of some inconsequential conflict in Indonesia, hardly worth bothering about, some tinpot tyrant egging on Uncle Sam, a place no nearer than Mordor, seemingly, or any more a threat, Orcs and Gooks, always a faceless enemy to combat, easy to hate at a distance, and does not Wormtongue bear a more than passing resemblance to Rasputin?, the lion a striking symbol of the Romanovs. The nephew he could not rescue, apparently, the boy tossed over the edge by malicious wind while he, Arch, inexplicably failed to notice the man-eater poised on the sandstone outcrop, incredibly, and pondering again his inability to save the child ripped from his grip by wind, tragically, for one is but plaything of fate, in the final analysis. Clintonians run amuck just over there, waving their cigars, but then again the trains sure did run on time under Bill and his minions, didn’t they, and the first time a girl haltingly took him in her mouth, sputtering and gagging some, in the backseat of the Old Man’s Chevy while parked on a dusty country lane, but not the lion crouching unnoticed just outside the unlocked door. The kid he bunked with in basic training and his mother’s card-playing cronies and the man who served up ground beef at the Red and White on Main Street and the tough from a neighboring town who tried to cave in his windpipe while sliding into second and the prof who lectured endlessly about hidden meaning in the Iliad and the boss who came to work drunk most every day and the slutty parking lot attendant who seduced him in the stairwell when not seducing other men in the stairwell and the opening act at the concert in a midtown loft who sang and played guitar like eternity itself rivering through her music and others many too many to mention crowding a cavernous hall just past the room housing the dogs and cats and gerbils and parakeets and that one nasty hamster, and, of course, the lion never caged. At length he limped from the river’s edge across a neighbor’s pasture to the shaded farmyard where he collapsed, more or less, unable to take another step. Damn balky tendon. Journey and Alice Cooper and Seger and what possible organizing mechanism thrust that motley lot loudly together? oh yes, White Rock Gods From Detroit, and, while we’re in the neighborhood, the American accent convincingly pulled off by Minnie Driver in Grosse Point Blank, and the time it snowed thickly, pleasantly, as the Lions played on Thanksgiving Day, a dozen or more uncles and cousins smothering every chair in the smallish living room while drinking in the blissful aroma of a turkey preparing to convert, be converted, to primate. Australopithecus himself never more content, even if the Lauper song would not come along for another 1.5 million years, indeed humming, perhaps, the selfsame tune, or some rudimentary prototype thereof, a tune waiting to be hummed, presumably, poised for discovery through all eternity, until hunched under a baobab on the African savannah the tune, or should one say “frequency,” invades the smallish brain of the pre-historic man and spits out the windpipe of that man lost in reverie, at least until a passing lion pride opportunistically seizes on opportunity to convert that humming man into lion tissue enzyme by enzyme, everything but the bones.
Cats on the brain. Time after time.
CHAPTER FOUR
When the menfolk returned from that day’s hunt empty handed, not to mention bone tired and more than a little annoyed, they found awaiting them an evening meal of pot roast and cooked carrots, and mashed potatoes and green beans, and apple sauce and tapioca pudding, and devil’s food cake with chocolate frosting for desert, and of course buckets of hot coffee or iced tea, choose one. As helpfully whipped up, or perhaps up whipped, by cousins of the feminine stripe. They, the cooks, stayed to eat, as did a handful of women from the grieving committee, all and sundry gathered ‘round the groaning board that was the dining room table. Feasting communally as villagers are prone to do following tragedy. Or, for that matter, triumph. Or, for that matter, pretty much everything in between.
“We done scoured them hills south of the river there,” Randy was saying between bites of roasted beast. “No damn sign of ‘im anywhere. Say, pass them carrots, willya?”
“Me and my boys done finetoothed every square inch of that pasture hard by the cottonwood grove,” Little Nate responded between mouthfuls of sauced apple. “We never seen so much as a tuft of hide. Say, shoot me them beans again, if ya don’t mind.”
“Them creatures sure do know how to hide good,” ventured one of the company.
“Could by anywhere,” added another.
“Nothing like a cat for layin’ low,” said someone else.
Quickly confirmations flowed from all quarters.
“Bred by nature to be stealthy and inconspicuous.”
“Downright spooky, when a fella gets right down to it.”
Nodding noggins all around.
“We’ll find it,” Arch muttered, not bothering to lift his head from the plateful of potatoes over which it then hovered.
“If the Good Lord be willin’,” someone added.
Amens all around.
After dinner, while the womenfolk cleaned and washed and rinsed and wiped and put generally away, the men huddled around a coffee table in the family room, examining with interest a two-foot by three-foot map of the surrounding area. Much pointing, pontificating, and raucous planning. Or what passes for genuine tactical planning, anyway, in a company of amateur tobacco-chewing volunteer lion tamers, that is.
Faith loaded up a plate and carried it to the cavernous barn where she gave it to A. Jacks who, for reasons known only to himself, had declined invitation to sit at table with all the rest. He made himself relatively comfy in an otherwise unoccupied barn stall, complete with the sleeping bag he apparently had brought, the cot Arch or someone had cobbled up, and the coleman lantern lending a modicum of light and heat. No room at the inn. He accepted the repast with a grunt and a nod. Faith sat at the edge of the stall and watched him eat.
Ajax alone received assistance from none among the Olympians.
You can look it up.
Faith glimpsed the lean killing machine as it leapt past her on the narrow snaking trail in the gloom of a lightning drenched spring afternoon, as mentioned. Glimpsed out the corner of one eye, a mere passing glance, perhaps, but more than sufficient to alert her to the beast’s return, on a mission to complete the twin killing, as it were. The lion clearly had it in for her boys, Faith realized. A beast with distinctive green-brown flashing eyes and the seminal muteness of its breed, boasting claws the sharpness of steak knives, bicuspids evolved to readily separate sinew from tendon, a species perfectly suited to slicing and dicing mere primates, thereafter converting the twin into the stuff that makes a mountain lion a mountain lion, as most assuredly it must if it the lion is to survive, for absent conversion, of deer mostly, and squirrels presumably, and possums probably, and mice aplenty, as harvested from our fields and sheds and barns – and, of course, the occasional newborn baby boy -- the lion’s particles as knit in a mystifyingly complex superstructure of corpuscle and capillary could scarcely continue metabolizing. Just as surely as Man’s Chief Purpose is to Glorify God and Enjoy Him Forever the lion must be fed, and, as luck would have it, whether one was particularly so inclined or on board or kool-aid drinking or not, the creature had a taste for Faith’s offspring.
All of which Faith cognized, realized, understood, in the nanosecond the beast shot past, just before A. Jacks interjected himself in the way of destiny. Thomas thus saved, the leaping beast instead hauled off Peter between its lion jaws, her child picked up and transported rather gently, in actuality, the way cats can be seen to lift and carry a kit from one place to another, the helpless thing dangling but not distressed, safe somehow in the lion’s jaws, and so too Faith recognized the man who had appeared across the river the day her husband dived beneath the waters and never returned.
Or at least not yet, anyway.
Faith looked up to see Aunt May Frederickson enter the barn stall.
“What are you doing out here child?” Aunt May asked. “Sitting in the cold all alone?”
Aunt May took a seat or rather bench at Faith’s side. She placed her hand on Faith’s hand and lightly stroked Faith’s hair.
May is not the same as shall or will.
Aunt