Washed UpWes Noyer, P.I.
Monday, OCT 3
The days with my brother, Waldo, were always too short. It seemed just as we had woken up and gone out to enjoy the sun, it was already setting. Two kittens, Wes and Waldo, frolicking in the dying sunlight, we pushed our bedtimes back a few minutes here and a few more there just to enjoy a little more of life. We neglected dinner, chores, doing laundry, all for just a little more play time together. I suppose that’s why we got mixed up in the night scene so early on. My brother took to it like a shadow—blended right in. For me, the transition was harder. I’d wanted to be a police officer even at that young age, so running with the filth in the underbelly felt wrong. That was the company the night kept, though. Still, I wanted to be by the side of my brother. To protect him.
By the time we had fully grown I had become what I always wanted to become: a sworn peace officer. A bull. I pinned a badge proudly on my pressed uniform and held a peaked cap between my peaked ears. My brother, I presume, felt a need to walk a different path—he’d barely speak to me when I took the job; never listened to me. He kept his lips buttoned. See, he’d made a name for himself in the cream smuggling business by then. In those days, the prohibition days, cream was illegal. I knew what he was doing and I encouraged him to stop, but there was too much money in it for him to do that. The night my unit was to come down on the crew my brother ran with, I tried to warn him without risking the lives of my partners. I was lousy with excuses to stay inside and out of trouble that night, but my brother needed to be out there, strolling the alleys, sniffing out the action, roaming the streets.
He was roaming a street when it happened. The light seemed to appear out of thin air. I remember seeing my brother staring at those lights, pie-eyed. His pipe stems must’ve been startled stiff. Before all that, my crew and I broke down the doors of the illegal cream smuggler’s den. The smugglers decided they wouldn’t go easy. In the end a few escaped and my brother would have been with them if he hadn’t stepped between a smuggler and me. He took a yo-yo to the shoulder for me. I thought he was dead, but, to my relief, he got up and ran. I gave chase, but of course while my heart was in the chase, it was rooting for the other team—my brother’s team. I wanted him to escape. If I had run with full authority, maybe I could have saved him. Maybe he’d be in prison not the grave. If I hadn’t joined the force, maybe I could have saved him, too. I was in the middle, walking the line. Just like he was running that dashed line between lanes when those lights appeared.
The van slammed into my brother.
He didn’t make it.
It was Felipe Femur and the Skeletone’s tour van that hit Waldo, and though I hate them—that rotten goodie two-shoes skeleton in particular—for it, I know they weren’t at fault. It was an accident. Black fur, black night, black road. Mr. Femur couldn’t have seen my brother in time to stop. He looked like the grim reaper stepping out of that van and stepping in front of the lights that fell on my brother’s twisted body.
‘I wish I could have seen one more sunrise with you,’ Waldo said.
‘You will,’ I lied to comfort him.
Red light fell across his face. Judging from his final smile, I think my brother might have mistook it for the sunrise. Dawn was still hours away, though. The red lights were from the ambulance that arrived too late to do anything but carry his body away in a bag.
We confiscated five-hundred dollars’ worth of cream that night. That’s how much my brother’s life ended up being worth. Not a decade later I could pick that five-hundred dollars’ worth of cream up at the local store, crime free. I certainly went through that much in the aftermath. My world had been turned upside down. I began being late for my shifts and even missing them all together. My friendships with the other officers suffered. I’d stopped giving myself baths. I got into arguments all the time. By the time I was asked to turn my badge in, I was washed up.
I took a few months off to find myself; recover. I could have spent all day playing in the sun, but without my brother it was as if the sun had no warmth to give.
I woke up feeling like the world had been flipped on its head. Turned out that the world was just as crooked as it had always been. I was the one who was upside-down. I’m not talking in some spiritual sense. I’m speaking in the literal sense. A rope was bound around my hind legs and I was strung up above a washing machine. The washing machine twisted and sloshed a tub of water aggressively. Following the rope from my paws to the other end, I found I’d been hooked up to some contraption meant to dunk me into the water slowly.
I was in no mood for a bath.
I looked around for some way to get myself down without taking a swim. Hannah Barbara was still seated, looking bored. She was still bound with rope, with tape over her whiskers. I found my paws had been tied together, as well. The laundromat was quiet. It seemed the De Tullio brothers had skipped out and taken Lucy with them.
‘They gone?’ I asked to be sure.
Hannah nodded and then struggled with her ropes. Her chair rocked, but the ropes did not give. I did the same until I felt the rope slip a little in its pulley rig. I just got closer to the soapy water, so I stopped moving.
After what seemed like an hour I heard distant whistling. It got closer and closer. Then I heard the jangle of keys and a door unlock. Someone entered the laundromat.
‘What the—?’ I heard the voice say upon seeing Hannah tied up in a chair and me hanging above a crazed washing machine. ‘Wes? Is that you?’
I knew that voice. So, familiar. But it couldn’t be—
‘Waldo?’
‘Wes? It is you!’ the voice said. ‘How’s it hanging, brother?’
‘You’re alive?’
‘Weeeeeell…” Waldo stretched the e’s in the word well beyond my patience. ‘You could say that.’
He stepped out in front of me, whiter than the sunlight we used to love playing under together. He hadn’t bleached his fur as I first thought. He had no fur. He had no skin, either. He was all bones. A skeleton cat.
‘I think I must have hit my noodle a few too many times,’ I said. ‘I’m seeing things. You can’t really be here.’
‘It’s me. I’m here, in the flesh—well, not the flesh. This body takes some getting used to. Taken years really and I still slip. It’s me though.’
‘What—how?’
‘Turns out that musician who hit me with his van moonlights as the grim reaper. I came back in the morgue. Started a new life. Err—new afterlife. This laundromat is mine. The Wanderer’s Launderer. Anyway, let’s get you on your feet. You look like you need to lay down.’
‘This is a lot to take in,’ I admitted. It certainly was. Blood had rushed to my head hours ago, but with the realization that my brother was still kicking, it was all too much. I fainted as my brother began working at the rope.
After I had turned in my badge, I slept the days away and stayed up all night with the company of only the skeleton in my closet. That skeleton was my brother, or rather the guilt I felt in not being able to stop his death. I knew he was involved in the cream smuggling and kept it from my superiors. If I had told someone, perhaps Waldo would have been by my side still.
After months of mourning I felt an itch. It was the same itch that encouraged me to join the police force and make it through the academy as top yo-yo and valedictorian. The itch wouldn’t go away and I couldn’t go back to the force. I never did quite fit in with the bulls and certainly not with the criminals, though I managed to be civil with them and understand them both. I always walked the thin line—the line nearest the underbelly. Private Investigator was the natural next step. I’d blown through my pension and needed to work again. Working kept me occupied and my mind off my loss. So, I took a bath and set to starting up a P.I. business.
I was suddenly wet. Underwater. My paws were bound, fore and hind limbs. I’d fallen in the washing machine. I struggled to surface, but the machine twisted me and pulled me under over and over. Then I felt bony paws on my scruff. I was pulled out of the basin.
Waldo stood over me. It was hard to read his expression as he didn’t have one. I always hated that about skeletons. You never know what they are thinking. It’s hard to trust a skeleton when you can’t read them. Especially for someone in my line of work, but this was my brother. It was probably an expression of concern.
I spit up soapy water and gasped for breath. Hannah had been cut free and looked over me, as well. Waldo cut my paws free and sat me up against the side of the washing machine that nearly killed me. I looked him up and down, torn between my excitement to find my brother among the living and hating him for being gone so long and leaving me to think he’d left me for good.
‘Where have you been, Waldo?’ I snarled.
‘It’s a long story, Wes.’
‘I have a motel room across the street.’ I sighed. ‘Let’s talk there. I imagine you have lots to say.’ Dead men tell no tales, but this dead cat certainly owed me an explanation. Turning to Hannah, I said, ‘We can figure out our next step over some food and cream.’
They took little convincing. Hannah and I were exhausted and Waldo had some explaining to do. We shut down the laundromat and headed back to my motel room.
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