Cat Raise the Dead (14 page)

As the cats crouched on the moonlit hillside, above them the high grass stems thrust black and sharp as knives against the moon. Through the grass they looked down onto the rooftops of Casa Capri, the sloping tiles struck into patterns of curving shadow. Far down beyond the retirement villa and beyond the village roofs, the moon's path cut like a yellow highway across the dark Pacific.

Nothing moved. No wind. The night was still and bright.

Just above the main building of Casa Capri, the rows of small retirement cottages climbed up toward them, their moonlit roofs gleaming pale, their little streets lit at intervals by the decorative lamps spaced along the winding lanes. But the cottages themselves were dark. No light shone, no curtain stirred where retirees slept. The time was 4:00
A.M
.

The main building of Casa Capri was dark at the front. Along the sides, a thin glow from the softened hall lights seeped out from the residents' rooms. At the back of the building, in the Nursing wing, bright lights burned. One imagined sleepless patients suffering late-night changes of IV bottles, or perhaps restless with pains and discomforts and with the fears which can accompany old age.

Glancing at each other, the cats slipped on down through the grass, down between the dark cottages, and
across the little narrow streets. Pausing in a geometrically neat bed of pansies, they studied the Nursing wing.

The windows in Nursing were high and securely closed, as if perhaps those shut-in patients disliked the cool night air. There was no access there, through those windows. They had crossed the last street into the shadow of the building when suddenly a clashing explosion of sound hit them, loud as the crash of wrecking cars. Metal clanging against metal. They crouched belly down, staring wide-eyed, frozen to the earth, ready to run.

But then they identified the harsh metallic music of a radio booming out from the Nursing wing, a blare of Spanish brass, of trumpets blasting and snorting, and they crept on again, ears tight to their heads, slinking.

The next instant someone turned the volume down, and the noise subsided to a nearly tolerable decibel level.

Eight cars stood in the parking lot, their metal bodies pale with dew from having been parked most of the night. Not a car among them was more than two years old, and they were all top-of-the-line Buicks, Chevys, even two Mercedeses. Skirting the parking lot, the cats headed for the Care Unit, and there, slipping in through the wrought-iron fence that guarded the little terraces, they searched for an open glass door, for access to a bedroom and the hall beyond.

Most of the glass doors were closed. The two that had been left open a few inches were secured in place by a bar, and the screens were latched. As if the occupants worried seriously about human intruders scaling the six-foot fence and strangling them in their beds.

The cats could hear the soft breathing of the shadowy sleepers, but some of the occupied beds looked hardly disturbed, the covers nearly flat and only a small, thin mound where the sleeper lay. Other occupants had tangled their covers and twisted them or thrown them on the floor. One old man, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, snored like a bulldog with bad tonsils.

Trying each door and screen, they were nearly to the end of the row before they found a glass standing open and the screen unlatched, or perhaps the latch was broken. The room smelled of cherry cough syrup. Slipping inside, they crept past the bed and its mountainous occupant. A metal walker with rubber feet stood beside the open door to the hall. They crouched beside it, looking down the empty corridor, then fled along it toward the social room.

In the darkness, the room seemed huge, the hulking shapes of couches and overstuffed chairs looming like fat, misshapen beasts. Beyond their hunching black forms, the white-clothed dining tables were moonlit, the moon itself shining in through the glass. To the left of the dim room, the patio gleamed pale through its glass doors. They leaped to the back of a dark sofa, listening.

From down the hall, toward the admitting desk, two women were talking; and the cats could smell coffee. Leaping from the couch to a chair, and to a couch again, they moved in that direction, then quickly through the open doors and down the hall.

At the parlor they slipped into the deep shadows beneath a chair. Staring out, they studied the brightly lit admitting desk and the open doors of the two lit offices.

The admitting desk was deserted, but in one of the offices the two women were laughing, and a coffee cup rattled. The cats fled past and down the hall, toward the closed door of Nursing, where they could hear the brassy music playing softly. Sliding into the nearest darkened bedroom, they sat close together, looking out through the crack of the door, studying the secured entrance to Nursing.

The door was one of those pneumatic arrangements which, the cats knew from past experience, was beyond their strength to open. If they waited long enough, someone had to come through; all they needed was patience. Behind them, in the dark bedroom, the sleeper
moaned and turned over; the room smelled sour, of sleeping human, and was too warm. Soon Dulcie began to fidget, and then a flea began to chew at Joe's rump. He bit at it furiously, easing the itch, trying in vain to catch the little beast. Lately he'd begun to think of his minor but stubborn flea infestation as a serious breach of personal hygiene, a scourge on the civilized being he had become, a source of deep embarrassment.

Clyde had suggested that if he hated flea spray so much, he might try a daily shower. Well, of course, Clyde would offer some incredibly stupid solution. Joe was surprised Clyde hadn't bought him a razor, encouraged him to take up shaving; certainly that would get rid of the fleas.

They waited, watching the lit crack beneath the door to Nursing for what seemed an endless time before suddenly that space darkened, and footsteps hushed on the carpet within.

The pneumatic door sucked inward, and a nurse hurried out past them, her white shoes flashing along, inches from their noses. Before the door sucked closed they bolted through.

They nearly rammed into the heels of a second nurse. Crouching behind her, their hearts pounding, they stared around for a place to hide, but the best bet, the only real option, was the cart beside her. She stood with her back to them, arranging something on its metal shelves. They could smell hot cocoa and buttered toast, and, as she turned toward a counter, they fled underneath, between the chrome wheels.

Soon they were creeping along beneath the moving cart as she pushed it down the hall, their ears flicking up against the cold metal. The rubber tires made a soft pulling sound on the carpet, like tape being ripped from a fuzzy surface. Around them they could see only the wheels, the wooden molding along the wall, and the bottoms of the evenly spaced doors. If there were charts on the doors presenting the patients' names, they could see
nothing of these. They might be passing Jane Hubble's room at this moment and never know. This procedure wasn't going to cut it. If they could ride on top the cart, that would be an improvement. Dulcie glanced at him with impatience, her tail twitching nervously against the metal wheel.

Some of the rooms were dark, but most were lit, and in some the voice of an elderly occupant groaned or called out. The smells of medicine and of sick people made them both want to retch. They could see the bandage-wrapped feet of one patient who was out of bed sitting in a chair. Halfway down the hall the cart stopped, the black rubber tires were stilled, and the nurse's white shoes padded away into a softly lit room. Behind her, they crept out to look.

Through the open door, a bedside lamp threw a narrow glow across the metal bed and across the thin, wrinkled occupant; he had an obedient, gentle face, as if he had long ago resigned himself to the entrapments of old age. As the nurse turned to straighten his nightstand, the cats slipped in behind her and under the bed.

Crouching beneath the dusty springs, they were only inches from her size five white oxfords, so close they could smell the mown grass through which she must have recently walked. This blended pleasantly with the smell of cocoa and buttered toast, and they could hear her arranging a tray before the patient, could hear the plate slide on the metal surface. She spoke to the old man in Spanish, but he answered her in English. Both seemed comfortable with the arrangement. They could hear her fluffing his pillows, then she braced her feet as if helping him into a sitting position. When she had him settled she left the room, wheeling her cart away.

The patient ate with little sucking and clicking sounds, as if his teeth didn't fit very well. They could see no chart on the inside of the partially open door, to tell his name. They had started to creep out when another nurse came down the hall.

Retreating again beneath the bed, Dulcie hunched uncomfortably, her paws tight together. She didn't like this part of Casa Capri—the Nursing wing was a full-blown hospital, reminding her too sharply of the vet's clinic. The disinfectant and medicinal smells and the cold, hard surfaces brought back every dreadful moment of her five days in Dr. Firetti's animal hospital, when she was sick with a respiratory infection.

She had, over in the social room, been able to maintain the illusion of happy days for these old folks, in a comfortable little world set aside just for their nurturing. But suddenly illness and the failure of the body were too apparent. In this wing of Casa Capri, all she could think of was sickness and dying.

Still, though, the old people were cared for, their meals were prepared, and they were warm and clean. If they had no one at home to look after them, and if they could not care for themselves, then where else would they be happier?

The cats remained beneath the bed until the hall was silent again, until they could no longer hear the rubber tires of the cart working its way from room to room. Above them, each time the old man set down his cocoa cup, it rattled as if his hand was shaky. He spilled a few crumbs of his toast, which rained down over the edge of the bed. He coughed once, then gulped cocoa. When he picked up the remote from the nightstand and turned on the TV, when presumably his attention had become fixed on an ancient John Wayne film, they slipped away, streaking out of the room.

Surely he hadn't seen them; behind them he raised no cry of surprise. Gunshots cut the night, and a horse whinnied.

They fled down the hall without the cover of the cart, repeatedly looking behind them, and quickly scanning the charts affixed to the patients' doors. Looking for Jane, Lillie, Darlene, Mary Nell, Foy Serling, and James Luther. They were just at the corner where the
hall turned to the right when someone spoke behind them. Joe careened against Dulcie, shoving her down a short, side corridor.

The voices came closer, two nurses speaking casually as they approached on some routine business. The end of this little hall was blocked by a door which must lead back to the Care Unit. They sucked up against the wall as two nurses passed, their white-stockinged legs and white oxfords marching in rhythm. One heel of the taller woman's size nine shoes had a minute speck of dog doo. The cats wrinkled their noses at the smell. Speaking Spanish, the women turned down the longer hall, passing a fire door. As they moved away the cats followed. Joe paused at the heavy, closed door.

“Teddy went out here. Spice shaving lotion.”

“So?”

“So when Dillon was dragging me all over, I saw wheelchair marks going out the fire door and into the parking lot.”

“Mae Rose said he drives a car, one of those specially equipped cars. If he's Adelina's cousin, probably he comes and goes as he pleases.”

“Then why does he live here? Adelina Prior is loaded. Why wouldn't she get him a nice apartment and hired help? Or why doesn't he live on that big estate with her?”

“Maybe he's sort of unofficial social director. Mae Rose says most of the old people like him, that he's always doing little favors, asking for the special foods they want, remembering their birthdays. He doesn't seem as sarcastic with the others as he is with Mae Rose.”

Someone changed the Spanish radio station to hard rock, and the thudding drummed at the cats' nerves like a distant demolition crew. Over the din they heard another nurse coming, the sticky sound made by her rubber-soled shoes on the carpet, and quickly they slid into a darkened bedroom.

Immaculate white shoes and red-tasseled sox passed them at a trot, trailing the scent of Ivory soap. Then two more nurses, their snowy Oxfords flitting like two pairs of white rabbits hopping along the hall.

When the way was empty again the cats moved fast, looking up at the names on the charts. The hall formed a rectangle around a block of center rooms, so that only the outside rooms had windows. By the time they had rounded the last corner and could see the nursing station again, they had found not one of the six residents that Mae Rose claimed were missing.

The nursing station ahead was so busy they might never get past it and out the door. Nurses moved swiftly between two counters, which were covered with medicine bottles and boxes and cartons and a stack of paper towels, with a large stainless-steel coffeepot and a tray of ceramic mugs. As they slipped into yet another darkened room, they were beginning to fidget with impatience. Staring out at hurrying feet and listening to disjointed snatches of conversation, both in English and in Spanish, they felt completely surrounded. Trapped. They grew so irritable they nearly hissed at each other.

Someone changed the radio station back to Spanish music. One of the nurses began to sing with it in a sultry voice. When at last the hall was clear for an instant, they fled for the nursing station, running full out, pausing only to scan the remaining charts, then slide beneath the counter.

Crouching under the crowded shelves that lined the back of the counter, they were hardly out of sight when Size Nine returned, moving in near them, smelling of dog doo. She had only to glance down beneath the shelves to see them huddled. Standing inches from their noses, she began to stack papers, tamping the stacks against the desk. The air under the shelf was hot and close. They heard the pneumatic door to the hall open, and someone wheeled the food cart away, presumably back toward the kitchen.