by Bill Crider
“We could’ve gone in my car.”
“I didn’t want you to have to drive all the way out to get me.”
“I think you’re just mad because I talked you into looking for the cat.”
“Animals seem to bring me bad luck. Remember the alligator? Not to mention the prairie chicken.”
“Hey,” Dino said. “That alligator wasn’t my fault. You got into that one all by yourself.”
I noticed that he didn’t bother denying the prairie chicken, however. But it was Christmas, or only a couple of days after it, so I decided to let by-gones be by-gones.
~ * ~
By the time we got to Miss Ellie’s house, the windows in the cab of the truck were misted over. That was because the heater didn’t work.
“You’re really driving a piece of junk, you know that?” Dino said.
“I’m sure the huge fee I’ll get for finding Miss Ellie’s cat will take care of that. I’ll probably be able to buy me a new Ford F-150 or something.”
“You wouldn’t charge an old lady for finding her cat, would you? It would be more like doing a favor.”
“I knew you were going to say that.”
~ * ~
Miss Ellie lived on Church Street down toward the medical school in an old Victorian house that looked as if it hadn’t been inhabited since the hurricane of 1900. Either Miss Ellie hadn’t decorated for Christmas, or she’d taken the decorations down already. Seen under the dark clouds and through the rain, her home could have passed for the House on Haunted Hill. All we needed was some thunder and a lightning flash or two. And of course a hill. There was no chance of that. Galveston doesn’t have any hills.
“Maybe if we sit here for a while, the rain will let up,” Dino said.
I smiled. “The eternal optimist. You can stay if you want to. I’m going to get this over with.”
I opened the door and made a dash for the porch. I was wearing a jacket that was supposed to repel rain, but it didn’t work very well. Wet weeds leaned over the sidewalk and slapped around my ankles.
Dino followed me. He was wearing an Astros cap to keep his hair dry. I don’t think it worked any better than my jacket did.
There was an old swing on the porch, but most of the boards were rotten. I wouldn’t have chanced sitting in it. The screen on the door was rusty and pulled away from the bottom at one of the corners. There were three or four holes in it, and someone had stuffed cotton in them as if that would keep the mosquitoes out.
I knocked on the door facing and waited, with Dino standing beside me, dripping onto the porch. After a while the inner door opened a bit and someone peered out from the darkness inside.
“Is that you, Dino?” a quavery voice said.
“Yes, ma’am. And Truman’s with me.”
“Well, you two may come in, then.”
The inner door swung wide. I pulled open the screen and stepped through. The house smelled musty and damp. There were no lights on anywhere inside as far as I could tell.
Someone that I assumed was Miss Ellie stood a couple of feet away. I couldn’t see her face. She was short enough to be Miss Ellie, however. She came up to about my waist.
“Follow me, boys,” she said. “We’ll go into the parlor.”
We followed her down a short, dark hall and turned left into a large room. Miss Ellie turned on a light, and I blinked.
There was no sign of a Christmas tree. The room was furnished with very old stuffed furniture with antimacassars on the backs of the chairs and the couch. Nothing in the room looked as if it had been sat on since Miss Ellie was a girl.
I could see Miss Ellie better now. She still wore her hair pulled tight at the back of her head and coiled into a bun, but now the bun was entirely white, as was the rest of her hair. Her face was lined, but it had been lined long ago. The truth was that she hadn’t changed much since she’d been my teacher, thirty years or so earlier. I’d thought she was ancient then, but she probably hadn’t been so very much older than I was now. It was a scary thought.
I shivered slightly, probably because the room was cold and I was wet.
“My, my, Truman,” Miss Ellie said. “You’ve become very handsome. And you too, of course, Dino. It’s so nice to see the two of you. I’ve talked to Dino on the phone recently, but I haven’t spoken to Truman in years.”
I felt vaguely guilty, as if I’d been caught rolling spitballs in the back of the classroom. I cut my eyes at Dino, who was looking virtuous, the good little boy who put in calls to his old teachers in their dotage. If only Miss Ellie knew.
“You boys have a seat,” Miss Ellie said. “Would you like some lemonade?”
Lemonade? Two days after Christmas? What I wanted was to get out of there. I said, “No, thank you, Miss Ellie.”
“Very well, then. But do sit down. I want to tell you all about Poo-Poo.”
“Poo-Poo?” I said.
Dino sat in one of the chairs. “Her cat. Somebody stole her, remember? We’re going to find her.”
“Oh, I do hope so,” Miss Ellie said. She sat on the couch and looked at me, her blue eyes as piercing as they’d been when I was in the fifth grade. “It’s so lonely without Poo-Poo in the house.”
Poo-Poo, I thought. I’m going to spend the afternoon wandering around in the cold rain and looking for a cat named Poo-Poo. Dino would owe me big time for this one. I sat down and waited for Miss Ellie’s story.
~ * ~
It seemed that Poo-Poo, a lovely calico, had a cat door and could go and come as she pleased. On cold, wet days, she generally pleased to stay inside, but she wasn’t there because she’d gone out sometime during the night and never come back.
“Poo-Poo always comes back in the morning,” Miss Ellie said. “I can’t remember a single time when she hasn’t come in and had breakfast with me.”
I wondered if Poo-Poo had a place set for her at the table, but I was afraid to ask.
“And you think someone took her?” I asked.
“That’s right, Truman. Why else would she have missed breakfast?”
She could have been run over, died of natural causes, or run away from home. I looked at Dino, and I could tell he wouldn’t like it if I said any of those things, so I didn’t.
“When I talked to Dino,” Miss Ellie said, “he told me that he’d be glad to look for Poo-Poo and that you’d be happy to help out. I hope it’s not an imposition.”
I looked her right in the eye and said, “Of course not, Miss Ellie.”
~ * ~
Water began seeping through my waterproof jacket after about ten minutes of searching. My running shoes had been soaked by the time I’d taken ten steps outside Miss Ellie’s house, and my jeans were clinging to my legs.
Christmas lights that hadn’t yet been taken down were red and green blurs in the rain. Santa and his reindeer sat on one lawn, looking as if they wondered what had happened to the snow. I brushed wet hair off my forehead and started up the walk.
Dino was smart. He’d gone down the opposite side of the street, so there was no way I could get my hands on him.
I knocked at the door, as I’d done at a couple of other houses, and asked the man who answered if he’d seen a stray calico cat. He was wearing a pair of old khakis and a white undershirt, and he had a can of beer in his hand.
“You kiddin’ me?” he asked. “I’m watchin’ a ball game.”
He shut the door in my face before I had time to ask anything else.
It was pretty much the same on the rest of the block. No one wanted to talk to me about a cat or anything else. There had been a number of burglaries in the area recently, I recalled, and I didn’t blame people for being a little touchy about talking to some stranger with water-soaked clothes and rain dripping down his face. Nothing spoiled the holidays quite like having your presents or money stolen.
Dino had finished his side of the street with the same kind of luck I’d had. He came across and met me on the corner.
“See any li
ttle calico carcasses in the road?” I asked.
“Don’t say stuff like that,” Dino said. “You wouldn’t want to be the one to have to tell Miss Ellie that Poo-Poo was dead, would you?”
“No,” I said. “And I wouldn’t have to be the one. You would.”
Dino took off his baseball cap and wrung water from it, and then settled it back on his head.
“I’m not going to tell her, no way. We’ve got to find that cat.”
“Where?”
“There’s the alley, and the next block over.”
“You take the alley,” I said.
~ * ~
The house in the middle of the block was dark and the yard was choked with weeds. Not far off the sidewalk there was a Realtor’s sign leaning at a slight angle.
I don’t pretend to understand cats, but I thought that a deserted house might have a certain appeal for a cat if she could get inside. There was a high board fence in the back, but fences like that don’t matter to cats. However, I didn’t see any broken windows or open doors that might have given Poo-Poo an entrance.
Still, I thought it was worth a look. I walked into the yard and all around the house, my shoes squishing on the rain-soaked ground. Not only were the windows unbroken, they all had screens. There was clearly no way inside the house, not even for a really sneaky cat.
I was about to go back around front when I heard something. I stopped to listen and I heard it again. It wasn’t loud, but it was very clear. It was a cat’s meow.
Most of the old Victorian houses in Galveston are built high off the ground, as was this one, and I couldn’t see in the windows. So I went up onto the small back porch and called out at the closed door. I felt like an idiot, but I said “Poo-Poo? Is that you?”
There was another meow, very close to the door, which was solidly closed. You’d think that a house for sale would be locked up, especially one that clearly had very few prospective buyers dropping by and just as clearly had been on the market for quite a while. But I opened the screen and tried the door anyway. It swung open easily, and a cat streaked out between my legs, crossed the back yard like a bullet and disappeared over the fence.
“Hey, Tru!” Dino yelled from the alley. “I found her!”
I decided that I’d torture him before I killed him.
~ * ~
Miss Ellie was so happy to have her little Poo-Poo back that I relented and let Dino live. I even let him take credit for finding the cat. Why spoil the day for him?
This time Miss Ellie offered us hot chocolate and clean towels. I took the towel and turned down the hot chocolate. After we’d both dried off as best we could and listened to Miss Ellie tell us how wonderful we were and how grateful she was that Dino had found Poo-Poo, we left.
“Didn’t that make you feel good?” Dino said before I dropped him off. “I mean, you were a big part of it, Tru, even if I was the one who found the cat. And you saw how happy Miss Ellie was. Something like that can really get you in the holiday spirit.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “It was better than watching It’s a Wonderful Life. We should do it every year.”
“You don’t have to be sore just because you didn’t find the cat. I gave you some of the credit.”
“And I appreciate it. But what I need now is a long hot shower.”
“Me too. See you later, Tru.”
He got out of the truck and ran to his door through the rain.
~ * ~
I had the hot shower and ate a big bowl of Wolf Brand Chili for supper. I fed Nameless, read some more in my book, went to bed, and slept the sleep of the just.
Until around two o’clock, when I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep. I couldn’t figure out what was bothering me for several minutes, and then I knew what it was.
I told myself that I should have thought of it earlier, but I’d been angry with Dino, and I’d wanted to get out of the rain. The analytical part of my brain had been turned off. It was just too bad that it had to turn itself back on in the middle of the night.
The question was this: if there were no broken windows in that deserted house, no open doors, no holes in the walls, how had Poo-Poo gotten inside?
I told myself that there were plenty of ways. She could have gone down the chimney, for one thing. After all, it was the season for things like that.
Or some interested buyer could have looked at the house, with Poo-Poo sneaking inside while the door was ajar.
Or maybe there were holes in the floor, and Poo-Poo had entered the house from underneath.
I didn’t really believe it was any of those things, however, so I got out of bed and found a dry pair of jeans. I thought about calling Dino but decided against it. He usually slept pretty late in the mornings, and he’d probably be groggy for hours if I could even rouse him at all.
It was much colder when I went outside, but the rain had stopped and the clouds were gone. Bright stars glittered in the black sky. I could hear the waves washing up on the beach, and I could smell the salty Gulf. I got in the S-10 and headed for town.
At one time, many years ago, Galveston had been one of those towns that never slept, but the gambling had come to an end, as had a lot of other things. Now at two-thirty in the morning, the streets were nearly deserted. There were no cars at all in Miss Ellie’s neighborhood except the ones parked by the curb.
I stopped the pickup and got out. The night was quiet, though I could hear the faint sound of the surf from beyond the seawall.
There were no lights in any of the houses around Miss Ellie’s, but Christmas lights still flickered outside in the yards of a couple of places where the homeowners had forgotten to turn them off or had decided to leave them on all night and to heck with the electric bill. I didn’t see a sign of Poo-Poo or any other cat. Probably I should have gotten back in the truck and gone on home.
But of course I didn’t do that. I went to the back door of the house where I’d found Poo-Poo earlier, trying to be even quieter than a cat. I tried the door again. The knob turned under my hand, and I pushed against the door.
It opened very slowly at first, and then very quickly, so quickly that before I could even let go of the knob I was jerked inside the house.
I managed to drop to the floor and do a forward somersault, so the baseball bat that was supposed to hit me in the head swished over me and knocked the breath out of whoever had yanked the door open. It may have cracked a couple ribs, too if the yell the guy let out was any indication.
I came up on my feet, my bad knee almost giving way beneath me, and turned around just in time to get my hands up before the bat hit me in the face.
I would have been better off if I’d been wearing a fielder’s glove, one of the bushel-basket-sized ones favored by the current crop of big-league outfielders, but as it was I managed to stop the bat a couple of inches from my nose and get a grip on it without too much damage to my hands.
I couldn’t see very well in the dark room, but I figured that whoever was trying to bash my head in couldn’t see much better than I could. I tried to wrench the bat out of his hands, but he was stronger and probably much younger than I was. I didn’t stand a chance.
So I shoved backward and let the bat go. The guy swinging it stumbled awkwardly and tripped over his friend, who was still lying on the floor and gasping for breath.
I heard the bat clatter across the floor and bang up against the wall, so I made a dive for it. I got to it about a tenth of a second before someone else, but that was enough time to give me a little leverage. I snatched up the fat end of the bat and jammed it backward.
The butt smacked into something hard, maybe someone’s forehead or cheekbone. There was a loud groan and the thump of a head hitting the floor. Now there were two people laying there, three if you counted me, except that I was sitting.
I stood up, keeping the bat in one hand, and felt along the wall for a light switch. When I found it, I flipped it up. The light wasn’t bright, but there was enough of it to mak
e me blink as I looked down at the two young men lying at my feet. They couldn’t have been much more than sixteen, if that, and I didn’t feel especially proud of having put them where they were or of most likely having solved the burglaries that had been happening in the neighborhood.
One of the boys, for that’s what they really were, was beginning to come around. He was holding his side and trying to sit up. Judging by the way he was looking at me, I was lucky that the two of them hadn’t had anything more lethal than a baseball bat.
“Let us go, old man,” he said. “Let us go, and we won’t hurt you.”
I wish he hadn’t said “old man.” I’m not that old, in spite of the way I sometimes feel. I don’t even have gray hair. Well, not much.
I looked at his friend, who wasn’t moving but who appeared to be developing a nice-sized knot in the middle of his forehead. He was lucky I hadn’t hit him in the nose.
“I don’t think you’re going to hurt me,” I said. “You’re not going to hurt anyone for a while.”
He gave me a practiced smirk. He’d probably get even better at it as he got older. He was one of the predators, one of the unhappy ones who couldn’t really see anything wrong with taking whatever it was that he wanted from whoever happened to have it. Sooner or later, he would have tried taking it from Miss Ellie, or someone equally helpless, who resisted just a little too much, and the baseball bat would have become lethal indeed.
I knew that I probably hadn’t changed his destiny, but at least I’d postponed it.
“How’d you find us, old man?” he asked.
“You shouldn’t have let the cat in,” I said.
He looked at me as if he thought I might be crazy. He said, “What’re you talking about?”
I didn’t bother to tell him.
~ * ~
“You just couldn’t stand it, could you,” Dino said to me the next day. “Just because I found the cat, you had to go out and be some kind of a hero so Miss Ellie would like you as much as she likes me.”
We were sitting in Dino’s living room, where his TV set was tuned in to an infomercial in which a man who didn’t look much older than the two I’d turned in to the cops the night before was talking about how to become rich by placing small classified advertisements.