Swamp Cats
Ah, Florida: land of sinkholes, quirky retirees...and murder?
I'm on my morning walk when Martha flags me down. She’s wearing a Marlins cap and matching magenta sweats.
"You have coffee yet?”
"Yup. Two cups."
"Well come in for a third." It's not an offer, but an order. She ushers me inside. Her icy air-conditioned home is a welcome escape from the relentless humidity.
"Where's the fire?" I ask, making myself comfortable at her kitchen table, which is set with four placemats even though as far as I know her husband Barry and I are the only people besides Martha who ever sit there.
"I didn't want to say this outside with all the busybodies around." She hands me a Mickey Mouse mug and fills it to the brim with hot motor oil. "But did you hear about Old Ingrid?"
“No.” I turn my mug around so I don’t have to look at the design and blow on my coffee. Disney stuff always gives me the creeps. “What did that crazy lady do this time?”
“She died, actually. Barry was the one who found her.”
“Died? You mean he found her body?” I thought she was going to say her cranky misanthropic next door neighbor sicced one of her seven cats on the mailman again.
Not that she croaked.
“He went to return a pitcher we'd borrowed to make sweet tea and found the door open. She was lying on the floor with the cats gathered around her. Apparently they were all crying. He said it was like a funeral.”
"What the hell happened to her?"
"That's what the police are trying to find out. Barry is cooperating in the investigation."
An investigation does seem warranted. We always called Ingrid old because she acted about a hundred with her cats and her casseroles and her paranoid reclusive ways, but she couldn't have been more than fifty.
No way she just keeled over one day for no reason.
The sound of rubber slides clapping against the laminate floor signals Barry’s approach. Unlike Ingrid, Barry is old, at least a couple decades older than his wife of five years.
Barry is a true native, not a transplant like Martha and me. Being a stereotypical Florida man, he always asks me the same question when I come over: "Wanna see my machete collection?"
It's for hacking at the swamp, allegedly. Not killing cat ladies.
"You wanna know what I think?” Barry is blissfully unaware that I’ve categorized him as a potential suspect. “I think it was those swamp people."
Martha sighs. "Here he goes." She drains the coffee in her own Minnie Mouse mug and fills it up to the brim.
"The gubment's been dumping waste in that lake for damn near a quarter of a century," Barry continues. "Heaven knows what kind of deformities those people got."
I've heard the stories, of course. When I first moved down here I saw a man who was covered head-to-toe in brown tar run behind the gas station into the sparse piney woods.
"Was that a swamp monster?" I asked the gas station attendant, only half-kidding.
"Naw," he grinned toothily. "Just a human turd."
Word on the street is there's a trailer park in a clearing in those woods, populated by drug addicts and degenerates of all stripes. All the harried flip-flop-clad mothers like to gossip about the "unclean, inbred, godless trailer trash" on the checkout line at Publix.
Apparently there’s no running water out there, so the trailer park residents bathe in the tarry radioactive lake—when they bother to bathe at all.
Unsettling conditions, to say the least. But that's Florida for you. The wealth gap in this town is a cavernous void.
"What happened to the cats?" I ask Barry.
"Gone feral, I guess. They were already half-wild. Hunters, all of them. I found one in the backyard picking at a dead seabird not long before Old Ingrid died. When I mentioned the little devils to Mr. Big Shot Detective, he said, 'What cats?'"
There's a sharp rap at the door. "Ah. That must be the detective now. My new best friend." He rolls his eyes. "Martha, hide my machetes."
Martha doesn’t move. “I hope all this craziness dies down soon,” she says when her husband is gone. “It’s a big spectacle is what it is. All these cops swarming around. Makes me feel unsafe.”
I notice that Barry’s slides have left muddy footprints everywhere. Martha notices too. “I’ll get the Swiffer.”
There’s another sound at the door: not a detective's insistent knock, but a series of dull thuds. Martha jumps, dropping the Swiffer. She peeks out through the window. “I don’t see anybody.” She opens the door and a skinny gray cat tumbles in. Its ribs are showing under a halo of frizz.
It makes a beeline for my legs, mouth agape. I pull them up under me just in time. I’d prefer not to get chomped on. "This is one of Ingrid's brood? Some hunter. It's practically emaciated."
Martha's mouth is a thin white line. She shares my distaste for household pets. "Should I give it some milk? I don't want this to become a regular thing."
The cat mewls impatiently, nipping at Martha’s heels while she rummages through the fridge. “I’ve got half and half. That will have to do.”
“I’m sure the cat won’t—.” A scream from outside stops me cold.
More screams, then a crash. Then the sound of something—or someone—being dragged.
“What on Earth was that?” Martha’s eyes are as big as the saucer she’s holding. There’s half and half all over the floor now. Guess she’ll have to Swiffer some more.
“We should stay inside,” I suggest. “I’m sure Barry will be back any second.”
“Not a chance. Get your ass up, New York. We’re investigating.”
I follow her out into the hundred percent humidity. The air smells rotten. We look all around the yard, but we don’t see any cops. No sign of Barry either.
Just six more hungry little monsters.
*****
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