Rook: Snowman Read online

  “That’s right, do you want to meet her?”

  Roger Persky checked his watch as if to say, you don’t have time to meet Jim Rook’s cat, for goodness’ sake; and Chuck Rolle arched his back and flexed his arms and looked at Jim as if he were working out how hard he would have to hit him, should the need arise.

  Karen came over and Jim took hold of her arm and led her to his car. “There … what do you think of her? Incredible to think she was stuck in a block of ice. Cute, isn’t she?”

  But Tibbles Two instantly scrabbled to her feet and let out a harsh, spiteful hiss. The fur on her back stood up and her tail turned into a bottle-brush. Karen reached out to stroke her and she retreated, her claws snagging on the leather seat and her head flattening like a cobra.

  “She sure doesn’t like me,” said Karen.

  “She sees you as competition, that’s all.”

  “Competition? Competition for what?”

  “Well, you know, competition for me. For my affections. Female cats are like that. They don’t realize they’re cats. So every time an attractive woman walks into their owner’s life, they naturally get a little spiky about it. And – well, that’s you. An attractive woman.”

  Karen looked at Jim with slightly narrowed eyes but she didn’t say anything. After a perceptibly long moment, Roger Persky took hold of her elbow and said, “We’d better get moving, if we want to miss the worst of the traffic.”

  “Roger’s – ah – giving you a ride home?” asked Jim

  “Roger’s taking me out for a drink. Well, Roger and Chuck.”

  “That’s great. That’s really great.”

  “But what?”

  “I didn’t say but. I never mentioned the word but.”

  “You didn’t have to. I could see it in your eyes.”

  “I have buts in my eyes?”

  “Really, Karen,” Roger fretted. “We ought to be making a move.”

  “I was just thinking that you’re one up on Olive Oyl,” said Jim. “Even she never got to date Popeye and Bluto, both at the same time.”

  Chuck stabbed a finger into Jim’s chest. “Do you know something, Jim? You can be a very offensive person sometimes.”

  “It was a joke, Chuck. Only a joke. I hope you three have a great, great time. Are you going on anyplace afterward? A disco? You should get them to take you to a disco, Karen. Roger is the West Coast watusi champion. Chuck can’t dance but he can flex his muscles in time to the music.”

  Karen smiled and shook her head but she didn’t laugh. The three of went off leaving Jim standing by his car. He punched his fist so hard against the side of the door that he almost broke his fingers. Jack and Linda saw him, and he had to grin and give them the thumbs-up, even though it hurt so much he could have exhausted every foul word in his vocabulary. He climbed into his car and started up the engine with a deep, chesty whoosh, followed by a deafening backfire. He couldn’t believe himself sometimes. He could just see himself standing there with a gooey look on his face, saying: ‘And well – that’s you, an attractive woman.’ And that insane remark about Popeye and Bluto. He was so embarrassed that he when he stopped at the college gates he banged his forehead two or three times on the steering-wheel. What was Karen going to think of him now? A leering idiot with all the sophisticated come-on technique of a Kansas-based toupée salesman.

  At the intersection with Santa Monica Boulevard a new blue Cougar drew up beside him with a sun-tanned young woman in it, its stereo throbbing with rock music. Usually he would have leaned back nonchalantly in his seat and taken off his sunglasses and given her one of his worldly Jack Nicholson expressions. But this evening he stayed crunched behind the wheel, with a bright red mark across his forehead, feeling about thirteen years old. His new apartment was on the top floor of a white block on Windward Avenue. It had been built in 1911 in the Italianate style, and even though it had suffered from some crass remodeling in the early 1960s, it had still had an elegance and a coolness about it which was hard to find, even in Venice.

  It had a large living-room with high ceilings and a window overlooking the courtyard in the center of the block. Outside the window there was a narrow balcony that was just about wide enough to accommodate two basketwork chairs and a broken Mexican drum which Jim used as an occasional table.

  At the far end of the living-room there was a dining area with a brown Formica-topped table and a hatch through to the kitchen. There were two bedrooms – although one of them was so small that you had to climb on the bed to get in and out of the door.

  Jim had tried to decorate it more stylishly than his last place. He had bought three large abstract paintings of red circles and a green and blue composition that looked like a Christmas tree toppling off a mailbox. He had arranged some blue-dyed pampas grass in a tall earthenware vase, and he had found the papier-mâché effigy of a horse under the stage at college. It was bright yellow with staring eyes which followed him around the room but he thought it looked cheerful.

  Tibbles Two followed him cautiously into the apartment, and proceeded to have a comprehensive sniff at everything. He went into the kitchen and unpacked his shopping. He had remembered what Laura Killmeyer had told him about feeding your cat on human food, and he had stopped at Ralph’s on the way home and bought seven cans of turkey’n’gravy; as well two chicken breasts and a quarter of Fontina cheese for himself, so that he could cook his favorite hangover dish of chicken and melted cheese and volcanically hot salsa.

  He popped the top of a can of Coors and took six long swallows, which was two too many because he had to stand in the kitchen for almost a minute with his eyes watering, punching himself in the chest to bring up the wind. Then he took his beer out on to the balcony to enjoy the last warmth of the day, and the ocean breeze that blew inshore at this time of day. Tibbles Two came out to join him, and hopped up on to the other chair as if she had lived with him all her life.

  “So where did you come from?” he asked her. “From what benighted shore were you washed up?”

  Tibbles Two stared at him through slitted eyes. Jim had often wondered whether it would be possible to discover what cats were thinking. Maybe you could monitor their synaptic impulses and turn them into computer images. Mind you, the result would probably be nothing more than a kaledeiscopic jumble of fish-heads and warm cushions and sudden lunatic urges to chase after balls of wool.

  “I hope you realize I expect total obedience out of my cats,” said Jim. “You go out when I tell you and you come back in when I tell you. No scratching at the door for wee-wees in the middle of the night. And when I bring girls back, you don’t sit on the couch giving me death stares.”

  Tibbles Two thought about that for a while, and then suddenly jumped down from the chair and went into the living-room. Then she came back and stood in the open door and mewed at him.

  “What do you want now? You can’t be hungry. Can’t you sit and relax for five minutes?”

  She mewed again, and kept on mewing, and in the end he had to get up and follow her into the apartment. “You want to go to the bathroom? I hope you realize I don’t like kitty litter. There is nothing guaranteed to put off a desirable woman more than a trayful of cat turds under the bathroom basin. You want to do ah-ahs, you find someplace outside.”

  But Tibbles Two didn’t go toward the front door. Instead, she jumped up onto the back of the couch and stepped onto the small table behind it, where there was a glass-based lamp, a stack of paperback books, a seashell that his fellow teacher Bill Babouris had brought him back from Greece, and a deck of Tarot cards.

  Tibbles Two stood on the table sniffing at the Tarot cards and mewing again and again.

  Jim said, “This is ridiculous. You want me to tell your fortune?” But Tibbles Two stared at him intently, and he said, “I see. You want me to tell my own fortune. Well, sorry. I’m not in the mood. My fortune is that I will never get to date Karen Goudemark. Every time I see her I will say something totally dumb and she will end up thinking
that I’m some kind of emotional retard. Apart from that, Dr Friendly will find a way of closing down Special Class Two and I will find myself selling pencils for a living.”

  He turned to go back to the balcony but Tibbles Two let out a long yowl, almost as if she had been attacked by a passing tom. She stood with one paw on top of the Tarot pack, her ears flattened and her fur bristling.

  “What the hell is the matter with you?” Jim demanded. “You’re a cat, get it? You don’t understand what Tarot cards are. You don’t even understand what the future is, let alone the fact that you can predict what it’s going to be. Just get down from the table and start behaving like a normal cat. I don’t know, go lick your ass or something.”

  But Tibbles Two stayed where she was, her fur still electric. Jim hesitated for a moment, and then he went across to the table and tugged the deck of cards from under her paw. He sat down on the couch, tipped the cards out, and proceeded to shuffle them with all the high-speed expertise of somebody who has spent many a long night losing his salary at poker. Tibbles Two dropped down on to the couch next to him and sat at his elbow, watching him acutely.

  “If I find out that something really lousy is going to happen to me, I’m going to blame you for it,” Jim told her. “I’ve had enough trouble for one day, what with that washroom turning into an iceberg, and Dr Friendly always getting on my case.”

  He laid the cards out in the Celtic cross pattern. He didn’t often consult the Tarot these days, except when entertaining women: they were always fascinated by having their fortunes told. He found its predictions too accurate, and he preferred the disasters in his life to take him by surprise. He was always worried, too, that one day he might turn up the Death card. If he was going to be killed in an auto wreck or drop dead of a coronary occulusion he didn’t want to know about it beforehand. He had learned that destiny is unavoidable, no matter what precautions you take. If the Tarot says you’re going to die, you can stay indoors and wrap yourself up in a comforter, but one way or another you’re still going to die.

  This evening his cards turned out to be fairly ho-hum. He was going to go to work tomorrow as usual. He was going to have a minor but irritating argument with somebody who was close to him – Dr Friendly, no doubt. He was going to be affected by an unexpected change in the weather. He was going to receive an invitation to visit somebody he had never met before – that could be interesting. And there was something that he couldn’t quite understand about hands. There was definitely a combination of snapping or breaking and hands, but it was unclear what exactly it was and who it was going to happen to. It didn’t appear to be him. Maybe somebody he knew was going to break a finger.

  “What do you think this is all about, TT?” he asked Tibbles Two, but Tibbles Two impassively closed her eyes and didn’t even mew.

  He reached the second-to-last card. This covers you – the card that tells you what your present circumstances are, and why you need to know what your future holds for you. He picked it up and frowned at it in complete bafflement. It was a Tarot card he had never seen before. A completely new, different card. It showed a figure standing in an icy wasteland, under a black starry sky. The figure was dressed in a hooded white robe, which was rippling in the wind. Its face was completely blank, totally white, except for a pair of dark glasses with tiny, rectangular lenses. It carried a long white staff.

  There were footprints in the snow beside the figure, but they were obviously the footprints of somebody who had walked close by. The figure itself had left no footprints at all.

  At the foot of all the other Tarot cards, there was a name, such as The Fool, or Death, or the Five of Wands. This card had a space for a name, but it was blank, just like the figure’s face.

  Jim scrutinized the card for a very long time, while Tibbles Two watched him. He had been casting Tarot cards for years, and he thought he knew the whole pack back-to-front. So where had this card come from? It couldn’t have been accidentally stuck in the carton for all of this time. Even if it had been, how had it suddenly been dislodged?

  There was nothing in the picture to reveal what the card might signify. The figure was simply standing in the snow, motionless. The stars had been very carefully drawn, so if he could discover what stars they were, maybe that would give him a clue.

  The card gave Jim an uneasy sense of foreboding. It wasn’t just the fact that he had never seen it before, but the way the figure was standing, as if it were waiting for somebody, and wouldn’t leave until it got what it wanted. Ever.

  He put the card down on the coffee table and went across to his bookshelf. He picked out his dog-eared copy of The Tarot Interpreted and thumbed through to the section where all the cards were illustrated in color. The Tarot deck traditionally included twenty-two trump or ‘triumph’ cards known as the major arcana, numbered zero to twenty-one, except for number thirteen, the Death card. Among the major arcana were the Sun, the Hanged Man, the Lovers, the Moon and the Fool. In some decks, Death was unnamed, but the card with the hooded figure on it wasn’t Death. It was something else: something beyond Death. Something that stood in the frozen wilderness and waited – but God alone knew what it was waiting for.

  Jim heard a sudden scuffling sound. He looked around, and saw that Tibbles Two was standing up on the couch, her eyes wide, her back arched, her teeth bared into a snarl. On top of the coffee table, the Tarot cards were dancing in the air, flying around as if they had all been caught in a gale. They whirled higher and higher off the table, going around and around, until they formed four columns of flickering, flackering pasteboard, all light and color and dazzling images.

  The four columns leaned slightly to the right, almost as if they were four men leaning against the wind. Jim slowly approached them, watching them in fascination. They looked just like the four vertical lines that had been drawn on the misted-over mirrors in the college bathroom. They made a noise that reminded him of something he used to do as a boy: stick a stiff square of cardboard into his bicycle wheel, so that it made a loud clattering sound as he pedaled along.

  He lifted his hand over them, but he could feel no updraft whatsoever. These cards were dancing by themselves, unblown by any natural wind.

  “What the hell is this, TT?” he asked Tibbles Two. He had experienced many supernatural events before, and he was a believer. But this was extraordinary. Nearly forty fortune-telling cards were spinning around in front of his eyes, in a room without the hint of a draft, and they were showing no signs of dropping or falling or losing their momentum.

  Jim knelt on the rug beside the coffee-table. He reached up and touched one of the columns of cards. Three or four of them were scattered for a moment, but then they flew back up to where they had been before. After a while, the remainder of the pack flew up into the air, as if somebody had thrown them up in the palm of their hand, and suddenly burst into thousands of tiny fragments. The pieces flew everywhere – all across the table, all across the floor, a blizzard of cardboard – while the four columns of cards bent themselves even more doggedly against an imaginary storm.

  TT mewed and lifted her paw as if to say Look, dummy. Look what’s happening on your coffee table. This is a message. This is a sign. Look at what I’m showing you, and learn.

  “I don’t know!” Jim shouted at her. “I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to be looking at!”

  The cards whirled around faster and faster; and the snowstorm of fragments blew around the entire living-room, and even out of the window, on to the balcony, like confetti. Then, just as abruptly as they had started to dance, the cards dropped on to the table, and lay there, lifeless and scattered, while the snowstorm gradually subsided, and all of the pieces spiraled to the floor.

  “Very enlightening, I don’t think,” said Jim, looking around his paper-strewn living-room. “Also very messy.” Tibbles Two jumped down from the couch and went into the kitchen, where he could hear her noisily lapping up her soya milk. He stood up and collected all the remaining Tarot
cards. He checked them all, thumbing through the whole deck three times over, but there was no sign of the card with the hooded figure on it. Must have been one of the cards that self-destructed, and turned his living-room into Santa’s grotto. He followed Tibbles Two into the kitchen and dropped the rest of the deck into the trash.

  He was just about to take a shower when the doorbell rang. He peered through the spyhole and saw a grossly distorted version of Mervyn Brookfeller, who lived across the hallway. He opened the door and said, “Hi, Mervyn. I was going to take a shower. Then I was going to come over and thank you for cleaning up my apartment. You did a fantastic job.”

  Mervyn was six feet three inches and wore platform soles which made him look even taller. He also sported an immense golden quiff which probably took him over six feet five. He wore a white satin vest embroidered with poppies and tight white satin pedal-pushers. His nails were as long as a woman’s, and immaculately painted with purple polish. Although he was only a tenant like everybody else in Jim’s apartment block, he had somehow appointed himself unofficial super, fixing everybody’s fuses, levering the teaspoons out of their sink disposal units, keeping the hallways hoovered and listening to everybody’s problems. He sang in cabaret at The Slant Club on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, under the name of Chet Sideways.

  He stalked into Jim’s apartment and looked around at all the ripped-up fragments of card. Then he turned to Jim with his arms held out wide, wordlessly seeking an explanation.

  Jim said, “I’m sorry. You did a terrific job, really. But when I got home, there was kind of an event.”

  “An event? It looks like you got married. Congratulations. Who’s the lucky girl?”

  Tibbles Two came out of the kitchen licking her whiskers.

  “You married a cat! How different! I mean, most men are always hankering after a little pussy … but you had the nerve to make it legal!”