Strays (20 page)

*   *   *   *

At first Sarah lay on her side, very still, her face no more than foot away from Strawberry.  It was like looking at a battered stuffed animal, something one might see at a cheap carnival hanging in a booth where you get three chances to knock down a stack of milk bottles.  The cat’s pelt, what little there was, was flat and still, faded in placed, seeming dirty and oily and pasted to her hide.  Sarah blew a soft gust of air at the cat’s head, and the ears did not flatten or flex.  She reached to Strawberry with her closest hand, letting a single finger rest in front of Strawberry’s nose.  The cat’s nose did not twitch, nor was there the familiar
whuff
ing sound of her taking in the scent of a stranger.

Strawberry was, for all intents and purposes, already gone.  Only the slightest lift of her chest wall, barely perceptible unless you looked long without blinking, gave any indication that the tortured cat was still breathing. 

Sarah withdrew her hand and nestled it under her own head.  She closed her eyes, releasing from her mind the exhausting bus ride and the troubling dreams of Big Buddy and the awkward boy who tried so hard but failed to save her.  When sleep at last came, it was deep, and if she dreamed at all she did not remember.

She awoke an hour later to the
whuff
ing sound in her ear.  She opened her eyes, and Strawberry was there, next to her head, still crouched flat with back arched, but somehow she had managed to make her way closer to Sarah.  Sarah felt Strawberry’s nose, dry rough as an old penny, working through her hair.  She lifted her hand to her head, cradling it around the cats wasted shell, pressing her palm lightly into Strawberry’s back.  She could feel the ridges of Strawberry’s spine, like a bag of bolts wrapped tight in a sack.  Strawberry let out a sigh, and something rattled in her chest, a low, emaciated growl.

Sleep came again to Sarah, and with it a dream.  This time she was alone on a road, and the boy was walking with her.  It was midafternoon, but the sky was dark with heavy clouds the color of gun-metal.  The boy did not touch her, indeed did not even look at her, and for a moment Sarah wondered if he even liked her.  But then she looked up at him, saw the way his eyes surveyed the landscape.  His jaw was taut, his lips coiled in a thin frown, and the whorl of his brow implied that he saw something she did not, something awful.  And yet she knew she was safe, knew that he was there for her, and that no matter what terrible thing came growling out of the clouds, the boy would stand between it and her, allowing nothing to bring her to harm.

When she awoke again, her nose was tickled by a tuft of fur.  Strawberry had moved closer now, was draping her paws across Sarah’s cheeks, lying her body across Sarah’s forehead as if claiming her.  The cat was breathing for sure now, the lungs expanding against the crown of Sarah’s head, and the tiny motor of her purr could be felt as well as heard.  Sarah opened her eyes and saw nothing but hair; Strawberry was laying her head across Sarah’s brow.  She smelled sweet, as if she had been rolling in fresh grass.

Sarah lifted a hand, groped, and found the top of Strawberry’s head.  She laid her fingers just behind the right ear, and this time the ear twitched and the purr increased.  With deliberate care, Sarah ran her hand down the length of Strawberry’s back.  The spine was less prominent for some reason, and cords of muscle seemed to be writhing just below the flesh.  Even Strawberry’s coat felt different, softer, like down, not the wiry, oily texture Sarah had felt earlier.

She could not see, and her nose was fighting back the urge to sneeze, but Sarah dared not move the cat.  Instead, she lay like that for what seemed like an hour, running her hand gently down Strawberry’s body.  With each stroke, the muscles seemed more alive, as if tiny little fingers skittered inside, gripping Strawberry’s bones fast.  The purr seemed to amp up its idle each time Sarah’s hand glided down the back, and Strawberry’s nose, cooler and becoming moist now, nestled into her cheek.

Somewhere beyond this bundle of fur that had plopped itself across Sarah’s head, she heard the slow whine of the door hinge as someone tried to opened it without disturbing her.  From off to her right, she heard Trudy’s voice.

“Oh my,” she said.  “I never thought.”

“I told you, Miss Trudy.”  Tom’s voice, speaking low but not whispering.  “Didn’t I tell you?”

Sarah allowed herself to sleep again, and the dreams did not return. 

She awoke on her side, and Strawberry had moved down, snuggling against her chest, the crest of Strawberry’s head pressed under Sarah’s chin.  The purr was steady, ceaseless, and the cat’s sides flexed and retracted with steady breaths.  Sarah ran her fingers through the cat’s fur, and it was warm and soft, the body beneath it sturdy.  It was as if she was waking up to an entirely different cat.

She closed her eyes again, allowing more sleep to come.  This time, the dreams were simple, nonspecific, but something wonderful seemed to wash across her, soothing every nerve of her body.  Strawberry’s gentle purr against her chest, rumbling along as steady as a generator, rolled with her into the darkness. 

*   *   *   *

It was midafternoon when Sarah finally awoke for good.  The room was darker, and even from her spot on the bed she could see through the south windows that the sky outside had grown overcast.  There was a hiss and rattle in the window as small gusts of wind picked up and declined.  Sarah blinked and rubbed the last sleep out of her eyes and looked around the room.

A young woman was in the southwest corner at a small vanity made of dark wood that looked to be older than the house.  There were two drawers on the vanity, one open slightly, and a large round mirror with hand-carved moulding.  The woman sat in a high-backed chair turned away from Sarah.  She was running a large brush through her hair, a luxurious mane the color of autumn that spilled around her shoulders.  At first Sarah thought the woman was Trudy, but a moment’s study starved that thought. Trudy’s hair had been lighter, blonder than this woman’s, and her frame had been quite lean.  The woman at the vanity was of a fuller figure, hips ample but not fat, soft curves at her waist and shoulders, all easy to discern because … the woman wore no clothes.

Sarah started at this and lay very still.  She had read stories in library books about haunted houses, stories of ghosts appearing in their natural habitat, doing mundane tasks over and over, to be observed by nosy humans.  Perhaps this was such a ghost, someone who lived in the house long ago, a young girl—maybe an aunt to Trudy’s late father—spending eternity in this room, naked and alone, brushing her hair and waiting for a boy, some secret and forbidden love who would never arrive at her window.

Just then, the woman stopped.  Although Sarah could not see her face in the mirror, the woman seemed to sense that she was being watched.  She set the brush on the vanity.  Her right shoulder rolled forward as she bent an arm across her chest to cup and hide her breasts.  She turned in the chair, its high back further hiding her exposed body, and grinned.

“Hello,” the woman said.  “You do nice work.”

Sarah set up and pressed herself against the metal backboard frame of the bed.  “You can see me?”

“Of course I can see you.  I’ve been with you all afternoon.”

Sarah looked around then and realized that the cat was gone.  Her first thought was that perhaps the poor thing had succumbed to its illness and died while she was asleep, that maybe Trudy had mercifully removed its remains as Sarah slept.  But she knew better.  After all, she had been with Tom for the past two days, and if there was one creature in the world like Tom, there had to be others.

“Strawberry?” Sarah asked.

The woman smiled and nodded.  “That’s what they call me.”

“What do
you
call you?” Sarah asked.

“I like Strawberry.  It’ll do.”

“Where are your clothes?”

Strawberry motioned with her head to the back side of the house, her pretty hair swishing across the back of the chair.  “Out there somewhere.”

“Where?”

“In the woods.  I left them out here before I came to this place.”

“Why?” Sarah asked.

“I came here in my cat form.  All cats are welcome here, but not all people are.”  She lowered her arm, keeping her breasts hidden behind the chair back.  “Miss Trudy’s seen people do some very bad things.”

“Yes,” Sarah said.  “We have that in common.”

“I figured if I came here as a person, like this,” Strawberry said, “Miss Trudy might be tempted to turn me away.  But if I came to her as a cat …”

“So she doesn’t know you’re—”

“Not yet she doesn’t,” Strawberry said, her eyes seeming to dance as she smiled.

“Why didn’t you show her?”

“I was lying low,” Strawberry explained.  “I was waiting for you.”

“Me?”

“I knew you were coming.  We all did.”

“You and the other cats?”

“Just The Glaring,” said Strawberry.  “We’ve known about you for awhile.”

“What’s The Glaring?” Sarah asked.

“Tom, me.  Others like us.”

“How many?”

“Not enough,” said Strawberry.

Sarah nodded.  “What else can you tell me?”

Strawberry ran her fingers through her hair, making it shimmer in the soft light being fed in through the windows.  “I can’t say.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not my place,” she said.  “It’s Tom’s.  He’s kind of territorial that way.”

“So when is he going to catch me up on all of this?” Sarah demanded.  “When does someone let me in on what’s going on?”

“In time,” Strawberry said.  “You have to take it in small bites.  In the meantime, I'm going downstairs to introduce myself proper.”  She looked about the room, frowning, then draped an arm over the back of the chair and shrugged.  “Got any clothes I can borrow?”

BTB Unchained

While Sarah and Strawberry were sleeping away most of their Saturday, a Honda Accord was making its way to Denver via I-70.  Just as it was entering the Mile-High City, it angled northwest on 270 over to I-25 and headed due north.  It had passed Kyle and Molly back in Kansas just east of Wakeeney and gained a good 20 minute lead by the time Kyle’s Impala had eased back onto the road.  That lead was expanded to over an hour for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that with the Accord’s better gas mileage (Kyle’s old Impala ate gas like a fat man eating pie at the county fair) it needed to make fewer fuel stops.

The BTB did, however, stop for other things. 

Just north of downtown Denver on I-25, they took a turnoff and found a liquor store.  They waited for about ten minutes before finding someone to buy them beer for their cooler.  He was a thin man with long silvery hair that made him look like an aging hippie, and he wore a faded t-shirt with the Colorado Buffalos logo on the chest.  Marty, the biggest of the BTB, approached the man and told him that he had recently graduated from high school and had been offered a full scholarship at CU, and this was his last hurrah with his buddies.  The aging hippie grooved on the story, agreed to buy them beer so they could celebrate, and soon the BTB were on the road again, Bran the Man driving, DC riding shotgun, and Marty napping in the backseat next to a fully replenished ice chest. 

They stopped again near Fort Collins for gas, and then continued north.  By the time they crossed the state line into Wyoming they were all getting hungry.  They found a little roadside diner outside of Cheyenne and took a good hour eating and laughing and flirting with a somewhat pretty blonde waitress with skunk strip of dark roots across her head and the heavy scent of cigarettes in her clothes. 

During this time, the Impala—almost 90 minutes behind them when they first pulled into the diner—cut their lead time in half, and it would have been more if Kyle and Molly had not met with an unnecessary delay at Fort Collins during their own fuel stop. 

It was evening when the Accord got back on the road, and DC took the wheel, driving as far as Laramie before the BTB wondered aloud if they should stop for the night.  But Bran the Man was on edge, twitchy with the hunger to get to Maupin, track down his new friend Jack, and hit those rapids like a trio of Indiana Jones, taming the wild river in ways nature never intended. 

“We press on,” he said.  “I’ll drive all night if you want.  But we do not stop.  We’ve been stopping too much our whole lives.”

Bran the Man took the wheel back and drove west on I-80, a cool beer between his legs and his cassette of The Beastie Boys’
License to Ill
album cranked as much as his two friends could tolerate.

He made it almost to Evanston, less than 15 miles from the Utah border, and that’s when fatigue finally hit him.  Somewhere off to his right he saw the Phillips 66 sign, the islands of gas pumps, the wide parking lot almost an acre, and rows of Peterbilts resting as their weary drivers slept off the last hours of a long haul.  It was just past midnight.  DC now slept in the back seat, using one of his sweatshirts as a pillow as his head rested on the ice chest.  Marty was in shotgun, bent forward, sleeping with wavy-haired head pressed against his arms as he crossed them on his lap. 

Bran the Man rubbed his eyes and finished his beer.  He eased the Accord back toward the trucker’s lot, finding a spot in the shadows close to the store, protected from unwanted light but well enough out of the way that it wouldn’t be smashed by a trucker making an early dawn departure.  He rolled down his window, tossed out his empty beer can, and eased back the seat.  It thumped against the ice chest, arousing DC only for a moment, but could go no further.

Bran the Man sighed and unbuckled his seat belt.  He pulled up the head rest enough to catch his head.  He crossed his arms and closed his eyes, and listened to the low hum of truck generators across that acreage of gravel lot.

Sleep came almost at once, an invisible killer pouncing out of the ether, driving Brandon deep into the land of dreams.

Kyle vs. Jack