Cat Raise The Dead

4

In the hills high above the village a miniature world of tiny creatures crept through the grass, vibrating and humming, a community whose members were unaware of any existence but their own, of any needs but their own to kill or be killed, to eat or be eaten. The two cats, poised above this Lilliputian landscape, waited motionless to strike. Around them the grass stems had been pushed aside to carve out little mouse-sized trails, but some of the paths were wide enough for rabbits, too, major lanes winding away, dotted with pungent droppings. One pile of rabbit scat was so fresh that grass blades still shivered from the animal's swift flight. The cats, leaping to follow, panted with anticipation.

Above them the clouds drew apart, freeing the moon's light, and the moon itself swam between washes of blowing vapor; the dark hills caught the light, humping between earth and sky like the bodies of sprawled, sleeping beasts.

All night they had worked together stalking cooperatively, not as normal cats hunt but as a pair of lions would hunt, hazing and driving their prey. Dulcie's eyes burned toward the trembling shadows, her smile was a killer's smile, her paws were swift. She was not, now, Wilma's cosseted kitty rolling on stolen silk teddies.

But yet as they hunted, a poetry filled her, and she began to imagine she was Bast, stalking among papyrus thickets, clutching live geese in her teeth. Racing through the grass, she was Bast, hunting beside Egyptian kings, Bast the revered cat goddess, Bast the serpent slayer leaping to the kill…

The rabbit spun and bolted straight at her and beyond her, exploded away, was past before she could strike. She jerked around streaking after it, hot with embarrassment. Joe had flushed the creature nearly into her paws, and she had missed it. It sped away, kicking sand in her face, dodged, zigzagged, showed her only its white fluff tail, and disappeared into a tangle of wild holly. Her nostrils were filled with its fear and with the smell of her own shame.

But then it swerved out again, and she dodged after it. As it doubled back she sprang, snatched it in midair, clamped her teeth deep into its struggling body.

Its scream cut the night as she tasted its blood, its cry was shrill, as terrified as the scream of a murdered woman. It raked her with its hind claws, slashing at her belly. She bit deeper, opening its throat. It jerked and stopped struggling and was still, limp and warm, the life draining from it.

She carried the rabbit back to Joe, and they bent together over the kill. He did not mention her daydreaming inattention. He scarfed his share of the carcass, rending and tearing, flinging the fur away, crunching bone.

"Someday," she said, "you're going to choke yourself, gorging. Snuff out your own life, victim to a sliver of rabbit bone."

"So call 911. What were you dreaming, back there?" He gave her an annoyed male look, and ripped fur and flesh from the bones.

She didn't answer. He shrugged. The rabbit was succulent and sweet, fattened on garden flowers. Dulcie skinned her half carefully, then stripped morsels of meat from the little bones, eating slowly. Only when the bones were clean, when nothing was left but bones and skull, did they settle in for a wash. Licking themselves, cleaning their faces, then their paws, working carefully in between claws and between their sensitive pads, they at last cleaned each other's ears. Then, stomachs full, they sat in the moonlight, looking down upon the village, at the moonstruck rooftops beneath the dark oaks and eucalyptus.

Because many of the village shops had once been summer cottages, the entire village was now a tangled mix: shops, cottages, galleries, and motels, crowded together any which way. But where the hills rose above the village, the houses were newer and farther apart, with dry yellow verges between. It was here that the cats hunted. Besides the rabbits and ground squirrels, the mice and birds, there were occasional large and bad-tempered rats. Both cats carried scars from rat fights; and Joe remembered too vividly the rats in San Francisco's alleys when he was a kitten, rats that had seemed, then, as big and dangerous as Rottweilers.

It was Clyde who had rescued him from those dark alleys. He'd had a piece of luck landing with Clyde and then the two of them moving down here to Molena Point. Though if he ever admitted to Clyde how much he really did like the village, he'd never hear the last of it.

"What are you thinking?"

"That Clyde can be a damned headache."

She stared at him. "You mean about the Pet-a-Pet program? If Clyde ordered you not to go near Casa Capri, you'd be up there in the shake of a whisker."

"I wasn't thinking of… Oh, forget it."

She looked at him unblinking.

"You're going to keep at it, aren't you? Keep nagging until I agree."

"What did I say?"

"Staring a hole through my head."

"You could at least try."

He looked hard at her.

She smiled and licked his ear.

He watched her warily.

"They talk to me, Joe. That little Mrs. Rose, she tells me all kinds of secrets. I feel so sorry for her sometimes." She didn't intend to tell him all of Mae Rose's secret, but she'd like to tweak his curiosity ever so slightly.

He lay down and rolled over, crushing the grass beneath his gray shoulders. Lying upside down staring at the sky, he glanced at her narrowly. There was more to this Casa Capri business than she was saying.

She patted at a blade of grass. "Those old people need someone to tell their secrets to."

The cry of a nighthawk swept the moonlit sky, its chee chee chee rising and dropping as the bird circled, sucking up mosquitoes and gnats.

She said, "Wilma tells them stories:"

"Tells who stories?"

"The old people. Cat stories. About the Egyptian tombs and cat mummies and Egyptian hunting cats and about…"

He flipped to his feet, staring at her.

"Not about speaking cats," she said softly. "Just cat stories. She's always done story hour for the children at the library. This is no different. Both our visits, after the cats and dogs were all settled down in the old people's laps, when everyone was yawning and cozy, she told stories.

"She told the little milkmaid cat. You know, There was a little cat down Tibb's Farm, not much more'n a kitten-a little dairy maid with a face so clean as a daisy but she wanted to know too much… And all was elder there and there was a queer wind used to blow there …"

"Boring. Boring as hell. Probably the old people love that stuff."

But her look iced him right down to his claws.

"And why do they need animals to visit them, if Wilma tells them stories? Isn't that excitement enough? You don't want to overtax those old folks."

She sighed.

"Get her to read that story by Colette, the one where the cat gets pushed off the high-rise balcony, that ought to grab them."

She shivered and moved closer to him in the tall grass. They were quiet for a while, listening to the nighthawk and to the far pounding of the sea. But, thinking of Casa Capri, she felt like the little milkmaid cat. She wanted to know too much. She was certain, deep in her cat belly, that she was going to find, like the little milkmaid, that there was summat bad down there.

She could hardly wait.