The four cuts in his side weren’t deep, but they bled freely.
Roosevelt settled into a chair at the table. He’d gotten some ice cubes from the freezer and wrapped them in a dish towel. He held this compress to his left eye, which was swelling shut. Fortunately, the bud vase hadn’t shattered when it hit him, because otherwise he might have had splinters of porcelain in his eye.
“Bad?” I asked.
“Had worse.”
“Football?”
“Alex Karras.”
“Great player.”
“Big.”
“He run you down?”
“More than once.”
“Like a truck,” I suggested.
“A Mack. This was just a damn vase.”
Sasha saturated a cloth with hydrogen peroxide and pressed it repeatedly to Bobby’s wounds. Every time she took the cloth away, the shallow cuts bubbled furiously with bloody foam.
I couldn’t have ached in more places if I’d spent the past six hours tumbling around in an industrial clothes dryer.
I washed down two aspirin with a few sips of an Orange Crush that I found in the Stanwyks’ refrigerator. The can shook so badly that I drizzled more soda over my chin and clothes than I managed to drink — suggesting that my folks had been misguided when they allowed me to stop wearing a bib at the age of five.
After several applications of the peroxide, Sasha switched to rubbing alcohol and repeated the treatment. Bobby wasn’t bothering to hiss anymore; he was just grinding his teeth to dust. Finally, when he had ground away enough dental surface to be limited to a soft diet for life, she smeared the still-weeping wounds with Neosporin.
This extensive first aid was conducted without comment. We all knew why it was necessary to apply as many antibacteriological agents as possible to his wounds, and talking about it would only scare the crap out of us.
In the weeks and months to come, Bobby would be spending more time than usual in front of a mirror, checking himself out, and not because he was vain. He’d be more aware of his hands, too, watching for something…teratoid.
Roosevelt’s eye was swollen to a slit. Nevertheless, he still believed in the ice.
While Sasha finished wrapping Bobby’s cuts with gauze bandages, I found a chalk message slate and pegboard beside the door connecting the kitchen to the garage. Sets of car keys hung on the pegs. Sasha wouldn’t have to hot-wire a car, after all.
In the garage were a red Jaguar and a white Ford Expedition.
By flashlight, I lowered the rear seat in the Expedition to enlarge the cargo area. This would allow Roosevelt and Bobby to lie down, below window level. We might draw more attention as a group than Sasha would draw if she appeared to be alone.
Because Sasha knew exactly where we were going out on Haddenbeck Road, she would drive.
When Bobby entered the garage with Sasha and Roosevelt, he was wearing his pullover and Hawaiian shirt again, and moving somewhat stiffly.
“You be okay back here?” I asked, indicating the rear of the Expedition.
“I’ll grab some nap time.”
In the front passenger’s seat, when I slumped below the window line in a classic fugitive-on-the-lam posture, I became acutely aware of every contusion, neck to toe. But I was alive. Earlier, I’d been sure we wouldn’t all leave the Stanwyk house with beating hearts and brain activity, but I’d been wrong. When it comes to presentiments of disaster, perhaps cats know things, but Christopher Snow’s hunches can’t necessarily be trusted — which is comforting, actually.
When Sasha started the engine, Mungojerrie scrambled onto the console between the front seats. He sat erect, ears pricked, looking forward, like a misplaced hood ornament.
Sasha used a remote control to put up the electric garage door, and I said, “You okay?”
“No.”
“Good.”
I knew that she was physically unhurt and that her answer referred to her emotional state. Killing Tom Eliot, Sasha had done the only thing she could do, perhaps saving one or more of our lives while sparing the priest from a hideous frenzy of self-destruction, and yet the firing of those three shots had sickened her; now she was living under a grave weight of moral responsibility. Not guilt. She was smart enough to know that no guilt should attend what she’d done. But she also knew that even moral acts can have dimensions that scar the mind and wound the heart. If she had answered my question with a smile and assurances that she was fine, she would not have been the Sasha Goodall that I love, and I would have had reason to suspect that she was becoming.
We rode through Moonlight Bay in silence, each of us occupied with his or her own thoughts.
A couple miles from the Stanwyk house, the cat lost interest in the view through the windshield. He surprised me by stepping down onto my chest and peering into my eyes.
His green gaze was intense and unwavering, and I met it directly for an eerily long time, wondering what he might be thinking.
How radically different his thinking must be from ours, even if he shares our high level of intelligence. He experiences this world from a perspective nearly as unlike ours as our perspective would be unlike that of a being raised on another planet. He faces each day without carrying on his back the weight of human history, philosophy, triumph, tragedy, noble intentions, foolishness, greed, envy, and hubris; it must be liberating to be without that burden. He is both savage and civilized. He is closer to nature than we are; therefore, he has fewer illusions about it, knows that life is hard by design, that nature is beautiful but cold. And although Roosevelt says other cats of Mungojerrie’s breed escaped from Wyvern, their numbers cannot be large; while Mungojerrie isn’t as singular a specimen as Orson seems to be, and while cats by nature are more adaptable to solitude than dogs are, this small creature must at times know a profound loneliness.
When I began to pet him, Mungojerrie broke eye contact and curled up on my chest. He was a small, warm weight, and I could feel his heartbeat both against my body and under my stroking hand.
I am not an animal communicator, but I think I know why he led us into the Stanwyk house. We were not there to bear witness to the dead. We were there solely to do what needed to be done for Father Tom Eliot.
Since time immemorial, people have suspected that some animals have at least one sense in addition to our own. An awareness of things we do not see. A prescience.
Couple that special perception with intelligence, and suppose that with greater intelligence comes a more refined conscience. In passing the Stanwyk house, Mungojerrie might have sensed the mental anguish, the spiritual agony, and the emotional pain of Father Tom Eliot — and might have felt compelled to bring deliverance to that suffering man.
Or maybe I’m full of crap.
The possibility exists that I am both full of crap and right about Mungojerrie.
23
Haddenbeck Road is a lonely stretch of two-lane blacktop that for a few miles runs due east, paralleling the southern perimeter of Fort Wyvern, but then strikes southeast, serving a score of ranches in the least populated portion of the county. Summer heat, winter rains, and California’s most violent weather — earthquakes — have left the pavement cracked, hoved, and ragged at the edges. Skirts of wild grass and, for a short while here in early spring, an embroidery of wildflowers separate the highway from the sensuously rolling fields that embrace it.
When we had traveled some distance without encountering oncoming headlights, Sasha suddenly braked to
