The One With the Green Cat
08/20/06 8:39 AM – 9:11 AM
The way she sat on the bench, I could trace the outline of her hips ten years later while I sat watching a boxing match in Las Vegas, eyes wide open, but I wasn’t there for a girl and the scent of her perfume blew back with the forward progress of the boat. I moved towards the prow to smell the breeze in its own visceral state.
The big cat was rumored to come here to drink, contemptuous of human presence. They claimed it was crazy because it never slept. Its size and color distinguished it but also by an odd tuft of fur that grew straight out from the back of its skull, like a cowlick. The explanation for that tuft was usually given as the mark of a former hunter’s bullet that had grazed and scarred the skin and mind of the cat. The hunter that gave it its cause for fame was rumored to be its first human meal.
This was all legend. There was no record of a disappeared hunter, but there were quite a few mauled cattle, three maimed villagers, and one dead white man. The last was the reason for my being there. It was the color of the creature that made it notable. They claimed it’s hair was green flecked with dark brown. A perfect camouflage for this territory, but odd for a mammal. My own guess was that, if the creature’s fur was green, it was not an inherent quality, but the effect of regular bathing in this algae-choked water. That was why I had chosen to take the long sweating boat-ride instead of the quick air-conditioned plane-flight. It’s strange to come upon the power plant after spending the previous five hours slowly meandering upstream through primordial jungle. I think that there was a reason that they situated it in the center of several zigzags. Either way you came upon it – upstream or down – it was jungle, jungle, jungle, then like the looming prow of charging warship, a monument to twentieth-century industrial baroque set in the middle of a freshly mowed lawn of Kentucky blue-grass. Out on that manicured fairway, surrounded by jungle that had ruled the earth since before the days of the dinosaurs, they had found what was left of the body.
The way she sat on the bench, I could trace the outline of her hips ten years later while I sat watching a boxing match in Las Vegas, eyes wide open, but I wasn’t there for a girl and the scent of her perfume blew back with the forward progress of the boat. I moved towards the prow to smell the breeze in its own visceral state.
The big cat was rumored to come here to drink, contemptuous of human presence. They claimed it was crazy because it never slept. Its size and color distinguished it but also by an odd tuft of fur that grew straight out from the back of its skull, like a cowlick. The explanation for that tuft was usually given as the mark of a former hunter’s bullet that had grazed and scarred the skin and mind of the cat. The hunter that gave it its cause for fame was rumored to be its first human meal.
This was all legend. There was no record of a disappeared hunter, but there were quite a few mauled cattle, three maimed villagers, and one dead white man. The last was the reason for my being there. It was the color of the creature that made it notable. They claimed it’s hair was green flecked with dark brown. A perfect camouflage for this territory, but odd for a mammal. My own guess was that, if the creature’s fur was green, it was not an inherent quality, but the effect of regular bathing in this algae-choked water. That was why I had chosen to take the long sweating boat-ride instead of the quick air-conditioned plane-flight. It’s strange to come upon the power plant after spending the previous five hours slowly meandering upstream through primordial jungle. I think that there was a reason that they situated it in the center of several zigzags. Either way you came upon it – upstream or down – it was jungle, jungle, jungle, then like the looming prow of charging warship, a monument to twentieth-century industrial baroque set in the middle of a freshly mowed lawn of Kentucky blue-grass. Out on that manicured fairway, surrounded by jungle that had ruled the earth since before the days of the dinosaurs, they had found what was left of the body.
posted by Spike at 6:25 AM
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