As sullen and gray and dark as the afternoon was, it nonetheless stung my eyes. I closed the door.
When a loved one dies—or as in this case is lost to me for another reason—I invariably make a joke of the pain. Even on the night that my much-loved father succumbed to cancer, I was doing mental stand-up riffs about death, coffins, and the ravages of disease. If I drink too deeply of grief, I’ll find myself in the cups of despair. From despair, I’ll sink into self-pity so deep that I’ll drown. Self-pity will encourage too much brooding about whom I’ve lost, what I’ve lost, the limitations with which I must always live, the restrictions of my strange nightbound existence…and finally I’ll risk becoming the freak that childhood bullies called me. It strikes me as blasphemous not to embrace life, but to embrace it in dark times, I have to find the beauty concealed in the tragic, beauty which in fact is always there, and which for me is discovered through humor. You may think me shallow or even callous for seeking the laughter in loss, the fun in funerals, but we can honor the dead with laughter and love, which is how we honored them in life. God must have meant for us to laugh through our pain, because He stirred an enormous measure of absurdity into the universe when He mixed the batter of creation. I’ll admit to being hopeless in many respects, but as long as I have laughter, I’m not without hope.
I quickly scanned the study to see what damage had been done, switched off the light, and then followed the same routine at the entrance to the living room. They had caused less destruction than Beelzebub on a two-day vacation from Hell, but more than the average poltergeist.
Bobby had already turned off the lights in the dining room. By candlelight, he was addressing the mess in the kitchen, sweeping shattered china into a dustpan and emptying the pan into a large garbage bag.
“You’re very domestic,” I said, assisting with the cleanup.
“I think I was a housekeeper to royalty in a previous life.”
“What royalty?”
“Czar Nicholas of Russia.”
“That ended badly.”
“Then I was reincarnated as Betty Grable.”
“The movie star?”
“The one and only, dude.”
“I loved you in Mother Wore Tights.”
“Gracias. But it’s way good to be male again.”
Tying shut the first garbage bag as Bobby opened another, I said, “I should be pissed off.”
“Why? Because I’ve had all these fabulous lives, while you’ve just been you?”
“He comes here to kick my ass because he really wants to kick his own.”
“He’d have to be a contortionist.”
“I hate to say this, but he’s a moral contortionist.”
“Dude, when you’re angry, you sure do get foul-mouthed.”
“He knows he’s taking an unconscionable risk with Toby, and it’s eating him alive, even if he won’t admit it.”
Bobby sighed. “I feel for Manuel. I do. But the dude scares me more than Feeney.”
“Feeney’s becoming,” I said.
“No shit. But Manuel scares me because he’s become what he’s become without becoming. You know?”
“I know.”
“You think it’s true—about the vaccine?” Bobby asked, returning the battered toaster to the counter.
“Yeah. But will it work the way they think it will?”
“Nothing else did.”
“We know the other part is true,” I said. “The psychological implosion.”
“The birds.”
“Maybe the coyotes.”
“I’d feel totally super-mellow about all this,” Bobby said, returning the butcher knife to the cutlery drawer, “if I didn’t know your mom’s bug is only part of the problem.”
“Mystery Train,” I said, remembering the thing or things inside Hodgson’s suit, Delacroix’s body, the testament on the audiotape, and the cocoons.
The doorbell rang, and Bobby said, “Tell them if they want to come in here and bust things up, we have new rules. A hundred-dollar cover charge, and everyone wears neckties.”
I went into the foyer and peered through one of the clearer panes in a stained-glass sidelight.
The figure at the door was so big that you might have thought one of the oak trees had pulled up its roots, climbed the steps, and rung the bell to request a hundred pounds of fertilizer.
I opened the door and stepped back from the light to let our visitor enter.
Roosevelt Frost is tall, muscular, black, and dignified enough to make the carved faces on Mount Rushmore look like the busts of sitcom stars. Entering with Mungojerrie, a pale gray cat, nestled in the crook of his left arm, he nudged the door shut behind them.
In a voice remarkable for its deep tone, its musicality, and its gentleness, he said, “Good afternoon, son.”
“Thank you for coming, sir.”
“You’ve gotten yourself in trouble again.”
“That’s always a good bet with me.”
“Lots of death ahead,” he said solemnly.
“Sir?”
“That’s what the cat says.”
I looked at Mungojerrie. Draped comfortably over Roosevelt’s huge arm, he appeared to be boneless. The cat was so limp that he might have been a stole or a muffler if Roosevelt had been a man given to wearing stoles and mufflers, except that his green feline eyes, flecked with gold, were alert, riveting, and filled with an intelligence that was unmistakable and unnerving.
“Lots of death,” Roosevelt repeated.
“Whose?”
“Ours.”
Mungojerrie held my gaze.
Roosevelt said, “Cats know things.”
“Not everything.”
“Cats know,” Roosevelt insisted.
The cat’s eyes seemed to be full of sadness.
20
Roosevelt put Mungojerrie on one of the kitchen chairs so the cat wouldn’t cut his paws on the splinters of broken china that still littered the floor. Although Mungojerrie is a Wyvern escapee, bred in the genetics labs, perhaps as smart as good Orson, certainly as smart as the average contestant on Wheel of Fortune, smarter than the majority of the policy advisers to the White House during most of the past century, he was nevertheless sufficiently catlike to be able to curl up and go instantly to sleep even though this was, by his prediction, doomsday eve and though we were unlikely to be alive by dawn. Cats may know things, as Roosevelt says, but they don’t suffer from hyperactive imaginations or prickly-pear nerves like mine.
As for knowing things, Roosevelt himself knows more than a few. He knows football because he was, in the sixties and seventies, a major gridiron star, whom sportswriters dubbed the Sledgehammer. Now, at sixty-three, he’s a successful businessman who owns a men’s clothing store, a minimall, and half-interest in the Moonlight Bay Inn and Country Club. He also knows a lot about the sea and boats, living aboard the fifty-six-foot Nostromo, in the last berth of the Moonlight Bay marina. And, of course, he can talk to animals better than Dr. Dolittle, which is a handy talent to have here in Edgar Allan Disneyland.
Roosevelt insisted on helping us clear up the remaining mess. Although it seemed peculiar to be doing housework side by side with a national monument and heir of Saint Francis, we gave him the vacuum cleaner.
Mungojerrie woke when the vacuum wailed, raised his head long enough to express displeasure with a quick baring of his fangs, and then appeared to go to sleep again.
My kitchen is large, but it seems small when Roosevelt Frost is in it, regardless of whether he’s vacuuming. He stands six feet four, and the formidable dimensions of his neck, shoulders, chest, back, and arms make it difficult to believe that he was formed in anything as fragile as a womb; he seems to have been carved out of a granite quarry or poured in a foundry, or perhaps built in a truck factory. He looks considerably younger than he is, with only a few gray hairs at his temples. He succeeded big time in football not merely because of his size but because of his brains; at sixty-three he is nearly as strong as he ever was and—I’m guessing—even smarter, because he’s a man who’s always learning.
He also vacuums like a sonofabitch. Together, the three of us soon finished setting the kitchen right.
It would never again be entirely right, I’m afraid, not with only one shelf of Royal Worcester, Evesham pattern, remaining in the display cabinet. The empty shelves were a sad sight. My mother had loved those fine dishes: the soft colors of the hand-painted apples and plums on the coffee cups, the blackberries and pears on the salad plates…. My mother’s favorite things were not my mother—they were merely her things—yet, though we like to believe that memories are as permanent as engravings in steel, even memories of love and great kindness are in fact frighteningly ephemeral in their details, and we remember best those that are linked to places and things; memory embeds in the form and weight and texture of real objects, and there it endures to be brought forth vividly with a touch.
There was a second set of dishes, the everyday stuff, and while Roosevelt set the kitchen table with cups and saucers, I brewed a pot of coffee.
In the refrigerator, Bobby discovered a large bakery box crammed full of the pecan-cinnamon buns that are among my all-time-favorite things. “Carpe crustulorum!” he cried.
Roosevelt said, “What was that?”
I said, “Don’t ask.”
“Seize the pastry,” Bobby translated.
I brought a couple of pillows from the living room and put them on one of the chairs, which allowed Mungojerrie—now awake—to sit high enough to be part of the gathering.
As Roosevelt was breaking off bits of a cinnamon bun and soaking them in the saucer of milk that he had poured for the cat, Sasha came home from whatever business she had been about. Roosevelt calls her daughter, the way he sometimes calls me and Bobby son, which is just his way, though he thinks so highly of Sasha that I suspect he would be pleased to adopt her. I was standing behind him when he lifted her and hugged her; as though she were a little girl, she entirely disappeared in his bearish embrace, except for one sneaker-clad foot, which dangled an inch off the floor.
Sasha brought the chair from her composition table in the dining room, positioning it between my chair and Bobby’s. She fingered Bobby’s sleeve and said, “Bitchin’ shirt.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ve seen Doogie,” Sasha said. “He’s putting together a package of equipment, ordnance. It’s now…just past three o’clock. We’ll be ready to go as soon as it’s dark.”
“Ordnance?” Bobby asked.
“Doogie’s got some really fine tech support.”
“Tech support?”
“We’re going to be prepared for contingencies.”
“Contingencies?” Bobby turned to me. “Bro, are you sleeping with G.I. Jane?”
“Emma Peel,” I corrected. To Sasha-Emma, I said, “We may need some ordnance. Manuel and two deputies were here, confiscated our weapons.”
“Broke some china,” Bobby said.
“Smashed some furniture,” I added.
“Kicked the toaster around,” Bobby said.
“We can count on Doogie,” Sasha said. “Why the toaster?”
Bobby shrugged. “It was small, defenseless, and vulnerable.”
We sat down—four people and one gray cat—to eat, drink, and strategize by candlelight.
“Carpe crustulorum,” Bobby said.
Brandishing her fork, Sasha said, “Carpe furcam.”
Raising his cup as if in a toast, Bobby said, “Carpe coffeum.”
“Conspiracy,” I muttered.
Mungojerrie watched us with keen interest.
Roosevelt studied the cat as the cat studied us, and said, “He thinks you’re strange but amusing.”
“Strange, huh?” Bobby said. “I don’t think it’s a common human habit to chase down mice and eat them.”
Roosevelt Frost was talking to animals long before the Wyvern labs gave us four-legged citizens with perhaps more smarts than the people who created them. As far as I’ve seen, his only eccentric belief is that we can converse with ordinary animals, not just those that have been genetically engineered. He doesn’t claim to have been abducted by extraterrestrials and given a proctological exam, doesn’t prowl the woods in search of Big Foot or Babe the blue ox, isn’t writing a novel channeled to him by the spirit of Truman Capote, and doesn’t wear an aluminum-foil hat to prevent microwave control of his thoughts by the American Grocery Workers Union.
He learned animal communication from a woman named Gloria Chan, in Los Angeles, several years ago, after she facilitated a dialogue between him and his beloved mutt, Sloopy, now deceased. Gloria told Roosevelt things about his daily life and habits that she couldn’t possibly know but with which Sloopy was familiar and which apparently the dog revealed to her.
Roosevelt says that animal communication doesn’t require any special talent, that it isn’t a psychic ability. He claims it’s a sensitivity to other species that we all possess but have repressed; the biggest obstacles to learning the necessary techniques are doubt, cynicism, and preconceived notions about what is possible and what isn’t.
After several months of hard work under Gloria Chan’s tutelage, Roosevelt became adept at understanding the thoughts and concerns of Sloopy and other beasts of hearth and field. He’s willing to teach me, and I intend to give it a shot. Nothing would please me more than gaining a better understanding of Orson; my four-footed brother has heard much from me over the last couple years, but I’ve never heard a word from him. Lessons with Roosevelt will either open a door on wonder—or leave me feeling foolish and gullible. As a human being, I’m intimately familiar with foolishness and gullibility, so I don’t have anything to lose.
Bobby used to mock Roosevelt’s tête-à-têtes with animals, though never to his face, attributing them to head injuries suffered on the football field; but lately he seems to have shoved his skepticism through a mental wood-chipper. Events at Wyvern have taught us many lessons, and one of them, for sure, is that while science can improve the lot of humankind, it doesn’t hold all the answers we need: Life has dimensions that can’t be mapped by biologists, physicists, and mathematicians.
Orson had led me to Roosevelt more than a year ago, drawn by a canine awareness that this was a special man. Some Wyvern cats and God knows what other species of lab escapees have also sought him out and talked his ear off, so to speak. Orson is the exception. He visits Roosevelt but won’t communicate with him. Old Sphinx Dog, Roosevelt calls him, mute mutt, the laconic Labrador.