Somewhere beyond this bundle of fur that had plopped itself across Sarah’s head, she heard the slow whine of the door hinge as someone tried to opened it without disturbing her. From off to her right, she heard Trudy’s voice.
“Oh my,” she said. “I never thought.”
“I told you, Miss Trudy.” Tom’s voice, speaking low but not whispering. “Didn’t I tell you?”
Sarah allowed herself to sleep again, and the dreams did not return.
She awoke on her side, and Strawberry had moved down, snuggling against her chest, the crest of Strawberry’s head pressed under Sarah’s chin. The purr was steady, ceaseless, and the cat’s sides flexed and retracted with steady breaths. Sarah ran her fingers through the cat’s fur, and it was warm and soft, the body beneath it sturdy. It was as if she was waking up to an entirely different cat.
She closed her eyes again, allowing more sleep to come. This time, the dreams were simple, nonspecific, but something wonderful seemed to wash across her, soothing every nerve of her body. Strawberry’s gentle purr against her chest, rumbling along as steady as a generator, rolled with her into the darkness.
* * * *
It was midafternoon when Sarah finally awoke for good. The room was darker, and even from her spot on the bed she could see through the south windows that the sky outside had grown overcast. There was a hiss and rattle in the window as small gusts of wind picked up and declined. Sarah blinked and rubbed the last sleep out of her eyes and looked around the room.
A young woman was in the southwest corner at a small vanity made of dark wood that looked to be older than the house. There were two drawers on the vanity, one open slightly, and a large round mirror with hand-carved moulding. The woman sat in a high-backed chair turned away from Sarah. She was running a large brush through her hair, a luxurious mane the color of autumn that spilled around her shoulders. At first Sarah thought the woman was Trudy, but a moment’s study starved that thought. Trudy’s hair had been lighter, blonder than this woman’s, and her frame had been quite lean. The woman at the vanity was of a fuller figure, hips ample but not fat, soft curves at her waist and shoulders, all easy to discern because … the woman wore no clothes.
Sarah started at this and lay very still. She had read stories in library books about haunted houses, stories of ghosts appearing in their natural habitat, doing mundane tasks over and over, to be observed by nosy humans. Perhaps this was such a ghost, someone who lived in the house long ago, a young girl—maybe an aunt to Trudy’s late father—spending eternity in this room, naked and alone, brushing her hair and waiting for a boy, some secret and forbidden love who would never arrive at her window.
Just then, the woman stopped. Although Sarah could not see her face in the mirror, the woman seemed to sense that she was being watched. She set the brush on the vanity. Her right shoulder rolled forward as she bent an arm across her chest to cup and hide her breasts. She turned in the chair, its high back further hiding her exposed body, and grinned.
“Hello,” the woman said. “You do nice work.”
Sarah set up and pressed herself against the metal backboard frame of the bed. “You can see me?”
“Of course I can see you. I’ve been with you all afternoon.”
Sarah looked around then and realized that the cat was gone. Her first thought was that perhaps the poor thing had succumbed to its illness and died while she was asleep, that maybe Trudy had mercifully removed its remains as Sarah slept. But she knew better. After all, she had been with Tom for the past two days, and if there was one creature in the world like Tom, there had to be others.
“Strawberry?” Sarah asked.
The woman smiled and nodded. “That’s what they call me.”
“What do you call you?” Sarah asked.
“I like Strawberry. It’ll do.”
“Where are your clothes?”
Strawberry motioned with her head to the back side of the house, her pretty hair swishing across the back of the chair. “Out there somewhere.”
“Where?”
“In the woods. I left them out here before I came to this place.”
“Why?” Sarah asked.
“I came here in my cat form. All cats are welcome here, but not all people are.” She lowered her arm, keeping her breasts hidden behind the chair back. “Miss Trudy’s seen people do some very bad things.”
“Yes,” Sarah said. “We have that in common.”
“I figured if I came here as a person, like this,” Strawberry said, “Miss Trudy might be tempted to turn me away. But if I came to her as a cat …”
“So she doesn’t know you’re—”
“Not yet she doesn’t,” Strawberry said, her eyes seeming to dance as she smiled.
“Why didn’t you show her?”
“I was lying low,” Strawberry explained. “I was waiting for you.”
“Me?”
“I knew you were coming. We all did.”
“You and the other cats?”
“Just The Glaring,” said Strawberry. “We’ve known about you for awhile.”
“What’s The Glaring?” Sarah asked.
“Tom, me. Others like us.”
“How many?”
“Not enough,” said Strawberry.
Sarah nodded. “What else can you tell me?”
Strawberry ran her fingers through her hair, making it shimmer in the soft light being fed in through the windows. “I can’t say.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not my place,” she said. “It’s Tom’s. He’s kind of territorial that way.”
“So when is he going to catch me up on all of this?” Sarah demanded. “When does someone let me in on what’s going on?”
“In time,” Strawberry said. “You have to take it in small bites. In the meantime, I'm going downstairs to introduce myself proper.” She looked about the room, frowning, then draped an arm over the back of the chair and shrugged. “Got any clothes I can borrow?”
BTB Unchained
While Sarah and Strawberry were sleeping away most of their Saturday, a Honda Accord was making its way to Denver via I-70. Just as it was entering the Mile-High City, it angled northwest on 270 over to I-25 and headed due north. It had passed Kyle and Molly back in Kansas just east of Wakeeney and gained a good 20 minute lead by the time Kyle’s Impala had eased back onto the road. That lead was expanded to over an hour for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that with the Accord’s better gas mileage (Kyle’s old Impala ate gas like a fat man eating pie at the county fair) it needed to make fewer fuel stops.
The BTB did, however, stop for other things.
Just north of downtown Denver on I-25, they took a turnoff and found a liquor store. They waited for about ten minutes before finding someone to buy them beer for their cooler. He was a thin man with long silvery hair that made him look like an aging hippie, and he wore a faded t-shirt with the Colorado Buffalos logo on the chest. Marty, the biggest of the BTB, approached the man and told him that he had recently graduated from high school and had been offered a full scholarship at CU, and this was his last hurrah with his buddies. The aging hippie grooved on the story, agreed to buy them beer so they could celebrate, and soon the BTB were on the road again, Bran the Man driving, DC riding shotgun, and Marty napping in the backseat next to a fully replenished ice chest.
They stopped again near Fort Collins for gas, and then continued north. By the time they crossed the state line into Wyoming they were all getting hungry. They found a little roadside diner outside of Cheyenne and took a good hour eating and laughing and flirting with a somewhat pretty blonde waitress with skunk strip of dark roots across her head and the heavy scent of cigarettes in her clothes.
During this time, the Impala—almost 90 minutes behind them when they first pulled into the diner—cut their lead time in half, and it would have been more if Kyle and Molly had not met with an unnecessary delay at Fort Collins during their own fuel stop.
It was evening when the Accord got back on the road, and DC took the wheel, driving as far as Laramie before the BTB wondered aloud if they should stop for the night. But Bran the Man was on edge, twitchy with the hunger to get to Maupin, track down his new friend Jack, and hit those rapids like a trio of Indiana Jones, taming the wild river in ways nature never intended.
“We press on,” he said. “I’ll drive all night if you want. But we do not stop. We’ve been stopping too much our whole lives.”
Bran the Man took the wheel back and drove west on I-80, a cool beer between his legs and his cassette of The Beastie Boys’ License to Ill album cranked as much as his two friends could tolerate.
He made it almost to Evanston, less than 15 miles from the Utah border, and that’s when fatigue finally hit him. Somewhere off to his right he saw the Phillips 66 sign, the islands of gas pumps, the wide parking lot almost an acre, and rows of Peterbilts resting as their weary drivers slept off the last hours of a long haul. It was just past midnight. DC now slept in the back seat, using one of his sweatshirts as a pillow as his head rested on the ice chest. Marty was in shotgun, bent forward, sleeping with wavy-haired head pressed against his arms as he crossed them on his lap.
Bran the Man rubbed his eyes and finished his beer. He eased the Accord back toward the trucker’s lot, finding a spot in the shadows close to the store, protected from unwanted light but well enough out of the way that it wouldn’t be smashed by a trucker making an early dawn departure. He rolled down his window, tossed out his empty beer can, and eased back the seat. It thumped against the ice chest, arousing DC only for a moment, but could go no further.
Bran the Man sighed and unbuckled his seat belt. He pulled up the head rest enough to catch his head. He crossed his arms and closed his eyes, and listened to the low hum of truck generators across that acreage of gravel lot.
Sleep came almost at once, an invisible killer pouncing out of the ether, driving Brandon deep into the land of dreams.
Kyle vs. Jack
While Bran the Man and the remainder of the BTB were sitting in the roadside diner in Cheyenne, playfully flirting with the weary waitress they secretly found repulsive, the Chevy Impala was almost 50 miles south on I-25, rolling off the exit ramp in search of fuel. It found what it was looking for at a Kwik Stop, with two rows of gas pumps under a green-and-yellow awning. There were three other cars scattered in strategic locations, and Kyle had to maneuver the banana boat called Impala in and about before he could line up his gas tank with one of the pumps. In the end he made it.
He killed the engine, and Molly stirred. Ever since her transformation back in Kansas, when they had stopped on I-70 just east of Wakeeney, she had remained in her human form. She did not speak of what had happened, and she seemed less at ease as a person. It was obvious that she longed to crawl in the back seat, eradicate her constraining clothes, and curl up once again as a cat on the floor, but for reasons known only to her, she maintained the form that had first appealed to Kyle when he saw her on the streets of his paper route, standing under the lamp and smiling like an angel. She stayed close during the drive as well. Kyle liked the way she sat in the middle of the Impala’s front bench seat, like a girl on a date when she really likes the guy. When she was sleepy, she laid her head on his thigh, a soft hand resting on his knee. He could feel her hot breath through the fabric of his jeans.
She had been sleeping like this when Kyle took the Fort Collins exit, and now her head rolled and turned gently in his lap when the engine died. She rubbed her eyes against his leg to arouse herself and then sat up in the car, blinking. “Where are we?”
“Just outside of Fort Collins. Stopping for gas.”
“Oh.” She yawned and leaned over to kiss his cheek. Kyle smiled and patted her leg.
“You want anything while we’re here?” he asked.
“Just a little air,” Molly said. “Why don’t I pump while you go in and pay?”
Kyle kept his hand on her leg and squeezed it. “Deal.”
She slid across the seat and opened her door on the passenger side. Kyle opened the driver side and got out as well. It was a cool evening for August, a light breeze coming from the west, and he stretched and took it all in, raising his arms above his head. His walk across the parking lot was tight at first, and he stopped at the door of the C-store to support himself against the building, bending each leg back, taking it with a free hand, and stretching until he felt a gentle pop. This had been the longest he had sat behind the wheel of his car, and his muscles were not used to it. That’s it, he thought. Soon as we get to where we’re going, I’m going to start working out.
He glanced back across the lot at Molly. She was leaning back against the car and stretching herself before fumbling with the rear license plate to expose the gas cap beneath. She glanced over at him and smiled, and Kyle smiled back. For a moment he was overwhelmed by a wave of something warm and simple and profound. He wondered if this was how it felt to be in love.
He entered the C-store, nodding at the balding gentleman with glasses who sat behind the counter. “She’s filling up,” he said. “Need me to pay in advance?”
The counterman shook his head. Kyle had wanted him to look out the window, wanted someone, anyone, to see the amazing creature who accompanied him on this journey. It wasn’t so much that he needed to tell anyone what she was doing; he just wanted to let the rest of the world know. She’s with me, he wanted to scream. Will you look at her already? That girl is here with me.
He went back to the cooler and searched the shelves until he found what he wanted. There were sodas in 20-ounce bottles, and he grabbed four Diet Cokes. Cradling them in his arms, he strolled down one of the aisles and grabbed a small bag of chips, and then over to the sandwich cooler. He wondered what kind of sandwich Molly would like. It dawned on him that he had never seen Molly eat in all the time they were together. What did her kind eat anyway? He thought about going to the pet food aisle and getting a bag of cat treats, and at first this made him laugh until he realized it might hurt her feelings.
The bottles of soda and bag of chips were awkward in his hands. He juggled them around and took them over to the counter, setting them next to the register. “Be right back,” he told the bespectacled counterman.
“She gotcha about fifteen dollars in the tank,” the counterman said.
Kyle nodded and went back to the sandwich cooler. He grabbed a couple of ham sandwiches for himself and stared at the other foodstuffs the cooler had to offer. Somewhere off to his right, he heard the jingle of the bells on the front door as another customer came in. He was thinking how he would have to ask Molly what she ate, which felt like an awkward conversation in the making, when he heard the heavy clomp of boots across the C-store’s linoleum floor. The steps grew louder as something made its way toward him.
“Ooh-wee,” a medium voice with a half-hearted bit of Midwest twang muttered next to him. “Y’see that fine piece of flesh out there pumping gas?”
Kyle turned and came face-to-chest with the awfulness. The stranger stood about six inches taller and was wearing a dark denim shirt with the top buttons undone. A puff of wiry hair peeked out over a sweat-stained wife-beater undershirt. A vest of black leather with red-and-green threading was tossed over the shirt, and just above the left lapel of the vest was stitched a matching leather patch with the stranger’s name in pale gray letters:
JACK
Kyle glanced down for a moment, taking in the stranger’s faded jeans and black engineer boots and then up into the stranger’s face. His skin was russet and spattered with road dust, and an overgrown mustache curled over his lips and down along the sides of his jowls. His eyebrows were bristly and in need of a trim, and his flyaway hair, roughly the color of old wicker, hung about his face and down to his collarbone.
Kyle forced a grin and looked into Jack’s eyes, and something made all the coursing blood in his body stop in its tracks, freezing him down to the smallest cell. The eyes were like
two shiny drops of tar, bulging without whites or irises, empty and yet somehow hungry like the eyes of a shark Kyle once saw on a Discovery Channel show.
“You deaf or something?” Jack asked.
“No, sir,” said Kyle.
“Answer my question. You see that fine piece of flesh out there pumping gas?” The black eyes glistened and almost boiled, twin pools of raw sewage, and it seemed that black maggots were drowning within them.
“Which?”
“Out there,” growled Jack. “You can’t tell me you missed that, unless ya blind or faggot. That it, boy? You faggot?”
“No, sir, I just—”
Jack’s shoulder flinched, and his hand shot up from his waist. Kyle snapped his head away and took a step back. Jack’s gloved fist stopped inches from his face, and the black-eyed biker snorted and cackled, his fist poised in the air, a snake ready to strike.
“Made ya flinch,” he said. “Ya know what that means?”
“No,” Kyle said, but he knew very well what it meant. He’d done his share of flinching in gym class back in high school, back when Bran the Man or one of his cronies got right up in his face like this hairy biker, who smelled, Kyle realized, of tar and rotted fruit.
“Mean’s I get to hit you,” said Jack. “Anywhere I want, as hard as I want.”
“If you excuse me, sir,” Kyle said, realizing how pathetic the repeated sir was sounding, “I have to go.”
He tried to move around, and Jack took a step to cut him off. “Just where you think you’re going?” he asked. “Where you think I’m gonna let you go?”
“Look, I don’t wa—”
“Don’t want any trouble?” the Jack barked with a snarl. “Yeah, ‘course you don’t want any trouble. All you little faggots don’t want trouble, don’t have the sack for it, and yet here comes ol’ trouble, looking for you all the same.”
Strays Page 16