“Look, Brutus. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times,” I began, but he didn’t let me finish.
“Zip it, hairball. I’m not here to pick a fight with you.”
“Oh? Well, you could have fooled me,” I retorted with some hauteur.
“It’s about that dame,” he said with something approaching embarrassment in his voice.
“Dame? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
He scuffed his paw on the branch and chipped off a piece of bark in the process.“The dead dame. The floater. You remember.”
“Oh, that dame.”
“Yeah, that dame. I’ve seen her.”
This struck me as odd.“Seen her? Where?”
“In my dreams,” came the intriguing reply.
“In your dreams,” I said skeptically.
“Yes, I’ve seen her in my dreams,” he said. “And what I was wondering…” His voice trailed off and he seemed to swallow something jagged lodged in his throat. Probably his pride.
“Yes?” I was still fogged to a degree. This was turning out to be quite the night for oddball confessions.
“Well, you saw what happened. Have you been having bad dreams? Napmares?”
I laughed what I hoped was a mocking laugh.“No, my dear Brutus. I don’t dream about the incident. In fact I’d all but forgotten about the whole thing until you showed up and dredged it up from the dead past where I left it.”
“Oh,” he said, and chipped some more bark from my branch. “Well, I keep seeing some waterlogged human corpse trying to attract my attention every time I close my eyes. It’s not much fun, I can tell you.”
“Yes, I can see how that would be annoying.”
“She seems to want something, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it is. Every time I offer her a piece of my codfish, she sighs and vanishes.”
“What I’d suggest is that you have a long talk with Dana. You know Dana, don’t you? Yes, of course you do. Now, you don’t have to take my word for it, but you and she have a lot in common.”
“You think so?” he said. And he gave me a look of such hopefulness my heart almost bled for the brute. But then I was strong again.
“Yes, I do.” I would have added they were both potty and would therefore get along like only two inmates of the loony bin can, but refrained from doing so. One has to remain civil on these occasions.
He looked at me kind of strangely, and finally muttered something that I can only describe as broken words of gratitude, and pottered off.
“Phew,” I said, as soon as he was out of sight, and laid down my weary head for a much needed rest. But, still my troubles were not over.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” a voice spoke from the darkness, and, looking up to see with whom I had the pleasure, I saw that… there was no one there.
9
Ghosts in the Park
Now, I don’t know what your policy is on disembodied voices suddenly coming out of nowhere and intruding upon what is supposed to be a perfectly wonderful evening, but I have to admit to not liking them. And I said as much. In fact the exact words I used were, “Could you please leave me alone and harass someone else?”
“No, I cannot,” the disembodied voice retorted, and with not a little bit of pique I might add.
I groaned both in spirit and in body.
“You could have prevented what happened, little one,” said the voice, “but you didn’t. You had it in your power to stop me from being murdered and you didn’t.”
Now, you would probably have expected me to pick up on the M word but I had stopped listening when the voice mentioned something about me being little. It perked me up a great deal. All my life people have called me freakishly large, and here was some unknown voice coming from up above calling me little. So you can’t blame me for jumping to conclusions.
“Thank you, God,” I said. “I’ve always said I wasn’t big. And thank you for finally answering my prayers. I’ve been praying for a long time, even though I wasn’t even sure you existed. I’m so glad that you do and that you’ve taken time out of your busy—”
“I’m not God,” thundered the voice. And now I noticed it sounded kinda hollow, as if it came from a tomb or something.
“Oh,” I said, a little taken aback. And then enlightenment struck. I cocked an eye at the upper branches of the tree where the voice seemed to be coming from. “Guardian angel?” I said, remembering something Dana had said.
An unearthly sigh drifted down and the voice spoke again.“I am not your guardian angel, little one. I’m the soul of the woman you allowed to be murdered.”
This rattled me somewhat, but nevertheless I trudged on.“Well, allowed is a big word,” I sputtered. If this person wasn’t God or my guardian angel, there was only one other option: Brutus or one of his gang was playing a practical joke on me. I now saw all. It had struck me as odd that Brutus, notoriously the toughest cat on the block, would suddenly go all wimpy on me but now his behavior made perfect sense: he was simply setting me up for the arrival of this ‘ghost’.
I gave a knowing smile.“The game is up, my friend. The cat’s out of the bag. I know what you’re up to. So you’d better come on down or else I’m coming up there. And you don’t want that, I assure you.”
A sad rattle sounded from higher up the tree.“It is true. It’s not what I want for you.”
“You’re damn skippy it’s not what you want. So, you better scoot and tell Brutus his psychological game didn’t work out as planned.”
“You are right,” heaved the voice mournfully. “It is certainly not how I planned this evening to go.”
“You have to tell me how you’re doing that thing with the voice,” I said. “It’s a great trick for Halloween.”
“Alas, I won’t be here when Halloween comes around.” The voice—I still hadn’t figured out to whom it belonged—seemed to be drifting farther and farther away somehow, growing weaker if you will. “Next time, little one, pay more attention and act when called upon. Don’t be afraid to intervene…”
And with these words, the voice died away and silence once again reigned. Well, as far as silence can reign in a small town park in the middle of the night.“Hello,” I said tentatively. “Are you there?”
But nothing stirred. And though of course I knew I was the victim of some kind of practical joke, I still felt strangely dejected. The voice had sounded so… sad. And, frankly, that just doesn’t fit the MO of Brutus or his amigos. It takes some measure of intelligence to be sad, is what I mean to say. And those guys just don’t have it. Inane giggling is what I would have expected. Not this otherworldly melancholy.
I shivered in spite of the balmy spring weather and wondered when the next surprise would mar my peaceful existence. Well, as it was, I didn’t have long to wait, for I’d just picked up on some promising squeaking sounding from down below that almost certainly was mouse-like in origin, when yet another voice addressed me.
“Well? Do you believe me now?”
As I might have guessed, it was Dana, back to badger me with her nonsense. I searched around to tell her what was what, when I noticed to my surprise there was no one there. And yet her voice had come from somewhere in my rear. Very close by it had sounded. Right about where the tip of my tail now raked the air in search of feline life forms and finding none.
“Can’t see me, can you?” Dana said. And I could have sworn she was sitting right next to me. Once again my tail swooshed through the air and found nothing to arrest its sweep.
“Dana?” I said, slightly spooked now. “Is that you?”
“Of course it’s me… little one.”
I started. Little one. That’s how that spooky friend of Brutus had called me. But how would Dana know about that? Had she been spying on me?
“You… you heard that?”
“Of course I did. I was sitting here the whole time.”