“Dude, when you’re angry, you sure do get foulmouthed .”
“He knows he’s taking an unconscionable risk with Toby, and it’s eating
him alive, even if he won’t admit it.” Bobby sighed. “I feel for Manuel.
I do. But the dude scares me more than Feeney.”
“Feeney’s becoming, ” I said.
“No shit. But Manuel scares me because he’s become what he’s become
without becoming. You know? ”
“I know.”
“You think it’s true about the vaccine? ” Bobby asked, returning the
battered toaster to the counter.
“Yeah. But will it work the way they think it will? ”
“Nothing else did.”
“We know the other part is true, ” I said. “The psychological
implosion.”
“The birds.”
“Maybe the coyotes.”
“I’d feel totally super-mellow about all this, ” Bobby said, returning
the butcher knife to the cutlery drawer, “if I didn’t know your mom’s
bug is only part of the problem.”
“Mystery Train, ” I said, remembering the thing or things inside
Hodgson’s suit, Delacroix’s body, the testament on the audiotape, and
the cocoons.
The doorbell rang, and Bobby said, “Tell them if they want to come in
here and bust things up, we have new rules. A hundred-dollar cover
charge, and everyone wears neckties.” I went into the foyer and peered
through one of the clearer panes in a stained-glass sidelight.
The figure at the door was so big that you might have thought one of the
oak trees had pulled up its roots, climbed the steps, and rung the bell
to request a hundred pounds of fertilizer.
I opened the door and stepped back from the light to let our visitor
enter.
Roosevelt Frost is tall, muscular, black, and dignified enough to make
the carved faces on Mount Rushmore look like the busts of sitcom stars.
Entering with Mungojerrie, a pale gray cat, nestled in the crook of his
left arm, he nudged the door shut behind them.
In a voice remarkable for its deep tone, its musicality, and its
gentleness, he said, “Good afternoon, son.”
“Thank you for coming, sir.”
“You’ve gotten yourself in trouble again.”
“That’s always a good bet with me.”
“Lots of death ahead, ” he said solemnly. “Sir?”
“That’s what the cat says.” I looked at Mungojerrie. Draped comfortably
over Roosevelt’s huge arm, he appeared to be boneless. The cat was so
limp that he might have been a stole or a muffler if Roosevelt had been
a man given to wearing stoles and mufflers, except that his green feline
eyes, flecked with gold, were alert, riveting, and filled with an
intelligence that was unmistakable and unnerving.
“Lots of death, ” Roosevelt repeated. “Whose? ”
“Ours.” Mungojerrie held my gaze.
Roosevelt said, “Cats know things.”
“Not everything.”
“Cats know, ” Roosevelt insisted.
The cat’s eyes seemed to be full of sadness.
Roosevelt put Mungojerrie on one of the kitchen chairs so the cat
wouldn’t cut his paws on the splinters of broken china that still
littered the floor. Although Mungojerrie is a Wyvern escapee, bred in
the genetics labs, perhaps as smart as good Orson, certainly as smart as
the average contestant on Wheel of Fortune, smarter than the majority of
the policy advisers to the White House during most of the past century,
he was nevertheless sufficiently catlike to be able to curl up and go
instantly to sleep even though this was, by his prediction, doomsday eve
and though we were unlikely to be alive by dawn. Cats may know things,
as Roosevelt says, but they don’t suffer from hyperactive imaginations
or prickly-pear nerves like mine.
As for knowing things, Roosevelt himself knows more than a few.
He knows football because he was, in the sixties and seventies, a major
gridiron star, whom sportswriters dubbed the Sledgehammer. Now, at sixty
three, he’s a successful businessman who owns a men’s clothing store, a
minimall, and half-interest in the Moonlight Bay Inn and Country Club.
He also knows a lot about the sea and boats, living aboard the fifty-six
foot Nostromo, in the last berth of the Moonlight Bay marina. And, of
course, he can talk to animals better than Dr. Do little, which is a
handy talent to have here in Edgar Allan Disneyland.