Ghost Cats of the South

by Randy Russell

  Burton turned on the flashers, grabbed the flashlight, popped the door, and climbed out. He picked up two flares from the emergency box and ran twenty yards behind the trailer. He ignited the flares in turn, dropping one at his feet and tossing the other as far as he could, farther back along the pavement. Burton returned to the front of the semi as rapidly as he could on two feet.

  The white cat was gone.

  Burton searched the shoulder and the weeds just beyond with his flashlight. It must have been injured, but not badly enough to be immobilized. He wanted to save that cat. If it dragged itself too far away, where Burton couldn’t find it, the cat would lie hidden and might die in the Alabama night.

  He ran the wide beam of his flashlight farther into the weeds, finally seeing a pair of eyes. As soon as Burton caught a glimpse of it, the white cat moved in a blur away from the road, up the far side of a shallow roadside ditch. Burton didn’t want to cross that ditch but would if he needed to. Checking more deeply into the darkness off the highway, Burton saw something new, a red light near a stand of trees, off to the right a bit. And then another one. It looked like red taillights, but one was on top of the other.

  Burton used the flashlight to find a foot route through the ditch. The shoulder was marked with rubber, he saw. And the ditch was shot through with fresh tire cuts. Burton was across the ditch in two jumps, heading with his bouncing light toward the trees, toward the taillights.

  Running toward the car in darkness, Burton managed somehow not to fall. There was smoke when he arrived. The air smelled like gasoline.

  The car was on its side, two people inside it, a man and a woman. Both were dazed and obviously injured, unable to get the available car door open. Burton clambered up top. It was a difficult maneuver, but Burton was able to open the passenger door. The dome light came on. The man and his wife inside were fairly banged up. The windshield was cracked in three places.

  “Let’s go,” Burton said. “Come on, now!”

  The couple stirred.

  Burton pushed his full weight against the open door, forcing it back toward the front of the car until the metal bent, locking it in place.

  “Take my hand,” Burton said to the woman. “Then undo your safety belt.”

  He got her out and helped her down from the car. He told her to move away. She didn’t budge an inch. She must be in shock, he thought. The right side of her face was swollen.

  The truckdriver climbed back to the open door to pull out the driver. The man was moving around now. Instead of giving Burton his hand, he lifted up a large white cat to the rescuer. The cat was dead. Burton could tell by looking at it. He knew a dead cat when he saw one. Besides, if the cat were alive, Burton wouldn’t have been able to see its ghost in the middle of the road.

  If Day and Night hadn’t alerted him well in advance, Burton wouldn’t have had time to slow down. He wouldn’t have been able to stop. He wouldn’t have seen the red taillights in the little woods far off the side of the highway.

  Burton helped the injured couple move far away from the car. Soon, it burst into flames. The woman could no longer stand. She sat in the wet weeds, watching the car burn. The man’s face was covered in blood. Burton found his cell phone and called 911. The state police, the fire department, and two ambulances showed up, filling the darkness with flashing, bright lights.

  The woman refused to be put into the ambulance until one of the firemen located and retrieved her cat. She cradled the dead animal to her chest, using her left arm. The other one was broken, as was her collarbone.

  It had been the white cat in the road, but Burton told the state trooper that he pulled over because he saw taillights in the woods. Most people didn’t understand cats the way Burton did. The truckdriver walked back to his rig with a heavy heart. He pretty much knew what he would find there.

  Even though he’d been inside his kennel with the wire door securely latched, Day and Night was gone. Burton’s companion wasn’t anywhere in the cab.

  Day wasn’t anywhere on earth.

  Day and Night was, and had always been, the combination of two dead cats. The white cat in the wrecked car was one. His wife’s long-ago deceased black cat was the other. That night, Burton added one and one together and came up with none.

  Burton sat in the driver’s seat with the door open. The kennel was empty. The truckdriver poured coffee from his thermos. His hands shook. Burton felt like crying and thought he just might.

  He didn’t know if cats talked to each other in heaven. There was a good reason, Burton supposed, that his wife’s cat had waited to find the right moment to visit him. Maybe dead cats could see the future. Or maybe, he thought, the way we know time on earth isn’t the way time works on the other side. Backing up or rolling forward in time, or sitting idle, might all be the same thing, once a body’s dead and becomes an angel or a ghost.

  The uniformed trooper in charge of investigating the accident came by to talk to Burton. He stood on the chrome rung below the open driver’s door. The trooper had seen much worse along the Alabama highways than what happened that night. But he had rarely seen anything better than what Burton had done.

  “Are you all right now?”

  “Yes, sir,” Burton said. “I believe I am.”

  “Well, I guess it’s time to move along. We have your name and address if we need to get in touch. I’ll take care of the flares for you.”

  Burton nodded.

  “Oh,” the trooper added, “one more thing. The man in the car wanted you to have this. He said he wished it was more.”

  The trooper handed Burton five crumpled twenty-dollar bills.

  Burton drove away that night as lonely as the first Christmas without his wife. He could smell the burnt car inside his nose. He could taste it. He drove toward Nauvoo, working it out in his head the way things had happened. He was sure now that cat ghosts talked to one another on the other side. And Burton was certain beyond doubt that Day and Night was gone the moment the white cat appeared in the road.

  The trucker bought dual chrome outlines of cats for his mud flaps.

  His first day off at home, Burton Halliday visited the local animal shelter.

  “A cat then, is it?” the attendant asked him.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m looking for a stray that talks, if you happen to have one that needs a home.”

  The lady laughed. It was an awfully nice sound to Burton.

  “Got one that’s been waiting just for you,” she said. “When it comes to talking, this one is a harp on roller skates, like to drive us all insane. It squawks, chatters, yodels, and plays the drums.”

  “That one, please,” Burton said.

  He smiled at the lady. She had nice eyes and was about his age. He wished he knew more women like this one. Women who laughed. When Burton was younger, he liked to dance. He’d dance around the living room to songs on the radio. His legs were older now, cramped up from sitting in the cab of that truck all day and all night. Perhaps it was about time he got around to dancing again.

  “If you want a noisy cat, you two are going to have a real fine time.”

  “If you wouldn’t be doing anything for dinner tonight, I could fix that for you,” Burton said.

  The woman blushed.

  “Well, sir,” she finally said, “my name is Carole Jean Anderson.” She held out her hand. “And I already know yours, Burton Halliday.”

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s a pleasure.”

  The woman looked warm and soft. Her hair was blond and her eyes crystal blue. She knew his name, so she must have been someone he’d met before. He didn’t remember it.

  “You know, Burton, I was friends with your wife before she died. I talked to you at the funeral and told you to call me anytime you didn’t feel like being alone.”

  “Sorry to say, I don’t remember,” Burton confessed. “I wasn’t paying attention then. Most of me died when she did, and it’s taken a long time for me to—”

  “Hush, now,” she told him. Carol
e Jean held up a finger to his lips. “Don’t apologize. I understand.”

  He asked Carole Jean if she liked to dance. She said she surely did.

  Burton paid the adoption fees and named his new cat C. B.

  “Have I got a story to tell you about cats,” he told his new pet. “I don’t really know where it begins, C. B. Did you know my wife had a cat when I first married her? Now, it was black. I’d be ashamed to say the name Jesus if that cat wasn’t black all over. The blackest cat you ever saw.”

  C. B. meowed and waited to hear the end of this one.

  MOUNT ROGERS, VIRGINIA

  A Patch of Fog

  People say there are witches on Mount Rogers. Others say they are just old ladies with cats. All agree, though, that wild horses are up there. And fog.

  This time of year, the fog rolls down from Mount Rogers at night, fills the mountain hollows, and spills across Interstate 81 into the edges of Marion, Virginia. The fog from Mount Rogers carries a strong spruce scent. By morning, most of it has lifted, pulled back to the mountain like misty outstretched fingers being drawn into a fist. Those who rise early enough in Marion and step outdoors to start their day are apt to say they are smelling the mountain as the last scented wisps of fog quickly disappear.

  Cindy Evans smelled the mountain. The twenty-sevenyear-old was late for work. What she wanted to smell were coffee and a cigarette.

  She’d slept right through the sound of her alarm. Cindy didn’t have time to make coffee that morning, and she’d run out of cigarettes the night before. She tied her hair into a ponytail and quickly jabbed her legs inside the same pair of permanently creased black slacks she’d worn to work two days earlier. She pulled a blouse off a hanger in the closet and slipped it on. She found her shoes, grabbed a toothbrush and her purse, and was out the door.

  Cindy would have to stop at the little store in Sugar Grove, even though she didn’t have time for it. She needed coffee and cigarettes. And she needed to visit the ladies’ room. She’d forgotten to do that before leaving the house.

  She heard the wild ponies holler from a meadow where they roamed a little higher up the mountain. Someone camping on the Appalachian Trail must have startled them. Hikers always approached the wild horses until they got close enough to make them holler. Cindy’s grandfather had told her that the ponies hollered when a panther was near. She didn’t believe any of that. Mountain panthers were extinct in Virginia, and had been for generations.

  Cindy hated her job. She hated even more being late to a job she hated. This morning, she hated the mountain, and she hated the wild horses, too. They could just go live somewhere else, for all she cared.

  She stuck her toothbrush in her mouth and tried to button her blouse with one hand as she drove her Ford Mustang through the S-curves in the road. She came to a complete stop at the intersection with Flat Ridge Road and managed to get two buttons closed. It was a steep uphill turn onto Flat Ridge, and a blind one. Cindy rolled the driver’s window down to get a clear view of the sharp turn in the road to her left. You could never really tell if a car was coming. She usually counted to three, then drove onto Flat Ridge anyway.

  At the count of one, an emerald hummingbird showed up at the tip of her nose. It flew in through the window, looked at Cindy, hovered just over the red handle of the toothbrush sticking out of her mouth, and buzzed out again, like a bee. By the time she said “Two,” the wing-whir of iridescent hummingbird was gone. Hummingbirds were messengers, her grandmother said. They brought good news.

  Cindy wished they brought coffee and cigarettes.

  “Three!” She pulled quickly onto Flat Ridge Road.

  As soon as she did, she saw it. A patch of fog stood in the road. A patch of fog the size of a person. Cindy blinked twice. It looked like an old woman, and then it looked like fog again. She bit down on her toothbrush’s bristles and drove right through the fog. She had no choice. She didn’t have time to stop for fog, no matter whose shape it was in.

  She felt cool mist brush across her face. Cindy didn’t realize what she’d done. A ghost lived inside that standing figure of fog. The ghost was an old lady with an important errand to run.

  On the other side of the patch of fog, Cindy felt odd all over. She felt strangely different from head to toe. She felt old. She couldn’t see as well. Her peripheral vision was gone. Either that or fog had moved in all around her. She slowed down. Her foot barely reached the pedal. She pushed her face closer to the steering wheel. Her hands ached.

  Cindy took the toothbrush out of her mouth. It hurt her gums to have it there. She meant to drop it in the passenger seat next to her purse, but her fingers didn’t cooperate with the plan. The toothbrush fell from her hand and clattered on the floorboard.

  Driving slowly to the little store in Sugar Grove, she could barely see over the steering wheel and had to use both hands to turn the wheel in order to pull into the parking lot. Cindy was a little late in pushing her foot on the brake pedal, and the Mustang eased into the yellow-painted concrete post in front of the store. The front of the car crunched, but just a little. No real harm. And frankly, Cindy didn’t notice what she had done.

  She slipped her arm through the strap of her purse and gingerly climbed out of the car. Cindy walked across the small portion of parking lot between her and the door into the little store. The purse was heavy on her arm. Her shoes were too small. Her feet and ankles hurt. A stabbing pain shot through her left hip with every step. She left the car door open.

  A dull pain was in her neck, and she couldn’t raise her head all the way. She looked at her shoes and wondered why they were so small. Cindy couldn’t imagine how she’d ever gotten them on. Maybe she had slept in them and never taken them off.

  She managed somehow to get inside the store. A blurry fat man stood behind the counter just inside the door. Cindy had to cock her head sideways to look at him.

  My, oh, my! He was fat, all right, the fattest man she’d ever seen. She remembered his name was Mike Wilson. They’d gone to high school together. Cindy liked him well enough. Mike was the only person in her graduating class who had a worse job than she did. But he was fat and dumb. What was her excuse?

  Cindy started to say good morning but forgot his name. Was it Mike?

  “You left your lights on,” the fat man said.

  I’m wearing my tights wrong? Cindy thought. Whatever was this fat man talking about? She wasn’t wearing tights. She hadn’t worn tights since taking ballet lessons in the fourth grade.

  Cindy knew what she’d come for but didn’t know where in the store to find it.

  “Cath foof!” she shouted at the fat man.

  “Next to the dog food. Right there at the end of the aisle you’re on.”

  White bear’s in the bend of Lake Huron? Cindy didn’t care where bears lived in Lake Huron. And she sure didn’t give a twit what color they were. Had that fat man called her dog poop? She’d have one of the men in her family cane him but good if he did it again.

  “I goth no teef!” Cindy said to herself, shouting it. She brought her hand to cover her mouth.

  “I neef cath foof!” Cindy tried again, louder this time. The top of her thighs turned warm. Cindy had wet her pants a little. She was glad she was wearing the black ones. “Half-enhalf!” she added.

  The fat man carried dry and canned cat food to her car. And a small carton of half-and-half. Cindy managed to set her purse on the counter. She reached inside for her debit card and brought out a fat bundle of dollar bills she’d never seen before. She held the loose money with her thumb crossed over her palm. Her hand shook. Her fingers wouldn’t work right. When Cindy lifted her thumb, the bills fluttered onto the counter like a deck of spilled cards.

  Mike Wilson shuffled the silver certificates and set them aside. He’d seen old folks come into the store with antique money lots of times, maybe twice a week or more. They must have cans of old money hidden everywhere up in those little houses on Mount Rogers. He handed Cindy back a few bills
, using regular ones. He rounded off the pennies to her benefit and set fifty-five cents in change on the counter. She left it there.

  The fat man helped Cindy to her car, holding her left arm as if it were broken. Her knees barely worked at all.

  The engine was still running. Cindy got her purse into the passenger seat and herself behind the wheel. The fat man closed the car door for her.

  “Thore smelf life pee!” she told him through the rolled-down window. The fat man should do something about that if he expected repeat customers. Cindy would drive to Marion the next time she needed things. She had a friend from high school who clerked in the grocery store there. Or maybe that was Sugar Grove. She couldn’t remember which right now. It didn’t matter anyway. The boy was fat and dumb and of no account to her one way or the other.

  The car seemed to drive itself once she got the gearshift out of Park, the way it does when you’re daydreaming and it takes you exactly where you’re going without your having to think about it at all. The Mustang didn’t take Cindy to work that morning. Instead, she rode slowly back up the mountain, turning here or there with her hands on the wheel. Her vision was fogged. She ended up on a gravel road high on the mountain. The gravel road changed into a grassy lane.

  She parked in front of a small house. A hummingbird was in the yard. Cindy felt a little younger here, younger than when she’d been in the store. She remembered she was late for work. She dumped her purse out on the passenger seat to find her cell phone. She’d call to let them know she was running behind.

  Her cell phone wasn’t there. She must have left it at home. Then she looked at the little house with the sagging porch roof in front and thought this might be home instead. The key to the front door was on the seat with the other items spilled from her purse. Cindy wasn’t sure how she knew that, but she did. She picked up the key and carefully made three trips from the car, each time setting a different bag from the store on the porch.