Spotted Cats Read Online Free Page A

other than mean-spirited and nasty?’ I said.
    ‘Piss poor. As usual. Nice of you to ask, as if you couldn’t see for yourself.’
    He stared down at his legs, twin lumps under the blanket. One of them, I knew, was half the diameter of the other. Most of the thigh muscle had been torn away from the bone by the windmilling hind legs of the same leopard that had gouged his face and clomped its teeth through his shoulder and ripped at his abdomen. ‘The body’s as good as it’s going to get. I still dream about that hospital, those doctors mumbling in their deep voices, a dialect I didn’t know. They all looked like Magic Johnson.’
    He smiled quickly at me, then drank again, emptying his glass. Without speaking he handed it to me. I refilled it and gave it back. He sipped, more slowly this time, and stared out towards the ocean.
    ‘I been thinking,’ he said. ‘When Jack Kennedy was my age, he was already dead.’
    I smiled. ‘That doesn’t necessarily make you old.’
    ‘No. Other things make you old besides the passage of the years. You have any idea what it’s like to feel absolutely powerless? To have no control, to know what you want, to know it’s right, and to realize that there’s not a damn thing you can do except wait, even then knowing that it probably won’t happen the way you want it to?’
    I shrugged.
    He snorted a mirthless laugh through his nose. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t figure you’d understand. The only thing worse is to look back and see your mistake and know you blew it, and know what you should’ve done, and know you can’t ever go back and try it again, do it right, make it right, and you’ve just got to live with it, and you don’t know how you can, but you do, day to day, hour to hour, churning it around and around in your head.’
    I looked out towards the ocean and said nothing.
    ‘So,’ he continued in his weak, moist, old man’s voice, ‘I screwed up the past and I can’t do a goddam thing about the future. So here sits Jeff Newton, professional hunter, twisted and broken inside and out. A poor excuse for a human being.’
    ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself,’ I said. ‘You’re alive.’
    ‘More’s the pity.’
    ‘Jeff, for Christ sake,’ I said, ‘it’s been six years.’
    ‘The man died,’ he said softly. ‘His name was Walter McIntyre and he was a chemical engineer from Teaneck, New Jersey. It was his first trip to Africa. He was my client and Nyalubwe got him. I killed him.’

CHAPTER 2
    J EFF REACHED OVER AND put his hand on my leg. ‘I don’t usually talk about it,’ he said quietly. ‘But I think about it all the time. That instant in my life. It changed everything.’
    ‘Jeff, you don’t have to…’
    He shook his head. ‘I remember that leopard’s breath. It was hot and rotten on my face. And the red. I saw red. Blood in my eyes. And the pain and the rush of adrenaline. The pain was only for an instant, and it seemed to be everywhere. But all that was the same instant of memory as the business I had to do, getting the muzzle of my gun against that cat’s belly and blowing him away. I wasn’t thinking of dying. Not then. I was thinking of killing. And I wasn’t thinking of Walter McIntyre, the poor silly son of a bitch. If he’d stayed in the hide he would’ve been fine. And so would I. I would’ve found that cat and killed him. He followed me into the tall grass after I told him not to.’ Jeff arched his eyebrows. ‘I keep telling myself it was his fault. And it was. But I was responsible for him.’
    ‘Can’t you just let it go?’ I said.
    He gazed out towards the ocean. ‘No,’ he said after a long pause. ‘No, I guess I can’t. See, there was something else that happened. Another series of thoughts on a different, deeper, more abstract level. I was thinking that finally, this was it, what I had been waiting for. This was the moment I had wanted. Hand to hand with a leopard. Equal terms. His teeth and claws, my