Matt after his show had given up and gone home.

“No groupies,” Letitia commented.

“No groupies.” Matt sounded relieved even to himself.

“You don’t worry that your ratings might be slipping?”

“No, because if they were, I’d do what I did before I had ratings to slip.”

“Which is?”

“I don’t know. Whatever I have to do to pay the rent.”

A form came barreling toward them from Matt’s left side, from the shadow the building cast along its sides.

Matt barely had time to put his hands up before something as big as a German shepherd lunged at him. Hairy, too. Red hair.

While he was thinking Irish setter, the apparition’s weight pushed him slightly backward and swiped his mouth off-center with a sloppy kiss.

It was five-feet-something of overenthusiastic girl and only the red hair kept him from pushing her away like an encroaching poodle.

“I love your show! I can’t believe I did this! ’Bye.”

And she dashed off around the building, giggling.

Letitia nodded. “Kiss-and-run groupie. Not bad.”

Matt backhanded his mouth. “Where are their parents, anyway?”

“At home, wondering where their kids are, as usual.” She chuckled, a sound as rich as water in a mountain stream plunking notes from a scale of river rocks. “Lighten, man. You’ve got fans and they’re in the desired demographic. I don’t know why you gotta see life in shades of gray when it can be a Technicolor paradise like the merry old land of Oz.”

“You forget the wicked witch.”

“Don’t look at me. I’m not playing no ugly old thing with striped socks unless I get to keep the jazzy red shoes, bro. That’s what it’s all about. Life does not have to be a black-and-white film these days.”

Letitia stopped to stare at a vehicle under the greenish glare of a security light. “There. See what I mean? Where’s that kick-ass motorcycle of yours? Or that sweet shiny silver Volkswagen Bug that Elvis left for you? That just makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time, Elvis givin’ people VW Bugs, even if they have been redesigned. Poor Elvis never got a chance for a redesign. I know what you’re gonna say: ‘it wasn’t Elvis.’” She sing-songed along with Matt, nodding at his programed response. “But why you driving that white chocolate old Probe now? It isn’t even white chocolate. It’s just plain white, honey, and that ain’t you. Trust me.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be me.”

“Yeah, that’s soooo tough. Easy job, good money. Raking it in on the traveling chitchat circuit. I don’t get those gilt-edged national speaking invitations. Not yet. And I was here first. So what is it? Girl trouble?”

That question was so wildly off and so right on that Matt felt like Letitia did about Elvis’s postmortem taste in giveaway cars: he didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

“Boy trouble?” she asked when he remained silent.

He saw that he’d at least have to commit to declaring a sexual preference. Before he could, his feet felt a faint, almost spectral thrum. They knew that subliminal vibration but his mind couldn’t name it.

“Damn it, Matt, my car’s in the garage, so we’re going to get in that Vanilla Ice car of yours and go someplace for a Bloody Mary and then you’re gonna drop me home —”

He was frowning into the distance, black and empty. “Yeah. Let’s get to the car.” He took her elbow, or what he figured to be her elbow, and tried to hurry her across the black asphalt sea of the parking lot.

That was like a fishing boat trying to tug the Queen Elizabeth into port in double time.

“What burr got up your nose?”

Not only his feet felt it. Now his knees were humming with it, all his joints, and he could finally hear that distant waspish drone, sweet and scary.

“Come on, Letitia!”

They didn’t make the car, of course.

Some things just overtake you, like hurricanes and tornados and very fast motorcycles.

It came spurting and bucking into the lot, as black and anonymous as the leather jumpsuited and helmeted figure that rode it. Zorro on wheels.

It came roaring toward them on a curving scythe like Death’s particular sheep’s crook, the dark side of the Good Shepherd. Matt cast a quick prayer at the nearest streetlight, a vigil light for the whole firmament and what might lie behind it.

He stopped moving and Letitia mirrored him.