TWENTY-SEVEN
Get the lay of the land, big guy, that’s step one.
I already had the lay of the land down pat: the back of the cage against the adobe wall, the big warehouse, the road cutting across the plain, the steep hills in the distance. Nothing moved except the sun, and you couldn’t really see it moving, but it had to be, because the next time you looked it was somewhere else.
Down pat: that expression stayed in my mind. A pat from Bernie would have been real nice long about now; even a pat from just about anybody. Meanwhile, heat was building up in the cage, pressing down on me from the tin roof. No water to be seen, and how would I have drunk it anyway, wearing that horrible muzzle? I tried to stay calm, and during the staying-calm period, I spotted something up on a ridge in the steep hills, a strange kind of something, like a skinny fire hydrant with an umbrella on top. Once some stray bullets hit a fire hydrant in Los Olas, and water came shooting out. I was thinking about how much fun that had been, and feeling more and more thirsty, when a long tractor-trailer—the kind they call an eighteen-wheeler but don’t ask me to count them—appeared on the road, raising a long cloud of dust. It came closer and closer, went right by me, and parked by the warehouse. The red roses on the side panel were hard to miss.
I heard the cab door slam shut but couldn’t see who got out. Silence fell. I explored the cage, searching for some little gap I could work on, or some weak spot, but there were no gaps, no weak spots. I found myself just standing there, poking my muzzled face through the bars. Up on that distant ridge the skinny fire hydrant with the umbrella top seemed to be on the move.
Another dust cloud appeared on the road, smaller than the first, with a white dot out in front. The white dot grew, changed shape, became a car, a long, white convertible I thought I knew, and when it turned off the road and parked in front of the warehouse I was sure.
Colonel Drummond, a cigar in his mouth and a straw hat on his head, got out of the car and entered the warehouse. After that nothing happened except that the umbrella-topped hydrant thing was still on the move, coming down the distant slope. Also I was getting hotter and thirstier.
Some guys came out of the warehouse, carrying paint cans and rollers. I knew rollers from back in the Leda days, when she decided to change the color of the kitchen to what it had been a few changes before, and Bernie got the idea of painting it himself to save money. The less said about that the better, but I learned one thing for sure: I hated having my coat shaved.
The guys went to the side of the eighteen-wheeler, opened up the paint cans, and went to work. Pretty soon the red roses were gone, the whole side of the truck all white with no pictures. It was interesting to watch, so interesting I forgot about the cage around me and the muzzle on my face. Then I all of a sudden remembered. It made me so mad I rubbed and rubbed my head against the bars real hard, tried to rub that muzzle right off. But it wouldn’t budge. I stood with my muzzled face between the bars.
The paint guys went away. The sun beat down, and we were back to the nothing moving thing, except for the umbrella-topped hydrant slowly descending toward the flatland. After a while the umbrella turned into a big sombrero, and the hydrant became a person, most likely a small one.
The small person in the sombrero came a little further down the distant slope. Then the warehouse door opened and out walked not the paint guys, who I was kind of expecting, but two other men. One was Colonel Drummond; the other—a big, round-faced guy with a handlebar mustache—looked familiar but I couldn’t place him. Then I noticed his snakeskin boots and remembered: Tex Rosa, owner of Cuatro Rosas trucking, some kind of buddy of Jocko’s. I backed away from the bars, deeper into the cage.
They walked toward me, side by side but not close, like maybe they weren’t buddy-buddy. Tex Rosa said something about trouble, and Colonel Drummond said, “You’re blaming me?”
“Who else?” said Tex Rosa. “You started it.”
They stopped in front of the cage. Human fear has a smell, a sweaty smell with some nasty sourness thrown in—and it was coming off Colonel Drummond in waves. Was he afraid of me, locked in a cage and muzzled? That didn’t make sense.
They gazed at me. “Fine-looking animal,” said the colonel.
Tex Rosa nodded. “I’m giving him to Jocko as a bonus,” he said. “That’s if there’re no more goddamn screw-ups.”
“I’m sure everything’s going to end up just—”
“Shut up,” Tex Rosa said. “And lose the cigar. It stinks.”
The colonel dropped the cigar. Rosa ground it under the heel of his snakeskin boot.
“Gonna need some scratch from you,” he said.
“What for?”
“Bernie Little.”
“I don’t get it,” said Colonel Drummond.
Neither did I. But they were talking about Bernie, so I listened my hardest.
“Think Panza’s just gonna up and hand him over?” Rosa said. “That not how it works down here.”
“You have to buy him?”
“We,” Tex said. “Meaning you and me. You put up the money, I’ll do the deal.”
“How much?”
“He’s asking sixty grand.”
“Christ.”
“I’ll talk him down.”
“How far down?”
Rosa turned to the colonel. “There are no guarantees. How come you don’t know that by now?”
Colonel Drummond looked down at the ground. I’d seen lots of duos like them in the nation within the nation. Tex Rosa was the winner and the colonel was the loser.
“It’s just that I can’t lay my hands on that kind of money right now, not even close,” the colonel said.
“Don’t want to hear it.”
“And when you do . . . buy him, then what?”
Rosa shrugged. “Have to take care of business.”
The colonel blinked. “The way you took care of DeLeath?”
“Nope,” Rosa said. “That was pretty much of an accident, Jocko getting carried away. Not that DeLeath didn’t deserve it—interfere with a character like Jocko, what happens happens. But the point is that taking care of Little will be more a matter of policy, all planned out, see my meaning. Unless you got some other idea.”
Colonel Drummond shook his head. “Little knows way too much.”
“Now you’re thinking.”
“But our problem is receipts are in the toilet since . . . since the Peanut thing.”
“Our problem?”
Some humans—never Bernie, of course—fell into whining when things weren’t going their way. You couldn’t tell whiners from how they looked. The colonel, for example: would I have picked him out as a whiner, with his long white car and yellow golf pants? No. But he started whining now. “Be reasonable, Tex. Peanut was the star attraction.”
“Shoulda thought of that before.”
“I did think that—always thought it. I just never imagined you’d go to such extremes.”
“Extremes?” said Rosa. “Tell you a quick story about extremes. Back in the Depression my great-granddad was trucking booze across the border and he had this junior partner—kind of like you and me. Comes a day when junior partner gets the bright idea of cutting my great-granddad—they called him Tex, too, by the way—out of one little truckload. And guess what.”
The colonel shrugged.
“Mister Junior Partner was never seen again,” Rosa said. “And here you are, alive and well.” He clapped the colonel on the back the way humans do to each other sometimes when they’re being palsy, except harder. “Turns out I’m a big softy—lot of people miss that.”
The colonel gave Rosa a quick sideways look. He was scared, no doubt about that, but he managed to lower his voice and stop whining. “I learned my lesson. And we’re not talking about a truckload of booze—it was just a goddamn parrot.”
“One of three left in the whole world.” Rosa bent down, picked up a small stone. “Went to a lot of trouble to get that parrot—think I was going to let something like that slip by?”
“Did I know that at the time?” the colonel said. “Plus I offered to pay you every penny I got for the stupid bird. Can’t we move on?”
“Move on where?” said Rosa, tossing the stone up and down in his hand. “It’s not about money.”
“It’s not?”
Rosa shook his head. “It’s a moral issue,” he said. “A matter of principle.”
“Tex,” said the colonel. “Money’s part of it. Don’t we need money to pay Panza so you can . . . do what you have to do?”
“No denying that.”
“Good. At least we’re agreed on that. Cash flow’s the real issue right now, but supposing we could bill the miraculous reappearance of Peanut, then in one fell—”
“Not happening,” Rosa said. “Can’t do that to the memory of my great-granddad. But tell you what—I’ll lend you the money.”
“You will?”
“Whatever Panza’s number turns out to be.”
“Why, thanks, Tex, I’ll pay you back as soon as—”
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Don’t think about paying you back?”
“Nope,” Rosa said. “In return I’ll just—what’s the word? Assume?”
“I don’t know. Depends what you’re—”
“Yeah, that’s it,” said Rosa. “Assume. I’ll assume majority ownership of the circus.”
The colonel licked his lips, thin lips, dry and chapped. “My circus?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But it’s been in my family for generations.”
“You can still be minority, no problem,” Rosa said. “And I’ll keep the name—Drummond Family Traveling Circus. Has a nice all-American sound.” Their eyes met. “Shake on it?” Rosa said.
Handshaking is one of those human things I’m always on the watch for in my line of work. And just because my situation might not have been perfect at that moment didn’t mean I wasn’t on the job. We’d been in lots of scrapes, me and Bernie.
The colonel looked away from Rosa, sticking out his hand at the same time. Rosa gave the colonel’s hand a hard squeeze and held on until the colonel’s eyes were on him again.
“Deal?” Rosa said.
The colonel nodded. Rosa let go of his hand. Drummond walked away, back toward the warehouse, shoulders slumped.
Rosa smiled at me through the bars. “See how it’s done?” he said. “And the kicker is Panza’s only asking ten.”
I didn’t get what he was talking about, just knew I didn’t like him, not one little bit. All I wanted to do was grab him by the pant leg—the actual truth being I wanted to sink my teeth into his ankle, right through one of those snakeskin boots—and bring him down for good. I growled at him, just in case he was missing where he stood with me. That made him smile even more. Then without warning he winged that stone at me real hard, hit me right on the nose between the bars of the muzzle cage. That’s a sensitive spot, meaning it stung pretty good, but I didn’t make a sound.
Rosa went off. The sun slid across the sky, away from me and sinking lower. The distant slopes got all shadowy, the small person in the sombrero nowhere in sight. I went back to trying to rub off the muzzle, and when that didn’t work, I had another search for any weak spots in the cage, finding none just like the last time. A little later I had another try, and I was getting ready for a repeat after that when activity started up at the warehouse.
First, the eighteen-wheeler backed up to a loading dock. Then a forklift appeared, and what was this? A cage rested on the forks, and in that cage stood a lion, the kind with the huge head of hair; not standing, really—he was actually pacing back and forth, kind of like me. The forklift drove into the eighteen-wheeler, emerged a few moments later without the cage. Then it disappeared inside the warehouse. When it came out again, another cage stood on the forks, this time with a black leopard inside, not pacing, but just lying down in a slumped kind of way.
Back and forth rolled the forklift, loading caged-up creatures into the eighteen-wheeler: another big cat I recognized from Animal Planet, although the name escaped me; some monkeys; brightly colored birds; a huge lizard; a chimp with his hands on the bars and his mouth open wide the way humans do when they’re about to scream. Plus there were other crates I couldn’t see inside. After a while the forklift returned to the warehouse and didn’t come out again. The door to the eighteen-wheeler rolled down and the truck drove away. Not long after that, Colonel Drummond left in his white convertible, followed by a big SUV with Tex Rosa at the wheel.
Then it got quiet. The sun went down beyond that distant slope, and the sky turned all sorts of colors, a beautiful sight, but I couldn’t concentrate on it on account of my thirst, and my tongue being so hard and dry and crusty. I decided to try rubbing off the muzzle again, and when that didn’t work I had another search for weak spots in the cage. But if there were weak spots, I couldn’t find them and maybe I got a bit frustrated because the next thing I knew I was up on my hind legs, hammering at the bars with my front paws. That was when the skinny kid stepped out of the evening shadows.
She took off her sombrero and put her face between the bars. “Jet,” she said in a low voice. “Pobre Jet.”
I liked kids in general, and had liked the look of this particular kid from the get-go.