The Last Coin Read Free Page A

another, atop the bureau. It stood there staring into the moonlight, its eyes glowing red. The room was full of cats. It stank like a kennel, the room did, the floorboards gritty with spilled kitty litter. An acre of ocean winds blowing through two-dozen open windows wouldn’t scour out the reek. He grimaced and played out line, waving the loop across the top of the bed toward the dresser. The cat stood there defiantly, staring him down. He felt almost ashamed. He’d have to be quick—jerk it off the dresser without slamming the pole down onto the bed and awakening Aunt Naomi, if that were possible. A
little
noise wouldn’t hurt; her snoring would mask it.
    He had practiced in the backyard when the family was gone. His friend Beams Pickett had helped him, playing the part of a surprised cat. Then they’d pieced up a false cat out of a pillow, a jar, and a gunnysack and snatched it off tree limbs and out of bushes and off fences until Andrew had it refined down to one swift thrust and yank. The trick now was to balance the pole atop the windowsill in order to take up some of the weight. Another arm would help, of course, if only to hold open the sack. He’d asked Pickett to come along, but Pickett wouldn’t. He was an “idea man” he had said, not a man of action.
    Andrew let the pole rest on the sill for a moment, watching the strangely unmoving cat out of one eye, the cat inside the window out of the other eye. He picked up the flour sack, shoving the hem of the open end into his mouth and letting it dangle there against the shingles. He was ready. Aunt Naomi snorted and rolled over. He froze, his heart pounding, a chill running through him despite the heat. Moments passed. He worked the pole forward, wondering at the foolish cat that stood there as still as ever. It was a sitting duck. He giggled, suppressing laughter. What would Darwin say? It served the beast right to be snatched away like this. Natural selection is what it was. He’d get the cats, then pluck up the corners of Aunt Naomi’s bed sheet and tie them off, too. It would be a simple thing to lock her into the trunk of the Metropolitan and fling her, still trussed up in the sheet, into the marsh in Gum Grove Park.
    It was easy to believe, when you looked at the wash of stars in the heavens, that something was happening in the night sky and in the darkened city stretched along the coast. The whole random shape of things—the people roundabout, their seemingly petty business, the day-to-day machinations of governments and empires—all of it spun slowly, like the stars, into patterns invisible to the man on the street, but, especially late at night, clear as bottle glass to him. Or at least they all would become so. Clearing the house of cats would be the first step toward clearing his mind of murk, toward ordering the mess that his life seemed sometimes to be spiraling into. He and Pickett had set up Pickett’s telescope in the unplastered attic cubbyhole adjacent to Aunt Naomi’s bedroom, but the smell of the cats had pretty much kept them out of it—a pity, really. There was something—a cosmic order, maybe—in the starry heavens that relaxed him, that made things all right after all. He couldn’t get enough of them and stayed up late sometimes just to get a midnight glimpse of the sky after the lights of the city had dimmed.
    All this talk of unusual weather and earthquakes on the news over the past weeks was unsettling, although it seemed to be evidence of something; it seemed to bear out his suspicions that something was afoot. The business of the Jordan River flowing backward out of the Dead Sea was the corker. It sounded overmuch like an Old Testament miracle, although as far as the newspapers knew, there hadn’t been any Moses orchestrating the phenomenon. It would no doubt have excited less comment if it weren’t for the dying birds and the rain of mud. The newspapers in their euphemistic way spoke of solar disturbances and tidal