Strays

by Matthew Krause

  Confident that he was alone, that Seby wasn’t hiding somewhere to ambush him, Kyle took the three steps down from the porch to the sidewalk and walked out to the curb to retrieve his bundle of papers. The bundle was stacked neatly with sheets of brown butcher paper on each side to protect the issues of the Eagle within, and the whole package was held into place with a plastic band.

  Kyle bent over, tucked his fingers underneath the bundle, and hefted it. It was Wednesday’s paper, a little heavier than the other days, second only to Sunday. Kyle had gotten the paper bundles down to a science after almost six years, rating the size and weight of the paper based on days of the week. Sunday’s was the heaviest, Monday’s the lightest, and so on. He did not like Wednesday’s, but at least they weren’t Sunday, and he grunted and heaved the bundle up into his arms, flipping it onto his shoulder.

  That was when something brushed against his leg, pressing his calf through the canvas work trousers he wore on his route each morning.

  Kyle let out a yelp and stumbled back, and the cat was there not six feet away, sitting on her haunches and gazing up at him, her amethyst eyes blazing against her thick black fur. Kyle recognized her all right. It was Seby’s cat, the cat that had almost six years earlier had played so hard on his sympathies that he had abandoned his one shot at cool and relegated himself to Seby’s world.

  Kyle shifted the bundle in his arms and looked around. It was not like Seby’s cat to venture so far from its home. The Lee family lived almost a mile away, and on those rare occasions when Kyle gave in to Seby and visited their home, the cat usually stayed on that narrow front porch, lounging against the wrought-iron railing, taking in the world but never venturing out of their yard.

  So why was it here now?

  Kyle peered about, his chest tightening a bit. The presence of the cat (Kyle could never remember her name) could only mean one thing—Seby was here. Of course he was. He had somehow caught on to Kyle’s change in schedule and had adjusted his own, this time bringing that damned cat with him. Kyle stood with paper bundle in his arms, looking at the cat and then marking the shadows between the houses. Damn that Seby! Couldn’t he allow Kyle this one hour of the day for himself? Walking the route was the only time Kyle had to himself, his only hour of peace, what he called his “happy hour.” Why couldn’t Seby grasp that? Why couldn’t he give Kyle this one thing, this one hour each day that was solely his?

  Have you asked him for it?

  Kyle jumped at the voice, certain that Seby had stolen up behind him. He spun, steadying himself so as not to drop the paper bundle, but no one was there. The voice had come from … where? Nowhere, he guessed. Just his mind, which already seemed to be folding in on itself as high school graduation approached, putting conversations together for its own amusement. There was no one there.

  No one but the cat.

  He glanced down at the cursed beast, little more than a downy inkblot against the glow of the street lamp. “What?” he asked. “Haven’t you ruined my life enough?”

  The cat thrust her chin defiantly, and her explosive lilac eyes winked at him once. Without a moment’s pause, it sprang up on its paws and darted to Kyle’s feet, where it again swiped against his shin with her entire body. She circled out away, turning and looking up at him, then circled back and swiped his leg again.

  “I know what this is,” Kyle said. “You’re crossing my path, aren’t you? You’re a black cat and you want to bring me bad luck.”

  The cat strutted out in a widened circle again, positioned itself about three feet in front of him, and looked up. She did not meow, but Kyle could hear the tiny motor inside her amping up its purr. Her eyes looked like pools of wine now in the streetlight, and they blinked again as the purr increased. In spite of himself, Kyle smiled.

  “Fine,” he said, stooping and putting the paper bundle down. “You win.” He squatted into a crouch, rocking carefully on his ankles, and extended his hand. “Come here.”

  The cat obeyed at once, strutting up to his hand and rubbing her head against his palm. She turned this way and that, pressing the fur just below her eyes against his fingers. Kyle had heard Seby talk about this. Cats made this move to mark their scent upon things, in essence to claim ownership of areas, items, and even humans. So now Seby’s cat, who had been nothing but trouble from the get-go, was claiming ownership of Kyle. Wasn’t that just swell? Still, when she pressed her small face into his hand, nudging his palm with her nose, Kyle could not help but give in to her charms.

  It lasted a minute, maybe less, and then the cat reared back and blinked again.

  “What now?” he asked. “Sorry, I don’t read cat sign language.”

  The cat shook her fluffy head, pranced up on her paws, and mad-dashed across the street, leaping onto the curb on the west side and tearing back into the bushes. Kyle watched after her, and in the still of the morning he could hear the rapid snap of brush as she sprinted through back yards and alleys. But this lasted only a moment. She was gone, and at last Kyle was alone.

  He heaved his bundle back into his arms, pressed himself to a standing position. He had a route to complete. Putting the cat behind him, he marched into the house to start rolling papers.

  * * * *

  Once the papers were rolled, Kyle did his last pre-route prep. First he tiptoed into the dining room and over to the hallway to listen by the doorway of his parents bedroom. Sure enough, Dad could be heard snoring, and although his snores were epic enough to drown out the sound of Mom’s breathing, he had no doubt that she was asleep as well.

  Next, he went back into the kitchen, carefully pushed open the door to the basement, and tiptoed down the seven steps to the low-ceilinged root cellar, where Kyle’s special thermos was kept. It was a blue thermos with Snoopy printed on its side, and when he was in grade school it had come as part of a set with a Snoopy lunch pail. Sadly, the lunch pail was no more, dented and rusted beyond reasonable use, but the thermos had remained intact, and on the shelf in the root cellar, amid almost a hundred other unused glasses, jars, water bottles, canteens, and sundry other containers, no one in his family—not even his nosy brother Tony—ever bothered to check for anything inside it.

  Which was good of course. If anyone had opened that old Snoopy thermos and taken a good whiff, it would no doubt have been Kyle’s ass in the fire.

  He had started filling the thermos his freshman year in high school after he discovered that old fifth of bourbon in the back of the pantry. He knew the story of the bourbon. Dad had purchased the bottle sometime in the 1960s, when the college welcomed a new president and Kyle’s parents had hosted a reception. Dad had bought the bottle because rumor was the president liked bourbon, and while that was indeed the case, the president had only a couple of fingers straight because he was driving. The rest of the bottle had been exiled to the back of the pantry, untouched in some 20 years since. Dad was not a drinker, or had not been since college anyway, and Mom, of course, couldn’t stand the stuff.

  The first time Kyle had drawn from that fifth of bourbon to fill his thermos was just a couple months before he turned fifteen, around the same time Dad had bought him the clock radio. He did not really know why he did it; he just enjoyed the adventure of doing something wrong. While walking his route, he had unscrewed the thermos cup, half-filled it with the warm amber liquid, and sipped it slowly as the morning unfolded. It burned, of course, but it also made him stronger, maybe even a little more handsome, certainly worthy of a spot among the cool and beautiful people. He liked it. The drink was magic, that’s what it was, an enchanted potion out of one of those fantasy novels Seby was always jacking about. Kyle knew he could not do without it.

  That first time, the full thermos had lasted him four or five days, but he knew that he could not keep drawing from Dad’s bottle. For one thing, bourbon smelled on his breath, and he always had to stop at Quik-Trip on the way home to stock up on breath mints. But for another thing, what would happen if Dad one day went looking for that bottle
only to find it empty?

  Fortunately, he had friends on his paper route. His customers liked him because he got them their paper early and always on the porch by the door. That counted for something, and Kyle got a lot of nice cards with $20 bills in them come Christmas.

  One guy in particular was Old Man Hansen, who lived in that house on the 600 block of Pinoak with the mismatched shingles and peeling paint. On more than one occasion Kyle would spy Mr. Hansen in the early hours, smoking on the front porch, the cherry of his cigarette like a tiny glowing eye in the shadows. Mr. Hansen always said hello and always wanted to talk, and Kyle was happy to oblige. When Kyle finally got up the courage to ask Mr. Hansen if they could “work something out,” he expected the old man to balk, but Hansen was open to it, and after minimal haggling, it was decided that every couple of weeks Kyle would give Mr. Hansen $20 for a $5 bottle of vodka (“On account it don’t smell on your breath,” Mr. Hansen advised).

  That was how Kyle kept his thermos full throughout those dreadful high school years.

  That fine morning in early May, the thermos was not quite full but still full enough to get Kyle through the route. He reached up to the second shelf, pulling the thermos out from behind a bunch of old colored glasses that no longer had a place in the simple décor of Mom’s kitchen. He tested its weight and was satisfied. He stole back up the basement stairs, stepping on the edges so they did not creak as much, and placed the thermos into his shoulder bags amid the rolled papers. Flicking off the kitchen light, he peered out the back door window, into the driveway at the rear of the house, to see if Seby was waiting for him.

  He was not. Kyle smiled. It would be a good day. He hefted the bags up onto his shoulders, stepped out onto the porch, and began marching up Warren to the first house at the southeast corner of his route.

  The Girl

  When he first saw the girl, he thought it was a joke.

  A year earlier, maybe more, a fog had rolled into Landes overnight, thick as a gauze scrim, so heavy that when Kyle walked his route he could not see more than half a block in either direction. About halfway through his route walk, he saw a shape moving toward him out of the fog, a quick-paced little man with angry strides. The man wore a cape that billowed behind him, and he carried a walking stick that he swung in his arm as he walked. Kyle figured the mysterious stranger could be up to no good, and in that haze, silhouetted against the far street lamp, he looked a bit like Mr. Hyde of Stevenson’s famous novel. With a yelp, Kyle had turned and run as fast as he could. Only later that morning, about a half-hour before class, did he learn the truth: it was Seby who had come after him in the mist, little Seby Lee with cape and cane “borrowed” from the costume department of the high school theater department. Seby had planned the whole thing as a prank on Kyle, and once he shared the story with his classmates, it was Kyle who was the butt of the joke and Seby who for one brief shining instant was “cool.”

  This morning, there was no fog. There was no mysterious man with cape and cane striding angrily toward Kyle. There was no Seby Lee to pester and annoy him. No, this time it was something different.

  This time it was a girl.

  She stood in the street on the corner of Oak and Taylor, standing just off the curb under the street lamp, her face turned up at the incandescent light. Her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly parted, and as Kyle approached he almost forgot to breathe. She was beautiful, tall, elegant. Her narrow hips and thoroughbred legs fit nicely in her jeans, which were a deep shade of black seldom seen in the denim worn around the halls of Landes High. She had a white loose-fitting t-shirt, and as she arched her head back her petite breasts were thrust out against the fabric, a simple pose that nevertheless sent a tingle into the small of Kyle’s back. Perhaps the coolest thing about her was her hair, deep ebony and shiny like a crow’s head, perhaps long but Kyle couldn’t tell for sure because she had it braided up on either side of her head in matching buns like …

  Like the way Princess Leia wore it in the first Star Wars movie!

  Kyle slowed his pace, lifting his feet carefully so as not to make scuffing sounds in the street. He began to step sideways, a weird crossover walk like he had been forced to run during agility drills in gym class. Working this way, he made his way to the side of the street opposite the street lamp, keeping himself deep in the shadows. The girl was stunning. She made every inch of Kyle’s skin sizzle and dance.

  “No hiding,” the girl said, her eyes still closed.

  Kyle stopped in the shadow of the old cottonwood on the adjacent curb. He held his breath and gripped the edge of his paper bags so the rolled newspapers inside would not creak against each other.

  “You’re not breathing,” said the girl. She dipped her chin forward and opened her eyes, almost black like fat drops of oil. “I can hear you not breathing. What’s your name?”

  After a moment, he let the air escape his lungs and said: “Kyle.”

  “Come over here, Kyle.”

  Something made his feet shuffle forward in cautious steps, out of the shadow of the tree and into the glow of the street lamp. Soon he was there in front of her, looking down into those heavy almost-black eyes with just a tint of deep lavender in them. She was shorter than he was, of course, but so was most everyone. Kyle had taken a growth spurt at an early age, and now, even as a senior in high school, it felt as if everyone was still trying to catch up.

  “I’m Molly,” she said. “You like my hair.” It was not a question but a declaration.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Saw it in a movie. Wanted to do it the same way.”

  “I figured.”

  Molly smiled, and a thin hand fluttered up and touched one of his canvas carrier bags. “What do you have in there?”

  “Newspapers,” he said. “I have a paper route.”

  “Wow. Up before the sun.”

  Kyle nodded.

  “Sounds cool.”

  “I like it,” he said.

  “Can I do it with you?”

  The air caught in his throat and he coughed to clear it. “I’m sorry?”

  “You know, can I do your route with you? Walk with you and all?”

  “Oh, that.” He shifted the carrier bags on his shoulder to make himself more comfortable and thought about the thermos and that warm, empowering drink that he had so been looking forward to. It figured. If it wasn’t Seby ruining his happy hour, it was this girl now, this … this beautiful, elegant girl.

  There was worse company to keep, he supposed.

  “I guess you can,” he said.

  “Cool,” she said. “Where do we start?”

  * * * *

  They did not talk of much on that route. Molly didn’t talk much period, and yet it seemed as if she was always about to say something, the way she smiled at everything and took in deep breaths of the night air, followed by shorter ones the way people did just before they spoke. She walked with a ridiculously cool saunter, each leg crossing in front of the other with each stride, almost like a runway model trying to give her hips the extra swing, except Molly’s hips didn’t swing so much. There was something insolent about the gait, but not in a bad way. She liked to keep her hands in her back pockets, and she tilted her head back a bit high as if tracking a jet trail in the starry sky, a pose that thrust those pretty little breasts of hers out against her t-shirt again. It was funny and unusual and Kyle’s hands ached to touch her, although he was not sure how he would do such a thing.

  Those rare times she did talk, it was usually to ask Kyle questions, casual and procedural at first like how long he had been delivering papers and what was the next house on the route. Later, she asked about where he went to school and if he had any friends, and although that little retard Seby Lee technically counted as a friend, Kyle told Molly that he had no friends at all.

  “That’s too bad,” Molly said. “Well, you’ve got one now.”

  Kyle tried to turn the conversation back to her but got very few answers. He asked he
r where she was from (“Around”) and he asked her where she went to school (“Same as you”) and he asked why he never saw her in class (“I see you, and isn’t that enough?”). When he got up the nerve to ask if she had a boyfriend, she gave him one of her many cryptic answers:

  “You’re my friend now, and you’re a boy, so I guess I do.”

  He wanted to tell her that this was not what he meant, but then he realized that there was no way to describe what he meant. What was a boyfriend anyway? Was it that and only that, a boy who was a friend? Would a kiss make it official or even something more? He had never really grasped the term, only dreamed about such things, and of course it was impossible to really explore these questions with a girl when Seby Lee was always—

  “Who’s Seby Lee?”

  “How’s that?”

  “You were saying something about a guy named Seby Lee,” Molly said.

  “Was I?”

  “I don’t know, you were talking to yourself.”

  Kyle bit his lip and grinned. “Just a guy. A freak of a guy in school that everybody hates, and somehow I got stuck being his best friend.”

  “Why does everyone hate him?” Molly asked.

  “Because they do. He’s just a nothing, a loser.”

  “So why are you his friend?”

  Kyle paused at this. It was a question he had never asked himself before.

  “Everybody hates him,” Molly said. “If that includes you, why do you call him your friend?”

  “I don’t,” Kyle said. “Not really.”

  “But you hang out with him.” She had stopped and was looking at him, those big blood-drop eyes blinking under the street lamps.