Cat Telling Tales

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  Charlie couldn’t see the fire below the hill, could see only dark smoke rising up, as she moved the first two nervous horses through the north gate into the stable yard, her mare snorting and pulling back. She could see in her mind the three weathered field hands’ shacks that stood below the hill huddled at the edge of the floodplain beside the river. Surely the old woman and Billy had gotten out, those places were so small, only a few steps to the door or a window. Hesmerra Young. Everyone called her Gran. Charlie thought of her and Billy waking to flames, the blaze licking at the walls and ceiling, and she felt her stomach lurch. But surely they were safe, the fire trucks were there now, and she tried to ease her worry. Billy Young was only twelve, a silent, shy boy, with gentle hands for a horse or dog; he worked for the Harpers at odd times when they needed extra help. Maybe, when the fire broke out, he was already gone, off on his bike to work at one of the other ranches. Often, as Max headed to work before daylight, he’d see Billy somewhere on the road on his bike, and give him a lift, throw the bike in the back of the pickup. The boy did odd jobs for many of the local horse people, cleaned stalls, fed, cleaned tack, lunged and exercised the horses. She guessed he went to school when he chose, maybe in the afternoon. She didn’t know how he managed that, maybe he had a work permit like their young friend Lori Reed, who was learning carpentry as Ryan’s part-time apprentice. Charlie liked that a kid wanted to learn a hands-on skill, in addition to getting a formal education. If Billy was gone when the fire started, if his gran was alone there sleeping off a hangover, had she gotten out, had she even smelled smoke? Redwing reared again, fighting the rope, but the boarder, a bay gelding, was calm and sensible. By leading them together, she got them across the yard and into the south pasture, as far from the flames as their land went. As she eased the mare through, her phone vibrated. Latching the gate, she picked up. “I’m moving the horses,” she told Max. She looked up as Ryan’s truck pulled in.

  “Shall I come up?” Max said.

  “No, Ryan’s here, we’re fine. I’ll call if we need help. Shall we hook up the trailers?”

  “No, they have it under control, not a breath of wind down here,” he said curtly.

  He sounded strange. She said, “Is everyone all right?”

  “Everything under control,” he said shortly. “I have to go.” He hung up, startling her.

  Something was wrong, he hadn’t wanted to talk. She told herself they were busy, the place must be chaos, the men cleaning up, to keep the last of the blaze contained, not let it creep along and start in the surrounding fields. The bottomland along the river lay fallow now, gone to coarse grass and weeds, the owner waiting for an upturn in the market, for some developer to give him an inflated profit. She didn’t like the thought of condos or tract houses down here, destroying the open land where she liked a nice gallop along the trail that ran beside the river. Max said no one would build houses on the flood bed, they’d have to be certifiably crazy. But all over California, people had done just that, built on cheap lowland, and then were surprised when, during heavy weather, their living rooms filled up with river mud.

  She could hear the firefighters’ shouts, could still hear the hiss of water hitting the buildings, the dull chunk, chunk of shovels as if the men were cutting back dry weeds or pitching rubble and loose boards away from the hot spots. Ryan joined her at the north gate. They haltered the other four horses and led them across the yard, Max’s buckskin gelding snorting, strung with nerves. Probably the fire wouldn’t climb the hill, with no wind, but the horses sure could smell it, and that was all they needed. At least the new green grass was rich with moisture, not tinder dry. But still, a sudden wind whipping up the cliffs from the sea, and who knew what the blaze would do? Well, the trailers stood ready if they were needed, the tires inflated, and all their horses would load easily. It was that, or tie the bunch of them head-to-tail and lead them all at once to safety, to one of the neighbors’ pastures.

  Slapping Bucky on the rump she sent him trotting away, the other three following him closely, as if Bucky might protect them. Ryan’s short dark hair was atangle, the collar of her jacket turned under as if she’d pulled it on fast, leaving the house in a hurry. With the horses moved, Charlie let the two big mutts out of the barn and put them in the south pasture with the horses. They took both vehicles, heading for the blaze, Charlie following Ryan’s truck. She could see Joe Grey sitting tall on the back of the seat. A right turn, and right again a quarter mile down the hill, and they bumped along the narrow dirt track that skirted the bottomland, heading into the smoke and the tangle of men and vehicles, the confusion of fire hoses spewing water, undulating like muscular pythons. They parked short of the burn, against the hill, and got out. Charlie smiled as Ryan threatened Joe Grey.

  “You stay in the truck, Joe. I mean it.”

  Joe sighed, put his head on his paws, his ears down, as if browbeaten. He couldn’t say a word in front of the firefighters. How was that fair?

  “Don’t scold him,” Charlie said softly. “It was Joe who called in the report.” She reached in to stroke his head, and gave him a wink. “Ryan worries about you,” she said. He gave her a smile and a cranky sort of purr.

  As the two women headed into the burn, a little smoky breeze whipped ashes in their faces. Most of the flames had been smothered, but where the blackened walls had fallen in, their remains burned cherry red. The smell of wet, burned wood was mixed with the odors of melted plastic, melted electrical wires, burned food, a stink that made them gag. Four men were raking refuse farther away from the smoldering boards, piling it against the hill beyond a tangle of old timbers, wooden barrels, and an old door with peeling veneer. Past the black, sodden remains of the shack, the white EMT van stood parked near the two fire trucks. The firemen and two medics stood there in a circle with Max. His thin face was streaked with soot, black smears stained his western shirt and jeans. He had turned away from Charlie and Ryan. That, and the look on the medics’ faces, made Charlie go cold; turning, she took Ryan’s hand.

  Not twenty feet from the burn, the other two cabins stood untouched, their rough wood siding soaked from the beating water, the roofs dripping. As Charlie and Ryan moved toward the group of men, a sick smell reached them, the stink of meat singed too fast on a hot barbecue. The circle of men nearly hid the portable gurney beside the EMT van. They could see it held a stretcher, strewn with a heap of blackened rags.

  But not only rags. Charlie made out a frail body tangled among burned blankets.

  Max turned to look at her, his mouth and jaw drawn tight. “She never left her bed, Charlie. She was there under the blankets, dressed in her flannel nightgown.” Charlie pressed her fist to her mouth. Max said, “There was glass in her bed, shards of glass under the blanket, as if a bottle had exploded in the flames.”

  Behind them, up the dirt road, the coroner’s white van pulled in off the two-lane, and behind it came a kid on a bike, leaning over the handlebars pumping hard, kicking up dust as he skidded off the highway onto the dirt lane, following the van. Skidding to a stop beside it, dragging his foot in the dirt, Billy Young sat looking at his burned house and the group of silent men.

  6

  Joe crouched on the dash of Ryan’s truck looking out through the windshield, watching Billy. The boy sat on his bike looking at the black and smoking remains of his home: the heap of fallen timbers, steam rising up from the alligatored wood. His fists were clenched hard on the handlebars, his face gone white. He was so thin his protruding wrists looked like the bones someone would throw to a hungry dog. His face was long, his cheeks sculpted in close, his brown eyes huge with shock, a look that made Joe’s belly twist, that made embarrassing cat tears start—this was as sad as watching an orphaned kitten whose mother had been hit by a car.

  He was dressed in frayed jeans limply shaped to his legs, run-over boots, a ragged khaki jacket that might have come from a local charity. Brown hair clipped short and uneven as if Gran took a pair of dull shears to it once in a
while. Joe had seen him out in the fields when he and Dulcie and Kit were hunting, they’d see him scrounging the mom-and-pop vegetable farms, picking up culls, dropping them in a black plastic bag: cabbages that had been accidentally cut and were left to rot, ears of corn that might have been wormy, tomatoes that had been missed or that the birds had pecked open.

  Max stepped over, blocking Billy’s view of the gurney, and put his arm around the boy, but Billy had already seen what was there. The firemen and medics had turned away, with their backs to him, so as not to stare at his grief. Joe watched Billy try to get his mind around what had happened, try to come to terms with the body on the stretcher.

  Did the boy have anyone else, besides his gran? What happens to an orphaned boy? Joe wondered. Will some county authority take him away, tell him where to live, put him in a foster home or institution? Tell him he can’t work anymore, that he’s too young to work? Confine him in a straitjacket of legal hierarchy? Is Billy Young nothing more than county property now?

  Max walked the boy away from the stretcher, talking softly; they talked for some time, Billy hesitantly asking questions, Max’s answers direct and brief. When Billy turned again toward the medics’ van, Max shook his head, discouraging him from approaching the burned body, and guided him instead toward Ryan’s truck. Watching them, Joe dropped to the seat and curled up, his chin on his paws, his eyes slitted closed.

  “No one else has been around here?” the chief was saying. “Anyone who might have accidentally started the fire?”

  “No one ever comes here,” Billy said. “Except Mr. Zandler, to get the rent.” He didn’t bother to wipe the wetness from his cheeks. Joe knew Zandler, he was the kind of scruffy and rude old man that a cat made a wide path around. A lanky and stooped man, shaggy black hair and bristly beard, old black three-piece suit, grubby white shirt, a necktie loose and crooked and dark enough to hide some of the grease stains. Billy said, “Sometimes my uncle comes, my aunt’s husband. He likes Gran. But Aunt Esther never comes, neither of my aunts do. Gran’s own daughters.”

  “That would be Erik Kraft,” Max said.

  Billy nodded. “I need to tell him. So he won’t come, find the house burned.” Joe thought if he were to reach out a paw and touch Billy, he’d feel him shivering, the kind of tremor you didn’t really see, that came from deep down inside.

  “Did your uncle come often?” Max asked.

  Billy shook his head. “Maybe three or four times a year. He’d give her spending money, fill up her whiskey stash. He said if her daughters wouldn’t give her money, he would. Said it was no one’s business what she did with it. He said her daughters didn’t realize how hard it was on her, raising me alone. But I always worked,” Billy said, “ever since Mama died I worked to help out.”

  “I know you have,” Max said. “The other two cabins, they’re empty? Isn’t there another tenant?”

  “A woman lived in one, Emmylou Warren. After Christmas she lost her job and couldn’t pay, and Mr. Zandler made her leave. Gran . . . Gran wouldn’t let her stay with us, she said we didn’t have room. Well, there is . . . was only the one room. Emmylou’s my friend, but I don’t know where she went.”

  “And the other cabin?”

  “It’s empty, half the roof’s fallen in, the floor rotted. The back room, where it doesn’t leak, I have some cat beds there, for my strays. I need to find them, they’ll be so scared.”

  Max nodded. “Go on, then,” as if he was relieved to see Billy distracted for a moment, or going off in private to get himself together. As Billy turned away, Max said, “If you can corral them, we can take them up to the ranch. You don’t want to leave them here alone, the coyotes will take over now.”

  Billy turned to look at him. “I’ll still be here. I can sleep just fine in the room with the cats. Until Zandler kicks me out,” he added uncertainly.

  “You can’t stay here alone.”

  “Why not?” Billy said defiantly. “You going to turn me in, Captain Harper? Send me to some home? What about my cats? No one can keep me in a home, I won’t stay.”

  “You can’t stay here,” Max repeated. “The minute someone at Child Welfare hears about your grandmother’s death, they’ll come nosing around. Go find your cats, Billy. There’s room for you at the ranch. You and Charlie can move the cats up the hill, shut them in a stall until they settle in.”

  Billy looked at Max for a long time. He turned away at last, moving off toward the little stand of willow trees farther along the hill, wiping his sleeve across his face. The little wood was a natural shelter where the frightened cats would have fled from the fire and noise, from the trucks roaring in, from strange men shouting, from the flames and smoke and from the violent jets of water. Walking away, Billy avoided the burn. Circling away from the fire truck and the medics’ and coroner’s vans, his shoulders were slumped, grief clinging around him as he went to gather up his wild little cats. Maybe they were the only real family he had left, Joe thought. The only creatures in the world who cared about him were there, crouching hidden among the willow grove. But then, looking toward the grove, Joe suddenly felt the skin along his back twitch violently, and he was thinking no longer of the frightened cats, he was seeing his stormy nightmare, seeing the same grove, the same stand of willows; but in his dream they had been blowing wildly, whipped by the driving rain. The same cliff rising up behind, rising up to the Harpers’ pasture; and the two shacks that the fire had left standing were surely a match for the rain-drenched hovel of his dream. He felt sick, he was shivering. What was this, what was he seeing? Or, what had he seen, in that midnight violence?

  That dream had been Kit’s kind of wild fancy, or could even be a product of Dulcie’s imaginative vision. Such dreams were not a part of his own nature.

  And yet this was not fancy, he had dreamed of this place, this cluster of derelict pickers’ shacks that he must have seen dozens of times while hunting the field along the river but which, until that night, until now, had no special meaning for him.

  Billy returned sooner than Joe would have thought, with a dark tabby tomcat wriggling in his arms. He shut him into the fallen-down shack and had turned back to find the others when Charlie and Ryan caught up with him. They talked with him a few minutes, then Charlie swung into her SUV and pulled away, turning up toward the ranch. Ryan headed for her truck and, opening the door, seemed relieved to see Joe safe inside. “Billy’ll be all right for a little while,” she said, “rounding up his cats. We’ll just run down to Firetti’s, borrow some cat carriers. It’ll take the most frightened ones a while to come to him.”

  “Is he all alone?” Joe said. “Except for his aunts? What’s that about, that they never see him? Where’s his mother? His father?”

  “His mother’s dead. His father . . . no one knows,” Ryan said. Turning right onto the two-lane, she glanced over at him. “Why would his aunts leave a child to grow up in that falling-down shack with that drunken old woman? Everything I’ve heard, she started sucking up whiskey first thing in the morning, the minute she rolled out of bed. She did work, though. Worked nights, cleaning offices. I guess she drank and slept during the day, apparently held her liquor well enough to function on the job. Some drunks are like that. That was her old Volvo parked off against the hill.”

  “When the fire started,” Joe said, “could she have been so drunk she didn’t even know, never tried to get out? Those shacks aren’t as big as a one-car garage; she could have rolled out of bed right into the yard. Was she so passed out drunk, she never knew?

  “Or,” he said, “was she already dead when the fire started?”

  Ryan gave him a sharp look. “You didn’t hear the coroner? He said maybe she was dead. Said it was hard to tell, she was so burned. We’ll know more once he gets her back to the lab and has a look.” She turned onto Ocean, heading for Clyde’s shops, and reached for her cell phone; she hit the single digit not for Clyde’s automotive shop itself, but for Clyde’s cell. “You back from up the coast?” />
  “Just pulled in,” Clyde said.

  “Can you have lunch?”

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  “We’re just pulling up outside. It’s about Billy Young, about his grandmother.”

  Joe thought maybe it was Hesmerra who had once worked with the night crew that cleaned Clyde’s shops and the Beckwhite dealership that occupied the other half of the sprawling, Spanish-style building. Some old woman Clyde had complained about, had said she’d better not be drinking when she cleaned his shop. But in a strange way, Joe thought Clyde must have been fond of the old woman. He said once, she held her liquor well—no brawling street fights, Joe guessed. No vicious cussing matches.

  Ryan ended the call, made a left across traffic, and pulled onto the red tile paving of Clyde’s wide, commercial driveway. The automotive shop occupied the north half of the Beckwhite building. The white, one-story structure, with its red tile roofs, was brightened by climbing red bougainvillea and stone pines alternating against its pale stucco walls. Clyde came out through his garage-sized entrance, removing the white lab coat that he wore around the shop, revealing a red polo shirt and jeans, and brown leather Rockports. The satisfied look on his face told Joe he’d probably repaired the Rolls-Royce just fine and wouldn’t have to haul it down the coast to work on it. “What about Hesmerra?” he asked, getting in, giving Joe a nudge to the shoulder by way of greeting.

  Ryan filled him in. “Why was Billy living with that old woman? I know his mother’s dead, but what about his father? Doesn’t anyone know where he is?” Ryan had been in the village only a few years, so she was not the rich source of gossip that Clyde was, having lived in Molena Point off and on for most of his life