"My name," T.B. croaked.
The moose jumped. "Christ. You scared me."
"So now we're even, huh?"
"Your name is Otherweiss? How come it ain't Octopus? You a foreigner or something?"
"I changed it."
"So you ain't Toby Octopus the insurance investigator?"
"Hell no. Do I look like an insurance investigator?"
"I feel real bad about this. It's all just a misunderstanding."
"So you're not with the Fighting Fish?"
"The who?"
T.B. started to laugh, which hurt so much he groaned. "You should ask a few questions before you go to the trouble of plugging a guy."
"It was no trouble."
"Still you coulda been more careful."
The moose smiled shyly. "Yeah, I coulda. But I'm not too bright. It's part of my colorful character."
"Would it have killed you to find the right octopus, you fucking dim bulb?"
The moose grinned. "I guess not. But for a dim bulb like me, that wouldn't really be in character, would it?" As if to demonstrate the subtlety of his point, he slugged T.B. in the head with his gun butt. The rest of the night got confused.
T.B. touched the tangle of rain-wet ribbons around his mouth. His tongue tasted like a wrought-iron railing. Some moose was carrying him over one shoulder. That explained it. All the ribbons were rushing to his head.
An hour later, and what a long hour it was, T.B. was hanging from the top of a flagpole above the courtyard of an elementary school. Eviscerated. Hung from a couple of flag hooks. Flapping in the cold wet wind. A lavender rag with eyes. Turned inside out. Staring at the streetlights through the back of his own translucent head. 77Hard to think in this condition.
The night was still. No more sirens. No more screaming. T.B. had reached a dead end, three stories off the pavement.
Down by the bank of Silk River, Turtle and Snake climbed the side of a concrete stanchion and ascended a steel web of pylons, girders, and bracing cables. Above them was their lookout fort.
"Hurry!" Turtle shouted. "They're coming closer! I can hear them!"
They reached the fort, a ramshackle wooden box that they'd cobbled together from discarded crates, rusty nails, and baling wire. There was just enough room inside for the two of them to sit together, play cards, and watch the world go by.
They soon saw the monsters. The dog walked wearily up the middle of Seam Expressway toward the bridge. The cat swung from his mouth. They were massive and slow and uncanny, like a dream spilling into the world. The dog knocked down a row of tollbooths and ventured out across the bridge's upper deck.
"They're right over us," marveled Snake.
"I can't see them!" wailed Turtle.
Perhaps the sound of running water roused the cat back to consciousness. Oh how she hated to get wet! Whatever the reason, she suddenly began to yowl and slash and struggle with her captor. The bridge shook like a three-legged card table. The dog lost his footing. The monsters fell from the bridge.
Their twin immensities smashed the pea green surface of the river. The lookout fort was suddenly awash in flying white water. The monsters surfaced and pounded the river with their paws, raising mammoth clouds of spray. The polka-dot cat paddled west across the river, spluttering in disgust. The dog swam after her, grinning from ear to ear, paddling efficiently and enjoying the exercise — a relentless gingham-checked torture machine.
A tugboat draped with truck tires chugged along the center of the channel. It was in the cat's path and had no time to maneuver. Her wake nearly capsized it. Then it got in the dog's way. He showed it all his teeth. It spun in his turbulence. He snatched it out of the water and tossed it over his head.
The tugboat tumbled end over end through the misty air. Ropes, floats, boat hooks, crewmen, everything not tied down hurtled in a loose cloud around the slowly revolving tugboat. Here it came. Snake could see the keel, then the deck, then the keel again. You could even see the white-haired tug captain — his skipper's cap, then his rubber boots, then his cap again. His flailing arms and legs couldn't alter his trajectory. Here he came.
The tugboat and its crew smacked headlong into the webwork of the bridge. Turtle took a blow to the head from a flying tin plate. He didn't quite pass out, but he lost track of things temporarily. Then it was like he woke up.
He looked around. He was drenched and dripping and sitting in the lookout fort, or what remained of it. A boat captain was pancaked against a nearby pylon.
Turtle looked down. Snake was draped across his lap. There was a plank fragment punched through her tail like a javelin, and half of her head was crushed. Turtle made a move to stand up.
"No," said Snake. "Leave me alone. I want to see this." Her good eye was still gazing across the water, watching the monsters as they swam toward the far bank of the river. "I want to see this," she repeated stubbornly.
Turtle sat and rocked his friend in his forelegs. He found himself singing a song he'd been hearing. "The gingham dog and the calico cat, side by side on the table sat. Twas half past twelve, and what do you think? Not one nor the other had slept a wink." He'd forgotten the rest of the words.
Turtle thought about the life Snake led. She didn't go to school. She had no home, no family. Turtle's mother didn't want her around. Turtle didn't even know where she slept or what she ate. She had nothing. He had everything. And now she was hurt, and he didn't know what to do.
Streams of river water cascaded through the bridge, and Turtle wept.
The three-legged cat dragged herself from the pea green river, trailing her pink satin intestines behind her in the mud. 77For a harrowing minute they snagged on a pile of logs. The cat had to backtrack and pull them loose with her mother-of-pearl teeth. She collapsed on the mud flat north of Cellophane Canal.
A rabble of filthy hobo rats crept from their burrows. They approached the fallen cat cautiously, wielding iron clubs and pointed sticks. They poked her, and she didn't move. The bravest rats among them tried to pry one of the green glass eyes from her head. Then the dog climbed from the river and shook himself. The rats took flight.
At last the dog ate his dinner. He ripped out her throat and pulled open her ribcage. He gnawed at leisure on the cotton muscles and packing twine sinews of her dear sweet legs. She was such a good cat.
After eating, the dog ran up and down the riverbank, guarding the corpse from the wild dog packs that haunted his dreams. He'd never actually seen another giant dog like himself. But he knew that they were out there, just waiting to steal his meat.
After patrolling the perimeter, he sat down beside the corpse and gazed at the fullness of the moon balloon and the beauty of the rainbow-spangled heavens. Then he rolled the cat over on her belly and stuck his stiff stuffed weenie into her slot. He raped the corpse with gusto. "Uk uk uk," he said.
"Ik ik ik," said the corpse.
The hands of the clock on the tower of the Eyeglass Bank Building inched toward midnight. The night sky looked down through her crinkled eye folds and winced in revulsion like a bedsheet on a clothesline when a gust of wind comes by. Beyond the badlands, the peaks of the Dollhouse Mountains cracked open their jagged mouths and moaned in pity for the cat. The city's poor few trees, filched from some model train set, wilted in shame. The bells of Crepe Cathedral rang the hour. The wind fell to nothing and held its breath. The colors drained from the stars.
A luminous form, hazy with distance, wavered in the moonlight over Mildew Swamp. It shone with a black light, like a midnight sun descended to the Table Land.
"Look," said Turtle, off across the water, on Scissors Bridge. "Something's coming."
"Turn my head," said Snake. "I can't move."