“Yeah,” she said, “something like that.”
He reached out a hand cluttered with silver to embrace the eggs and gently roll them back and forth across the gleaming expanse of the plate. “No, I’m just going to fondle them,” he said, and he got the expected response: she laughed. “But does anybody still play dice around here?” he called down the bar as the eyes of the regulars slid in our direction and then away again.
In those days — and this was ten years ago or more — the game of Horse was popular in certain California bars, as were smoking, unprotected sex and various other adult pleasures that may or may not have been hazardous to your health. There were five dice, shaken in a cup, and you slammed that cup down on the bar, trying for the highest cumulative score, which was thirty. Anything could be bet on, from the next round of drinks to ponying up for the jukebox.
The rain hissed at the door and it opened briefly to admit a stamping, umbrella-less couple. Ludwig’s question hung unanswered on the air. “No? How about you, Daria?”
“I’m working, actually.”
He turned to me. I had no work in the morning or the next morning either — maybe no work at all. My apartment wasn’t what I’d thought it would be, not without anybody to share it with, and I’d already vowed to myself that I’d rather sleep on the streets than go back to my aunt’s because going back there would represent the worst kind of defeat. Take good care of my baby, Kim, my mother had said when she’d dropped me off. He’s the only one I’ve got.
“Sure,” I said, “I guess. What’re we playing for — for drinks, right?” I began fumbling in my pockets, awkward, shoulders dipping — I was drunk, I could feel it. “Because I don’t have, well, maybe ten bucks—”
“No,” he said, “no,” already rising from his seat, “you just wait here, just one minute, you’ll see,” and then he was out the door and into the grip of the rain.
Daria hadn’t moved. She was dressed in the standard outfit for Daggett’s employees, shorts, white ankle socks and a T-shirt with the name of the establishment blazoned across the chest, her legs pale and silken in the flickering light of the fake fireplace in the corner. She gave me a sympathetic look and I shrugged to show her I was ready for anything, a real man of the world.
There was a noise at the door — a scraping and shifting — and we all looked up to see Ludwig struggling with something against the backdrop of the rain. His hat had been knocked askew and water dripped from his nose and chin. It took a moment, one shoulder pinning the door open, and then he lifted a cage — a substantial cage, two and a half feet high and maybe four long — through the doorway and set it down against the wall. No one moved. No one said a word. There was something in the cage, the apprehension of it as sharp and sudden as the smell it brought with it, something wild and alien and very definitely out of the ordinary on what to this point had been a painfully ordinary night.
Ludwig wiped the moisture from his face with a swipe of his sleeve, straightened out his hat and came back to the bar, looking jaunty and refreshed. “All right,” he said, “don’t be shy — go have a look. It won’t bite. Or it will, it definitely will, but just don’t get your fingers near it, that’s all—”
I saw coiled limbs, claws, yellow eyes. Whatever it was, the thing hadn’t moved, not even to blink. I was going to ask what it was, when Daria, still at my side, said, “It’s a cat, some kind of wild cat. Right? A what — a lynx or something?”
“You can’t have that thing in here,” one of the regulars said, but already he was getting up out of his seat to have a look at it — everyone was getting up now, shoving back chairs and rising from the tables, crowding around.
“It’s a serval,” Ludwig was saying. “From Africa. Thirty-five pounds of muscle and quicker than a snake.”
And where had he gotten it? He’d won it, in a bar in Arizona, on a roll of the dice.
How long had he had it? Two years.
What was its name? Cat. Just Cat. And yes, it was a male, and no, he didn’t want to get rid of it but he was moving overseas on a new job and there was just no way he could take it with him, so he felt it was apropos — that was the word he used, apropos—to give it up in the way he’d gotten it.
He turned to me. “What was your name again?”
“Junior,” I said. “James Jr. Turner, I mean. James Turner Jr. But everybody calls me Junior.” I wanted to add, “Because of my father, so people wouldn’t confuse us,” but I left it at that, because it got even more complicated considering that my father was six months dead and I could be anybody I wanted.
“Okay, Junior, here’s the deal,” Ludwig said. “Your ten bucks against the cat, one roll, what do you say?”
I wanted to say that I had no place for the thing, that I didn’t want a cat of any kind or even a guinea pig or a fish in a bowl and that the ten dollars was meaningless, but everyone was watching me and I couldn’t back out without feeling the shame rise to my face — and there was Daria to consider, because she was watching me too. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, okay, sure.”
Sixty seconds later I was still solvent and richer by one cat and one cage. I’d gotten lucky — or unlucky, depending on how you want to look at it — and rolled three fives and two fours; Ludwig rolled a combined eleven. He finished his beer in a gulp, took my hand to seal the deal and offer his congratulations, and then started toward the door. “But what do I feed it?” I called. “I mean, what does it eat?”
“Eggs,” he said, “it loves eggs. And meat. Raw. No kibble, forget kibble. This is the real deal, this animal, and you need to treat it right.” He was at the door, looking down at the thing with what might have been wistfulness or satisfaction, I couldn’t tell which, then he reached down behind the cage to unfasten something there — a gleam of black leather — and toss it to me: it was a glove, or a gauntlet actually, as long as my arm. “You’ll want to wear this when you feed him,” he said, and then he was gone.
FOR A LONG MOMENT I stared at the door, trying to work out what had happened, and then I looked at the regulars — the expressions on their faces — and at the other customers, locals or maybe even tourists who’d come in for a beer or burger or the catch of the day and had all this strangeness thrust on them, and finally at the cage. Daria was bent beside it, cooing to the animal inside, Ludwig’s eggs cradled in one hand. She was short and compact, conventionally pretty, with the round eyes and symmetrical features of an anime heroine, her running shoes no bigger than a child’s, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and I’d noticed all that before, over the course of weeks of study, but now it came back to me with the force of revelation. She was beautiful, a beautiful girl propped on one knee while her shorts rode up in back and the T-shirt bunched beneath her breasts, offering this cat — my cat — the smallest comfort, as if it were a kitten she’d found abandoned on the street.
“Jesus, what are you going to do with the thing?” Chris had come out from behind the bar and he was standing beside me now, looking awed.
I told him I didn’t know. That I hadn’t planned on owning a wild cat, hadn’t even known they existed — servals, that is — until five minutes ago.
“You live around here?”
“Bayview Apartments.”
“They accept pets?”
I’d never really given it much thought, but they did, they must have — the guy next door to me had a pair of yapping little dogs with bows in their hair and the woman down the hall had a Doberman that was forever scrabbling its nails on the linoleum when she came in and out with it, which she seemed to do about a hundred times a day. But this was something different. This was something that might push at the parameters of the standard lease. “Yeah,” I said, “I think so.”