Ghost Cats of the South

by Randy Russell

  Inside, she found the house completely furnished. It was clean as a pin. A pair of prescription eyeglasses was on the dining-room table. Cindy picked the glasses up and put them on. She could see a little better then.

  The cat in the kitchen was a handsome young thing. It paced the floor, waiting to be fed.

  It moved its mouth as if it were speaking, but Cindy couldn’t hear a thing.

  “Your name is Biscuits,” she said to the cat. When it wasn’t a person who was listening, Cindy’s words sounded as normal as when she had all her teeth.

  A second cat came into the kitchen. Cindy had expected it, too.

  “Good morning, Gravy,” she said to the cat.

  Biscuits and Gravy, the two house cats, took turns walking between Cindy’s legs, rubbing the lengths of their bodies against her. Cindy’s legs felt better. Her feet seemed a little less swollen.

  Cindy turned on the coffee maker. It had been readied the night before. A half-full bottle of red food coloring was on the counter. She set it aside and used the electric opener to pretend to open a can of cat food. Biscuits and Gravy meowed like crazy when she used the can opener. Cindy smiled, listening to the cats compete for loudest breakfast yowl. She could hear them now. Being with the cats made her feel more comfortable in her body.

  She pulled open the tab-top cans and fed the cats. Her fingers worked fine now.

  Cindy filled a five-gallon dispenser with fresh water. The dispenser was propped up on the floor over an orange plastic bowl. Cindy knew exactly what it was for. She filled the perpetual cat feeder with dry kibble and added two drops of red food coloring to a pan of sugar water sitting cold on the stove. She brought the twin hummingbird feeders in from the front porch and poured red sugar water inside each one. Enough remained in the pan for another day.

  Through the kitchen window, she watched a pair of wild horses in the grassy field behind the house. They looked just right to her, even after she took off her glasses. The horses looked perfect. They looked at peace. Cindy poured half-andhalf into a mug of fresh, hot coffee.

  Biscuits and Gravy walked out onto the sloping porch with Cindy. The cats stretched, then lazily strolled off into the yard. They’d return soon, she knew. The mountain morning would be officially through when they did. Likely as not, Gravy would bring back a mole or a mouse and drop it at Cindy’s feet.

  Setting down the mug of steaming coffee, Cindy went back into the house and retrieved a hairbrush from the bedside stand. On her way back out, she picked up the crocheted lap blanket from the couch. Sitting in one of the two slat-seat rockers on the porch, Cindy removed the band from her ponytail. She brushed her hair with one hand while sipping the best cup of coffee she’d ever had in her life. She didn’t think once about wanting a cigarette.

  Mist lifted from the yard, disappearing as the sun warmed the mountain air. Cindy heard a whirring sound by her left ear. Suddenly, the hummingbird hovered in front of her face. Her grandmother said hummingbirds were messengers, but this one didn’t have a thing to say. It darted to first one feeder, then the other. Soon, a second hummingbird joined it.

  The twin buccaneers of buzz battled each other for access to both of the feeders. Just like people, Cindy thought. She laughed. She had a feeder for each of them, but that wasn’t enough. The water was always sweeter in the other bird feeder.

  Cindy was listening to the sound of water rushing around rocks in a nearby mountain branch when she heard a short whinny to the side of the porch. One of the wild horses was coming into the yard. It shook its thick mane once, as if to ask permission. Then, ignoring Cindy, the horse walked slowly forward, munching tufts of grass. Cindy wished she had eyes as pretty as those of the horse. She could count its eyelashes from where she sat.

  The hummingbirds left and came back, each repeatedly trying to trick the other into finding another place in the woods to feed.

  While Cindy was finishing her second mug of coffee, the cats returned. Cindy went inside to dispose of the mouse. Biscuits and Gravy came with her. Cindy moved the glasses from the kitchen counter to the dining-room table, where she had found them. She tidied up the house a bit and prepared the coffee maker for its next use.

  Cindy sat on the couch and played with the cats. Her time here was over. The last wisp of fog had lifted from the mountain. She sighed. She smiled. She didn’t have a single ache or complaint. She closed the door behind her and breathed in deeply. She smelled the mountain. It smelled of spruce trees and jasmine grass. It smelled of running water and tangled vines. It smelled wild, and it smelled sweet.

  At the store in Sugar Grove, the fat man pushed a package of cigarettes across the counter.

  Cindy Evans snatched it up. She was running late.

  “Your hair looks nice today,” Mike Wilson said. He stared at her chest, as usual.

  “Yours would, too,” she told him, “if you had any left on top.”

  Cindy raced into Marion. In minutes, she backed her Mustang into one of the parking slots at work. Hurrying around the front of the car, ready to break into a trot, she stopped dead in her tracks. The front bumper was crunched. She frowned and pulled the cell phone from her purse. She called her house.

  “Steve, if you ever drive my car again without asking, and it isn’t an honest-to-God emergency, you can pile up your clothes and leave right then,” she said. “Because I’m kicking you out.”

  She hurried inside, ready to apologize for being late. Mrs. Wilson sat at the front desk under a stack of gray curls that looked as if they were painted in place. She stared at Cindy with her mouth open. Cindy looked up at the clock.

  “What?” the twenty-seven-year-old asked. “I still have two minutes before I’m late for work.”

  “Your blouse is unbuttoned, dear,” the older lady said with a sniff.

  “Oh, that,” Cindy said. She tried not to blush. “I stopped at the store in Sugar Grove. Your son must have stared it open.”

  CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA

  The Cat in the Well

  Bruce Bagzis couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to travel. It was silly to be this worried about a cat. He’d been phoning his wife every few hours. Normally, Charleston was his favorite city to visit on business. This morning, he didn’t want to be there. He didn’t want to be anywhere.

  He’d driven the rental car from the airport down Interstate 26. Somehow, he had drifted onto the Mark Clark Expressway and circled half the city, coming into town across the Cooper River Bridge, all 13,000 feet of it suspended under two diamond-shaped cable towers. The towers reach 575 feet in height. He drove under both of them and barely noticed.

  Sugar was depressed, the veterinarian said. And she was about to die because of it. Bruce didn’t know how a cat could sit there day after day and then die. But that’s exactly what appeared to be happening. Sugar had been his daughter’s cat. Hannah named her. Sugar stayed with Hannah in the hospital, kept the young girl company through chemotherapy and worse. It was two months since Hannah passed, and now the cat had decided she would die, too. Just like that.

  “Cats hold out hope when someone is gone,” the vet had told Bruce and his wife. “She’s convinced now that your daughter is not coming back.”

  After their daughter died, Sugar sat in Hannah’s chair and meowed. The white cat slept in Hannah’s bed and meowed every ten minutes through the night. Sugar roamed the house looking for Hannah. She tried to coax Bruce and his wife, Cheryl, into looking for their daughter. They had nowhere to look but the graveyard.

  Bruce cried about it. Cheryl cried, too. They cried about Hannah, but they had been doing that all along. Sugar’s depression was something new. She quit eating. She quit grooming, and her coat went dull. Her eyes seemed to see nothing. Sugar lost interest in everything. She just sat there and waited to die. The vet gave them pills to stimulate her appetite. That approach didn’t work.

  Bruce cried because Sugar was the last living thing they had of Hannah’s. Sugar held the family together through it all. Wh
en Hannah died, Sugar stayed with them through the night while Bruce and Cheryl wept for the loss of their child. Cancer takes its toll. In the end, the young girl was tired of it, exhausted beyond what a child should ever know, really. In the end, they were prepared to lose Hannah, to let her go.

  Sugar, Bruce feared, was all that held him and Cheryl together now. Sugar was the remaining bit of life that made the house bearable. If Sugar died, Bruce would have to move out of that house. He’d have to leave Hannah’s house. He wondered if Cheryl would come with him. Bruce Bagzis couldn’t sleep.

  The sky in Charleston looked the same as the ocean to Bruce.

  After Hannah died, he went back to work. This was his first trip for the company. He thought Charleston would be perfect. He thought he would walk the streets of the old city and remember Hannah in a fond way, think of her as being somehow well now, though gone, think of her being alive and happy again, in his heart.

  Charleston was supposed to be his time alone with his deceased daughter.

  Now, all he could think about was that cat. If Sugar died, it would be the cat telling Bruce and Cheryl that they should, too. Maybe that’s what parents were supposed to do.

  His meeting was later that day at the Maison Du Pré. Simple stuff, really. Just signing contracts in person, instead of through the mail. Might be a pencil change or two in the margin, then a handshake, a few friendly words. It was the way things worked in the South. Might as well do your contracts with firms in New York City, if you wanted to put everything into Fed Ex packets and never meet the people with whom you conducted your business affairs.

  Bruce left his room at the Du Pré. He couldn’t just sit there like Sugar and stare at the wall. It wasn’t quite daylight yet when he found the coffee shop on East Bay Street. He got the largest they had, added sugar, and put three creams in the pocket of his sports coat. He bought a muffin but ended up cramming that in his pocket as well. He thought he would walk down Washington and Concord streets to Waterfront Park but ended up on Anson Street instead. Walking against the one-way traffic made him somehow feel more comfortably alone.

  “You-all can go where you want to,” Bruce said to no one at all. “I’m going this way.”

  Soon, he was meandering on one-way cross streets for a couple of blocks, then wandering back south another block or two, turning when he felt like it. He barely touched his coffee. Bruce liked Charleston, its buildings much lower than most cities. You could see church spires everywhere. They were the tallest things around.

  It felt like it was going to rain, but then Charleston always felt that way.

  Palmetto palms were everywhere. They were cute trees, but this morning they seemed uninviting. You couldn’t stand under one for shade, after all. And you didn’t want to lean against one either. Their trunks looked scaly to Bruce. You wouldn’t want to put your shoulder or your hand there.

  He found a block with massive old oaks. The airy Spanish moss hanging from the tree branches looked like ruined lace in the first light of dawn, looked like shrouds just the right size for Hannah’s dolls. Charleston had been so inviting and so charming the other times Bruce visited. On his honeymoon, for starters. It was supposed to be just the place for his first trip away from home since Hannah died.

  That morning, though, the little city streets with their columned houses and window-shuttered businesses weren’t inviting at all. Cobblestone streets and paths lay here and there, and fountains and gardens, but the whole of Charleston seemed to be shut away from the streets by tall hedges, iron fences and gates, and pastel-painted or gray stucco block walls. You had to have a permit or a key to sit down anywhere at all. Being in Charleston felt wrong.

  Bruce decided to head on back toward the grass at Waterfront Park. If he sat there, maybe the ocean would have something to say to him of an early morning in Charleston. He found a shortcut through a narrow paved alley, then realized too late it turned sharply to the right. Before he knew it, the little alleyway dead-ended. The wrought-iron gate hanging at the end of the alley was open.

  He supposed he could be arrested if anybody minded his being there. That was okay, since the police were polite in Charleston. He would move on if someone asked him to. Inside the gate was a courtyard. A low brick wall ran across the back. Pieces of slate covered the ground. A small stone fountain stood in the middle. It wasn’t turned on. Coins were in the bottom of it, where children had made wishes.

  Bruce wondered what he would wish for, if he could wish for anything other than Hannah’s not having died so sick and so young. What was it people wished for? Wealth, fame, happiness, love.

  He sat on the brick wall and felt like crying. That was nothing new. Bruce set his coffee down next to him, pulled off the sip-through cap, and poured in a cream. The coffee had turned cold. He probably wouldn’t drink it. The sun was fully awake now. It shone in separate beams of light among the trees. Birds, already finished with most of their morning singing, moved in the branches.

  He heard water. It sounded to Bruce as if something splashed behind him.

  Leaning backwards over the brick wall, he found himself staring at a crescent-shaped hole in the ground. The hole was mostly covered by a round lid made from pieces of thick boards. Bruce turned around and leaned over the wall on both hands to get a better view. The wooden cover had partially slipped aside atop a circle of bricks. The bricks were much older than those used to build the garden wall.

  He heard something splash again.

  It was a well, Bruce realized. He had been taught as a child to stand back from wells. His grandmother told him that a cannibal witch named Annie Greenteeth lived at the bottom of wells. She had long, sharp teeth and ate children who leaned their faces over wells. Her bony arms were long enough to reach to the top, no matter how deep the well might be. She hooked her long, crooked fingers into peering faces and pulled them in. If that wasn’t scary enough, Annie Greenteeth had bad breath, his grandmother said. Like cooked cabbage and onions.

  It was a well, and something moved inside it. Something splashed.

  Bruce was over the wall in a flash. Bending over the well, he used both hands to pull the cover back. Two copper-colored eyes looked up at him. A tiny wet head cocked from side to side. The eyes didn’t plead for rescue. They were curious over who Bruce might be. He reached for the animal, which was treading water.

  The soaked cat leapt up the side of the well on its own and was out quickly. It looked like a tan otter. It bounded to the top of the brick wall and stood on all fours, shaking water from its fur in a series of head-to-tail shudders. Then it stretched. The cat was still thoroughly wet and looked distressed to Bruce. It was skinny, starved. The cat looked miserable wet.

  Bruce took off his sports jacket and laid it across the wall. He returned to where he’d been sitting before. He took off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt. In want of company, the wet cat walked the wall. Bruce called to it. It knocked over his coffee. Bruce pulled off his shirt and wrapped the cat in it. He rubbed the shirt gently over the animal, its head sticking out. As he toweled off the cat, she purred.

  Then she walked away from him. Both left feet forward, then both right. She stopped to smell the spilt coffee. The cat chose a spot on the wall in sunlight. She lay out to her full length and stared at Bruce.

  “You could say thank you,” Bruce said.

  He flapped his shirt in the air, hoping to dry it. Then he spread it out on his half of the brick wall. Shirtless, he slipped his jacket on and draped his tie loosely around his neck.

  “We both look like idiots,” he said.

  The cat agreed and immediately began to groom her face with her paws. She was the color of sand, he noticed. Two colors of sand, actually, in a faint pattern of tabby stripes. Bruce remembered the muffin in his pocket. He peeled the top off it and brought it to the cat. He set it in front of her. She stretched her head forward for a quick smell, then drew back and continued combing her fur into place.

  She stopped once to stare at B
ruce, blinking. He stood in front of her. One color was sand, he decided, and the other was cream.

  He remembered the two creams in his jacket pocket. He got one out, fumbled the top off, and held the cream in front of the cat. He held it in his fingers so she could lap up the sweet milk without knocking the container over with her tongue. It wasn’t good for cats to have much cream, he knew. But she wanted it.

  As soon as she was through, she groomed her face again, cleaning her whiskers. Bruce leaned against the wall and watched. He had nowhere to go. He thought they should be friends, his having saved her life and all.

  “What are you going to eat today?” he asked.

  The cat rolled onto her back in the morning sun. She was confident, afraid of nothing, he realized.

  “A mouse, maybe? Grasshoppers?”

  The cat meowed. She seemed to want her belly rubbed. Bruce was hesitant. Cats won’t often let people touch their bellies. Sugar sure wouldn’t. He tickled the cat’s soft belly fur with two fingers, then petted her gently. She purred. The cat had what she wanted.

  In a moment, she slipped from under his hand and sat upright on the wall. The cream tabby cat sat beside Bruce and stared at the fountain in the middle of the courtyard. She meowed loudly, waited, then meowed again. Bruce stared at the fountain, remembering the coins he’d seen there when he first walked by. He crossed his arms. The cat meowed a third time.

  “What would I wish for?” Bruce said out loud. “I guess I’d wish for more sleep.”

  The cat waited.

  “Oh, I know. I wish that Sugar wouldn’t die.” It was killing Bruce to watch Hannah’s cat go through that. It was killing him to watch Cheryl watch the cat slowly die. “You wouldn’t do that,” Bruce said to the cat sitting next to him. “You were in a well paddling around like a drowning rat, and you’re not depressed.”

  The well cat didn’t say anything.

  Bruce’s cell phone sounded. He flipped it open. It was Cheryl. He pushed the button.