Strays

by Matthew Krause

  “I’m trying really hard to believe,” she said.

  “Believe what?”

  “Believe in you.” She let go then and turned away. Kyle watched her as she strode back to the car, placed her hands on the hood, and slumped against it, exhausted. She stood that way for maybe a minute, but it seemed much longer.

  “Listen,” she finally said, her back still turned to him. “If you want to turn around right now and go back home, go right ahead. I’ll find somebody else. I don’t think there is anyone else, but if there is, I’ll find him.” She turned to him then. “And he’ll be happy to find me, do you see, Kyle? He’ll be happy to do what he can and do what he has to, because unlike you right now, he’ll be a man.”

  “Oh, so I'm not a man now,” he snarled.

  “No,” Molly admitted it. “Not entirely.”

  Kyle clenched his teeth, unscrewed the bottle, and took another hard pull. He did not tilt back his head but extended his jaw and let it gurgle across his tongue, staring at Molly as he did so. Some of the vodka dribbled down his chin, and when he lowered the bottle, he swiped his mouth with his hand.

  “You’ve made your decision,” she said.

  He was breathing hard now, and he could feel it stinging in his lungs. “I'm not a man.”

  “You’re a work in progress.”

  “If I’m not a man, why are you with me?” he snapped. “Why did you … that morning behind Mr. Weathers garage.”

  “The man I kissed behind the garage was who you are, Kyle?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Who you are,” she repeated. “My hero.”

  A dry laugh burst from his chest at that one. “Don’t kid yourself, Molly.”

  “The boy who rescued me and Seby Lee from those bullies all those years ago. The boy who wanted more than anything to be a bully himself but for some reason he couldn’t.”

  “I couldn’t let them hurt you. Seby, on the other hand …”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” she said. “You wouldn’t have let them hurt Seby either. I was just there to make sure you made the right decision.”

  “What if I hadn’t done anything? What if I had joined Bran the Man and those boys and gone to town on both of you?”

  “Then you would have gotten what you wanted,” she said. “At least for a little while. Those boys would have liked you, and Seby would have never been a part of your life through high school.” She smiled. “And we wouldn't be having this conversation right now.”

  Kyle considered this, his thumb absently stroking the cap of the bottle in his hand.

  “So what’s it going to be then?” Molly asked. “You want to go back home? Or do you want to go with me and see what’s in store?”

  “Is it good?”

  “Some of it.”

  “What about the rest of it?”

  “I don’t think you want to know about that,” Molly said. “Not until you’re stronger.”

  Kyle smiled and ran his right hand through his hair again. He almost did not notice when the left hand loosened and the bottle slipped from his fingers, thudding on the grass at his feet. The sound of it hitting turf pulled him from his trance, and he looked down at it, considering what to do with it.

  “Pick it up,” Molly said.

  “Huh?”

  “You know you want to. Pick it up.”

  Kyle scratched his neck and smiled. Yes, he wanted to pick it up. But he wanted Molly more, even now, even after learning this secret. The right thing to do right then was to pick it up, all right, and then hurl it into the adjacent field, but that struck Kyle as melodramatic, the kind of thing fake alcoholics did on Lifetime TV. “I better leave it,” he said.

  Molly smiled. “So you’ve made your choice?”

  “I have,” Kyle said. “Besides, Dad always warned me not to drink and drive.”

  Molly came to him then, and her arms encircled his waist, and she held him, and he held her back. It seemed that he held her for a long time, oblivious to it all, to what had come before during that painfully lonely summer, and to what would come after. He was in the moment, and it was sweet … and then that niggling little part of his brain, the part that had driven him to the thermos all those years ago, flashed a little Post-It note on the back of his eyes.

  One bottle left, he thought. I had two, and if I leave this one on the ground, I will still have one.

  He knew what he had to do, knew what was right to do. But in the end, he simply held Molly and decided to leave that second bottle where it was, lodged under the shotgun side of the front seat.

  Just in case, he told himself. Only just in case.

  Safe Place

  As Kyle drove west on I-70, half a continent away the early morning sun was just hitting Sarah’s eyes. The bus was making its final turn, slowing on 84 and taking the 11 exit to turn left into the town. Once pointing north, the sun was now shifted to the right, blazing bright on the horizon even through the bus’s tinted windows, and she lifted her hand to shield her face. Tom was already back in his cage, reduced again to his feline form, having made the change back at the Hermiston exit near where 82 met up with 84. Sarah blinked and studied the box houses that grew thicker as the bus rolled north. She had expected more mountains in Oregon, and although there were some small hills the sky was still huge, almost white in the morning summer sun.

  The bus curved left again, and Sarah saw the world pass outside her window, noting a green highway sign with indicators for Milton, Freewater, and Walla Walla. The direction of the bus, and the arrow on the sign indicated they were heading toward the City Center. The road was wide, and the houses and businesses were low and set back from the street. Sarah watched an old car wash flow past on the right, followed by a small used car dealership in the modified lot of what was once a gas station. She could see down narrow residential streets that each progressed a couple of blocks before fading into a hill on the business district’s northern edge.

  At last the bus slowed and angled to the right, and Sarah could see they were pulling into the parking lot of a small diner that perhaps had been a filling station at one time given that remnants of the gas pump islands could still be seen. The bus groaned, and the brakes hissed, and the driver announced the stop.

  Sarah reached down and found the handle of the cat carrier, easing it out from the floorboard, careful not to jostle it too much. Tom’s face was pressed against the wired cage front blinking at her. She stood from her seat, balancing the carrier with her right hand, and with her left she reached up and pulled the pack from the shelf above the seat. She draped its canvas strap over her shoulder and fell in line in the aisle behind the few weary travelers that had stood up in front of her.

  When she stepped off the bus, the woman was standing there about five feet from the door. She was a thin woman with a weary face, maybe in her late 30s, maybe 40. She wore a long skirt with a green-and-lavender paisley pattern and a thick beige sweater that looked more suited for a man. Sarah wondered if the sweater belonged to the woman’s husband, but something told her it did not. She fantasized a rugged, handsome stranger who passed through town and loved the woman for awhile before moving on his way, leaving this warm and wonderful sweater behind that no doubt still smelled of his after-shave. The woman’s sandy blonde hair was drawn back from her face in a ponytail, but wispy bangs still found their way across her forehead, into her eyes. Her chin was narrow, cheeks prominent, and even without makeup she looked quite pretty. She had been studying each passenger that stepped off the bus, eyeing them specifically for the cargo they carried, and when she spied the cat carrier in Sarah’s hands her eyes lifted and she smiled.

  “Sarah,” she said.

  Sarah started at the sound of her name. She turned to the woman, and nodded without thinking. “Yes,” she said. “How did you—”

  “I recognize Tom,” the woman said, motioning with her eyes to the cat carrier. “My name is Trudy.”

  Sarah nodded again and managed a small
hello. She looked around this new corner of the world, noting the handful of passengers that had disembarked from the bus, many of them stretching but hanging close lest their ride move on without them. She was surrounded by a small town that took no pains to hide its smallness, even seemed to take pride in it. Across from the bus stop was another car wash, this one looking newer with bright cool colors, and beyond that a small park with an even smaller wading pool. She could see the bone-white spires of a grain elevator off to her left, and to her right, north down the intersecting street, the road passed over a girder bridge and disappeared into hills dotted with maybe three or four houses.

  “Where am I?” Sarah asked.

  Pendleton,” Trudy said. “Oregon.”

  “Why am I here?”

  Trudy put her hands on her hips and grinned. “I thought you could tell me.”

  Sarah shook her head. “I’ve been running for awhile.”

  “I know,” Trudy said. “At least you had Tom with you.”

  “Not at first,” Sarah said.

  “Well, he’s with you now.” She motioned with her head toward the diner. “Come on,” she said. “I’m parked just up the street.”

  Trudy drove a medium-sized hatchback called a Merkur. It had a weird paint job, top half silver and bottom half black, as if it had been sitting in two feet of crude oil. There was a funny sort of spoiler on the back that extended out from about a third of the way up the rear windshield. Trudy stuck her key into the slot next to the Xr4Ti printed above the left bumper and flipped the hatch open. She unhooked the covers and pushed the seat forward giving it a modest amount of space and then reached for the cat cage.

  “Here,” she said. “Tom can ride in back.”

  Sarah turned her body to move the cat cage out of reach and took a step back. “He’s fine with me.”

  “He needs room to make his shift,” Trudy said. “He can do that back here.”

  A shiver passed through Sarah’s chest. Make his shift. Trudy knew about Tom, and Sarah was not sure how she felt about that. On the one hand, it was comforting to know she was not alone, that this last 36 hours or so had not been a delusion. But on the other hand, now that it was real, it meant a new way of seeing things that she was not ready to consider.

  “I don’t know you,” Sarah said.

  “You think I’m one of them?” Trudy finished.

  Sarah felt her chin dip in a slow nod, like one of those toy dogs with its head on a balance that made it shake lazily. “Them,” she repeated.

  “Yes, them,” Trudy asked. “The people in your life who try to hurt you.”

  A breath missed its mark in Sarah’s throat, making her cough. She reached up with her free hand and caught the open door of the hatch to steady herself.

  “They can’t touch you now,” Trudy said. She extended her hand for the cat carrier again. “Come on now. Let’s get Tom inside and get you someplace safe.”

  Sarah did not want to trust the woman, for trusting a stranger had brought no good into her life. And yet Trudy was here, and she knew Tom, and Tom seemed to know her. Sarah imagined that if Tom had felt something was off he would have growled and hissed and even tried to get out of the cat carrier. But he had been silent the whole time, his face pressed against the wire caging.

  Sarah looked at Trudy’s extended hand. “I’ll do it,” she said. She lifted the carrier and set it in the back of the hatch. Trudy nodded and reached in to open the cage. Tom strolled out and stretched, then looked at Sarah, blinking.

  “I know,” Sarah told Tom. “You need these.” She reached into the pack and pulled out Tom’s clothes, laying them in the back of the hatch. “All good?”

  Tom answered with one of his patented humphs.

  “Let’s go then.”

  She closed the hatch but did not move around the back of the car to the driver side just yet. Instead she stood there, watching Sarah, eyes narrowed as if trying to read the small print on a medicine bottle.

  “What?” Sarah said. “What is it?”

  “I just had to see for myself,” Trudy replied. “You’re her.”

  Sarah shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You have a lot to learn,” Trudy said, “but you already know more than you believe you do. Here.” She held her hand out, palm up.

  “What?”

  “Take my hand,” Trudy said. “Take it and tell me what you know.”

  Sarah looked at the hand and then up at the wild bangs that teased across Trudy’s forehead. This was one strange woman all right, but she seemed safe enough, much safer then the men in her life. She placed her hand on top of Trudy’s outstretched palm and waited.

  “Close your eyes.”

  Sarah did, and then everything changed.

  “What is it?” Trudy asked. “What do you see?”

  The chill swept over Sarah again, bitter and uninvited in the warm August morning. She closed her eyes. The inside of her lids burned orange with the sun against them, and even this was not enough to shut out the world. In the midst of the orange, swirling about in the fire and smiling, she saw her benefactor’s face. “I see you,” she said.

  “What else?”

  There was something else. The orange gave way to green, and there was a fence and a mailbox, two trees in a yard, an old circle of stone next to a metal seat with pedals below it, and a porch with an old-fashioned school desk on it. “Your home.” Sarah squeezed her hand. “I see your …”

  “Tell me,” Trudy said.

  There were things all about, small and bounding and purring. “I see them, all over your home. They’re your … your …”

  “It's okay. You can say it.”

  “Your … children?” Sarah asked.

  “What else?”

  “I see a man,” Sarah continued. “He has silver hair, and he wears an old gray work shirt.”

  Trudy squeezed her hand. “What’s he doing?”

  “He’s in the woods,” Sarah said, and it was as if she had left the street just down from the bus stop in Pendleton and was back in the woods near the strip, not running now but floating like a leaf caught in a breeze. “There is a tent, and he is smiling at me. He’s trying to tell me …”

  She felt Trudy squeeze harder. “What?” Trudy asked. “What is he saying?”

  Sarah squeezed Trudy’s hand back and pressed her eyes further shut. The silver-haired man was there, bent in front of the tent, pounding in a last stake, but he looked back over at Sarah, and his smile was easy, gentle, the father she needed and never saw. His mouth was moving but no sound was coming out, but for a moment Sarah read one word in the curl of his lips, a round half-pucker followed by widening grin. He was saying a name.

  “Trudy,” Sarah said.

  “Yes.” There was a catch in Trudy’s voice now, and her hand continued to squeeze.

  “He’s saying your name.”

  “Yes.” She held the squeeze for a moment more and then released Sarah together. “You can open your eyes now.”

  Sarah did and saw that Trudy was wiping her face on the sleeve of her big sweater.

  “You okay?” Sarah asked.

  “I’m fine,” Trudy said. “You saw him.”

  “Yes.”

  “I only feel him, all the time, all around. But I haven’t seen him. Not since he left.” Trudy blinked away a last bit of moisture and looked at Sarah. “It’s you all right. You’re her all right.”

  Sarah shook her head. “What just happened?”

  Trudy smiled, and fresh tears appeared at the rims of her eyes. “You’ve made me very happy, that’s what happened. Tom too, I think.”

  They looked at the hatch, and Tom the cat was peering out the back windshield, his eyes at half-mast as he glared at them.

  “He wants to make his shift,” Trudy said, “but he doesn’t want to do it here in town where someone might see.” She reached out with her right hand and squeezed Sarah’s shoulder. “Let’s go,” she said. “We have a lot
to talk about.”

  * * * *

  Trudy’s farm was about a ten-minute drive in the Merkur, which was built more for speed on the open road than the rugged terrain that surrounded the town. They made their way north over the girder bridge and turned off the blacktop about half a mile north, winding back on gravel roads in a bouncy game of chutes and ladders. The Merkur mounted a tall knoll after a meandering series of pointed curves, and when Sarah glanced out in her rear-view mirror, she could see the town below and behind them.

  “Almost there,” Tom said, his shift back to human form complete. Sarah felt his hand on her shoulder. “I promised you’d be safe.”

  Trudy had said nothing during the drive. The only sound she made was an occasional sniffle, forcing her to wipe her eyes again. Sarah tried to engage her early on, and Tom had touched her arm from the back seat and squeezed, suggesting it was a bad idea.

  When the car crested the knoll, the road straightened out, and in the distance was a cluster of trees. The tires of the Merkur grumbled on the unpaved road as Trudy amped the speed a hair. In less than a minute, they were at the trees and turning off the road, and at once Sarah found herself at the home she had seen in her recent vision.

  It was a house that could be marked by its stages. One half to the west was two-story, tall with a sharp and pointed roof, and the faded gray of the paint suggested it was an older wing. To the east, a one-story section shot out, the boards of its siding cut about two inches wider than those on the two-story wing. It looked as if one of those ugly ranch-style homes from back in the 1970s had been cut in half and bolted to an old farmhouse that had clearly been here since the before the Great Depression, but the covered wraparound porch, which connected the two halves, managed to pull it all together.

  The Merkur stopped, and Trudy shut off the engine. Sarah opened her door to step outside. She saw the fence, and she saw the mailbox, and she saw the two trees in the front yard. She looked over to her left and saw the round wheel of stone mounted on a metal apparatus, with a seat and two pedals that spun the stone when pressed.