Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [52]
“Hey, that’s Ms. Muggles you’re talking about.”
“Adam, please, no kittens.”
“Great. I’ll be right over.”
We called him Pip. Or, rather, I called him Pip. Sylvia called him Your Cat, as in Your Cat just shit on the floor again. In Kiribati, dogs and cats had intuited that, unlike the I-Kiribati, we were unlikely to kill them, and so eventually we had found ourselves hosting a cat and a half-dozen dogs. Sylvia did not want to repeat the experience. Port Vila too had its share of wild dogs and cats. Sylvia sensed—perhaps correctly—that word would get around in the animal community that we were pushovers and soon we’d be feeding and cleaning up after a dozen strays.
Like most kittens, Pip was spirited and affectionate. I daresay he may have even been cute. A black and white ball of fur, he was particularly talkative. While I worked on my book, he’d spend his time mewing at the various lizards and spiders that periodically stopped by for a visit. Now and then, to amuse myself, I’d lift Pip up to the ceiling where the lizards had crawled out of the reach of his claws. He’d get a good sniff of lizard, and then I’d set him down and watch him scamper up furniture and make spectacular, though futile, leaps into the air, straining to reach the reptiles. You had no idea, did you, that the writing life could be so exciting.
One morning, however, I was gamely trying to ignore the cat. As was his habit, he leapt up onto the dining table where I worked on my laptop. Typically, Pip enjoyed walking on the keyboard and leaving his print on my manuscript—gtyhjb was a favorite contribution. I went to shove him off and, unusually for him, he drew his claws, embedding them in the wooden table.
“No, Pip,” I admonished. “You can’t do that. We’re renters.”
Meeeooowww, he howled. He curled his back. His fur stood straight up, as if he had been playing with the electric socket.
“Off, Pip.” I picked him up, intending to set him down, and that’s when I saw it. A centipede.
Until I saw this particular critter, I had always thought that all centipedes were like those small hundred-legged insects one periodically encounters in North America. On a nuisance scale, a centipede, at least in my experience, ranked far below a mouse, perhaps just a fraction higher than a cricket. A Vanuatu centipede, however, is a different beast altogether. On the nuisance scale, I’d put it up there with a rattlesnake. A Vanuatu centipede is, to begin with, a carnivore. Yes, that’s right. Vanuatu centipedes eat meat. Now, I’m no entomologist, but you’d think that fact alone would be enough to bump it out of the insect classification. Second, they are venomous. They kill their prey by injecting it with venom, and have two pincers near their head designed for this very purpose. And then there’s this: Their legs are venomous too. Centipedes can have upwards of three hundred legs. Ponder that, if you will. Now, three hundred legs, of course, need to be connected to something—something large enough to carry three hundred legs. You might conclude, then, and rightly so, that Vanuatu centipedes are big, very big. They can grow to be more than a foot long. And they are nearly indestructible. You may think that you’ve solved the problem by chopping a centipede in two, but in fact, what you have just done is create two angry, scurrying missiles of poison.
And, as I was now discovering, the centipedes in Vanuatu are hideous to behold. I had leapt on top of the table and joined Pip in contemplating the horror that was scampering across the floor. This particular centipede was nearly a foot long. Even a ladybug of those dimensions would have sent me scooting toward high ground. A Vanuatu centipede, however, does not have pretty coloring. It looks remarkably like the Darth Vader of the insect world, armored and menacing, exuding malice. This, I agreed with Pip, was trouble.
Just then the telephone rang. “Why don’t you get it, Pip?”
The cat wasn’t leaving the table. He stalked and paced with an upturned tail, mewing and moaning,