10
The pet shop young man came as promised, right up the sidewalk after he got out of a beat-up old Buick Century. Helen saw him stop in front of the house and with her drink got out of the recliner.
“Who in the hell’s that?” she said.
Arthur sidled up beside her, smelling the coffee in his hand. Once in a while, he had a gin and tonic with her to be sociable. But she could drink all by herself just fine.
“It’s somebody I hired to catch the cat.”
“Oh yeah? How much’d you have to pay him?”
“Twenty bucks,” said Arthur, sipping from his steaming cup.
“Thirty more after he turns it over.”
She kept watching the young man. He was walking up and down the sidewalk. He carried something that was alive in a tow sack.
“I don’t think it’s even out there anymore,” Helen said. “And what’s that he’s got in that sack?”
“I saw it this morning, walking around. It’s probably hiding. I don’t know what he’s got in the sack.”
“How do you know he can catch it?”
“He said he could. He seems like a nice young man.”
Helen stepped to the dining room table and removed a chair that she placed by the window. She sat in it and looked out for a bit. He sipped his coffee. He knew that three months was a long time to go without for somebody who liked it as much as she did. He guessed she was tired of trying. But so was he. Whenever he looked at it now, the head of it seemed to be turning purple. Was it dead, had part of him died? Sometimes it felt cold, rubbery. Like there wasn’t any blood circulating through it. Like your arm when you sleep on it at night sometimes.
“I feel sorry for that boy out in the cold,” she said.
“He’s getting paid for it.”
“I wish I knew what he had in that sack.”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Arthur said. He stood close to Helen and eased his hand onto her shoulder. She reached over her drinking arm and patted his hand just for a second, and then Arthur took his hand away. He knew how wet she could become. She was evidently coated on the inside with the slickest and most lubricious oil imaginable. He figured she still harbored vast reserves of it, deep, hidden within her body like a petroleum deposit buried beneath a mountain. He hoped nobody at the Peabody was drilling for it.
The young man stopped in the yard and set the sack down. The sack moved and jerked about. Arthur didn’t know if he liked the look of that. He’d thought maybe he would have something on a long pole with a snare or a loop on the end of it, but it was plain now that he hadn’t come equipped with anything like that.
“What’s he got in there?” Helen said. “A monkey?”
“Beats me. He didn’t say what he was going to use. He just told me he could catch it.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask him.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake.”
“What?”
“You hired somebody and you don’t even know what his name is? Where did you find him?”
“Over at the pet shop at the Mall of Memphis. You know, Studebaker’s?”
“God.” She sipped her drink. “That’s such a stupid name for a pet shop.”
“Well…I guess if that’s your name…”
“What were you doing at the pet shop?”
“I was looking for a tranquilizer gun for the kitten. You know, one that shoots darts? You know, like those you see on TV? You’ve seen them, like the ones they use over in Africa and places? I saw them shoot one into an elephant that was running amuck one time. Well, actually they shot five or six into it. They had to keep reloading their gun. I think they were using extra-large darts. I didn’t figure I’d need any that big.”
Helen looked out the window again, frowning. She seemed pretty disgusted with him.
“I can’t imagine what you could have been thinking,” she said, and flounced the edge of her dress over her pretty knees as she sometimes did when she got agitated with him. Out in the yard, the young man took a long look around, then pulled a leash out of his pocket and opened the mouth of the sack. What started coming out was a scarred old pit bull, brindle colored, tiger striped, nub eared, a runt.
“Oh shit!” Helen said, and lurched up, sloshing some of her drink on the carpet. Out in the yard, the young man had snapped the leash onto the pit bull’s collar and was kneeling and petting him. Arthur could see the wide tongue of the dog licking his hand. The dog moved with difficulty, as if his legs were bad. The young man stood up and led him forward and the old dog limped along beside him.
“What’s he doing out there, Arthur? If he lets that dog hurt that kitten…”
“I don’t know what he’s doing just yet. Why don’t we wait a minute and see?”
“I don’t know if I want to see or not. Don’t you know they train those dogs to fight by letting them kill kittens?”
“I didn’t know that,” Arthur said.
“Why, hell. They’ve outlawed them in England because they’ve killed so many children. Don’t you know that?”
“It’s news to me,” Arthur said. She was getting kind of mad. She got kind of mad easier when she was drinking. She got kind of mad sometimes when he couldn’t get it up, too. She’d yelled at him once. Then left.
“Don’t you ever read the papers?”
“Just the funnies mostly. I like ‘Snuffy Smith.’ And ‘Dear Abby.’”
There was a flurry of motion at the corner of the house and the dog dove at something. The young man was yelling, pulling at the leash, his breath coming out in a white fog, and when Arthur glanced at Helen she had raised a hand to her horrified mouth. She set her drink down and turned away.
“I can’t watch this,” she said. “Not in front of my own house.” She had her fingers over her eyes.
“Look,” Arthur said, pointing.
“How could you do such a butthole thing?”
“It’s not what you think. Look.”
“No. I’m not.”
“You’d better. He’s caught your cat for you.”
Helen sniffled and turned slowly. She took her hands down from her face. The young man was leading the pit bull toward their front door, and the dog had the kitten in his mouth similar to the way a pointer retrieves a downed quail. The kitten was writhing in the dog’s mouth and frantically scratching its muzzle with all four feet, but the old dog just ignored it and kept limping forward. Arthur could see that the kitten was yowling, because its mouth was wide open and he could see its teeth. Once they got closer, he could also see that the kitten was going to the bathroom all over the place. Then the young man stopped next to the steps out front and said something to the dog and the dog stopped and sat. Its muzzle was bloody from where the kitten had scratched it, was still scratching it. Its face was a mask of old cuts, and healed stitches of leathery-looking skin, but its eyes were bright and in them Arthur could see what he thought was a kind of love. It made him feel so good he smiled. The young man lifted his hand and waved at Helen and Arthur and smiled. They waved back. It was starting to snow again.
11
In an old building on Front Street, just above the river, a guy named Domino D’Alamo read a work order and then took some fresh meat out of the walk-in cooler that was next to the lion-meat freezer. He was wearing gloves and he had a coat on over his apron. The radio in the back was turned up loud since he was hard of hearing. A pimply prison guard had fired a twelve-gauge shotgun right next to his ear one day just for the fun of it, one beautiful April day down in Mississippi, when spotted orange butterflies were out on the roadside daisies while they cut the tall grass with sling blades, and the free folks just drove on by all day long.
He was cutting meat at night in this little shop now, by himself, which suited the shit out of him, since he didn’t like people very much. The lion-meat freezer had a big sign Mr. Hamburger had written out with a thick black Magic Marker: “Lion Meat Only.” Nobody else
ever messed with the lion meat because nobody else wanted the stinking job. The weed Domino kept hidden in there was high grade, worth $100 on the street for a quarter ounce, or $6,400 for a pound, which was his usual load. He kept it in a box stamped PRIME RIB that he marked for his own identification with a single slash of a red Magic Marker.
He unwrapped the fresh meat from the cooler. Sometimes the lion meat was old beef. Sometimes it was old mutton or pork. He was sure the lions didn’t care what it was. He figured they’d eat anything, goat, horse, mule, burro, whatever. This stuff wasn’t lion meat and it hadn’t been in there yesterday but it was so fresh it still had some blood oozing out of it. He guessed maybe Mr. Hamburger had brought it in sometime.
This meat was in some strange chunks and didn’t really resemble any meat he’d ever seen, but he knew there were plenty of other kinds of meat in the world. What he wished he could get his hands on again was some whitetail. Now there was some good stuff. It was about the best stuff he’d ever put in his mouth. But it was hard to get your hands on whitetail if you didn’t hunt. And Domino didn’t hunt. The only whitetail he’d ever had was roadkill that had been brought to the prison kitchen sometimes. And since he’d worked in the prison kitchen his last two years, he’d always gotten some of it. Along with the warden, who was crazy about it, too.
He’d been lucky to land this job straight out of Parchman. You could pick a lot of cotton in eighteen years. Domino was one of those people for whom prison rehabilitation worked in that he’d learned a marketable skill and had made connections that were helping him in the outside world.
The weed came in once a month from a connection Domino had now in Oregon, on a UPS truck with one of those friendly guys in a brown uniform carrying a five-gallon bucket of drywall plaster. Mr. Hamburger had okayed the deliveries to his place when Domino told him that he had a Sheetrock operation on the weekends (a lie) and had to sleep in the daytime (not a lie), which was when United Parcel Service made their deliveries, so somebody else who worked the day shift always signed the chart for him, since it was evidently just drywall plaster. Domino dug the wet plaster out from around the package of weed late at night, waterproofed it and wrapped it in old meat that was about to turn bad, stuck it in a marked box, and froze it in the lion-meat freezer into one solid chunk that would take a chain saw to cut apart. It worked out real good for everybody. The lions got fed. Nobody got hurt. Domino knew he might get hurt if Mr. Hamburger ever found out what he was doing. He’d heard things about the mob and Chicago. Everybody had. But Domino didn’t ask any questions. He just went about his work.
He cut through some big pieces of the fresh meat with a sharp knife and a bone saw, still wondering what it was. Maybe it was elk. Maybe one of Mr. Hamburger’s rich buddies had gone on a hunting trip out West and bagged an elk and hadn’t been able to eat all of it. He looked closer. He was sure it wasn’t whitetail. If he’d thought it was whitetail, he’d have kept some of it for himself.
Actually, the lion guy got a pretty good deal. He only paid fifty cents a pound for the meat even if it was porterhouse steaks, even if it was filet mignon. But going down there wasn’t like going to a zoo where the lions were walking around pretty healthy and intact. Some of these lions couldn’t walk around too good because they had only three legs. Some had half a tail, or one ear, or not many teeth because they were so old, and the lion shit smelled really bad. He knew the guy tried to keep the cages clean, and was just trying to help the lions, who had been mistreated and neglected by previous owners, but Domino could take one look into their big yellow eyes and see that they would eat him, too, if they could get to him, even if some of them did have only three legs. While he was down there, he dropped off the weed at an empty house in the country down close to Water Valley. He made a phone call beforehand and the money was always sitting on the front porch in a plain brown paper bag. He left the box, picked up the bag. It went about as smooth as a baby’s ass. And he’d already made the phone call for this trip.
He started taking the boxes out and stacking them on a two-wheeler, and carrying them outside, and started sticking them in the sealed cooler of a reefer truck that he used for deliveries. He put the prefrozen, marked weed box in first. He had to make several trips because there was so much lion meat today, as well as a package wrapped in garbage bags and already frozen, heavily taped. The work order stated that he was to dump it somewhere but not give it to the lions. It was probably guts. He put his arms around it when he picked it up.
He was actually looking forward to going back out in the country and making his casual rounds. He was already thinking about a Pizza Den sandwich for supper.
He went up to the empty second-floor office and smoked part of a cigar outside on the rusty fire escape, high above the river, since Mr. Hamburger didn’t like smoking inside. It was snowing again, flakes drifting down on the brown, moving water, falling far out there over in Arkansas, like a picture. He watched a tugboat come by, heading upstream with three barges, way out there. He could see a deckhand walking around. No telling where the guy was going. Lucky fucker. Going up the river like that, you’d probably see some whitetails drinking water. That would be like a picture, too.
He went back down and ground the fresh meat up and shaped it into some mounded two-pound packages and pulled some shrink-wrap over the white foam pans. He always wrote “Hamburger Dog” on them, but today either some asshole had stolen his Magic Marker or he couldn’t find it, so he just left them blank. It was no big deal. Mr. Hamburger knew what it was. He’d written the work order. After that he went back out and stuck them in the back of the reefer truck and cranked it up. They wouldn’t freeze hard before he got to Como. It wasn’t the first time he’d fixed up a bunch of dog food for his boss. He was supposed to deliver the dog food out to Mr. Hamburger’s house on his lion-trip way out of town, as usual. He never had seen the dog on his trips out there because he’d never gone into the house. But he figured the dog had to be a big bastard, as much meat as Mr. Hamburger had sent out there. Maybe he was a Rottweiler. Or a mastiff. All he knew was that he was glad he didn’t have to pay for his dog-food bill.
He’d wondered often why Mr. Hamburger was always in such a bad mood. He’d almost bite your head off if you said good afternoon, so naturally nobody ever did.
12
Miss Muffett bumped softly on her plastic leg down the long hall, toward the cavernous kitchen she had to use. The big house in the little town of Como, thirty minutes south of Memphis just off I-55, was loud with its silence. It was a nice old town with large oaks and stately homes and mostly quiet streets. No mullet-headed punks running up and down with monster bass speakers going. You could sit out on the porch in summer. Most of the time, her boss was never there. Not these days. Not since his tragic accident six months ago. Now he tried to stay busy. He always thought he had to tend to his business in Chicago even though he was supposed to be retired. But Chicago had been good to him. So good that he’d been able to expand his meatpacking business to Memphis a few years ago. For the last few nights he’d been working in his shop out back. She’d seen the limo pull in there a few nights ago. But she never went out there except to get some meat out of one of his coolers. She didn’t want to bother him. She guessed he tried to work out his anger with work. He was the one who’d insisted she help him dig the postholes so that he could fence in the backyard for the little dog. She’d told him three times she was scared of machinery. She didn’t blame him for being angry with her. But it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing they could talk about either. The doctors had already said there was nothing they could do for him. Just like with her leg and her daddy’s boat motor out on Sardis Lake so many years ago. Her daddy didn’t mean to cut her leg off with the prop. And it almost killed him when he did. He went to his grave still apologizing to her for it, and crying over it. But some things you couldn’t do anything for. You just had to get used to having one real leg and one made out of plastic. You had to get used to doing some kin
d of job that wasn’t too hard but that still brought in some money, like housecleaning, which she’d done for years all over Como and Sardis and Senatobia, or even house-sitting and dog-sitting for rich people like Mr. Hamburger. It wasn’t so bad. Miss Muffett knew that things could always be worse.
The floors were shining from her diligent mopping with Mr. Clean. She looked behind a tall potted plant. Two small and perfect dog turds lay there, one crossed over the other in an X, almost identical, almost hidden. He had his own little personal dog door built right into the wall there in the kitchen, so why did he keep messing in the house? Because it was cold outside sometimes and he didn’t want to go out to use the bathroom, that’s why. He was very crafty about where he left his surprises. She believed he did it on purpose and it never failed to piss her off.