by EQM
“I did the same thing. Hopefully it doesn’t work that way, though.”
“Hopefully not.”
“But maybe sometimes it does.”
Dan lowered himself onto one of the beanbags again and the three of them sat together, a stunned family. “Maybe there’s a story in this,” Dan said after a while.
“No, I don’t think so,” Gwen said, even though she knew that a story was exactly what Louise had intended to give her—a parting gift of sorts. “No,” she said again. “I don’t want it.”
Copyright © 2010 Jennifer Itell
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Fiction
CHEMO BOY AND THE WAR KITTENS
By Brian Muir
The story “Chemo Boy and the War Kittens” has a special significance for award-winning film writer Brian Muir, for he has battled cancer himself, more than once. We’re happy to be able to report that his health is currently good, and that 2010 is also treating him well in other respects: Broke Sky, an indie film he co-wrote, which won nearly a dozen film-festival awards, recently premiered on cable, on IFC. The series to which this new story belongs is surely one of the strongest P.I. series running at short-story length.
On the sole of my boot it spread; a Rorschach smear, crumpled legs reaching out in a quest to crawl, to spin a web, to hide in a dark crevasse waiting for juicy prey. I scraped it off into the kitchen garbage. Spiders have never been my favorite.
If Thumper had seen it creeping around, he would have scampered away, the big sissy. But he was asleep in a cool spot under the bed on this warm April morn.
Summer had made an early cameo in Portland and didn’t want to yield the spotlight to spring’s curtain call just yet, some roses coming out of the wings before their cue, blossoming deep scarlet.
I finished my cereal at the houseboat window. Waves lapped in the wake of an outboard puttering down the Willamette, fishermen in search of spring Chinook. They were wasting their time. With the warm April and not much rain lately, the river hadn’t risen enough for the fish to move. The runs were still holding up on the Columbia, so these guys on the river weren’t doing much but moving water around.
I walked up into the Sellwood district and The Coffee Shack. I said my how-dos to Rossa and he slid a brew across the counter, straight up. I slapped down change and he turned to grind beans, not interested in conversation, meaning he’d lost big at the casino the night before. Best to let him stew when he’s boiling about bad cards.
Other than me, the place was empty. I checked behind the Blazers’ team photo on the far wall, what passes for my P.O. box, surprised to find a folded note stuck there. I stuffed it in my pocket and took off.
Moments later, under a shaded awning, I sipped my joe and read the note. It was from a woman I’d helped a couple of years ago, who was being stalked by her coworker. A dash of the creep’s own medicine had scared him off; the woman no longer lived looking over her shoulder and she had a pleasant new coworker.
The problem she needed help with now involved a tortoise named Gamera.
Karen’s home was a modest two-story on Tolman not far from Reed College. An old pine snuggled the side of the house, cooling half of it with shade.
We caught up on old times in the kitchen over coffee; I used my Coffee Shack cup, saving her the wash on a mug. Among Karen’s crop of strawberry-blond locks, grey hairs took a proud stand, a middle-aged woman’s war paint. Her green eyes and warm smile of white teeth no doubt fueled MILF fantasies for young men at the grocery store, but she seemed satisfied staying single. Raising a teenaged son put more than enough strain on even the most casual of relationships.
The story she told me had been in the news over a month ago: A tortoise had been found in a field not far from here, near death. Someone had snatched him from Karen’s backyard, turned him over, and stabbed him with a length of rebar, leaving him on his back to bleed out. When I’d seen the story on TV I hadn’t made the connection to Karen’s name, so enraged was I at the thought of this defenseless animal being tortured with no way to defend itself or scream for help, slowly dying in silence.
Karen took me into the backyard to meet Gamera. Normally, he’d have the run of the place, but since the attack he was being housed in a large, reinforced chicken-wire cage with fresh lettuce heaped in one corner. A tube protruded from one nostril, leading to an oxygen tank on the far side of the cage; one of his lungs had been punctured by his attacker and the organ was still repairing itself.
Karen opened the cage and let me scratch Gamera atop the head. Hard to tell if he enjoyed it or not, but he didn’t pull back into his armor so I’m guessing my touch wasn’t too offensive. For a sixty-year-old (the vet’s best estimate) who had undergone a near-fatal stabbing a month ago, Gamera seemed to be faring pretty well.
“He’d lost a lot of blood by the time he was found,” Karen said. “But the vets say he’ll make it. Psychologically, I don’t know. Since he doesn’t meow or bark, I can’t tell how he’s feeling.”
“I know what you mean. My rabbit at least squeaks and squeals sometimes, so I can get a feel for what he’s going through.”
She nodded. “After we got him back, he didn’t want to eat. I had to force it down him. But he’s doing better.”
“The cops have no leads?”
“I can’t even get them on the phone anymore. They gave it a lot of legwork at first, especially after the news coverage, but now it’s not a high priority.”
“You could call the news again, ask them for help. The public is a sucker for a good animal story.”
“I tried. They said they would send somebody over but it was the same day that biker got hit.”
“The one who rode the hood of the car for six blocks? I remember.”
“Pretty soon there’s going to be a civil war between bikers and motorists in this city.”
“I’m already stocked up for it,” I told her.
She smiled but didn’t think it worth a chuckle, her mind dark with other matters. “The police figure Gamera was targeted; it seems more likely to them than a random attack.”
“They’re right.”
“I can’t imagine anybody I know doing something like this. It doesn’t make sense.”
“How about somebody your son knows?”
Karen glanced at an upper window, curtains drawn against the sun. “He says no. But I don’t know ... with everything he’s going through right now ...”
I squeezed her shoulder. “Mind if I talk to him?”
Donny’s room seemed par for the course for a boy of nineteen not prone to sports. Comic books lay scattered about the room; sci-fi and horror-movie posters decorated the walls; his computer screen pulsed with a fantasy game: bearded barbarian with bloody mail and gleaming broadsword.
In the chair before the desk, skin pale for lack of sun, Donny’s shoulders poked out like chicken bones, jeans hanging off his legs like a scarecrow’s wardrobe. His face was open and wide, not even a hint of stubble on his head, bald as a squid.
“Obviously, you’d be pissed if you knew who did that to him.”
He glared. “Obviously. Duh.”
Nothing but teen ’tude.
“Yeah,” I said. “Dumb question.”
I scanned the room, eyes falling on a shelf of ornate figurines of Japanese movie monsters.
“I’m guessing you’re the one who named the tortoise. Gamera? Wasn’t he the giant turtle that could tuck in his head and legs and go spinning through the air like a Fourth of July pinwheel?”
He grinned for the first time since I’d entered his sanctum sanctorum, the smile of someone who’d found a kindred spirit. A gap showed in his bottom teeth. “Touché,” he said. “A woman after my own stripe.”
“Touché? Your own stripe? Does that gamer-speak work on the ladies?”
He shrugged bony shoulders, “Not really.”
“Looks like it worked on that one.” I pointed to
a photo tacked on the cork-board amidst pages torn from Wired magazine: a cute Eurasian girl and Donny arm-in-arm; Donny with a full head of long blond hair.
As Donny’s eyes found the photo, longing flashed and then was gone. “She’s not my paramour ... my girlfriend. Not anymore. Since graduation we don’t really hang with the same crowd.”
“What’s her name?”
“Calico. Well, her real name is Marise. But everybody calls her Calico.”
“Like the cat?”
He nodded. “Because she’s mixed race, like a calico’s fur is different colors.”
He shifted tiredly in his chair, changing the subject: “You going to help track down the scoundrel who hurt Gamera?”
“Scoundrel? Back to gamer-speak, I see.”
He shrugged.
I said, “I can think of a few other descriptive insults for whoever did that to Gamera. Most have fewer letters than ‘scoundrel’ and cut right to the meat of the matter. Not suitable for a family audience, as they say.”
“Using that sort of language might take the sheen off the luster of such a fine maiden.” He grinned.
I grinned back. Maybe that overblown verbiage would work on some of the ladies after all.
He said, “When you find whoever did it, let me have a crack at them. I’ll inflict injuries my avatar hasn’t even been programmed for.”
“Touché.”
Calico had an apartment off Powell, in a run-down complex up around 120th. Sitting in my Willys Jeep outside, I kept an eye on the complex, watching her enter the building in the company of a roughly cute twentyish guy of the black T-shirt set, his shorts ending down around his shins, a chain loop dangling from one pocket. The stocking cap over his dark curlicues was a pointless gesture in this heat and made him look like an idiot. But Calico obviously had no problem with it as the two snuggled arm in arm.
As evening fell, I chowed fast food, trying to decipher the tailgate of a pickup parked in front of me, adorned with a Jesus fish that had swallowed a Star of David. Burger grease dripped onto my jeans, making me bounce and curse a blue streak. That stuff is hell to wash out, ruining a perfectly good pair of True Religions. I’d often thought about wearing thrift-store duds on recon, but my vanity precluded such sound rationale. By the time I looked up from trying to dab out the grease spot, Calico and Stocking Cap were climbing into an old VW with mismatched paint, she driving.
As the VW chattered down the block, I shoved the Willys in gear and took off after.
They drove a couple miles, sticking to the Southeast side, pulling over at a little one-story job with a weed-choked lawn. The open garage door spilled light onto the cracked drive. Rolling past, I managed to side-eye a drum set in the corner of the garage, near a wall of hanging tools.
I parked halfway up the block. Sat for a few minutes and waited.
Then I heard the sound.
It slammed into my ears without warning, a pounding, crying, screeching sonic boom. Like the noise a drunk driver might cause mowing down a marching band at ninety miles per hour, complete with bloodcurdling wail of the entire horn section crumpled in the street, legs snapped in compound fractures.
I got out of the Jeep and walked toward the house, face scrunched, legs not willing to take me into the abyss.
Stopping at the end of the drive, I kept one hand over an ear, not much help. Calico twanged bass licks while Stocking Cap pounded the skins like a serial killer whose modus operandi involved bashing heads with ball-peen hammers. The singer doubled as lead guitarist; he should’ve picked one or the other, his reach far outdistancing his grasp. Sweat glued his long hair to his cheeks as he wailed indecipherable lyrics.
The sound waves tickled my face. Shouting, I couldn’t even hear my own voice over the roar. The band didn’t stop playing until the song was finished, many moons for yours truly.
Calico swung her gaze my way. “What did you say?”
“I said, do your neighbors ever complain about the noise?”
The singer answered in a voice much higher than the gravel his vocal cords produced while ‘singing.’ “As long as we stop by midnight, they’re cool.”
“Tolerant people.”
“Or they like good music,” Stocking Cap sneered.
“That’s your spin.” I tore a flyer off the guitar case leaning against the garage wall. The bright blue paper shouted: Friday Nite at the Rue Morgue! 8 PM! The War Kittens! The graphics showed four silhouettes, cat people wielding weapons.
“The War Kittens? That’s you guys?”
The singer nodded, surly.
Me: “Sounds like something out of a Zelazny novel.”
The singer: “Who?”
Me: “Never mind. How come there’s four of you on the flyer but only three of you here?”
The singer again: “Had to cut one loose, baby. Call it a clash of personalities.”
“Call me ‘baby’ again and I’ll show you a real clash of personalities.”
He shrugged.
Calico tipped her head toward the hairy singer. “That’s Manx.”
“Why, because he lost his tail?”
“’Cause my last name’s Manxman—” As if wanting to add an insult directed at me, he smartly cut himself short.
Calico pointed at Stocking Cap. “That’s Rex. A Rex is a type of cat, too. They have curly fur.”
“And high body temps,” said Rex, twirling his sticks, “Because I’m so hot.” He pounded a quick solo, not without its licks but still whiffing of amateur.
“A rim shot would have sufficed,” I offered.
“And I’m Calico,” she said.
“Because you’re mixed race,” I surprised her. “Donny told me.”
“You know Donny?”
“Met him this morning. Helping him out with the Gamera situation.”
Rex rolled his eyes. “Not that freakin’ turtle again!”
“It’s a tortoise,” I said.
“Whatever. I just don’t see what the big deal is.”
“You think it’s okay for someone to abuse an animal?”
“It’s not like it’s a kid or something.”
“Cool it, Rex,” Calico seemed irritated by his attitude.
“Cops already asked us about this,” sneered Manx. “You’re not a cop, are you?”
“Just a friend of Donny’s. Like you, Calico.”
She lowered her eyes. “I haven’t talked to him since last year—”
“That’s all over,” Rex cut her off.
To Calico I said, “If you want to tell me the history—in private—leave me a message at Rossa’s Coffee Shack. You guys too, if you can think of anything that’ll help me with the Gamera thing.”
Rex scowled. Manx tightened guitar strings.
I nodded and turned to go. “By the way, what are the War Kittens at war with?”
Manx lifted his proud chin. “Conventional rock ’n’ roll.”
“You certainly are.”
Providence Portland up on N.E. Glisan dominated a neighborhood of middle-class homes and shops; the new Center of Hope cancer clinic towered next to it. Between light clouds, sun broke through to warm the manicured grounds.
I’ve been to hospitals with metal detectors, but Center of Hope doesn’t have one. Not yet, anyway. As if patients don’t have enough to worry about being sliced and diced in the name of healing, we have to add the possibility some nutball might sneak a firearm in with deadly intent. Problem is, if said nutball’s intent is potent, he’ll get the gun in, believe it. In terms of true safety, a metal detector is about as effective as trying to stop a spiked mace ball with a slice of cheddar.
At one point during my elevator ride, the doors opened and I heard a patient moaning somewhere like a gutshot bear. I got off on the seventh floor, where family members delivering flowers traversed the halls, dodging nurses in colorful scrubs.
In the infusion clinic, a wall of windows looked out on pinetops reaching to touch passing clouds, hungry for water. Eig
ht or ten black leather recliners lined the walls. In each sat a patient hooked to an IV: a thin, sixtyish man with his feet up, asleep; a Filipino woman with a scarf around her balding head laughing with a friend; a middle-aged woman with a pasty face and garish red wig puzzling over a crossword, chewing pencil eraser.
In a corner chair near the window, Donny’s head lolled back, mouth open, napping. I flagged a nurse checking IV bags but before she could respond, a young woman sidled up next to me, her hair cut in a short bob with faint stripes of green still visible from an earlier visit to the salon. Her eyes were the color of sea foam and her hospital scrubs had Scooby-Doo on them with a nametag: TABIE CASSIL.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“You a nurse?”
She chuckled. “No, just a volunteer. I’ve only been here a few weeks.”
“I thought you seemed a little young. I’m here to see Donny, if that’s okay. I’m a friend of his mom’s.”
“Karen? I know her. It should be cool, but he’s probably tired. Varla? Donny okay?”
Varla, the nurse, glanced at Donny in the chair. “Just drowsy.” She smiled and swept past.
Tabie informed me, “Some of the meds they give patients during chemo kinda wipe them out.” She watched Donny, green eyes warm with friendship. “It’s crappy what he’s going through.”
“Crappy’s a good word for it,” I offered, before crossing the room and quietly unfolding a chair next to Donny’s recliner. I smiled at the Hispanic man hooked to an IV in the next recliner, full head of black hair that hadn’t fallen out yet, knee bouncing impatiently.
Donny’s chest rose and fell inside a Joker T-shirt, breaths deep and smooth. A comic book lay cover-down on his stomach along with his cell phone. A needle taped to the back of one hand, the thin IV tube curled up to a half-full bag of clear liquid hanging from a metal stand. This was Donny’s third treatment of six in his battle against Hodgkin’s. Doctors were optimistic.
I sat and watched him for a few minutes. Eventually he snorted, eyes fluttering as he left a dream to focus on my smile.
“Ah, fair maiden,” he said tiredly.