When the Cat's Away (17 page)

Back when Margaret Mead was jumping rope in the schoolyard, Jim Bone and I had taken Anthropology 301 together at the University of Texas at Austin. Of course, now he was Dr. Jim Bone, but I didn’t hold that against him. Jim had retained everything he’d learned in the anthropological field, traveled the world, and gone on to become one of the foremost experts on ancient, obscure, and lost cultures. I’d repressed everything I’d learned, traveled the world, and become a country singer who, some cynics would say, is probably also an expert on lost culture.

Jim had spent considerable time exploring in South America and had been the first white man to do a lot of things. One of them was hosing a pinata. It was only 7:30
A.M.
, Texas time, but in New York, I had the spiritually debilitating feeling that time was running out.

“Jimbo! Leap sideways!” I said. “Somebody put a red paw print on the door of my loft.”

Jim sounded a bit grumpy but coherent. “Bit obsolete,” he said. “People haven’t been doing that for a thousand years.”

“Yeah, well, somebody did it to me last night.”

“I’ll tell you what it’s
not .
” he said.

“What?”

“A ‘Happy Bar Mitzvah’ sign.”

What followed was a long and somewhat ill bout of laughter. Only idiots or geniuses laughed that way at seven-thirty in the morning. It was dealer’s choice.

When the maniacal laughter had subsided, Jim gave me a crash course on the lowland Wachíchi many of whom had been jaguar priests, and all of whom appeared to have vanished from the face of the earth in the space of one week, over a thousand years ago.

The Wachíchi worshiped a god called Kukulcan, the cat god, who some believe was an early spaceman, and who disappeared into the skies forever in 986
A.D.
The Wachíchi were seagoing colonists, contemporaries of the Aztecs, Incas, Babylonians, and ancient Romans. The tradition of wearing masks so the sun couldn’t see their faces originated with the Wachíchi, was later borrowed by the Iroquois, and was even later taken on by many disingenuous Americans who still didn’t wish the sun to see their faces.

The jaguar priests of the Wachíchi, in their darker moments, were said to dress up as cats. It is known that they dealt with the structure of evil, not the structure of accomplishment. The information, according to Dr. Bone, comes from the
Chilam Balam
, which are roughly the New World equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls—except, again according to Dr. Bone, that they are about one hundred times spookier. “So you’ve become involved with a cat lately,” Jim said.

“You’ve been readin’ my mail, brother. Several weeks ago a friend of mine’s cat disappeared during a cat show at Madison Square Garden and very little’s been the same since.”

“Sounds about right. Any South or Central American types in your life currently?”

“You’re battin’ a thousand.”

“Are they maybe Colombians or Peruvians—?” 

“Colombians.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“So am I.”

“Let me get a cup of coffee. Hold the line. I want to think about this for a moment.”

While Dr. Jim Bone got a cup of coffee in Austin, Texas, I took the opportunity to move smoothly into hot chocolate number four and to perform the prenuptial arrangements on cigar number two. I lit the cigar and tongued a few more mini-marshmallows. There was a certain sweet afterglow to the combination that I’d never felt before in my life. Jim was back on the line.

“No one knows for sure,” he said, “what happened to the Wachíchi. Did they disappear? Did they sail somewhere and recolonize? But around 1000
A.D.
the Norse fought many wars with a group they called the cat people. This occurred in the New York-New England area. One of the results was a tribe of Indians that spoke a combination of Old Norse and Quiche. Quiche, of course, was the language of the Wachíchi.”

“This is,” I said, “no doubt fascinating. But how is it relevant?” This is one of the problems you encounter in dealing with anthropologists and archaeologists. They prefer the past to the present. How stupid of them.

“What I’m trying to establish in your adult brain,” Jim said rather irritably, “is that there is a long tradition for the Wachíchi to be visiting New York City.”

“Unpleasant,” I said.

“Not from an anthropological view.”

“Fine.”

“I’m not trying to scare you, but people have traveled a lot farther for a lot stupider reasons than finding a cat.”

“Certainly this is a bit farfetched.”

“Jason and the Golden Fleece. The quest for the Holy Grail. Hell, the Egyptians went all the way to Tunisia for a missing finger ring. It’s not that strange.”

It was that strange.

Art Linkletter was right, I thought. People
are
funny. Of course, they’re not quite as funny as Art Linkletter, but they’re funny enough to make you die laughing.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Can’t you understand this? Am I here alone? Am I driving through a ghost town? You may be on the verge of a major anthropological discovery.” One of the little difficulties with the world is that it’s riddled with anthropologists who travel to the far corners of the earth and bore people with their theories. My father once told me that in Greenland every family has five kids, three dogs, two chickens, and one anthropologist.

“Like what?” I asked. “Finding a fossilized turd in the litter box?”

Dr. Jim Bone was not amused. “Wake up, man. Don’t you know what that red cat strike on the door means?” 

“That’s why I called you, Jim.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said evenly. “That’s the standard Wachíchi mark of death.”

“I’ll jot that down in my field notes,” I said. But I knew I wouldn’t have to jot it down to remember it. If I’d had any field notes and if I’d tried jotting something down in them, I couldn’t’ve been sure my hand wouldn’t shake.

“That cat you’re looking for,” said Jim. “The one that’s missing. That cat wouldn’t have four white paws, would it?”

I felt like an ancient civilization had come crumbling down on top of me while I’d been out in the field looking for arrowheads. For a moment I was speechless, a rare occurrence indeed. Then that good old twentieth-century indifference came roaring back. Man is nothing if not resilient. Only sometimes there’s little enough to be resilient about.

Four little white sweat socks, I thought.

“How,” I asked, “in the name of Kukulcan, did you know that?”

“Because the Wachíchi had another name for Kukulcan.”

“Yeah? What?”

“They sometimes called him,” said Dr. Jim Bone, “the God Who Stands with His Feet in the Clouds.”

47

The telephone works in mysterious ways. Sometimes it brings you cheerful little insipid greetings from cheerful little insipid people. Sometimes it leaves you just a little to the north of scared shitless.

I was cleaning the red paw print of Kukulcan off the door of the loft with hot water and Ajax when Ratso almost stumbled on the bucket on his way into the bathroom.

“What the fuck are you doin’?” he asked. “You’re gonna want lab tests, aren’t you?”

“The only thing I want a lab test on is your brain,” I said a bit unkindly.

“Yeah, but if it’s human blood, or animal blood, that might tell us something.”

“It’s already told us something,” I said. I gave Ratso a quick rundown on the phone call I’d had with Jim Bone. When I finished he tried to whistle but it was too early in the morning. He settled for looking pale.

“The last thing the cops want to hear,” I said as I continued washing off the blood, “is some yarn about ancient civilizations. Cops are not anthropologists. They find other ways of being tedious.”

“I still don’t think you should’ve washed it off.” 

“It’s either that or look at the son of a bitch every time I come in. It’s probably nothing anyway.”

Ratso didn’t look convinced.

As I paced up and down the loft and listened to him gargle, cough, and flush the toilet about seven times, I didn’t think I was too convinced either. All of us will be relics someday, I thought. Let’s just hope somebody nice finds us. It was probably too much to ask that somebody nice should find us while we’re still alive.

Ratso came out of the bathroom, got dressed, and put on a pair of telephone repairman’s rubber boots that almost went up to his waist.

“I hate rain,” he said.

“I love the rain,” I said.

The cat, who was sleeping peacefully on the rocker, didn’t say anything, but it was safe to say, I thought, that she loved the rain, too.

I looked at the open door of the loft. There was still a ghostly shadow where the red paw print had been. It didn’t look like the kind of thing Ajax and hot water would get rid of. I doubted if Mr. Clean was going to cut much ice either. I was going to have to get a new door or a new loft.

No matter what I did, I had the feeling the ghostly shadow would always be there. If not on the door, in the nightmare of my mind’s eye.

48

The snow was beginning to mix with the rain as Ratso and I walked along Twelfth Street that Saturday night. It was just a little after eight o’clock and young men were picking up young women for dining engagements. Young men were picking up young men for dining engagements. Young women were picking up young women for dining engagements. You are what you eat.

It was Saturday night. It was the Village. It was America. It was 1988. It was cold. About the only thing it wasn’t, was very pleasant. In the far reaches of my peripheral vision I could see a specter lurking. I could feel the frostbitten wings of angels occasionally brushing against my cowboy hat. Something besides rain, snow, cheap perfume, and roasting chestnuts was in the air. It was death—possibly the only dinner guest more unwelcome than Sidney Poitier.

As we crossed Fifth Avenue, the rain seemed to let up and the snow began to fall more heavily. In the white-and-gray dimness I could just make out the giant iguana on the roof of the Lone Star Cafe one block up the street. It stood like a beacon to rather ill pilgrims. Even in that weather, I felt the chill it gave me.

It’d been a little over a year ago that I’d played the Lone Star. It had been the performance of my life and damn nearly the last performance of my life. Now everything was back to normal at the Lone Star except that Cleve was sending me postcards from the mental hospital, and when I wanted a waiter to bring my check I seldom used the phrase “Drop the hatchet” anymore.

On the other side of Fifth, a cat jumped out of a garbage can. From force of habit, I tailed him a little way down the block. It wasn’t Rocky. Kind of hard to keep your mind on a missing cat when you knew that soon you might be missing your lungs.

We banked a sharp left in the middle of Twelfth between Fifth and University and went down a few steps and through a couple doors into Asti’s Italian restaurant, where the waiters, bartenders, busboys, and the guy that checks your hat and coat all sing opera.

As we came in the place, Augie, the owner, was behind the bar banging out “Dixie” on the rows of bottles. Then he moved over to the cash register and played a few more choruses, using the keys to ring up the melody and sliding the cash drawer in and out for percussion.

“Versatile,” said Ratso to a group of well-dressed European tourists. They looked at him like they thought he’d just flown in from the coast and hadn’t bothered to take a plane.

Saturday night is not the best night to go to Asti’s. There’re a few too many tourists from Iowa, Japan, and the Upper West Side. But if it wasn’t for tourists in New York, they’d probably have to close the Empire State Building, the Staten Island ferry, and the Statue of Liberty, because the locals would stay away in droves.

My knowledge of opera extends to
The Student Prince
, which I know isn’t really opera but is very good, and sometimes
La Bohème,
Asti’s draws heavily from both of these, some show tunes, some long-haired, fat-lady type songs that are good to get drunk by, and medleys of things like “Dixie,” 

“When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and “Hava Nagila,” which say something to everyone but Japanese businessmen.

Asti’s was founded by Augie’s father on the date Caruso died. You can’t urinate in the place without coming face to face with autographed photos of Toscanini sailing for America and Caruso singing an aria. Augie assures me Caruso did not die after he ate there.