from phenomenon after the fact.”
The Agent smirked slightly while taking again his seat in the folding chair.
“I’m doing the best I can,” Arch replied, a tad defensively. “I just seem to be having some trouble remembering. Almost as if my memories have been eras--….”
“The lion roars seeking whom it shall devour,” Hanratty interrupted rather brusquely. “Not sure what you have to whine about, honestly. If stripped of memory the mind would be free to perceive each dawn as the first day of creation -- no narrative, no subtext, no script. Just me and you and a dog named boo.”
He chortled at his own obscure mid-70’s musical allusion.
“I know what you’re trying to do,” Arch replied steadily, emotions carefully caged. Hanratty slid from his chair back to the narrow window where he looked out at the breaking day in a wistful sort of way.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he replied. “The old reverse psychology trick. Sorry, thought I’d give it a shot. It’s not like the frequency is going anywhere. We can wait. All the time in the world, really. Assuming the world ends in seventeen days.”
He turned to face Arch.
“If the lion feeds on the disobedient, and if unfailingly obedience is the order of the day, then won’t the lion go hungry, hmmm? In the meantime we’ll just see how she plays out, eh. Flip the coin. Roll the dice. How’s that sound?”
Arch nodded slightly.
The guy could be a real meathead, at times.
Arch idly remembered again the circumstances under which he came not to remember what once he had known, or thought he knew, or fleetingly had glimpsed, perhaps, a frequency, a code, an access-granting configuration. As if reading his mind, Hanratty did too. He drew close to the side of the bed again, his hooded features mere inches from Arch’s supine puss.
“Once upon a time, right?” Hanratty said with something like wistfulness. “We go way back, my friend. That’s the thing about time, of course, it flies. Einstein didn’t discover gravity, he re-imagined it. Then again, all your transfiguring figures are that way. Ezekiel, Amos, Jeremiah. Timothy, Peter, Daniel. Marilyn Manson, Manfred Mann, Mickey Mantle, Mr. Magoo, Michael Myers, Michael Martin Murphy, Mary Magdalene, Moses…..”
“Ya, I get it, what’s your point?” Arch interrupted. From experience he knew the loop could and would continue endlessly unless interrupted.
Hanratty shook his head as if to emerge from a slight daze.
“Geez, you got quite the collection of M’s socked away there. Anyway, the point is, captives of narrative, each and every one. And, by the way, it’s perfectly okay to be paranoid if everyone is out to get you.”
Hanratty roared at his own joke, standing and slapping -- yes literally slapping -- his knees.
Arch smiled slightly.
Another Agent strolled into the room carrying a cup of coffee which he handed to Hanratty before taking a seat on another folding chair near the lone window. Hanratty grunted and nodded at his colleague before turning back to Arch.
“Shift change. Well, it’s been a real slice, as usual. I’ll be back, as someone once said. It’s not entirely wrong, by the way, to analogize time travel and memory, because, after all, that’s what recollection is, a returning of oneself to the past. Which is what you should be doing, and pronto.”
He swilled down the cup of joe while sliding easily from the room.
“The Dodgers beat the Cubs again, FYI,” Hanratty called over his shoulder while exiting stage left. “In case you’re interested. I picked it up on a Des Moines radio station last night. Hint hint.”
With a flourish he left the room, leaving Arch to attend to his aching ankle while the newly posted midnight-blue-suited man did crosswords, seated on a folding chair in the comfortable sunbeam flowing from or through the lone window.
Not unlike a cat, Arch couldn’t help thinking.
CHAPTER SIX
The menfolk wending their way through the sandy loam of the Platte bottomland, hands on knees in search of cat tracks, stopped just about then to reassess.
Unaware of Arch’s plight, just as he was unaware of them. Well and truly plighted, nonetheless.
The tracking mission so promisingly undertaken a few short hours earlier had, by then, gone sincerely awry. Just like that, the trail went cold. Leaving the men roaming, or rather crawling aimlessly, in the mud and dirt and clay and sand.
Downright comical, in a way. Men ranging in size and age from average to young to dumpy to tall to old to callow to fat falling to the ground like a guy who’s lost his contact lens. The sun rising higher and day getting warmer all the while. Plenty muggy and uncomfortable for May, made all the more so by the relative lack of even a hint of fresh breeze.
The cat tracks had done disappeared.
At length the men clotted to rest their weary limbs in the shade of a Ford heavy-duty eight-cylinder four-wheel-drive pick-up truck.
Plenty frustrated, by then.
“It ain’t right that animal should live,” one of the men grumbled as the posse collectively reclined. “Not after what it done.”
“Once she’s got a taste for human flesh, no tellin’ who she’ll go after next,” said another.
“Damn straight. Ain’t no man safe long as that creature runs loose.”
So on and so forth.
The council of war considered and rejected several options -- including not least giving up the whole damn operation and sitting back to wait for the cat to either kill again or just go away, whichever came first -- before settling on what seemed the most expedient of several possibilities. Abe and Lefty drove to town to fetch the baling wire and acetylene torches. Rick and Slim headed to Griswald to collect the chickens. Bill and Bob swung by the Gibson’s in York to freshen the company’s supply of duct tape and blasting caps.
By late afternoon the designers had cobbled the several mechanical ingredients into a rudimentary prototype. They stepped back to admire their work. With a satisfied air the men eventually completed manufacture of the gleaming steel-and-baling-wire contraption before camouflaging it generously with branches and leaves in a carefully selected location near the place where the creature’s tracks last had been clearly seen. Somewhat clearly been seen. The work once completed, over the course of say an hour or three, they piled back into their trucks and headed to Rose and Cal’s for a well-earned adult beverage.
They would have used venison but none among the company had any such meat in their freezers, and the white-tailed critters had made themselves scarce again, so none were readily on hand for gunning down and gutting purposes. No matter. A suitable substitute was into the cage hurled.
Since they could not come to the cat’s locale, wherever that locale might be, they would instead bring the killing creature to them, mountain to Mohammed style, or, more accurately, the trap they cleverly set. The clever trap they’d set. One designed with sticks drawing blueprints in the dirt, and some considerable trial and swearing error, particularly as regards the precise size of entrance required so that a cougar of unknown dimension could fit. Someone remembered a cat can slip into any opening at least as big as its head. Searching memory, the men recalled watching the domesticated cousins of the killing machine materializing through impossibly small cracks when motivated by milk or mice, so the motion unanimously carried. They figured the lion likely was hungry again some five days on from its last tragic kill, so a half dozen dismembered members of the poultry family would more than suffice. Besides, at eighty-six cents a pound, the bait was not exactly cheap.
Job completed they went to town as mentioned to cool off or get drunk, whichever came first.
Faith