Spotted Cats

by William G. Tapply

  She shut the door. I smiled at it. Then I called Charlie. He’s a prosecutor for the United States Justice Department. His office is located across town in Government Centre on Cambridge Street. Charlie and I went to Yale Law together. He’s a good friend and my number one fishing partner. When Shirley, his secretary, answered, I said, ‘Hello, sexy.’

  She giggled. ‘Oh, you silly, Mr Coyne.’

  ‘How are the grandchildren, Shirl?’

  ‘Lorraine had a baby two weeks ago. A beautiful little boy.’

  ‘What’s that make?’

  ‘Sixteen. And Jimmy’s wife is expecting again.’

  ‘Marvellous. Congratulations. Hard to believe, a young chick like you with grandchildren.’

  ‘Oh, stop,’ she said. I knew she was smiling. ‘I hope you’re planning on taking himself fishing, Mr Coyne. He’s working so hard. He’s just been a bundle of nerves lately.’

  ‘Matter of fact, I am. Is he there?’

  ‘I’ll get him for you.’

  A moment later Charlie came on the line. ‘Hey, Brady,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Dan LaBreque’s boat in Gloucester. Five-thirty Wednesday. That’s five-thirty in the morning. Bring your fly rod.’

  ‘Music to my ears. Say no more.’

  ‘Charlie, I’ve got to say one more thing.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he grumbled. ‘I figured as much.’

  ‘I need you to check your computers for me.’

  ‘Aw, Brady. I thought you’d learned your lesson by now. You’re not off detecting again, are you?’

  ‘Naw. Just need some background. It’s for a client.’

  ‘Oh, sure. I know you, pal.’

  ‘Honest.’

  I heard him expel a loud breath. ‘You gonna tell me about it?’

  ‘After we catch our fill of blues.’

  He sighed again. ‘OK. What do you want?’

  ‘Three names, for now. Lillian Robbins. Alan Sauerman. Martin Lodi.’

  ‘Hang on. One at a time. Spell them.’

  I spelled Lily’s name for him.

  ‘Where’s she live?’

  ‘The Cape. Orleans.’

  ‘You want criminal records? Tax history?’

  ‘Anything you can get.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said. ‘Next.’

  ‘Alan Sauerman,’ I said. ‘A doctor. Orleans, also, or someplace nearby.’ I spelled that for him, too.

  ‘This is gonna cost you, Coyne.’

  ‘I’ll buy lunch at Gert’s after we load the boat with bluefish.’

  ‘Damn tootin’ you will,’ said Charlie. ‘Sauerman. Robbins. All right. What was the other one?’

  ‘Someone named Martin Lodi,’ I said. ‘I’ve got no idea where he lives.’

  ‘And you want this by Wednesday?’

  ‘If possible. Please.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ said Charlie.

  I waited until noon to call Maria Conway in Phoenix. They were two or three hours behind us, I could never remember which.

  A secretary put me through to her. When I told her my name, and reminded her of the time she and Dan LaBreque had driven down to Orleans to appraise Jeff Newton’s jaguars, she claimed to remember me. ‘I still see Dan about once a year,’ she said. ‘There’s an annual convention in Chicago we both attend. We talk on the phone now and then, too. Dan’s been a good friend. He helped me find this job. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Dan suggested I call you. Those jaguars were stolen. Dan said you had a handle on the market for Mayan art.’

  ‘Not the market for stolen art, Mr Coyne. Anyway, as I remember it, Mr Newton brought in those jaguars from Mexico illegally.’

  ‘Maybe he did. It’s not so much the cats I’m after. It’s kind of personal with me. I was there when they were taken. Jeff was seriously injured. I’d really like to track down who did it.’

  ‘I can keep my ears open.’

  ‘Will you do that?’

  ‘If Dan told you to call, that’s good enough for me. I guess I know most of the collectors and museum people in our field. If there’s any activity in new Mayan stuff, one of us will hear about it. I’ll ask around.’

  ‘Well, thanks.’

  ‘You know, Mr Coyne, it’s not likely your cats will show up in any legitimate places. I mean, you shouldn’t be holding your breath.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve got some other things to do.’

  CHAPTER 8

  WEDNESDAY THE SUN ROSE at four thirty-two. I was waiting for it on my balcony with my second cup of coffee. For half an hour I had watched the painting of the sky over the harbour—grey evolving into the palest yellow and shifting by imperceptible stages through gold into orange. Then, in an instant, the rim of the sun popped out of the ocean.

  I had been sitting out there with my early morning thoughts, the kind of clear but untrustworthy insights that seem to come to me first thing in the day before my censoring process kicks in, allowing me to analyse them and reduce them to reason. Usually they take the form of regrets—opportunities unrecognized, mistakes unforgiven, betrayals unavenged, the litany of all our lives. Sometimes they linger with me all day as a vague discomfort in my gut. More often they dissolve like the ocean mists when the sun rises.

  My regret on this new day focused on a marriage that had gone sour, on two little boys who had somehow become men, or close to it, while I wasn’t looking, on my own independent ways, which struck me, just then, as unbearably selfish and empty, on my isolation from the people who meant the most to me, and on my recognition of the harsh truth that all of that seemed to suit me fine.

  I had finally reached Joey on Monday evening. He answered the phone himself, for which I was grateful. I hadn’t the courage to talk to Gloria again.

  ‘Yo,’ he said when he picked it up.

  ‘It’s your old man.’

  ‘Oh. Hi, Dad.’ So it was still ‘Dad’.

  ‘Have a good weekend?’

  ‘It was OK.’

  ‘That volleyball jock?’

  ‘Debbie? Sure. Mostly me and Cliff hung out. I stayed over at his house. What about you?’

  ‘I was down the Cape. Did some fishing.’

  ‘Get some?’

  ‘Yes. It was pretty good. Look, you tried to call me…’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘So what’s up?’

  ‘It’s kinda hard right now…’

  ‘Something to do with your mother?’

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘She’s there?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Want to talk?’

  ‘Yes. Can I call you back?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Five minutes.’

  I hung up and waited at my kitchen table, watching the lights wink and flicker over the ocean outside my apartment. It was nearly fifteen minutes later when the phone rang.

  ‘Joey,’ I answered.

  ‘It’s me. Look, Dad, I got a real problem here.’

  ‘So I understand.’

  ‘You talked to Mom?’

  ‘Yes. She told me her side.’

  ‘Yeah, well that’s why I didn’t get right back to you. I had to take out the trash. She’s really on my case.’

  ‘Anything wrong with taking out the trash?’

  He hesitated. ‘That’s not the point. It’s like I’ve got to ask her permission before I take a leak, practically. She’s bitching at me all the time. I never do this, I never do that, I spend too much time with Debbie, there’s no way I’m doing my homework, the house is a mess, the lawn needs mowing, I should do my own laundry, she has to do all the vacuuming. She was never like this when Billy was here. I’m going nuts.’

  ‘So’s she.’

  ‘You’re not kidding.’

  ‘Is she right?’

  ‘What do you mean? Oh. Well, in a way, I guess. But I try, Dad. I mean, sometimes I do things. She never even notices. She only notices when I don’t. It’s like heads you win, tai
ls I lose. Know what I mean?’

  I found myself nodding. I sure did know. ‘Since Billy went off to school,’ I said, ‘it’s just the two of you. That’s hard for her. She’s sad because you’ll be gone in a year or so, too.’

  ‘She’s got a funny way of showing it.’

  ‘You’ve got to try to get along.’

  ‘Shit. I am trying. She’s not. I can’t take it.’

  ‘Try harder. It’s a big house. You live there, too. She’s not your slave, you know. You can make things easy, or you can make things hard. Do things before she has to remind you. She’ll notice.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Look, Dad.’

  ‘What, son?’

  ‘Well, I had this idea.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, I mean, you guys have like joint custody, right?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I mean, I could live with you, right?’

  ‘Is that what you want?’ I said carefully.

  ‘It’d be great, Pop. Don’t you think?’

  ‘I haven’t had a chance to think it through.’ I hesitated. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Sure I have. That’s why I called you.’

  ‘You can solve your issue with your mother by running away from it, huh?’

  He was quiet for a minute. ‘You’re saying no, right?’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying, you’ve got to think it all the way through. I’m saying that you can’t run away from your problems. I’m saying you’ve got to think about your mother.’

  ‘I think Mom would be thrilled,’ he said.

  ‘You better think again, then.’

  I heard him sigh. ‘I guess I hear you.’

  ‘What do you hear?’

  ‘It’s a dumb idea.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t want you,’ I said, though even as I said it I wondered if I was telling the truth.

  ‘Sure. It’s OK. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I am worried about it. Your happiness—and your mother’s—is important to me.’

  ‘It’ll work out,’ he said. ‘Look. I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later, OK?’

  ‘Sure, son. Talk to your mother.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll do that.’

  And we hung up.

  And now I was staring out at the sunrise, awake while the rest of the world still slept, and for some reason that conversation with Joey, with his litany of complaints about Gloria, and hers about him, reminded me of what I have been told more than once and in more than one way by more than one female person: I don’t know very much about women. Correct that. I don’t know much about intimate and complicated human relationships. Which probably accounts for the fact that I can’t seem to sustain many of them, and those that I do manage to hang on to seem to cause me more unhappiness than joy. And which in turn probably accounts for the fact that I live alone and can’t imagine living any other way, however lonely and empty it sometimes feels first thing in the morning.

  I love my sons beyond all reason. But I couldn’t imagine one of them living with me.

  I downed the dregs of my coffee and went back inside. I picked up my Winston ten-weight fly rod and saltwater reel, the plastic box of bluefish poppers, and the spool of twenty-pound wire leader from the table where I had assembled them the previous night. Then I elevatored six floors down to the parking garage under my apartment building. I climbed into my car and pointed it north to Gloucester.

  Dan and Charlie were waiting for me at the marina. Dan was in the cabin of Cap’n Hook, his twenty-two-foot Grady-White, fussing with the controls. Charlie was wrestling aboard a big cooler which, I knew, contained more beer and Pepsi-Cola and ham and Swiss cheese sandwiches on pumpernickel than the three of us could consume in a week. We would be well fortified should Cap’n Hook’s engines betray us ten miles out to sea.

  Charlie looked up and nodded when I climbed aboard. He was already sweating from his exertions. It was going to be a hot one. I said good morning to Dan, who lifted his hand to me without turning around. He was wearing a long-billed fisherman’s cap, a faded T-shirt celebrating Woodstock, stained chinos, and boat shoes without socks. His seagoing uniform.

  ‘Shall I get the lines?’ I said.

  ‘We been waitin’ on you,’ he answered in the exaggerated Downeast lobsterman’s drawl he unconsciously tended to adopt when he was aboard his boat.

  ‘I’m not late.’

  ‘Ain’t early, neither.’

  The twin diesels began to burble. I climbed out, untied the lines, coiled them and passed them in to Charlie, then stepped back into the boat. Dan eased us away from the dock. I unfastened the bumpers and stowed them. Then I ducked into the cabin.

  Dan waved at a big thermos. ‘Java,’ he said. It was a command, the captain’s prerogative. I poured three mugs full, placed one in the spill-proof holder beside Dan where he stood at the wheel, and took two back to where Charlie was rigging fly rod.

  He accepted the mug I handed him and nodded. I grunted. I uncased my rod, screwed on the anodized saltwater reel, threaded the line through the guides, and knotted a foot and a half of wire to the end of the leader. I tied on a red and white popper, hooked it into the keeper ring, and set the rod aside. Then I sprawled into a deck chair with my coffee.

  Charlie and I stared at the water as Dan weaved among the boats and buoys of Gloucester Harbour. I took off the thin windbreaker I had worn. Charlie rubbed sun block on to his face and the backs of his hands.

  When we cleared the harbour, Dan turned left and we began to follow the shoreline northward. He throttled up and the growl of the engines became a whine. The bow lifted, then settled, and we skimmed across the sea. After ten or fifteen minutes he swung to the starboard. We were heading east, towards the sun, out into the ocean. I lounged back in my chair and closed my eyes, not to sleep but to savour the wash of salt air on my face and the clean smells of the open sea. They soon rinsed from my soul those lingering fragments of doubt and regret.

  Joey and Gloria would work things out. She was right. The only thing I could contribute was a little superficial philosophy. It was their problem. It had to be.

  The same with Lily Robbins and Alan Sauerman and officers Maroney and Kinney. The hell with them. And the hell with the bastards who had cut me with a knife in the nighttime. For that matter, the hell with Jeff Newton and his Mayan jaguars.

  I was going fishing.

  Abruptly the pitch of the engines changed. I opened my eyes. Dan was pointing. I looked. A pod of whales. There must have been a dozen or fifteen of them off the port bow, not close, but still huge and majestic, lolling and wallowing on the steely grey surface of the morning sea, surrounded by wheeling gulls. Dan eased us towards them. I saw one of the great mammals spout, a tall fountain of spray that caught the angled sunbeams and scattered them in a million particles of light over the sea. One of the huge beasts slapped his tail against the water like a giant beaver and sounded. A camera with a long lens on it had materialized in Charlie’s hands. He was at the side, snapping pictures as if he’d never seen whales before.

  Some years they were there, so commonplace that one soon ignored them. Then they would disappear for a year or two, following the erratic migration of the organisms that nourished them. And when they returned, we celebrated it until, once again, they became part of the scenery.

  We watched them for a while. I was glad they were back. After a few minutes, Dan gunned the engines and we jumped away, leaving the pod to its piece of ocean. Charlie and I returned to our seats.

  I wouldn’t ask Charlie about Lily or Alan Sauerman or Lily’s old boyfriend, Martin Lodi, nor would he volunteer anything on those subjects. Not out there, not while fishing. We conducted no business while fishing. That was one angling ethic that Charlie and I had never needed to discuss. It was too transparently obvious. Ten minutes later Dan slowed to trolling speed and we let out jointed lures from the boat rods, one just subsurface, one maybe ten feet down, and one o
n lead-core line to travel deep. Prospecting, Dan called it. We were looking for a school of blues to cast flies to.

  The first one hit fifteen minutes later. Charlie and I were sitting facing the stern, watching the rods fixed in their holders, monitoring the little vibrations at the tips that told us the plugs were still wobbling, that they hadn’t snagged seaweed. Abruptly one dipped and the reel began to screech. ‘Take it,’ I told Charlie. He grabbed the rod and held it high, while line peeled out. I reeled in the other two lines. Dan threw the engines into neutral.

  The bluefish fought doggedly, as they all do. They are strong. They don’t leap like tarpon, nor do they cut screaming high-speed runs across the sea like bonefish. But they come to the boat reluctantly, and when they do arrive they thrash and snap with those wicked teeth, and if you aren’t careful they’ll whip a big plug with three sets of treble hooks into your face.

  Charlie managed to get his fish alongside. Dan came back and reached down with a long-handled gaff. He impaled the blue through its lower lip and swung it aboard.

  Charlie kneeled beside the fish and gingerly removed the plug from its mouth. ‘A keeper?’ he asked Dan.

  Dan shook his head. ‘Nope. Too big. Ten-pounder, anyway. I don’t trust the PCB level of bluefish that big. Toss him back. Let’s see if you guys can’t snag a few five-pounders on your fly rods.’

  Charlie dropped his fish overboard. Dan stood at the stern, shading his eyes. After a minute he said, ‘There.’

  He pointed. I looked. I saw it, a patch of smooth water like an oil slick surrounded by the natural chop of the sea, and above it the gulls had begun to materialize, seemingly from nowhere. Bluefish sign. They were chasing baitfish towards the surface. I knew that not far beneath that deceptive island of flat ocean a school of blues was chopping and slashing at menhaden or baby eels, and the water was churning with gore and bits of fish meat and guts, and the blues were swirling and snapping frantically, impelled by their primeval appetites.

  Dan claims he can smell them. Melons, he says. I’ve never been able to detect the smell. Probably because I smoke.

  Dan eased us over until Cap’n Hook sat, her engines idling, on the edge of the slick. I climbed out on to the bow, rod in hand, and stood, legs wide and knees flexed against the rolling of the boat. Charlie was already casting from the stern. Up close, I could see the subsurface flashes of frenzied bluefish. Awkward in my eagerness, I stripped line off my reel and began to cast. In a moment Charlie had one on. Then my rod was nearly wrenched from my grip. My fly rod bent double and the single-action reel screamed as line was ripped off it. I could only hold my rod high and let the fish run against its resistance. I was into a bluefish, and all leftover thoughts of comatose friends and stolen jaguars and invaders of my sleep, both criminal and female, evaporated. I was on the sea with a bluefish on the end of my line and the world was a fine place.