it was necessary to apply as many anti-bacteriological 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 I 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 Good all 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,