The Sound and the Furry (9 page)

Uh-oh. Birds: not my favorite, as I may have mentioned already. I looked up and saw
birds right away, more than two. Which two did Bernie mean? I wasn’t sure, but then
a big brown one with a huge beak dove down toward the water, and a few moments after
that an even bigger brown one followed it. The first bird plunged right into the water,
smack, without even trying to slow down, disappeared under the surface and came up
with—what was that? A fish? And then the two birds were fighting over it. A mistake,
because the fish wriggled free and fell back into the river. The two birds rose up
as one, beating each other with their
wings. Even from this high above, I could hear their squawking. We had nothing to
fear from those two birds. Bernie was right again. I put a paw on his knee. He gave
me a pat.

We drove over the bridge, were soon on a two-lane blacktop in flat country, the wettest,
greenest country I’d ever seen, some kind of creek or canal glistening through the
trees almost the whole time.

“Bayou country, big guy,” Bernie said. He sniffed the air. Whoa! How often did that
happen? “I think I smell something.”
Go on, Bernie, go on.
But he did not. There was lots to smell, of course, way too much to go into now,
but sometimes in life one certain smell dominates all the others—take the time all
the trash haulers in the Valley went on strike—and that was the case in bayou country.
This was a rot domination zone, no question, rot falling down on and rising up through
all the other smells out there. Quite pleasant: I liked it here.

“On the other hand,” Bernie said and then paused.

On the other hand what? I couldn’t remember the first hand. Once at a party, maybe
that time some of the guys had a beer keg throwing competition, Bernie’d said that
if people had a different number of hands they’d think different. But nobody had gotten
it, whatever it was, and we’d had to leave pretty soon after. That keg bouncing down
the street after us: what a sight! Especially under a full moon. But that wasn’t the
point. The point was . . . the thread, the thread. I was in danger of losing it, and
then the danger passed, and it was gone. I was back to feeling tip-top, or even better.

“What if the whole family’s in on it, even Ralph,” Bernie continued after a nice relaxing
silence, “and they’re using us as a cat’s paw against these Robideaus?”

Whoa! Stop right there! Or even before. Us? A cat’s paw? Had
I ever heard anything worse in my whole life? Panting started up, big-time.

“Nah, no way,” Bernie said, after a moment or two. “Too Byzantine.”

I got the “no way” part. No way meant forget it, one of my specialties. The panting
got itself under control. Meanwhile, the road had narrowed, the trees looming in closer
and closer. Their leaves were dark green, but a kind of whitish fringe grew over everything,
touching the ground in some places. I’d never seen anything like that whitish fringe.
The smell was a bit like the smell of the sponge in the tub after one of Leda’s long
baths; back in the Leda days, of course. Bernie always took showers, and so did Suzie,
so there were no more sponges at our place. I missed them: a damp sponge in your mouth
is a nice feeling, as long as it’s not too soapy. Here’s another thing about the smell
of the whitish fringe. It made my eyelids heavy.

Bernie’s a real deep sleeper, can sleep through just about anything—like when that
truck loaded with cymbals rolled over practically right in front of our house!—but
I’m not like that. Even if part of me is sleeping deeply, there’s another part that
always knows what’s what. For example, we’d slowed way down, the sound of the Porsche
throttled down to just a mutter. I opened my eyes.

We were driving along a street in some little town. On one side stood some trailers
up on blocks, a few houses, all a bit lopsided, and a store or two, green things sprouting
in every open space. And what was this? Chickens on the loose? Plus some members of
the nation within the nation—that’s what Bernie calls me and my kind—resting in the
shade.

“Ch—et?”

On the other side was one of those canals they seemed to have out the yingyang in
these parts. A bayou? Was I getting this right? Don’t count on it. Lining the near
bank of the bayou was a long and narrow wooden boardwalk, with some piers extending
out in the water. Boats, big and small, were tied to the piers. Across the bayou was
a setup that looked pretty much the same—a little settlement with boats docked in
front of it. Nothing seemed to be moving except for us and the chickens pecking at
the dirt: not the air, not the water—a deep dark green, like no water I knew—not a
branch or a flower. I sat up very straight, always best when coming into someplace
new.

Bernie parked at the foot of one of the piers. “This is it, big guy,” he said, wiping
sweat off his brow with the back of his arm. “Boutette family pier is third from the
end.” We hopped out—me actually airborne, Bernie not—and walked out along the pier.
Fish smells hung in the still air, and so did a scent that reminded me of frog or
toad or snake, but more peppery, an odd kind of peppery mixed with poop. Other than
that, this pier didn’t seem to have much going for it. No boats, for example. All
the other piers had boats tied to them, but not this one. So therefore? That was Bernie’s
department. I followed him to the end of the pier and got in a quick lick of the arm
he’d used to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

Bernie gazed across the water for a bit, then looked up the bayou to where several
little bayous seemed to flow into it, and finally down the bayou, shading his eyes
from the sun. The bayou got wider in that direction, bent in a long curve, the water
vanishing behind a wall of trees.

“Could hear a pin drop,” he said.

Kind of a puzzler. Bernie was saying he was capable of hearing a pin hit the floor?
Like one of those pins Suzie used for sticking
notes on the wall of her cubicle back when she was with the
Valley Tribune
? Or did he mean a bowling pin? I’d gone with him to the Police Athletic League Bowling
Night once, probably wouldn’t be doing that again anytime soon. But I remembered the
racket whenever the bowling ball blew those pins sky high. Bernie could hear that,
no problem. I pointed my ears up. Not a peep from any type of pin I knew, but I did
hear a low
throb-throb
coming from beyond the bend in the bayou.

Bernie turned and started walking back to the foot of the pier. I stayed where I was,
eyes on that distant gleam of water where the bayou rounded the bend.

“Chet?” Bernie said. “Let’s go, big—” He paused, gave me a close look. “Something
up?” He came and stood beside me. We’re partners, me and Bernie.

The nose of a boat came into view, and then the whole boat, small and metal, with
a putt-putt motor at the back, the first
putt
always solid sounding, the second kind of sputtering. I had heard that kind of mismatch
thing from the Porsche more than once; it always meant the tools would soon appear.

Sitting at the back with a relaxed grip on the motor’s stick-out handle was a big,
gray-haired woman wearing a halter top and shorts. And what was this? A patch over
one eye? That always worried me. As she came closer, a similar sort of boat but black
instead of silver started up from one of the piers on the far side and headed down
the bayou. A woman was driving that black boat, too, an even bigger gray-haired woman,
also in a halter top and shorts, but without an eye patch. As the boats passed each
other, not too far apart, both women did that middle-finger raising thing. The name
for this is giving the finger. We have ways of doing something similar in the nation
within, but no time to get into that now. With humans, I’d seen bloody scenes come
next plenty of times and got ready for anything. But the boats went their separate
ways, the women not making eye contact even once.

The silver boat came
putt-putt
ing toward us. I’d actually never been up close to a boat. The little waves it made
were beautiful, and so were their sounds, a bit like the wind in the trees but thicker
and somehow more satisfying. The woman cut the engine and the boat glided in a long
slow curve, coming to a stop right beside the pier and rocking gently in the water.

The woman rose, picking up a coiled rope. Bernie held out his hand to take it from
her, but she ignored him and whipped the rope around a rusty metal bar kind of thing
sticking up from the pier and locked it down with a tight knot. I’d seen that knot
before—Bernie is great at knots and had taught Charlie a whole bunch—but the name
didn’t come to me. I was cool with that.

Some squarish cages lay in the bottom of the boat. The woman grabbed one and heaved
it up on the dock.

“Help you with that?” Bernie said.

She paused, fixed her eye on him, and then on me: a big dark green eye, pretty much
the same color as the bayou, and not at all friendly.

“You the detective?” she said.

“That’s right,” Bernie said.

“Then you might as well, long as I’m paying you anyways.”

Which I didn’t get. Wasn’t Vannah paying us? This . . . this pirate woman! Yes, I’d
made a connection—a connection coming from a time after Leda left when Bernie and
I watched a lot of pirate movies—one of my very best! For a moment, I actually couldn’t
think of another. The moment passed. A welcome breeze sprang up in the still air,
coming from somewhere behind me.

“Mrs. Boutette?” Bernie said.

“My friends call me Mami.” The dark green eye got a bit colder. “Are we gonna be friends?”

“Don’t see why not, Mami. I’m Bernie Little. And this is Chet.”

“He plannin’ to blow us all down with that tail of his?”

Bernie laughed. What was funny? Something about my tail? How could there be anything
funn—I took a quick backward glance—not something that requires much head turning
here in the nation within, by the way, and saw that my tail was in action, big-time.
You might think it would be a snap to ramp it down to stillness in a matter of moments.
You’d be wrong. No offense.

“How’s my idiot son?” Mami was saying.

Bernie licked his lips. That’s something I’m always on the lookout for with humans,
but Bernie? We were in new territory. “Which of the, ah, um . . .” he began, and came
to a halt.

Her dark green eye narrowed, seemed to get less green, more ice-cube colored. “I’m
talkin’ ’bout Baron, of course.”

“Right, right,” said Bernie. “Frenchie.”

“Frenchie?”

“What we call him back home—just a friendly nickname.”

“Friendly.”

“He’s a likable guy.”

“If he’s so likable, how come you put him behind bars?”

“That was business.”

That bayou-colored eye of hers opened wider and warmed up. “You’re an
homme serieux
.”

“Huh?” Bernie said.

“Cajun talk,” said Mami. Her eye moistened, like she might be on the verge of tears.
That would have been a stunner. It didn’t happen. “The truth is, Bernie, I’ve got
three idiot sons. It’s like Ralph soaked up all the IQ points meant for the others.”
She
gazed over at the buildings on the other side of the bayou, and then into the trees
beyond. From down in the boat, she reached up and grabbed Bernie’s hand, squeezed
it so hard it bore a red mark when she let go. “Find him for me, please.”

“We’ll do our best,” Bernie said, flexing his hand. “Is there a Mr. Boutette in the
picture?”

Mami felt in her pocket, took out a can of dip. “What picture would you be talkin’
’bout?” she said.

Or something like that. I’d known plenty of dip chewers—take our mechanic, Nixon Panero,
for example—but never a female one. She popped off the can top with her thumbnail,
a short, thick thumbnail, black at the edge, and offered the can to Bernie.

“Maybe later,” he said.

Another stunner. What a case this was turning out to be, whatever it happened to be
about! Had Bernie ever chewed dip before? Just once, when he was a kid, long before
we got together, of course. He’d told Nixon that it had made him puke. Humans don’t
like puking. In the nation within we don’t really like puking either, but it’s no
big deal. And then sometimes you find yourself scarfing up the very puke you just
puked! What was that all about? Life is full of surprises. But forget all that, because
just then I happened to catch a brightness in Bernie’s eyes, sure sign that he was
having a bit of fun.

“Ain’t no Mr. Boutette, if that’s what you’re askin’,” Mami said popping a thick dip
in her cheek. “He’s long gone.”

“Where?” said Bernie.

“On the bottom.” Mami waved one of her big strong hands down the bayou. “Fell off
of a shrimper in a storm.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.” With a grunt, Mami hoisted another cage up onto the dock. Bernie stacked
it on the first one. That was when I
noticed what was inside those cages: crabs! Lots and lots of crabs, some blue, some
yellow, all wriggling around. I knew crabs from the tank at Big Al C.’s Place for
Crabs, a joint we used to hit in South Pedroia—don’t get me started on Big Al C.,
now breaking rocks in the hot sun—but I’d never seen them like this before, up close
and—how would you put it? Kind of . . personal, that was it. The next thing I knew
I had my front paws up against that top cage. All that wriggling and those little
crab eyes! And the claws: What was with those wicked-looking claws? I only wanted
to see better. Maybe I did end up seeing better and maybe I didn’t, but there wasn’t
much time for any certainty, because just about right away both those cages somehow
toppled off the pier and fell splash into the water, sinking out of sight.