Something Magic This Way Comes (17 page)

She started walking, putting her earphones in and switching on the iPod. A moment later, she skipped to the next tune. After today, she didn’t want to know what would happen if she played “It’s Raining Men” again.

T
HE feral cats in the courtyard were having sex again. Joshua pulled his pillow over his head and tried to go back to sleep. No matter how many times he got animal control out here, he never seemed to win.

A thousand cats had to live in the trees behind the old stone mansion. A thousand cats, and a thousand more being made every single day.

No one had warned him about the cats when he moved in.

Or the raccoons. They made even worse sounds during sex than the cats. Cats were bad enough; they sounded like panicked children or terrified women, bringing back old memories from his years in Beirut, Bosnia, and Iraq.

But raccoons sounded like vicious lions ripping up a corpse. On his first night in the mansion, he grabbed his largest flashlight and ventured outside to see what was causing the noise—his curse, always to run toward danger instead of away from it—and expected to see a bear mauling some skanky kid who’d been smoking meth near the back of the property.

Instead, he startled two raccoons having a private (well, not really private, more like intimate) moment.

One screeched and scurried toward him, while the other fell over backward.

He ran all the way back to the mansion, laughing harder than he had in years. Fortunately, the raccoon didn’t give pursuit.

Outside his window, the sex continued. One particularly throaty yowl sounded like Stuben’s cameraman right after the roadside bomb sliced off his left leg.

The image—blood spurting, Stuben covered with shrapnel crawling toward his injured friend, the truck burning behind them—already flashed in front of Joshua’s eyes.

He wouldn’t get any more sleep, maybe not for a few days.

He rolled over and looked at the clock alarm he didn’t need. Six
A.M
. A long day of nothing ahead.

But if he stayed in bed, he would either haul out his gun and shoot the damn cats—which was illegal, since he was just inside the city limits—or he would try to sleep and would suffer the nightmares for the rest of the morning.

More yowling. His skin had become gooseflesh. He rubbed his right arm, the only unscarred patch of his upper torso, and watched the gooseflesh disappear.

Then he got up, and made the bed, just as if he were still in the field.

Actually, it felt as if he were in the field. This old mansion reminded him of some of the places in Bosnia—built long ago, abandoned by the people who had loved it, and left to decay. Yet vestiges of luxury remained.

This room was one of those vestiges. The gold marble floor caught the morning light, and the sandcolored walls reflected it. The bed stood on a large raised platform made of marble as well, and his friend Roxy had placed silk hangings around the king-sized mattress, so that it felt as if he slept under expensive mosquito netting—not that he needed any in this part of Oregon.

The bed itself, one of those pillow-top jobbies with a machine that adjusted the mattress hardness, bordered on ridiculous. So did the silk sheets, the thick down comforter he hadn’t needed since it was spring, and the extra soft pillows. The occasional tables matched the marble floor, and the vanity in the walkin closet seemed like just that, a vanity.

But he’d only given Roxy a week to prepare the place for his arrival. That included furnishing, cleaning, and repair. From what he had heard (and seen) the cleaning had taken most of the week. The furnishing was a one-day affair, and the repair, unless it was an emergency, hadn’t gotten done at all.

His own fault, really. From the time he left the hospital in Wiesbaden to the day he had arrived in the town his passport claimed as home, he’d had nearly six weeks. Of course some of that included evaluations at Bethesda, and a psych work-up in some private D.C. clinic that operated on government grants.

But he still could have guessed his arrival here with more than a week’s accuracy.

Here, not home. He couldn’t call this place home.

It wasn’t. It never had been. He’d come here as a child to visit his grandparents, and he’d spent summers in a now-unusable room down the hall. From those visits, he remembered his grandmother’s kitchen (warm and inviting, always smelling of coffee and cake), the books in the library (mostly untouchable in languages he couldn’t then read), and the hot sunlight (clear and crisp without the haze of humidity he had come to accept from his parents’ sojourn in the south).

He used to think he loved it here. But he had discovered he didn’t love it anywhere. Not that one place was better than the next. No. He couldn’t stay in any place long enough to get to know it.

That was one of the many reasons he’d become a war correspondent. One of the many reasons he’d traveled for ninety percent of his adult life.

One of the many reasons he felt like he was going slowly insane locked in this place, on the outskirts of a town he didn’t remember.

The cats screeched, and then something clattered.

He peered out the window in time to see a black-andwhite tabby fleeing across the yard. A clay pot, still filled with dirt, had fallen over. A gray cat with eyes that looked like abalone stared at him from below.

The evil eye, his great-grandmother would have said. She had lived in this room until he was eight.

That summer, she had died during her afternoon nap, and his grandmother made him say good-bye.

That was the first time he had seen death. The small, shrunken old woman with clawlike hands was completely motionless. She smelled faintly of pee and mothballs. Her skin was a color of gray that he knew was unnatural, even then.

His grandmother had cried that afternoon, but all he had felt was relief. Relief that the old woman wouldn’t caw questions at him, spraying him with her musty breath; relieved that those hands would no longer clutch at him; relieved that he no longer had to pretend to enjoy the sticky candies she had forced on him every morning when he went to see her before being allowed outside.

Outside, into the courtyard, where fountains had once sprayed and flowers had bloomed. The same courtyard where cats had sex and broke his grandmother’s pots and stared at him as if he was the one who was out of place.

* * *

He waited until ten to call animal control, and by then it felt like midafternoon. He was hot and cranky and filled with coffee. He’d already watched three iterations of
Headline News
, two silly
Fox News
roundups, and some MSNBC reports, all while tuning his radio back and forth between the BBC and NPR. He had read the
Oregonian
and wished for better west coast paper versions of the east coast dailies, because reading them on-line made him feel as if he were still in the field.

He saved the international papers for the real afternoon, when he was done with the American entertainment nonsense and ready for unabashed journalism.

But he had a gap to fill between ten and one, and on this day, he decided to fill it by solving the cat problem once and for all.

He got the same dispatch that he always got, a lackluster woman with a voice to match, who seemed to believe that people’s animal problems were none of her business. This time, he asked for her supervisor.

He knew it would take some argument, and it did, but he got transferred to a kind, caring woman who knew his property and empathized with his problem.

But, she told him, all animal control could do was put down the rabid cats and the terribly sick ones. The county would fix the animals at taxpayer expense, and then return them to the place they were found.

Which explained why his feline population hadn’t gone down no matter how many cats he live-trapped for Animal Control. He felt an uncharacteristic surge of anger and frustration. How was he supposed to live here if the place was overrun with felines?

And that was the problem: He was living here. He couldn’t just move to another dilapidated mansion or a quiet ranch house. The only way he’d gotten out of the hospitals was to promise he would stay in one place for a year. One place didn’t mean one town. It meant one building, one location, no moving—not even once.

Of course, he had to check in with the local psychiatrist, who sent reports back to Bethesda. Joshua wouldn’t be approved for military access—no embedding—without finishing his year in the States. He could, he supposed, report the old-fashioned way—sneaking around, doing the work on the side—but modern news organizations required their reporters—even the stringers—to have military access. He’d have to work for Pacifica, which paid next to nothing, or Al Jazeera, which would make him suspect in his home country, or any host of other not-quite-mainstream news organizations.

He thought of all this while the supervisor explained her problems—the lack of funding, the lack of state regulations, and the lack of interest by anyone who didn’t have an animal problem—and midway through her discourse, he realized she had recognized his name and was hoping for a local story of some kind, one that might help her fund her tiny government fiefdom.

“I empathize,” he said when she took a breath.

“There isn’t enough money anywhere. But aren’t there regulations about the number of cats that one person can own?”

“You own these?” she asked.

“Didn’t you just tell me that they’re my problem? Didn’t you say they have to stay on my property?”

“Hmmm,” she said. “I see what you mean. But then the cats would all have to be put down.”

“I thought that’s what you did anyway,” he said.

“Oh, no,” and then she started into another endless monologue about feral cats. Because he wanted her on his side, he didn’t interrupt. Instead, he thumbed through the want ads in the
Oregonian
.

When she finally finished, he said, “I need to get them off the property.”

She was silent for a long moment, and he could feel the disappointment echo through the line. He wasn’t sure why he cared. Normally he bulldozed past other people’s emotions. But this time, he recognized his own hesitation, and he wondered if he was being gentler than usual because he was fragile himself.

“Before we invoke that state law, which might get you fined and maybe even arrested—” she suddenly sounded like arresting him was a good choice— “let me put you in contact with a local woman who is starting a no-kill shelter. Maybe she can help you.”

He couldn’t imagine these wild creatures being sheltered, but he figured he would go through the hoops.

What else did he have to do? And if he got arrested for having too many cats, so be it. It would give him a few days to examine the local jail and pretend he had moved somewhere else.

“Fine,” he said. “What’s this woman’s name?”

“I’ll call her,” the supervisor said. “She’s skittish with people. If she wants to come, she’ll come. If not, you’ll see an officer in a day or two.”

A day or two. The wheels of government worked slowly no matter where he was. He tried not to sigh, thanked the supervisor for her time, and hung up, disappointed that his great foray into the bastion that was Animal Control had only taken an hour.

Maybe he would start the afternoon papers early and go through all of his languages. He’d have to struggle with Arabic—it was his newest language and his poorest—and he hadn’t tried reading Serbian in almost a decade, so he’d see if his skills had atrophied.

But it would be good to revisit old ties. He was supposed to be writing a memoir, after all; that was his official, nonmedical excuse for hibernating.

He hadn’t started. But now, after two weeks of his own company, without deadlines or explosions to run toward or meetings to set up with the general staff, he needed something to occupy his mind.

Something besides cats and exploding cameramen and shrapnel, raining like hot flame all around him.

* * *

Two days later he had made his own nest in what had once been the library. He had no idea where all the books had gone; his parents had probably sold them along with the furniture when his grandparents died.

He hadn’t come home for that funeral. His grandparents had had the misfortune to get hit by a tanker truck on the same day as the Beirut barracks bombing that killed all those marines. He hadn’t even been in his quarters for his parents’ frantic intercontinental phone calls. When he heard the news, nearly a week after it happened, he flashed on his grandparents’ bodies burned beyond recognition like the men he’d seen around the compound, and he didn’t even feel guilt.

People died. The living went on. That was the way of things.

He felt guilt now. He had loved his grandparents, and he had loved this library. Maybe he would spend the year refilling it with books. Or maybe a half year, so that he could enjoy them.

He finally decided to go into town—his first foray since he had discovered that these days all a man needed was an internet account and a credit card to make grocery stores deliver.

Feeling decadent and a little rich (he never really spent his pay in all the years he’d gone from country to country), he bought himself two computers—a desktop model, which he hadn’t had since laptops were introduced, and a brand new lightweight laptop that made the battered ones that had gotten him through two separate war zones feel like anvils.

He was just driving back when he saw her standing in his driveway, her arms stretched out as if she were giving a benediction to the dozens of cats that surrounded her.

When the cats realized his vehicle was coming through the gate, they scattered. She whirled—and he got a momentary impression of an angry goddess, creating her own tempest. Then her arms dropped, and she tilted her head, looking like an ordinary and somewhat plain American woman.

He got out of the gas hog that Roxy had leased for him and felt a bit of embarrassment. He had planned to get something that didn’t guzzle as much fuel— after all, he’d seen what the greed for oil could do— but he hadn’t gotten around to that either.