Adios, Cowboy, page 5
“She fell out of the sky,” he said. He had already entirely convinced himself of this story, so there was no point in getting cross with him.
Later it turned out that he had taken the kitten from the outlanders, that it had been Maria’s favorite.
Maria spent the whole day meowing, running across the field, calling the kitten, we discovered.
But by that time we had already taken the little animal to the vet.
Herr Professor examined the creature, rubbed an ampoule of anti-parasite stuff into the fur on her back, and explained something to Daniel with undisguised adoration.
Daniel turned up the sleeve of his pullover and scratched a scab on his elbow. There was something coquettish about him, now that I think about it, even when he was biting his nails or squatting on the toilet. And, like all genuine coquettes, he appeared entirely unaware of it.
“Dirty great pedophile,” my sister whispered of our neighbor as we stood at the door of his kitchen in which there was never any heat, even in winter.
Daniel, the strutting warrior, handsomer than anything you could find in the streets of the Settlement, helped him, soothing the brindled kitten with his dirty hands.
* * *
For my brother Daniel, who had just discovered video games, the cat was a space oddity, a furry projectile and little galactic trooper.
But my father, as soon as he saw her, said: “Well, just look at her, the little star, what a coat, what bearing, à la Claudia Cardinale!”
So she became Jill, as in Jill McBain from the Sergio Leone film Once Upon a Time in the West. We wanted to please our father.
Not long after, the Iroquois Brothers came into our street with their heavily armed, little halfwitted Maria to fetch their cat Mikan. My father easily persuaded them that Jill was Jill—that she couldn’t be Mikan, that she didn’t have balls, that she had fallen out of the sky, what else.
Later, nevertheless, that stone was hurled at my head—from the back I looked very like my brother.
My father bequeathed to his sorrowful amigo his leather belt, the parrot, and an old silver Colt—he had bought it specially for him, for his birthday, and it “had once been able to fire real bullets,” Daniel said. He roamed through the streets of the Settlement, got up like that, even after he emerged from his childhood years. He always walked in a diagonal, in an unpredictable tacking movement, trying to trick the murderer Liberty Valance or the greedy Pac-Man. Or to capture the cyber badge of the universe, like a cyber cowboy.
And the rest of us walked like that too, tacking, the aim of the game being to obstruct an invisible enemy sniper. There weren’t any snipers in the Settlement, but just in case.
The parrot didn’t interest Daniel much. She strolled along the top of the dresser, cackling. She was waiting for her master, our father, and then she forgot who or what she was waiting for, but she still went on standing up there, waiting.
Ginger Jill spent a long time stalking the crazy bird, lying in wait for it, the little hyena.
In the end all that was left of the parrot’s puffed-up pride were a few bloody feathers on the tiles and her untouched beak.
That all happened not long after Daniel’s funeral. No one was thinking about the unfortunate bird, which ought to have been shut up in a cage, out of reach, I recall.
Later, my sister cleared up the mess and turned with a broom, full of righteous anger, on ginger Jill, who was calmly licking herself with her pink tongue. Jill is a wily and elastic little beast and my sister assumed she had made herself scarce until the dust settled.
Later we went to look for her at our neighbor’s. She was lying on the floor tiles cleaning her tail just as she had been when we’d last seen her.
We adored ginger Jill, full of electric indifference under our stroking palms. It was easy to construe indifference as wisdom.
“Bloodthirsty sphinx,” said Herr Professor as soon as she had grown into a huntress.
Had ginger Jill been the size of a dog, I thought, she would have slit my throat as well. Sooner or later all cat owners come to believe that. But as it was, she had to accept my love and concern.
And like all cats with a modicum of self-respect, it seemed as though she was on the point of speaking and so we deliberately attributed several powers or inexplicable events to her.
I know something about cats, but neither the Cheshire Cat, nor Snowball, nor Simone Simon nor Natasja Kinski, nor the fiery Behemot, nor Louis Wain’s cat, not one of them had that elegance, that self-sufficiency and commitment of an actress in love, that no one could ever be sure whether they were just putting on. Probably, but that didn’t matter too much to the actors.
“Jill is devil-ificent,” said Daniel, looking at her.
“Why aren’t I a cat? That’s my real nature,” said my sister, watching Jill stretch.
And Jill was our household devil-ificence, but nevertheless, we would have coldly skinned her alive because of our father’s parrot had we caught her in the act.
I sat beside the fridge on the tiles with the dirty black grouting, absentmindedly peeling off a Fanta sticker, while my sister cleaned the bloody marks from the floor with Vim and a scrubbing brush, from time to time emitting shrieks of revulsion and fury, shooting a glance at me as though I was the one who had slit the bird’s throat.
Where had he been hiding all these years, that old guy we called Herr Professor, I wondered as I ambled toward the Settlement, through this town that never sleeps in summer. He must have gone a really long way away. He left without a word and all that reached us from him was a telegram of condolence, stunned, I’d say—three whole weeks after Daniel’s death. There was also a short letter, with no sender’s address, that we presume came from him. The letter was addressed to Daniel, and it arrived a week too late for him to have received and read it. It was postmarked Perm and the stamp had a picture of Laika the Astrobitch on it.
July was on the wane, the night heat bursting out of the ground, in protuberances of earth, bumps in the asphalt—there had been no rain for more than two months. I was still several kilometers from the house and it was several hours before morning. Behind me was Zagreb, distant, more distant than Perm, than Osaka and Juneau, and Santa Fe, the most distant city on earth.
“That’s what the towns where you abandon your failed illusions are like,” our favorite cowboy Ned Montgomery would say, riding off into the sunset with a cigarette between his teeth.
After a while, in the Old Settlement, we began to avoid Herr Professor. Stories were going around. People stick a stinking badge on you, which everyone can see apart from those who have been marked like that—they even wonder where the stench, wtf, is coming from. Like when you tread in dog dirt, and don’t realize that what’s smelling is your shoe.
Even Jill, with instinctive feline opportunism, avoided our neighbor’s doorway, even though she would have found bits of skin and meat in the kitchen, and mice and lizards in the garden.
Daniel, who lacked any curiosity about village intrigue and scandal mongering—but who was passionately and joyfully curious about animals—once used to go on whole-day visits to the vet’s. But with time, he too stopped going, I recall. That was shortly before the incident.
At the time the incident occurred, I was thoroughly settled in Zagreb, so I can’t say all that much about it. My brother had just begun to hang around with Iroquois Tomi, the younger Barić, and some of his other local contemporaries, my sister told me. They mended motorbikes and got up to the usual secondary-schoolboy foolish things.
Later word went around that Tomi and Daniel and some of the other Iroquois Brothers had thrown stones at a bus on the route Old Settlement–Northern Habor–Center and almost killed the driver. But that wasn’t true, Ma said.
It seems that this was the work of Ear and Tiny, my sister affirmed. I knew Ear and Tiny, two jerks who dressed like Puff Daddy and Eminem.
Now all the actors in that story are corpses.
Ear was sent to a San Patrignano home and all trace of him was then lost. Some say that his body was found burned in a container, somewhere near Ancona.
Tiny had a whole barrelful of bullets emptied into him by a stranger, from behind, as he rode his Vespa.
The younger Barić, was killed on the road. He was walking along the tarmac and taken out by a drunken truck driver. I’m really sorry about him, he wasn’t crazy.
When the incident occurred, when Herr Professor was beaten up and his apartment trashed, I recall, all those lads from the Settlement were summoned to the police station. Including Daniel.
Ma was beside herself, my sister said.
“The man was almost done for,” said Ma, meaning Herr Professor.
“Dear God, I’d prefer he was killed himself rather than have him kill anyone else,” said Ma, meaning my brother.
It ended with the vet making a statement that it was not those lads, Daniel’s pals, the papers reported.
Soon afterward, Herr Professor left the Settlement, while “the perpetrators were not found,” it was reported, I recall.
People carried on gossiping. That the vet had got a job with the UN peacekeeping force, looking after the army dogs, that he had worked his way through half the soldiers or they through him—stories like that were extremely popular at the time—and had finally moved to the Netherlands with a young UN employee.
It was also said that he had a clinic on the other side of town, also that he had married a woman vet with whom he was living in a basement with a little garden, but there were no children.
Ma was convinced that she had seen him once at the Bazaar, stealing a walnut from a pile on a stall; he had passed on quickly, presumably afraid of the stallholder, and Ma would have called to him to say hello, but she simply couldn’t remember his real name.
And now he’s come back.
“That old gay’s back,” said my sister when she called me in Zagreb, after she had opened the conversation with a desperate: “I don’t know what to do with her.” Meaning Ma.
“I can’t leave her like this, but I have to go back to work, I’ve got revision for those losers with resits.”
Then a sigh.
Then: “Hell.” And: “You thinking of coming?”
“Not that soon,” I said, the day before yesterday in Zagreb.
And then my sister said that, that the man I’d given up looking for had come back.
As though I’d been summoned from a stuffy waiting room after I’d already given up the ghost five or six times, I thought.
It took me half an hour to pack a bag with everything I could cram into the idea of my life.
“The number you have dialed is currently unavailable,” maintained my sister’s voicemail when I got off the bus and called her. It was already late, I observed, they would be asleep. Ginger Jill slept on Mother’s feet, Ma lay on her back like a corpse, with a burned-out cigarette in her fingers, while my sister up in the attic slept with her hair in a firm nighttime plait, curled up, with a pillow over her head. On way home. Be there early morning. Press. Sent.
Make something of your life, they say. But what can you make of your life if you don’t have money for a taxi? Your old man never set foot in a taxi. Your old lady never set foot in a taxi. And you live in a country where such a thing is expensive, a privilege. I can see you’ll never marry. No-no-no, don’t get annoyed. You’re not bad, and you’ve got a nice jacket, but you’re a one-off. Try to make something of your life, get an education, if you’ve got connections, let them sort you something where you won’t slave for peanuts, but know this—if your old man never set foot in a taxi, there’s only the remotest chance that you will and that’s the way things are. A brave insight into that fact is the most you’ll achieve in life. Such are the times, such is the place. You and I will always have enough for a decent pair of shoes, because we know that decent shoes are the most we can have. You and I will always have decent shoes: we need them because we don’t have money for a taxi.”
That’s what the guy at the bar said. He sat down beside me, slurping his beer.
Tubby Diana had turned off the music after the police intervened.
In front of the building, by a parked BMW, some lads had got together over a bottle of Chivas Regal. You could hear the kitsch blaring even through the closed doors of the car.
Diana was drying glasses. She had that expression on her face, like abused women who have given up on themselves. But still on a knife-edge.
“If you said boo, she’d have a heart attack,” said my sister. But that’s the same expression women here have if they don’t have a man and they’re past twenty-something. Hey-ho. Where did I go wrong? The girls who never left the Old Settlement didn’t have a lot of choice.
Some became surfers’ babes, others motorcycle molls.
“Born groupies,” said my sister.
“Born to be wives,” she said.
Diana herself had married a boy from the Settlement for whom his Yamaha was the be-all and end-all. He shortened the exhaust and sped past her house until she married him, I recalled.
“Rats,” yawned the guy at the bar, glancing through the door at the lads by the BMW.
“Oh, leave them be,” Diana said, smiling bleakly. She wanted to go home without gunshots and sweeping up glass. Me too, I thought.
“Racketeers,” muttered the guy in our direction. One of them seemed familiar to me, as though I’d seen him at one time in Daniel’s company, when I used to come home from uni. But when our eyes met, he turned his head away, quickly.
I’ve known Diana my whole life. We all called her Tubby Diana, because she had been a tubby child. Now she’s thin, but the Tubby has stuck. She’s no older than me, and she has two little sons with the biker, twins, and her face is puffy.
“All the local lasses are bloated with alcohol by their twenties,” said the guy, tipsily. “Maybe that’s your fate as well. Accumulating fluid,” he informed me.
Diana could give me a lift home when her shift ends, I’d thought as I dragged my suitcase along and caught sight from the street of the familiar pink neon sign of the Last Chance with its painted green palm.
“Sure, old thing,” she had said, “no problem.”
It was almost day.
There weren’t many customers at the Last Chance. Closing time was in the air.
The fellow at the bar, an old guy sleeping with his head on the table (“Dipso,” said the g.a.t.b.), four Swedish tourists at the separate table (“swingers,” said the g.a.t.b. between two gulps), and right at the back, beside the door to the toilet, a mysterious good-looker playing a mouth organ.
Well, well, I thought. What film was this?
A foot on the edge of the table and a blue tuxedo. He was leaning his head and shoulders against the wall. Playing.
Foreigner, I thought.
“Phoney?” I asked the guy at the bar, rolling my eyes in the direction of the lad in the gloom.
“Nah! That’s Angelo!” said the guy.
“Hey, Tubby, take Angelo a Southern and give the kid a cognac! And another big one for me!” he rolled the empty beer bottle across the bar.
Diana looked at him grudgingly. The guy owed her.
“To hell with that!” The guy pulled a face. “Write it down. Just write it down, I say.”
The good-looker in the corner blew twice into his harmonica to clear the dust, then launched into a familiar tune. Yippee ya yo. Yippee ya yay.
3
“THE KID DID A THOROUGH JOB. He wanted to be sure he wouldn’t survive,” the inspector had commented.
They found Daniel’s body immediately, some twenty meters from the viaduct, in a vineyard, and his left arm only two days later, in a stream under a spruce bush.
“You’re lucky, the part that was in the water wasn’t got by vermin,” said the coroner when we had made our way down the long staircase into the hospital’s basement mortuary. They had somehow attached the arm for the identification.
Blood had spurted all over the place, over the trees and the frozen vine leaves, said people who had made a pilgrimage to the place of the mishap for the first few weeks, leaving plastic roses and lamps that lasted as long as their batteries did behind the St. Andrew’s cross.
“A performance,” my sister had said as we approached the railway line.
On the day of the funeral some relations whom I barely knew drove me from Zagreb.
They crammed six adults into the car. It was drizzling and we were all given a salami sandwich for the journey. The air was sour as were the salami and the drizzle.
Later, in the evening, as my sister and I drew near to the railway, I was still feeling sick from that air in my nostrils. My sister wanted to get it over with quickly and dragged me by my moist, limp hand, as though we were children; she held it for a while in her own cold, dry one, digging her little sharp nails into my palm.
In the mortuary, I looked at my brother’s right hand, on which the nails he’d always bitten down to the quick had grown in the meantime. Because of those nails that had grown I would’ve known he was dead, even in my sleep.
“It’s Daniel,” I said, although the puppet with the small head lying on the metal table no longer had anything to do with him.
He didn’t leave any kind of letter.
“They don’t usually leave any, actually,” people told me.
“Get over it, doesn’t everyone leave without a message, what’s so strange?” said my sister.
What do I know about everyone, I thought. It wasn’t like Daniel, I thought, to go without a word.
Some people I half knew wept without ceasing and that drove me out of the house. I remember that one lady in black, who used to frequent funerals, sat in the hall, in the corner under Mother’s old hair dryer, sobbing and blowing her nose noisily, so that she looked like a desperately grieving woman at a hairdresser’s.
