“The man who was my only family for half my life is dead, as good as assassinated, and I suppose I’m next on the list. I don’t know if there’s any point for anything but another three fingers of Black Bush whiskey, but I’ve been told by the only man I ever trusted you’re a pretty smart and gutsy girl, and the Las Vegas weather would be better for my legs and my lungs, if not my long-term ‘health,’ so I have a decision to make as to where I’ll live and die or if there’s any point to the years in between those states.
“I don’t know anyone now, here or anywhere, who knows anything about me but enemies.
“They tell me my name is Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella, and I know I need to get the hell somewhere else fast. I guess there’s only one question to ask or answer before I decide where.
“Is it possible …
“Do you … love me?”
Temple had slowly slid down from shock until she was sitting on the hard parquet floor, her back braced against the sofa front, her legs and feet disappearing into the thick long hair of her faux-goat-fur rug.
Midnight Louie was now sitting right beside her, his soft, warm, sturdy bulk bracing her side and shoulder on the left side, the heart side.
There was no time to dither. She heard a hard-breathing silence on the other side of the world, from the other end of the satellite high in the sky, up there with Ophiuchus looking down and almost shaking the stars out of the sky from laughing at muddled mortals and that nasty upraised third finger of fate that seems to direct all the traffic in the universe.
She had no options either. So she listened to her voice break the silence and say three little words.
Three little inevitable, critical, dangerous, life-altering little words. She sighed and spoke them.
“Come home, Max.”
Midnight Louie Decries Sex and Gore
Actually, I do not decry sex. I am actively trying to acquire it, but the pool of possibilities continues to shrink during a politically correct age. Also I am turning up too many female relatives lately. I actually have begun to miss the evil Hyacinth, the late Shangri-La’s Siamese magician’s assistant.
All of my assorted human associates have been distressingly dull and monogamous, until just lately, which is not setting a good example for my species.
Nor am I against Al Gore. I am all for saving the planet and its many glorious species, every one, including my sorely tried larger cousins, the Big Cats. And no one can say I have not done my personal part for overpopulation.
What I do object to is “all gore,” the profligate and gratuitous use of truncated human body parts to pander to the popular taste.
It is bad enough that eaten-away legs figure in this last case. A floating severed arm on semipublic display does not polish the badges of the German or British police forces, even if it is from the last century.
My species is not known for shirking blood and guts, since we are carnivores, something we try to downplay in our domestic lives. We are only carnivores because nature has honed us for thousands of years to eat on the run.
Clearly, we can be rehabilitated.
Humankind I am not so sure about. Certainly, recent turns of events abroad put Kitty the Cutter in a whole new light. I must also take the powers-that-be to task for putting our absent Las Vegasites through so much misery and danger. I expect the usual murder victim, deserving or not, but I do not expect to lose anyone really nice. This is fiction, after all! I do not want it to be “a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing”!
Wait a minute! Ignore that last, borrowed turn of phrase. Sometimes I get carried away. I tell a good part of this tale, and I am not implying I have an idiot bone in my body or hair in my coat.
Anyway, since Mr. Gandolph the Great was falsely thought murdered in one of my earlier books, during the Halloween haunted-house séance to bring Harry Houdini back from the dead, I am hoping for a second resurrection.
It may be too much to hope that my heedless collaborator is listening to my druthers. She is part and parcel of a savage breed.
Homo sapiens is notorious for playing with its kill, as witness the watery end of poor Boots or the vicious slaughter of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, an ironic piece of mob violence if ever there was one.
Me, I do indeed think there should be a mob museum in Las Vegas or even elsewhere; in fact, several of them. The public thirst for gory details should be satisfied and showcased, so the rest of us natural-born carnivores do not look so bad.
Very Best Fishes,
Midnight Louie, Esq.
If you’d like information about getting Midnight Louie’s free Scratching Post-Intelligencer newsletter and/or buying his custom T-shirt and other cool things, please contact Carole Nelson Douglas at P.O. Box 331555, Fort Worth, TX 76163-1555, or at www.carolenelsondouglas.com. E-maiclass="underline" cdouglas@catwriter.com
Carole Nelson Douglas Meditates on Mobs
As usual, you have hit the nail on the head, Louie. The more lurid elements of life and death sell like gangbusters. And the fact is that very word derived from the federal raids to capture mobsters emphasizes that it’s always easier to glamorize the baddies than the goodies.
The mob era that still lingers was built on greed, power mongering, and bullying, as were the centuries-long Irish “Troubles.” Hearing a British couple’s deliberately public, bigoted remarks against “the Irish” in an Irish hotel during a college trip spurred me to start my first novel, Amberleigh, on my return to the U.S. that very fall.
What I’ve read of the nineteenth-century Irish diaspora, when the Irish were literally starved out of their own land and driven to emigrate, illustrates the lengths of brutality that bullying will go to. The Magdalen asylums are another. A year or so before the Good Friday Agreement between the Northern Ireland factions, I spent a gala convention banquet spellbound, hearing my dinner partner, a Roman Catholic widower rearing three children, talk about the spirit-shattering hardships of living in Protestant-dominated Ulster. Such institutionalized, mean-spirited bullying can’t be underestimated as one of the most dangerous and savage human traits.
Those of us who love and adopt animals often save them from bullying situations. I write about cats because their storied “independence” means they will leave unkind or even “not perfect” situations. I write about dogs too, but I find their natures too tragic to address in darker terms. As animals with a pack organization and alpha and beta rankings, they’re always vulnerable to bullying by their own kind and others. As are humans. I’ve never seen a cat that wouldn’t run from abuse if it could. Dogs and too many abused women and children don’t share that gift, the instinct to be solitary for self-preservation’s sake.
Apparently, Kathleen O’Connor did.