The Sergeant's Cat

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  Frank smoking, Cat purring, ducks quacking down below. A right turn was not so nice; it meant getting caught up in a web of narrow one-way streets, crescenting alleys and steep bridges that led into the inner city of Amsterdam, originally of seventeenth-century gabled-house splendor, subsequently abused by the greed of commerce, recently revamped as a quaint old-world center, of interest to tourists and pleasure-seeking lo­cals, a region of hup-ho, hanky-panky and goings-on.

  There was a choice: left/right. The Volvo turned right. Frank smiled happily for a moment, then worriedly for more moments.

  Frank liked to see himself as a detached introvert, a home­body who’d got it together, a lone watcher of ducks. His wife, Betty-Baby, lonely, watched TV, but that was a while back now, before she got too sickly fat and was hospitalized in the private clinic. A brief daily visit, after work, to his ailing wife was part of the detached, introverted, got-it-together loner’s life, which wasn’t a bad life at all.

  How long had Betty-Baby been away now? Frank calcu­lated, reaching for figures and dates, payments of medical bills going out, insurance payments coming in. While he calculated, the Volvo waited behind a truck that burped up foul smoke.

  Frank pulled his sun roof shut. That the truck’s rattling exhaust burped oil-smudged air into the Volvo’s vents hardly bothered him, of course. No point in fretting about unavoidable aggravations when things are going well. Frank smiled sagely at the truck’s enormous rear doors that denied him passage and view.

  The truck moved. The Volvo didn’t as yet, but then it did, with Frank nodding via his rearview mirror at the angry driver behind. She filled a small car. The car beeped, the truck burped. Frank laughed out loud.

  Things still couldn’t be better. Wasn’t he making a fortune on what Betty-Baby’s dad once called “our modest but profit­able lines”? The lines consisted of specialized hooks and needles used in art needlecraft by rich ladies with a need to embroider cushion covers, prepatterned wall hangings, bellpulls to summon servants who had left, keyboard covers for pianos nobody played. There had to be quite a few of them, Frank thought: bent-over grannies and aunts in slipping wigs and shoulder scarves, buying the strangely adapted hooks and needles that his company turned out so diligently. All the products had air-tight patents. The machinery making them had been paid for years ago. Yet the quantities sold weren’t big enough for Big Business to even consider worrying about. An easy little product, a high profit margin, no competition, a steady, abundant flow of cash into Frank’s company.

  His company? Well, Betty-Baby’s dad’s company, but the old man kept forgetting his own name these days. It was okay when Wuffo the dog was alive, for Wuffo brought her dodder­ing master home after walks. But Wuffo herself got old and forgetful, too, and then died, so the old man went to the nice nurses in a nice home, fulfilling nice needs. Frank signed the nice checks with pleasure. With power-of-attorney passing to son-in-law Frank and with only child Betty-Baby ailing, who owns what?

  But there was another question just now that got away. Catch the question, Frank. How long has Betty-Baby been sick? Maybe three months? Is she missed? She is not missed. Mostly invisible housekeeper Mrs. Bakker keeps good house. May the good life go on forever. So why the Volvo’s wrong turn? Why this almost uncontrollable anger all of a sudden? Wherefrom this glowing desire to step on the gas and ram the smelly truck, shift gears, and reverse into the little beepy car?

  Hey, a parking space ahead between elm trees at the side of a canal. Get in there. Don’t worry about signals. Ignore the little car’s lady’s wagging finger. While you’re at it, ignore the lady’s lips mouthing “Asshole.”

  Frank, getting out of his vehicle parked inches from the canal’s quay, recognized his surroundings. The company was formerly located here, before the inner city exchanged grimy business for glitzy pleasure. Now the refurbished merchant man­sions, warehouses, and workshops held cozy bars, tourist hotels, arty galleries behind spiffed-up gables. Frank checked his watch. The galleries would be closing by now, bars would be very much open. What now? Guzzle a gallon?

  Frank hadn’t guzzled in years. Guzzling requires buddies, good old boys who shout welcomes and thump you around a bit before opening up the inner circle. Frank remembered him­self as “Tarzan,” raising a tulip-shaped glass of juniper-flavored gin to toast mustachioed and earringed “Pirate,” squat, military-dressed “Stinky,” and a bartender known as “Saturated Fats.” Twenty years ago, these were important people on Frank’s stage. The stage collapsed, the actors wafted away—not quite, though, for Frank recalled running into Pirate again recently, and the new image, bald-faced and with no earrings, cheerfully men­tioned one wife, three kids: “The five of us, Tarzan, having breakfast every day.”

  “The three of us, Pirate,” Frank could have said. But Frank, huddled in his British raincoat, with his blown-dry hair wavy in the breeze, didn’t say that. It wasn’t true, anyway. Betty-Baby and Cat didn’t breakfast, but slept in, snoring gently, hand in paw, while Frank gobbled precooked and slurped instant in the living room, one eye checking the paper to see how his stocks were doing. Not that they were ever really doing. Boring beer and banks, electronics, oil. As permanently safe as the royal Netherlandic House of Orange. If the shares dip, wait five minutes. Up they pop again.

  “Still drink beer, Pirate?”

  “No. No beer.” The man had receded into the crowd, on his way to earn, smilingly, more tribal breakfasts.

  Frank, standing between the Volvo and a doggie-crusted elm tree, faced a cinema poster showing a nude woman ap­proaching a warty alligator. See the movie? But shouldn’t he have dinner first? Grab a nuked bite somewhere close? Why not go home and share one of Mrs. Bakker’s filets mignons with Cat? Sautéed chanterelles on the side? Cheese and crackers for a leisurely savory? Real whipped cream on fresh fruit? Java cof­fee? Cuban cigar? View of the park? Another pleasant evening watching more ducks? What was he doing here in this hellhole?

  General Frank curtly ordered himself back into the Volvo. The troops demurred, said “Nah.”

  Frank wondered whether a woman was wanted, perhaps. There should be quite a few bare-shouldered, bare-legged, bare-bosomed women waiting in the alleys all around, framed by neon tubes, illuminated erotically by pink-or purple-shaded spotlights hidden under windowsills: a multicolored selection.

  Frank muttered a warning to himself. You’re not in your right mind today. You want to get sick?

  He tried compromise. Take out a blue movie and stick it into the VCR at home. But the temptation kept tugging him along the narrow sidewalks behind the phallic metal posts in­stalled by the city two feet apart to protect peaceful citizens from heavy traffic. He touched the posts’ smooth tops gently, begging off that urge. He passed bars filling up with bright young people. Being forty years old was borderline, maybe? Wouldn’t his clothes make him stand out?

  He stopped in front of a small store, put on rimless gold-rimmed spectacles, and appraised his looks mirrored between the window’s display of high-heeled boots, shoulder bags, and other leather items for gay tourists. His light-grey three-piece suit seemed fine. Maroon silk tie? Nice. Button-down pink pure-cotton shirt? Neat. Hair? Thinning, sure, but still covering well. Frank frowned. Why would he concern himself with being ac­cepted by the insignificant little people? Wasn’t he the country’s monopolist of profitable needlecraft hooks and needles?

  He walked on, stubbing his toes on cobblestones, limping for a bit. He recognized the gable he leaned against. It shielded the patrician mansion where he had started work twenty years ago, fresh from business school, for Betty-Baby’s father. A while later the building was sold and the company moved to the mod­ern business park on the city’s outskirts where he bossed it around today, but it was here Frank’s career had started.

  Frank laughed too loudly, then frowned furiously. Why was he out of control if he hadn’t started drinking yet? He clearly heard the ope
ning line of a sad jazzy tune. Did the music orig­inate in a sound system turned on inside the building or was old Frankie cracking up? He shook his head to get rid of a depressing but fascinating ballad, played on a row of double basses handled by tall men with hollow eyes.

  In order to rid himself of these frock-coated musicians, Frank appealed to the wall he leaned against, feeling it tenderly with his fingertips. He remembered the building as a ruin, but now its surface had been filled in and varnished, its doors re­painted, its rotted window frames replaced. The tall mansion’s imposing entrance displayed seven brass push buttons with elegantly lettered nameplates, one for each story. So there were apartments here now, instead of Betty-Baby’s father’s tatty of­fice, the clerks’ rooms, and storage for the finished product. The basement, where machinery once thumped and stamped, had become a bar.

  Frank rethought himself into the nineteen-year-old bright young fellow finding his gateway to success here: stepping through—stepping right into it. Into marriage, too.

  He didn’t know about Betty-Baby then, about the sole heiress. Betty-Baby was learning manners at a Swiss college at the time, but about to return to make her debut.

  Stepping through.

  Did you arrive? Frank asked Frank. How do you like the other side?

  I do. I do, Frank told Frank.

  Now he was rich, and Betty-Baby was nuts. Frank, waiting for the electricity in his stubbed toes to subside and the gloomy bass players to finish their tune, saw the face of Betty-Baby’s doctor. “Physically,” the face said, “there’s nothing wrong with your wife.” The face smiled. “My colleagues are in full agree­ment, of course.” So what about Betty-Baby’s itching, stomach cramps, dragging leg, weight problem, breathing troubles?

  “I would like to recommend a psychiatrist, Mr. Nullish.”

  Frank pushed himself off the wall, hurt his toes again, stag­gered backward into a passerby, turned around, apologized.

  “Join AA,” the passerby said. “They’re boring blowhards, but can be helpful at times.”

  “Yes,” Frank said.

  “They sure helped me,” the passerby said, pointing at the bar’s entrance close by. Frank noticed a strong smell of gin com­ing from the bar and from the passerby’s mouth. “I can resist the attraction now,” the passerby said, holding up a stubbly chin. “I don’t have to enter those bad places anymore. I can go home.” His red-rimmed eyes squinted. “Okay?”

  “Yes,” Frank said.

  Sure Betty-Baby was crazy, just like his brother Pete and his wife Suzie. Another story of success. Pete, through Suzie, stepped into a sole agency for Japanese dike-repairing machin­ery. Suzie tired of exercising her credit card in shopping centers and started seeing a shrink. Pete was invited to show up, too. Pete came to Frank. There was Pete, in Frank’s office, silhou­etted against the showcase filled with needlehooks and hooked needles.

  Pete’s face shone with the sweat of fear. “This shrink wants to make me crazy, too, Frankie. Not me, brother, not me. Lib­erty for me.” So Pete bought himself a plastic replica of a Duesenburg 1931 convertible and picked up girls in the inner city to go sailing with him in his plastic mini-schooner.

  We have all gone crazy, Frank thought.

  If he could have known then that he would be selling needlecraft hooks for a living—being useful to old ladies at eight times cost. It was a good thing he didn’t believe in heavenly justice. As long as he didn’t believe, he wouldn’t have to amuse Saint Peter.

  Saint Peter: What did you busy yourself with down there, sir?

  Frank: Eh—with making money.

  Saint Peter: Is that so, sir? Specifics?

  Frank: Yes. Well, I kind of cornered the market for hooked needlecraft needles, crochet hooks, the kind with those little chromium-plated catches at the end, you know? Mahogany han­dles?

  Saint Peter: What else did you do, sir?

  Frank: Eh—nothing.

  Saint Peter, leading a choir of angels wielding flaming swords: Hahahahaha.

  They probably wouldn’t even bother to shove him into hell, but cruelly ignore him instead, let him wander about like he was wandering about now.

  Frank wandered into the bar. The bartender reminded him of Saturated Fats, but this was a younger man, although even more blubbery, more overflowing his pants. The bar was an­tiqued—seats and counter stained in yellowy browns and shot-gunned into wormholes under sagging smoked over-beams bearing a partly white-washed ceiling. Teak wainscoting was added for elegance. A copper rail lined the bar for parking un­steady footsies on. There were spittoons in every corner.

  “Draft?” Saturated Fats II said, sliding a mug toward a tap.

  Frank raised a hand. Beer is for canals, comes out like it goes in, without even being polite enough to change color. “Whoa, Fats. Whiskey. American. Ice, no water.”

  “Sir,” Fats said, “the name is Edmond.” He wasn’t reaching for the beer tap anymore. He wasn’t reaching for anything.

  “Edmond,” Frank said, gently edging forward to reach a bar stool between longhairs smooching with each other and cleavage in a lace blouse being stared into by a man with loose teeth. “I am sorry, Edmond.”

  Edmond’s bellies cascaded. “You aren’t just saying that, sir?”

  “No,” Frank said.

  “No, sorry?” Edmond asked.

  “Yes, sorry.”

  Edmond poured from a square black bottle and moved ice about with a silver stirrer. Frank smiled. He hadn’t been drinking for a while. Or smoking. Now he would smoke again, too. He looked at the tobacco display behind the bar and pointed at Black Belgians. Edmond opened a pack, tapped out a cigarette, pushed a candle across.

  Frank coughed, waved the loosely stuffed cigarette through dense smoke, and coughed again.

  “Being bad?” Cleavage asked, ignoring Loose Teeth’s pro­test.

  “Sir?” Edmond asked, half closing his eyes in disgusted dis­belief. “Sir? Could you arrange your dentures?”

  “What is this?” female Longhair asked, watching Loose Teeth’s coated tongue frantically trying to correct the position of his overturned dentures.

  “Fellini,” male Longhair said.

  With the third bourbon and the fifth Black Belgian, Frank found himself afloat on pure joy. A flashing insight promised that he could step back to the exact moment that marked the beginning of his wrong turn. The step had to be in time only, for his present location was right. The exact moment happened right here, twenty years ago. Up until then, everything had been fine.

  What good times were coming back! Nothing to care about then. Young Tarzan hangs out in his happy jungle, rides the magic streets of Amsterdam on his shiny Harley-Davidson, lives in an attic listening to Dizzy Gillespie on LPs. He wears corduroy pants, a leather jacket, no tie. He goes for Jane.

  “Me Frank, you Ravena.”

  “Ha!” shouted Frank, banging the bar with both hands. “Ha!”

  “Sir?” Edmond asked.

  “Edmond,” Frank whispered, “Edmond, I thank you. This magic third drink, the house drink, is showing me what’s what. Thank you, Edmond. Have one on me.” He raised his glass. “Hup one.” He raised it higher. “Hup two.” He put it to his lips. “Hup three.” Immediately there was a third flash of insight. Find Ravena. Things had gone wrong after Ravena, so he would have to get back to Ravena to start again. How simple. Bring her magical presence back into his life. Start again. Total turn­around in two easy steps. “Edmond? Got a phone book?”

  Ravena wasn’t listed.

  Frank rested his hand on the page. He was doing well back then, before turning right instead of left. True to type, daredevil type, young Frank had faced Betty-Baby’s dad in his gloomy office. The old man lectured about attitudes, about young Frank’s double-exhausted, rumbly, wide-handled, all-victorious American Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Betty-Baby’s dad e
x­plained that an employee being trained for business management shouldn’t be imitating Marlon Brando. Betty-Baby’s dad, in his pinstripe suit, made weighty words flow heavily.

  But did young Frank Nullish pay attention? He did not. He was looking at Betty-Baby’s dad’s new secretary’s long light brown legs with tightly curved calves, her supple body in a short skirt and tight blouse, elegant hands poised above the Reming­ton’s keys, dark eyes, raven black hair.

  Frank had met Ravena in the corridor that day. They held hands briefly. He secretly read her application letter in the clerks’ room. Born in Borneo? Frank saw palm leaves, heard parrots screech and the slow flap of flying-fox wings, an exaggerated sunset splashed in blood reds and soft orange tints slowly giving way to silver shades as the full moon sails in. Ravena steps out, naked but for a woven grass loincloth. Shell anklets click. The Remington’s keys click. Betty-Baby’s dad has spoken and Frank is sent off to sell the bike, get a decent suit, behave, think of the future.

  But not yet.

  Frank stepped out of the past for a minute to enjoy more bourbonically clear insights. “Edmond?”

  The square black American bottle poured more clarifying potion.

  Frank, inhaling insightful black smoke, reentered the past.

  Betty-Baby’s dad went off on a business trip. Frank bought six yellow tulips and had a student clerk deliver them to the presidential chamber. The messenger, for a small consideration, promised not to say that the tulips were bought by Frank. Mys­tery goes with true love.

  Next move. Meeting in corridor.

  “Would you like to have dinner with me at the Chinese restaurant of your choice?” future executive Tarzan asked sec­retarial Jane.

  “No.” She brushed past him. Her huskily vibrant voice made him see birds of paradise spreading brocade wings, a pouched tree kangaroo pogo-sticking across a glade, giant orangutans tossing banana peels, a tiger partly hidden in bamboo shadows.