Spotted Cats (11 page)

She had changed into snug-fitting white jeans and a rust-coloured flannel shirt. She had the sleeves rolled up to her elbows and had left several buttons on the front undone. She was adept with the paddle, although once she had pushed us up into the cove across the pond she barely had to paddle at all. Down there in the bowl formed by the hills on all sides, there was no breeze to ruffle the surface of the water, and we drifted slowly on unfelt currents of moving air, just fast enough to give me new fish to cast to.

We hardly spoke. When we did, it was in whispers. ‘See that one over there?’ she’d say, or ‘Damn. Missed him,’ from me. The quiet of the place commanded respect.

There was a hypnotic rhythm to it—false cast once, twice, shoot out the line, watch it settle like a silvery snake on to the black skin of the water, squint at the barely visible white wings of the little fly, twitch it once, pause, then the swirl, the lift of the rod tip, the pulse at the end of the line, a leap or two, quick bursts of shimmering light against the darkness, then the thrumming resistance as I stripped in the line with a rainbow trout hooked on the end of it.

I sat up in the bow with my back to Lily, surrounded by the place, my head empty of all else, intent only on the fishing and the silence and the pond. No thoughts of Jeff, being kept alive by machines in Hyannis, of myself, waking up with an elbow digging into my chest and a knife at my throat, of stolen Mayan jaguars, road pizzas, murdered watchdogs. In that canoe, it was mindlessly sensual, and I was cleansed and filled and satisfied with the delicate organic smell of night air and water and coolness, the sounds of tiny wavelets slapping against the sides of the aluminium canoe, the feel of the dampness of the air as it gathered into droplets in the hairs on my arms, the silhouettes of shadowy night birds and bats swooping and darting over the pond and now and then bursting its skin with their wingtips.

And I was aware of Lily. I remembered the feathery kiss she had brushed on to my cheek, and her scent, flowers and perspiration.

I also remembered Maroney’s suspicions. She could have planned it. He was right. She could have.

Out on that pond, I didn’t believe it. Nobody who handled a canoe so effortlessly, who honoured so fully the silence of the place and the gentle art of fly casting for evening trout, could be a criminal.

So we drifted and I cast and I let the darkness absorb me until, inevitably, I struck too hard at a trout that might have been bigger than the others, and the frail leader snapped. I sat there for a moment, letting the limp line trail out on the pond. Then I reeled in.

‘Had enough?’ said Lily softly.

‘I never get enough of this. Busted off my fly. Too dark to tie another one on.’

I lit a Winston—my first since I had stepped into the canoe. I always suspected that if I could do nothing but fish I would quit the cigarette habit instantly. I hoped someday to test my theory.

Lily paddled us slowly back to the dock at the foot of Jeff Newton’s hill. Trout continued to break the surface ahead of us, some of them almost close enough to touch with my rod tip. Occasionally one would burst completely out of the water, and the sound of the splash would ride across the water towards us.

She eased the canoe alongside the dock. I climbed out and snugged the painter to a ring. Then I held down my hand to Lily. She took it, braced one knee on the dock, and hauled herself out of the canoe. She didn’t let go of my hand. Instead, she tiptoed up and kissed me beside my ear. ‘That was the most fun I’ve had in years,’ she said quietly. ‘For a while out there, I didn’t think of anything except being there. Thank you.’

‘They say fishing is the most fun a man can have standing up. I guess that goes for a woman, too.’ I gave her an awkward one-armed hug. ‘You’re an accomplished guide,’ I added. ‘Thanks.’

She turned and relaxed against me, and I could feel the fronts of her thighs pressing against mine and her breasts soft against my chest. She burrowed her face into the hollow of my throat and muttered something I couldn’t understand. I felt her mouth against my skin. I leaned back and nudged her chin with the crook of my forefinger. She looked up at me. ‘I couldn’t understand what you said,’ I said.

I heard her chuckle. ‘I said, you really love fishing, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s my passion.’

‘I like that. A man with a passion. Most people don’t have a passion.’

I hugged her. ‘Fishing helps me see things straight. It works as a kind of metaphor for me. A metaphor for life.’

Her lips pressed against my throat.

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I think it’s the other way around. Life is a metaphor for fishing.’

‘Oh, sure,’ she whispered. ‘I understand perfectly.’

She touched the back of my head with the fingers of one hand, and then her other hand reached up to my neck and she moved against me.

‘Hey,’ I said.

She tilted back her face and smiled at me and then angled her head so our mouths would meet. I stroked her hair. Her hips pressed against me.

After a long moment she twisted her mouth away from mine and ducked her head. ‘Oh, boy,’ she whispered into my throat.

I held her against me, gazing up at the dark sky, suddenly feeling awkward. ‘Oh, boy?’

She looked up at me. ‘Yeah. Oh, boy. Something wrong with oh, boy?’

‘No. Oh, boy is perfect.’ I kissed her again. We dragged it out, improvised a little. I moved my hand up and down her back. I could feel the tenseness of her muscles.

Standing on a dock by a little Cape Cod kettle pond, holding a woman seemed the natural way to end an evening of fly fishing for trout. But after a few minutes, one either proceeds to the next step or else breaks the embrace. Lily seemed inclined to do neither, so it was I who gently held her by the upper arms and pushed her away from me.

She looked at me with her head cocked to the side, smiling. Then she shrugged. She picked up the two trout and the paddle and I gathered up the fly-fishing gear and we trudged up the path to the house. We were careful that no parts of our bodies touched along the way.

When we got back to the house, she disappeared in the direction of her room. When she came back, I was cleaning the trout in the sink. Her face shone as if she had just scrubbed it. She had brushed her hair. The top of her shirt was still unbuttoned. She stood close to me, her hip firm against mine.

‘Hi,’ she said softly.

I nodded. ‘Look at this.’

I slit the belly of one of the fish from anus to pectorals, hooked out the entrails with my forefinger, and then pricked the stomach with the tip of the knife. I sorted out the bits of matter that burst out and showed them to her. ‘Damselfly nymphs,’ I said. ‘They were gorging.’

Women, in my experience, have stronger stomachs than men, but the residual chauvinist in me still assumes that when they are shown the entrails of a fresh-caught trout they will avert their eyes, perhaps gag, or at least say, ‘Yuck! Gross!’

Lily reached into the sink and poked at the gunk with her forefinger. ‘There’s other stuff in here, too,’ she said.

‘Sure. A few mayflies. Lots of midges.
Diptera,
to us entomologists. Mainly, though, these big things. The damselflies. That dry fly I was using they must’ve mistaken for emerging adults.’

She looked up at me and grinned. ‘Whatever you say.’

‘We anglers like to understand what’s going on.’

‘It seems like magic to me.’

‘
Juju,
’ I said. It was the African word Jeff often used. ‘All fishermen believe in
juju.
’

‘Lots of
juju
out there tonight,’ she said.

‘Look, Lily—’

She smiled. Sadly, I thought. ‘For a while there I didn’t even think about Jeff, or the jaguars, or anything. Except…’

‘There’s all kinds of magic,’ I said. She frowned, so I added, ‘Once I found the filter from a cigarette in a trout’s stomach. A Parliament, it was. I caught him on a Red Quill. Looks nothing like a cigarette filter. After that, I had to believe in
juju.
Skill just wouldn’t explain it.’

She shrugged and nodded. We weren’t talking about the same thing at all. I rinsed out the belly cavities of the two fish, dabbed them dry with paper towels, wrapped them in sticky plastic paper, and put them into the refrigerator. Then I washed my hands.

‘Nightcap?’ said Lily.

‘Sure.’

We took our glasses of Old Granddad and ice on to the patio. Somehow, on top of the hill far from the water, it seemed different. The mosquitoes still zizzed and the night birds swooped and the traffic swished in the distance. But the stars looked dimmer than they had from the pond, and up there on the hilltop a breeze sifted through the pines, bearing on its currents the aroma of salt fog from the sea.

It was different. Different
juju.

We sat apart and stared up at the sky and didn’t talk. I smoked. Once in a while Lily slapped at a mosquito.

I heard ice cubes click against her teeth. She sighed and stood up, ‘Bed for me.’

‘I guess I’ll sit awhile longer,’ I said.

She bent and kissed my forehead. ‘Night,’ she murmured.

‘Good night.’

‘I had fun.’

‘Me, too. Thanks.’

I lit another cigarette, telling myself it would be my last of the day. I watched a cloud drift across the face of the moon. I thought about the theft of the jaguars. It could not have been a random housebreak. It must have been what Maroney had called an inside job. But who? Lily? The doctor, Sauerman? Jeff himself? There were no other candidates that I knew of. Except me.

None of them, I concluded. Everybody on the Cape probably knew about the jaguars. Word gets around. Dr Sauerman, or the meter reader, or the exterminator, one of them would mention it to a stranger at a party in Sandwich, who’d tell the guy who replaced his muffler in Barnstable, who’d pass the story of the golden jaguars and the vicious Dobermans and the old invalid and the sexy housekeeper on to the boys on the bowling team in Falmouth.

It could have been anybody. To suspect Sauerman himself, or Lily, or me—that was naïve and simplistic.

But somebody had smashed in Jeff’s skull, and someone had held a knife to my throat, and the fear I had felt remained with me. I realized it was mingling with anger, and I knew that was a dangerous sign.

Let go of it, Coyne, I told myself. Chalk it up.

Good advice, I replied. But hard to follow.

I crunched what was left of the ice in my drink between my molars and went into the house. Lily had left the lights on for me. I put the glass in the sink, brushed my teeth in the bathroom, shut off the lights, and went to bed. I closed my eyes and drifted on thoughts of rainbow trout sucking in white-winged dry flies and Lily’s soft, eager mouth and the way the canoe rode on the pond’s liquid surface and the smooth curve of her back, and I began to float, only it seemed as if it were on her liquid skin…

The click of the doorlatch sounded like a gunshot. It yanked me up from the beginning of my descent into sleep, reminding me all at once of a knife at my throat and the taste of fear. ‘Who is it?’ I said loudly.

The door cracked open. I saw her shape against the dim light in the hallway. She was still wearing jeans and flannel shirt.

‘Lily. For Christ sake.’

The door opened wider. Her shadowy form entered. The door closed. I sensed rather than saw her move towards me.

‘Go away,’ I said.

‘Shut up,’ she said. I felt her rump hard against my hip when she sat beside me. Her hand touched my face, and she bent and kissed me softly on the mouth. Then she stood up.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Look,’ she said. ‘I just want to be held. Do you mind?’

‘I suppose I could handle that.’

‘Then for Christ sake don’t talk anymore.’

She unbuttoned her shirt and dropped it on to the floor. Then she sat beside me and shucked off her pants. She stood up again. She was still wearing her bra and panties. She fumbled for the covers. Her skin slicked against mine as she slid in beside me.

She burrowed against me, one arm over my hip. I kissed her throat.

‘Just hold me is all,’ she said.

‘I’ll try,’ I said.

She burrowed and squirmed against me. I trailed my hand down her back, over her rump. I could feel her muscles tense as I touched them.

She moved her head. Her mouth was soft against my jaw. She kissed my mouth and pushed against me. Her nails dug into my shoulders. My hand moved along her back. ‘When I was a kid,’ I said into her hair, ‘I could unsnap these things one-handed.’

‘I’ll do it,’ she said.

Afterward, we held each other for a long time, until I felt myself twitch and I knew I had been drifting into sleep.

‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘Did I kick you?’

She kissed my throat. ‘It’s OK. Sleep.’

I hitched myself into a half-sitting position with the pillow bunched under my neck. ‘I think I was dreaming,’ I said. ‘Someone was coming at me with a knife.’

‘Aw,’ she said. She rubbed my chest.

‘I didn’t know Jeff rode bikes,’ I said.

‘Bikes?’

‘Motorcycles.’

‘Me neither,’ she said.

‘He did. There’s one in the shed.’

‘Must’ve been a long time ago.’

She adjusted herself against me. She was making a purring sound against my shoulder. I stroked her back.

‘Tell me about your husband, Lily.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘What was his name? What did he do? What happened?’

‘It wasn’t a husband,’ she murmured. ‘It was just a man. His name was Martin Lodi and he wasn’t very good for me and it was a long time ago. He’s all gone now.’

‘Dumb guy.’

‘Dumb lady,’ she said.

I woke up suddenly and all at once. Lily was gone and grey light suffused the room. Just outside my window a bobwhite whistled, a human sound, easily imitated. I got up and went to the window. Fog blurred the trees. It was hard to guess what time it was. The bobwhite sat under a pine outside, strutting and pecking among the needles. I whistled to him once through the screen. He lifted his head quickly and peered around. Then he resumed strutting and pecking. I watched him until he wandered out of sight among the trees. Then I went back to bed.