A Curious Affair (19 page)

Denny, who ran the office, looked up from his newspaper and laughed. Above his head hung the faded picture of a naked woman. It was a 1969
Playboy
calendar turned to December. It was always turned to December. Denny was a loyal, one-woman man.

“That machine giving you a hard time, Jillian?”

“As ever.”

“It’s the damnedest thing. It never does that to anyone else, you know.”

“Machines hate me,” I agreed, finding the situation much less amusing than he did. “Want to help me out?”

“Sure.” Denny stumped over and gave the red box a solid whap. It obligingly spit out my root beer. The clunk of its arrival in the tray sounded like a bark of contempt, but I didn’t complain. Denny smiled again. “You just need to know how to speak its language.”

“Thanks.” I picked the can up, but didn’t open it. Experience said that there was a better than even chance that the thing would spray me if I didn’t let it sit for a while. Machines really do hate me. It’s probably because of my stance on cell phones. In this age of the Internet, word has probably gotten around.

“Denny, I’ve been thinking. You know what this office needs?” My tone was a shade too enthusiastic, and he eyed me a bit warily.

“Uh…what?”

“A cat. It hasn’t been the same since Grover passed.”

“Well, no. But Grover was a dog,” he pointed out.

“And that was the problem. Poor Grover—once he lost his hearing, it was just a matter of time before…”
I didn’t go on. Grover had come to a bad end when one of the car lifts in the garage had dropped on him. “But a cat would just stay here in the office and keep people company while they waited for their cars to be fixed. They’ve done studies, you know. Pets help lower people’s blood pressure. Keeps them from being so cranky.” Unless they had allergies to cat dander.

“You know, that isn’t a bad thought,” Denny admitted. “It would help folks while away the time. I’ll talk to Ross about it.”

“Good. And I even know the prefect cat. His name is—Happy.” Happy really should have been called Sleepy Two. He looked like Sleepy’s cousin and shared the lazy temperament. “He’s a fluffy orange cat—looks like a pumpkin. He’s very mellow.”

“Is this one of Irv’s cats?” Denny asked.

“Yes. I’ve found homes for most of them.” That was a smallish lie. I had homes for three. Four, if you counted Atherton.

Denny returned my keys soon after, and, feeling a righteous glow at having placed another cat and tended to the well-being of the Subaru—the one machine in the world that doesn’t hate me—I rushed back home.

Atherton wasn’t enthused about the cat carrier I put him in—a leftover from a neighborhood yard sale that I had inherited when its previous owner abandoned it—but he understood the necessity when I explained about the shelter. I made sure to put him in the front seat where he could watch the world as we traveled. Once underway, I slipped Ian Hunter’s
Rant
CD into the player. Brother Ian was a good man, and I was feeling his indignation. Of course, he was singing about socio economic injustice in England and I was pissed off about greedy nephews who were getting away with murder, but it still felt like a meeting of the minds.

Atherton listened intently as I sang along, and I had a
moment of near-vertigo as I considered what this could mean. I could share anything with him: Shakespeare, Rossini, poetry. Of course, there was every chance that he wouldn’t care about Romeo and Juliet’s ill-fated love affair or the trials of the Barber of Seville. But who could resist T. S. Elliot’s
Old Possum’s Book of Practical
Cats?
All I had to do was read it aloud.

We had a bit of bad luck on Apple Road. I got stuck behind one of the many turkey trucks headed for the ranch where they raise free-range fowl. The options, once trapped on the two-lane tarmac, are limited. There is no place to pull over and no place to safely pass. Cars have tried it, with disastrous results. Last year we had a truck overturn and it was a blood fest. Panicked juvenile turkeys went racing to their deaths on the freeway that runs parallel to Apple Road. They committed mass suicide by motor home and tour bus, and hundreds of turkey dinners were lost just before Thanksgiving. The road was covered in turkey slaw that had to be scraped up with snowplows, and there were white feathers ghosting around for months. The collisions hadn’t done much for the vehicles, either. The truck driver was unhurt but badly shaken, and soon retired from the turkey-hauling business.

It was difficult, but I bided my time and crawled along at six miles per hour until I reached Ranch Road where the vet’s office was. It wasn’t the most painful of ways to pass the time. Daffodils were blazing on the hillside and the first lupines had leapt out of the ground overnight and burst into glowing purples and whites that almost hurt the eye with their vivid hues.

Dr. Dervon was kind and very eager to cooperate on a story about the perils of feline leukemia. For those of you who don’t know, it’s an incurable viral disease that affects 2 to 3 percent of all cats. The rate goes up in cats that are ill, very young, or living in stressful situations.
The disease can cause cancer, blood disorders, spontaneous miscarriages, and a host of immune deficiency disorders that sound a lot like AIDS. The only way to avoid infection is never to let your cat interact with infected felines, since it can be transmitted through saliva or mucus. There is a vaccine that is fairly effective but not foolproof. What I didn’t know was that there were some treatments for the disease that could add a couple of years to an infected animal’s life. I wrote them down carefully—Immuno Regulin, Interferon Alpha, Staph Protein A and Acemannan. I had to leave my readers with some hope if their beloved pets turned up infected.

I managed a quick word with Clive while Dr. Dervon looked Atherton over and pronounced him healthy. Atherton tolerated the contact but didn’t enjoy it. He had come a long way, though, in just a few days. A week ago, he might well have bitten the vet for taking such liberties.

The next stop was the animal shelter. I had high hopes of getting some news there. Cats came in from all over the county and there was a good chance that this clearinghouse for feline gossip would have some news about Wilkes’s activities.

“What a handsome kitty,” Caitlin Brown said, stuffing her fingers through the carrier’s bars.

Jillian, what does she want? She won’t touch me, will she?
She smells of dog
. Atherton was offended.

“You’ll have to forgive him. He’s a bit reserved. Too dignified to ask for chin scratches, and I’m afraid that Dr. Dervon rather ruffled his feathers during the exam.”

“Poor kitty.” Caitlin pulled her fingers out of the carrier. I shifted so that she had to turn away from the carrier to face me. I opened my note pad and began explaining what I was writing about. I started with the
question about the worrying rise of the disease among cats being brought to Animal Control.

It didn’t surprise me that Arthur, the shelter’s only permanent resident, sidled up to the carrier and began a low-voiced conversation with Atherton. I wanted desperately to eavesdrop, but they kept their voices down. I thought I heard Atherton ask if Arthur liked living at the shelter, but his reply was lost under Caitlin’s recitation of dismal statistics. All I could do was nod and scribble and trust that Atherton would remember to ask about news of Wilkes.

As I had half-expected, there were no new reports of Wilkes’s doings among the shelter cats. They knew of him and the meth dealers but had no news. A bit discouraged, I asked Atherton if he wanted to go with me to the grocery store, though it would mean waiting in the car while I shopped. Feeling more at home in the Subaru now, he agreed to come with me to the lower Bag-N-Sav. It wasn’t fun for Atherton, but I felt better about being out in the wide world with the cat riding shotgun.

I thought that shopping might be stressful but found that planning a dinner was much like riding a bike. You wobbled a bit and took things slowly, but everything did come back rather quickly. After all, at one time I had been an enthusiastic amateur chef.

Conscious of Atherton out in the heating car, I trolled along as quickly as possible, hooking in only what I absolutely needed. Even at that, the grocery bill still came to ninety-eight dollars, since the refrigerator was down to cultures of botulism and a decade-old jar of pickles. Shaking my head and wondering if I couldn’t just serve chili—on sale, two for $1.35—and dinner rolls, I rolled my cart out to the car and stowed the groceries in back.

I saw Atherton’s nose twitch, and knew he was
smelling the steamed shrimp. That made me feel better about the money spent. Two bucks’ worth of shrimp would send him to heaven. If only I could find nirvana so easily.

Tyler picked up Hula and Sleepy that afternoon but couldn’t stay for a cup of tea; he had been asked by Father Browne to attend evening ser vices at Saint Patrick’s, built at the very apex of Bellemont Street where it could overlook the town’s sinners and admonish them with its white spire that thrust upward like the very finger of God. Tyler explained that there had been some trouble at the church with pranksters letting air out of parishioners’ tires, and no threats of the evildoers getting extra hell-time had put an end to the nonsense. That made the priest suspect that the culprits were rival Methodists whose place of worship was right down the street. In the interest of continuing interfaith peace and harmony, Tyler was planning on sitting in the parking lot and making sure that the Catholics’ tires remained unmolested.

Disappointed that he couldn’t stay for a cup of tea and a visit, after Tyler left for church I asked the cats to put the word out to the neighborhood that I wanted to know who was messing with the cars at Saint Patrick’s. And to please make note of what kind of clothing they were wearing, not just how they smelled. It wasn’t that I felt especially obliged to defend the Catholics’ automobiles from malefactors of any religion, but I didn’t see any need for Tyler to be spending his time waiting around a parking lot to catch a petty vandal when the cats could do it for him. There had to be more benefits to this talking to cats thing.

Saturday dawned bright and warm. It took courage, but I decided that I would zip myself into some jeans and a halter top and go to the blues festival. I would eat a tritip steak sandwich, maybe have a beer, and talk to the feral cats who lived at the fairgrounds, since they were about the only cats I hadn’t talked to yet.

In my investigative fervor, I completely forgot why Cal and I stopped attending this annual event.

The day did not begin auspiciously, and I should have taken note of the signs and portents. When I stepped outside I noticed the gutters along the garage’s southern face were growing a bumper crop of miner’s lettuce and vetch. I’d cleaned them out already three times that winter, but there were always more oak leaves to fill them. Oak leaves are supposed to be hostile to other plants but, just like the ivy the deer aren’t supposed to eat—ha! Those giant vermin would eat poison oak when nothing else is available!—plenty of weeds seemed to do just fine in the oak’s acid mulch. The shingles were also a lovely shade of spring green, which meant that the moss had
come back and was busy devouring the asphalt shingles that kept the rain off my head.

Annoyed, I turned to look at Abby’s wall, which was now a shaggy green monster seething with various species of hard-shelled moss-eating bugs that gave it an eerie kind of shimmer and made the green fur seem to crawl. I was certain that if I stared long enough I would actually see her moss spitting spores onto my roof. And Abby absolutely refused to consider spraying it with weed-killer.

As I knelt to pick up a broken branch that was blocking the communal drain, I noticed a stealthy shifting in the leaves in her gutter. I thought at first there might be a mouse or lizard foraging in the dead foliage, but as I watched, a baby cyclone spun to life at the edge of the street, rearing up quickly on dead, brown, leafy legs. It whirled drunkenly toward my front stairs, growing more golden as it picked up drifts of pollen and other street detritus. It gibbered in a dry, scraping voice. The little tornado was a valiant and quite scary effort, reaching almost human size, a whirling Golem of leaves and twigs that reached for me with its many arms, chasing me as I backed away down the stairs. I clamped my lips tightly together, refusing to scream though I was suddenly terrified.

Fortunately, the dust devil wasn’t strong enough to survive my stairs. The baby twister collapsed on the top step, twitched twice and then died in a small explosion, leaving a fresh pile of debris on my front deck. I had always wondered how the large piles of kindling and moss came to land at my front door. Now I knew: They shambled there with the help of the wind. It was dust devils that sometimes came scratching at my door in the dead of night.

The notion suddenly creeped me out. It was too close to having a poltergeist haunting me.

Feeling nervy and restless, I decided to walk to the fairgrounds. It’s a bit of a hike and involves taking one’s life in one’s hands when inching along the cliff face on Stockyard Road where there are no bike lanes or sidewalks, but it is better than trying to find parking at the fairgrounds when a major event is happening. As is the case everywhere in Irish Camp, parking is at a premium on event days.

Torrence Smith was taking tickets at the gate. He is a retired cowboy, almost ninety, bowlegged and toothless, and what people used to call simple—meaning that some rooms in his brain have been left unfinished, and those he lived in were all rather dusty and unkempt. Certainly the cloudy blue of his unfocused eyes proclaimed his age and announced his mental bulbs had dimmed. Still, he seemed happy enough in his work, and I was amused to watch him labor at his slow pace even though—or perhaps because—it annoyed the out-of-towners in line ahead of me.

That’s one of the problems with tourists, I thought smugly. They just don’t know how to slow down and get along in a town where very few people wear a watch, preferring to rely on the clock at the top of the courthouse—though it was notorious for getting stuck at the ten o’clock hour—or the tolling of the church bells (Saint Patrick’s for the Catholics, and about three minutes later the bells at Mount Zion for the Protestants) to tell them the hour.

My amusement with the outsiders didn’t last long. It never does. Amusing tourists become annoying tourists after only minutes. I think it’s their cell phones. Why do people go to concerts and then spend the whole time yammering to people they didn’t like enough to invite to the event? You know, I liked it better in the days when families kept their freaks locked up in the attics at home. Really. It was better for society as a whole.
I know that sounds weird coming from me, the queen of freaks, but I stand by this assertion. The Victorians weren’t wrong about everything. There is no need to pack up your oddballs and take them to other people’s cities and towns and turn them loose on the unsuspecting public—especially when you are at something billed as a family event. If you have two heads and bad manners, keep them both at home.

Before I begin my tirade in earnest, let me say that the music at the festival was fabulous—Shane Dwight, Cafe R&B, The Mofo Party Band. All awesome from what I heard. The weather was perfect, the venue fine. It was just all the rude out-of-towners who came for the festival that ruined it for us townsfolk and the other normal people.

Of course there were the rude and drunk attendees. This happens at any and all public events, but usually not in such numbers as I saw that day. One female in black leather chaps and a tube top was staggering drunk by ten a. m., and just before eleven attempted to strangle herself in front of the main stage where the MoFo Party Band was warming up. Since she had already thrown up near my feet and spattered my sandals with half-digested beer and churros, I thought her friends should let her get on with the job without interfering. I thought it an interesting experiment for the other drunks to watch: Can you actually kill yourself that way, or would you stop throttling when you ran out of air? But her companions seemed to like her more than I did, and they took steps to save her. It required three people to pry her hands off her own neck but—darn it—they persisted until she passed out and they could cart her away.

I saw another drunk pitch down face-first on the lawn a few minutes later and have to be dragged away by the medics, who seemed reluctant to touch her. It was a
relief because every fifteen seconds or so she’d scream out, “This shit don’t stink!” And it was scaring the ferals, who were trying to enjoy a snack at the dumpster near the
BBQ
RIBS
AND TATERS
trailer.

The rest of the drunks were men—usually with cigars, toilet breath and T-shirts from Harley shops in Modesto and Stockton (the new murder capitol of California, I heard someone say; thirty-seven homicides so far this year, one man bragged). The amusing part was that few of these men actually rode motorcycles. The genuine gentlemen of the road were far better dressed and mannered. These same biker-pretenders were also covered in tattoos.
What’s wrong with that?
you ask. You will argue that some tattoos are absolute works of art, and I agree. You probably have lovely flowers and butterflies and cute animals riding mascot on your shoulder, or maybe the small of your back. But these men’s markings were mainly words and pictures of violence. The women went more for forms of sexual degradation. I believe that these were markings and mutilations meant to offend rather than entertain, and they succeeded—at least with me and probably with their mothers. Words have power, and symbols carry meaning. Swastikas, death’s-heads, phrases like “Kill them all and let God sort them out,” “cunt” and “slut” are meant to provoke strong visceral reactions. These were disturbing labels to see on human bodies, frightening even, but no one else in the crowd seemed to mind or even notice, perhaps because violence and bad manners truly have become the coin of the realm where most people trade. The thought of trying to ever go back and live in that society makes me shudder. If I could build a wall around our town, I would. We would all be safer and happier if we could keep the barbarians on the other side of the gate, allow them in only when they offered a needed good or service.

A man in motorcycle boots and a tattoo that said pig-sticker trod on me. He didn’t apologize, and I didn’t try and make him once I got a look at the tattoo. I at first assumed that pig-sticker was some reference of disdain toward law enforcement, but then I got a good look at the illustration, which made his bestial sexual preferences exceedingly clear. At that point, all I wanted was away from these people, and quickly. So I started moving through the crowd, looking for signs of the feral cats who had abandoned the Dumpster near the screaming drunk.

The smell of cigars and marijuana grew more intense. I began to feel dizzy but also stubborn about completing my self-appointed mission. I would not flee in the face of these monsters. I would stay and talk to the cats, damn it; I didn’t care how many smelly, sweaty, tattooed drunks I had to push through. So, I pressed on in spite of my growing light-headedness.

It was freaky—all of it—for a small-town girl who avoids crowds. But it got worse the further I went into the fairgrounds. I was Alice down the rabbit hole. I’d expected some psychological friction while attending this event. Four years is a long time to avoid crowds, and there would have been assimilation problems even with the well-heeled crowd at the opera, but this was far worse than anything I anticipated. It seemed to me that in the last half of a decade, society had devolved into something hateful and dangerous that respected nothing, not even itself.

Oddly though, the mental aspects of contact with the multitude turned out to be the least of my woes. The thing that pushed me to the borderline of hysterics was the presence of these physical freaks who had invaded our town and seemed to be pulled to me like metal filings to a magnet. For instance: the lady beside me at Shane Dwight’s dance party. She wore one open-toed
shoe and one sneaker. The open-toed shoe showed off her toes—which were mixed up. The big toe was in the middle, the little piggie where the big toe should be. The nails were a thick yellow like sheep horn and twisted out into claws. And she wore a ruby class ring on the big toe. I can’t tell you how wrong that looked. God only knows what was in her sneaker. Maybe a cloven hoof. I tried not to stare, but didn’t want to make eye contact with her because she kept chanting fuck-you-fuck-you-fuck-you and making small stabbing gestures with her hand.

And then there was this woman at the dance party with the fattest ass in the world. Think of the biggest you’ve ever seen and then double it. Normally, this would have moved me to pity and concern for her health, but she wasn’t just a butt—she was an asshole. Her idea of dancing was to bend over and bounce her behind off people, and laugh when they toppled over or shrank away in disgust. Being laid out by a stranger’s ass would have been horrible enough, but she was wearing short shorts that were just gobbled by her flesh until gone. In thirty seconds it was like she was in a G-string. And then nothing but dreadlocks of pubic hair and a tattoo on one cheek that said slippery when wet. And she was absolutely slick with sweat. She touched me once. E www. I pulled a sharp pencil out of my fanny pack and prepared to defend myself as I scrambled for safety over the folding chairs at the front of the stage. The three people on the end row seats behind me also fled from her—and who could blame them? That crack could swallow someone’s head! Sorry, that was rude. But really, beyond a certain size and age (and species) you just don’t need to be rubbing your butt on strangers. I really hoped Atherton wouldn’t say anything about my smell when I got home. I knew I would have to shower immediately or risk offending him.

In my haste to escape the Butt that Ate the World, I collided with another person. At least, I think it was a person. It might have been a demon come up from hell for the day to do a little recruiting. Unable to help myself, I actually ran away from the man who had done something that looked like Trapunto to his face. On a quilt, the raised embroidery would have been lovely, but in flesh? He had his eyelids pulled back so far that they didn’t close completely when he blinked. He had also filed his teeth to sharp points. The thought of the pain involved in filing those teeth made me want to vomit. His skin also had a horrible pallor reminiscent of jaundice. I am certain that this man was carrying some terrible disease.

I saw another boy so full of facial piercings that he actually jingled like a Christmas sleigh when he walked. He, too, looked pale and unwell, and his eyes were as empty as those I’d imagined in the dust devil.

Now I’ll be really despicable, and you can know the very worst about me and hate me if you must. Someone had the bright idea of bringing in a busload of blind people to the show—an excellent notion, and one which our town has always supported: We are absolutely handicap accessible and make sure all our musical events are friendly to persons with physical challenges. But this group came with only one seeing guide, and the noise level made spoken instruction impossible. So they had to form a conga line of the blind about thirty people long. Each show and at every stage, they gave them front row seats. Why? They were blind! The noise in these small venues is the same—that is to say, deafening—front or back. Why inconvenience the whole crowd who settled in early by making them move at each performance—folding chairs, blankets, coolers, umbrellas—when there were plenty of seats at the back? But the powers that be did it anyway. And thus the poor group stumbled through
the increasingly intoxicated crowd, turning ankles—both their own and those of the people they trod on. The guide was oblivious: a case of the deaf leading the sightless, perhaps. Only a severe hearing impairment could have kept the guide from noticing all the rude comments and threats from the crowd. It was obvious that many of the blind visitors heard what was being said, and were troubled, but they were at the mercy of their stupid leader and could only stumble on and hope that human goodwill would prevail. I was afraid that it might not, and seriously considered calling Tyler. But what could I say that would sound reasonable? There were security guards around and no one had actually done anything violent.