Beluga Read Free Page A

cat?”
    Pearl nodded. “Fergus.”
    â€œBlack and white?”
    Pearl nodded.
    I pointed him out, and Pearl said, “Oh.”
    She’d tried to feed and tame him during the time that had passed since then, but Fergus was on the feral side and wouldn’t be domesticated.
    With Desmond out on the driveway, Pearl could give him both the Fergus story and the saga of Gil’s transplanted Nuttall oak. He was a trapped man and knew it. For my part, I veered off toward the basement.
    â€œChecking on something,” I called to them both once I was halfway across the yard.
    Pearl never locked her basement, so we were taking a chance keeping money down there, but the place was such a cluttered mess—almost everything in it was broken—that you could look inside and see there wasn’t anything to take. Since there weren’t any stairs up into the house, it was just its own junky thing and didn’t even lead to a place that might be better. A fellow would have to be sorry and industrious both to wade into that thicket, and those are traits you rarely find paired together in a man.
    Our cash was all in a big plastic toolbox on a low shelf in a back spidery corner. There were lawn chairs leaned up against the cabinet in case the spiders weren’t enough. Even Desmond wouldn’t mess with the thing. He’d linger in the basement stairwell and have me go get money out whenever he needed some.
    I moved the chairs. I opened the box. We had maybe two hundred and forty thousand left from the three and change we’d started with. As I counted out Larry’s money, I was already writing it off.
    I might even have dwelled a bit on Larry and grown sullen in the basement if Fergus hadn’t scared me half to death. He didn’t leap out or anything. He had too much bulk for that. Fergus was just sitting on a patio table, an old wooden one with a couple of splintered slats. He was watching me with his yellow eyes until he got a sudden urge to bathe. When he went to lick a paw, I vaulted and nearly hit a rafter.
    â€œHow’d you get down here?”
    Fergus yawned.
    â€œShe’s looking for you,” I told him.
    Fergus got an urge to lick his belly, indulged it, and then studied me the way cats will. If he could have talked, he probably would have said, “You still here, asswipe?”
    I’d been around cats enough to know how to pick a strange one up, but I couldn’t be sure that Fergus’s neck scruff would support Fergus’s tonnage. He burbled some when I hoisted him. For my part, I swore quite a lot and then went running up the steps and across the yard, desperate to set him back down.
    â€œLook here,” I shouted, and Pearl turned her wan light beam upon us.
    â€œOh, baby!” Pearl made me give him to her against my better judgement, and he stayed in her arms for a nanosecond before clearing out for Gil’s oak. Fergus scrabbled up the trunk and perched on a limb. Pearl turned her flashlight on him.
    â€œKind of big for a cat,” Desmond said.
    â€œKind of big for a pony,” I told him.
    *   *   *
    I let Desmond handle Beluga. I’d done my bit by showing up and listening to Larry’s spiel. It seemed certain somebody would make some money. I just wasn’t convinced it was us.
    â€œYou going to give it to him all at once?” was the only thing I asked Desmond.
    â€œTo her,” he told me, and that was about the best thing he could do.
    Then four or five weeks went by. I didn’t think much about it except for when the twinges hit. I’d imagine Larry in new sneakers we’d underwritten. Larry in Gucci glasses. Larry riding around in a Range Rover with a gold-plated Rolls-Royce grille. I kept it all to myself since I knew that Desmond was just doing for an in-law, by which I mean I didn’t come right out and complain, but me and Desmond did chafe for a bit.
    We work together.