Forever Odd

had washed out of the winter day.
        I didn’t mind dying, but this cavernous fire-blackened pit was an ugly place to do it.
        “Did you kill Robert?” she repeated.
        “He fell off a balcony.”
        “Yeah, after you shot him.” She didn’t sound upset. In fact she regarded me with the calculation of a black widow spider deciding whether to take a mate. “You play clueless pretty well, but you’re for sure a mundunugu .”
        “Something was wrong with Robert.”
        She frowned. “I don’t know what it is. My needy boys don’t always stay with me as long as I’d like.”
        “They don’t?”
        “Except Andre. He’s a real bull, Andre is.”
        “I thought he was a horse. Cheval Andre.”
        “A total stallion,” she said. “Where’s Danny the Geek? I want him back. He’s a funny little monkey.”
        “I cut his throat and pitched him down a shaft.” My claim electrified her. Her nostrils flared, and a hard pulse appeared in her slender throat.
        “If he didn’t die in the fall,” I told her, “he’s bled to death by now. Or drowned. The shaft’s got twenty or thirty feet of water at the bottom.”
        “Why would you have done that?”
        “He betrayed me. He told you my secrets.”
        Datura licked her lips as though she had just finished eating a tasty dessert. “You’ve got as many layers as an onion, boyfriend.”
        I had decided to play the we’re-two-of-a-kind-why-don’t-we-join-forces game, but another opportunity arose.
        She said, “The Nigerian prince was full of shit, but I might believe you can become a panther after midnight.”
        “It’s not a panther,” I said.
        “Yeah? So what is it you become?”
        “It’s not a saber-toothed tiger, either.”
        “Do you become a leopard, like on Kilimanjaro?” she asked.
        “It’s a mountain lion.”
        The California mountain lion, one of the world’s most formidable predators, prefers to live in rugged mountains and forests, but it adapts well to rolling hills and low scrub.
        Mountain lions thrive in the dense, almost lush scrub in the hills and canyons around Pico Mundo, and often they venture into adjoining territory that would be classified as true desert. A male mountain lion will claim as much as a hundred square miles as his hunting range, and he likes to roam.
        In the mountains, he’ll feed on mule deer and bighorn sheep. In territory as barren as the Mojave, he will chase down coyotes, foxes, raccoons, rabbits, and rodents, and he will enjoy the variety.
        “Males of the species average between one hundred thirty and one hundred fifty pounds,” I told her. “They prefer the cover of night for hunting.”
        That look of wide-eyed girlish wonder-which I had first seen on our way to the casino with Doom and Gloom, and which was the only appealing and guileless expression that she possessed- overcame her again. “Are you gonna show me?”
        I said, “Even in the daytime, if a mountain lion is on the move instead of resting, people rarely see it because it’s so quiet. It passes without detection.”
        As excited as ever she had been at a human sacrifice, she said, “These paw prints-they’re yours , aren’t they?”
        “Mountain lions are solitary and secretive.”
        “Solitary and secretive, but you’re going to show me .” She had demanded miracles, fabulous impossible things, icy fingers up and down her spine. Now she thought that I would at last deliver. “You didn’t conjure these tracks to lead me here. You transformed … and made these tracks yourself.”
        If Datura’s and my positions had been reversed, I would have been standing with my back to the mountain lion, oblivious as it stalked me.
        As wrong as nature is-with its poisonous plants, predatory animals, earthquakes, and floods-sometimes it gets things right.

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    FIFTY-TWO
        
        IMMENSE, THE PAWS, WITH WELL-DEFINED TOES… Lowered so slowly, planted so gently that the carpet of ashes, as powdery as talcum, did not plume under them…
        Beautiful coloration. Tawny, deepening to dark brown at the tip of the long tail. Also dark brown on the backs of the ears and on the sides of the nose.
        If our positions had been reversed, Datura would have watched the approach of the mountain lion with cold-eyed amusement, darkly delighted by my cluelessness.
        Although I tried to