by Debra Dixon
Strangers offered to buy the station and people in town wanted to know when Grandpa planned to close. He went from being overwhelmed to being depressed.
Joe Peavy Day dawned cool and clear. The smells of candy apples, boiling peanuts, and barbeque hung in the music-filled air. Several thousand people showed up to honor Grandpa. It was a proud day for all of Mossy Creek and especially the Peavys. Grandpa and Jason led the pledge to the flag together. Jason wore his Eagle Scout uniform (without his ear accessories, thank God). Pruitt and I were proud enough to burst.
The day was so full most of it became a blur. Mother and her committee outdid themselves.
The week following the celebrations, Mother went through something I can only describe as postpartum depression, and Grandpa’s depression turned to defeatism. He didn’t go to the station a single day and reconciled himself to living with Mother permanently. The day she took him over to the EMC office to have the utilities turned off at Grandma’s little house, they both cried.
A few days later, Grandpa received a call from an archivist at the Smithsonian Institute (you got it, the one in Washington!). The man wanted to talk about the sixty-year horde of dusty trinkets stashed in the grease bay at the station. Then Mr. Hardy from the Georgia Preservation Society called again. He wanted to hold a meeting with us and the Smithsonian archivist and anyone else Grandpa wanted present.
Grandpa, Mother, Ida Walker, Ham Bigelow, and I met with the two men in the reading room at the Mossy Creek Library. The gist of the matter was, they wanted to inventory and archive the cards of key rings, sunglasses, breath fresheners, bottle openers, cans of old motor oil and all the other unsellable stock Grandpa had pitched aside through the years. And they wanted to keep the stuff in context, which meant at the station. They also wanted Grandpa to record an oral history of his life and the history of the gas station. If Grandpa agreed, he could keep the station and they’d help get it registered as a historic site, which meant he might qualify for a grant to help maintain the old gas station as a museum. Talk about heaven sent.
Mother was speechless. Not me. I jumped in to suggest a whole collection of local oral histories and pointed out our treasure trove of elderly citizens. When the archivist started talking about national grants and federal funds, Ham Bigelow allowed the state would be more than happy to help in the production of such a worthy project. We were off and running.
Soon it will be my turn to host the bridge club again, but I’m not the least bit intimidated this time. I’m still the same non-confrontational chicken I’ve always been, but now I’m the chicken who’s in charge of The Mossy Creek History Project, interviewing elderly bridge club members for their life stories.
And they don’t mind my dust bunnies at all.
WMOS Radio
“The Voice of the Creek”
News Flash
This is Bert Lyman, interrupting your afternoon of golden oldies featuring Little Jimmy Dickens and the Carter Family, the greatest hits of Andy Williams, and the best of Kathie Lee Gifford. WMOS is activating the first-ever Willis the Cat Memorial Lost Pet Alert. Named in honor of the late, great Mossy Creek police mascot, Willis the Cat. Here goes.
Willis the Cat Memorial Lost Pet Alert!
Be on the lookout for a yellow tomcat, Otis. Otis is missing, and his owners say there’s a reward for his return. Otis is about twelve inches high, ten pounds, mustard colored with white feet and mustache. If you have any information, call or drop by the police station and tell Officer Sandy Crane. Do not bring Otis to the station if you find him. Sandy says the chief’s parakeet, Tweedle Dee, could only tolerate one cat — Willis — and now that Willis has passed away Tweedle Dee is swearing off friendships with cats and any other animal that likes to eat birds.
Stay tuned for breaking news as we get it.
Chapter 7
Sometimes, you can do a job a little too well.
The Cat Nappers
Chapter 7
The sign taped to the lamppost read:
HAVE YOU SEEN OTIS?
My best friend, Patty English, and I put down our can of nails, hammers, and scraps of wood in order to stare up at the blurry, furry face in the black and white photocopy. He was ugly, like a cross between a sheepdog and Shrek, except we knew he couldn’t be green. We were doing our best to remember this now-famous missing cat. After all, being kids, we knew most of the local pets by name or by reputation. Mostly the dogs. Some dogs like Mrs. Brill’s golden retriever Sammy or Miz Beechum’s little dog, Bob, were either naturally friendly or at least smaller than we were. Others, like Mr. Shaw’s big rottweiler over on Pine Street, had made us detour around his little corner of the world more than once.
But cats . . . now cats were more likely to ignore us than not. They seemed to have their own business to attend to and as long as we didn’t do mean things like tie cans to their tails or worse, they stayed out of the way. And, we returned the favor. Only a few had impressed us enough to remember them, like Miz Reynold’s cat who hung out on the square in front of her store or Miz Caldwell’s coon cat that was almost dog-size. But knowing what this cat, Otis, looked like could pay off. The rest of the sign offered a $20 reward for information.
“We must know something,” Patty mumbled, tapping the flier with one dirty finger like Otis would speak to us if she got his attention. “We could use that money for the movies.”
“Or to buy doughnuts from Beechum’s,” I added helpfully. Doughnuts were my new favorite things. Especially the chocolate-covered ones. Every time we bought two, Miz Beechum would put an extra in the bag for us to split.
“Forget doughnuts, Nancy Bainbridge, our fort needs a roof,” Patty announced.
The fort. That’s where we spent every Saturday afternoon — maybe Sunday if we could get away with it — along with Janie Hughes, Teedie Wertz and sometimes her little brother Raymond. We called him Whammer because whenever he hit a nail or kicked a can or sneezed, he yelled, “Wham!” He learned it from TV and nobody seemed to be able to make him stop.
Anyway, we were building our fort — our secret fort — in an empty lot halfway between Church Street where we lived and Mossy Creek Elementary. The lot wasn’t really empty. Way back off the road was an old broken-down house that my mother called somebody’s ‘homeplace.’ I wasn’t sure how a homeplace was different than somebody’s regular house except that it was old and empty, but I didn’t ask her to explain. She’d already forbidden me to go anywhere near that house or — on the threat of having my backside tanned — going inside. Heck, there were plenty of places to hide and play without going inside the house. The yard had tall, bushy hedges — as tall as my daddy — that had taken over the front walk forming a natural tunnel, and the backyard was a jungle of bamboo so thick we could build a fort in the center of it and never be found if we didn’t want to be. We called it Sha-La-La Land, like Frontierland at Disney World.
That’s where we’d been hurrying to when the sign slowed us down.
“I bet we can find this ugly cat,” Patty said. She looked around to see if anyone was watching, then tore the sign down and stuffed it into the pocket of her jeans. “Let’s go get Teedie and Janie.”
We picked up our tools and boards and trudged on toward Sha-La-La.
“Keep an eye out,” Patty ordered as we passed fences and yards.
I did. We’d voted Patty our leader back when we’d first started to build. For one reason, she was almost a year older at ten than Janie and I — two years older than Teedie. And for another reason, she had nerve. She wasn’t afraid of anything. Not right off, anyway. You had to convince her not to jump in the fire so you wouldn’t be called upon to jump in after her.
“Hey, there’s a yellow cat!” I pointed up ahead, eager to be the finder of the twenty-dollar Otis.
Patty dropped her board and pulled out the flier. “Not enough hair,” she said. “Besides, it must belong to the people who live there, it’s in their yard.”
“Oh, okay,” I s
aid, disappointed. “At least I saw one.”
Two more blocks of fast walking and casual searching brought us to the faint path leading through the weeds to our secret world. We stopped and pretended to rest as a car passed us. One of the rules of Sha-La-La Land was that you couldn’t let anyone see how you got there.
“Okay, let’s go,” I said, after the car turned at the stop sign.
As quick as rabbits we hurried off the street and disappeared into the brush. Halfway down the path I stopped to break a branch of sweet shrub and stuck it in my top pocket. I liked the way it smelled. Lots of it grew around the secret entrance to Sha-La-La Land perfuming the air like sweet apples and honey. I figured someone who’d lived in the old house must’ve planted it and like everything else, it got out of hand. My mother says a lot of the old plants do that — they take over when the people leave.
By the time we reached the leafy tunnel leading to the front door — or where the front door used to be — of the house I felt my usual shiver of excitement. I loved Sha-La-La Land. Every overgrown bush, every new, determined to spread, shoot of bamboo, every bird’s nest and rabbit hole, and all the smells of old wood, rich dirt and autumn leaves. I loved it because it was secret and it was ours. We’d claimed the land when it looked like nobody else wanted it.
I didn’t love the old ‘homeplace’ though. It’s not like I thought it had ghosts in it, or anything. I’m too old to believe in ghosts. Just sometimes, starin’ at the broken windows and the missing door made me feel like the house was starin’ back. Grinning with no teeth like old Mister Rufus down at the hardware store. In the second place, ivy grew along the roof like tangled green hair and when the wind picked up it kinda whistled or sighed through the missing boards. My mother didn’t have to threaten my backside to keep me clear of it. I didn’t tell Patty and the others about being scared though. ’Cause, best friend or not, I was sure if Patty found out she’d have to march right across the rotten porch and through the hole that used to be a door and expect me to follow her step for step. As my grandma would say, “into the belly of the whale.”
No thank you. I’d rather walk through fire or be a life-sized dog biscuit for Mr. Shaw’s yard demon.
Teedie and Janie were waiting for us in the last sunny spot before the curtain of bamboo became a nearly solid wall. They’d brought their own assortment of tools and supplies. Janie had two plastic garbage bags, a ball of kite string, and a Tupperware bowl with no lid. Teedie had a rusty bucket with a frayed piece of rope tied to the handle, a pair of equally rusty pliers, and a flashlight with a cracked lens. Whammer was absent
In single file, we slipped through the small gap in the bamboo and followed Patty along the dim green tunnel too slender for any adults to get through. Above our heads the autumn-yellow bamboo swayed and creaked in the chilly breeze, but near the ground everything around us was still. Like walking through a box of giant chopsticks. When we reached Sha-La-La Land — the cleared center of our private world, we stacked our building supplies on the ground.
Patty looked over our contributions and announced, “We need more boards.” She pulled the flier we’d swiped off the pole and showed it to Janie and Teedie. “And here’s how we get ’em. If we find this cat, we could buy all the stuff we need.”
“Let me see.” Janie took the flier. She and Teedie stared at Otis’s homely face. “Looks old. That cat must be from out of town. I don’t remember ever seeing him before.”
Teedie said, “That’s why he’s lost, silly.”
“Otis could be a girl, ya know,” I added.
The other three turned to stare at me for a moment. Then Teedie said, “So?”
I just shrugged. I’d run out of smart aleck replies so I moved on to brilliant ideas. “Since we don’t have boards, let’s go on a Otis hunt.”
* * * *
I’d heard people at church call Mossy Creek a “small” town. Actually, I’d heard Miz Purla say somethin’ like small, stubborn town but I didn’t really know what she was talkin’ about. My mother said Miz Purla was always pitchin’ a fit about one thing or another. First it was the famous Foo Club, because they wanted to set up a booth at the fall festival and give out buttons that said, Until further notice, vote Heil, No. I thought she’d been upset because they spelled the “H” word wrong. Then she stood in front of the Mayor’s office and handed out fliers demanding that the pur-petraitors who burned down the old high school should be brought to justice. Whatever that meant. Half the kids in Mrs. Anderson’s third grade class found out the fliers made great paper airplanes — we folded and flew them all over the square before Sandy down at the police station made us pick every single one of them up and throw them in the trash. She didn’t seem mad though.
No matter. To us, the kids from Church Street, Mossy Creek was the whole world. Bigger than the bunch of us. We’d have to split up to search it proper.
Janie and Teedie went off toward the square while Patty and I hiked over toward East Mossy Creek Road. We cut down the alley behind the newspaper office, heading for the swimming hole behind Hamilton Inn. Patty had some notion that any lost cat would look for water. What better place to start a search than at the swimming hole? She’d decided. I didn’t mention the rumor that cats didn’t like water all that much. I followed the leader down a deer path.
“Pee-uw. What’s that smell?” I asked, doing my best not to breathe.
“Somethin’ dead.” Patty answered, then picked up the pace.
Oh no, not Otis. What if that same hawk who tried to carry off Miz Beechum’s Bob a couple of years ago came back for our twenty-dollar cat? “Do you remember if the poster said, Dead or Alive? Like in the movies?”
Patty stopped, propped her hands on her hips and looked at me. “Why would anyone pay twenty dollars for a dead cat?”
She had me there. All I could do was shrug. I’d never understood that whole proper burial thing. Patty turned and continued down the path.
Once we reached the swimming hole the smell went away, so we weren’t required to investigate further. We searched all around.
No Otis.
* * * *
The sun was hanging low over the mountains by the time we all met up back at Sha-La-La. Patty and I had found one cat that sort of resembled Otis but we weren’t sure since he didn’t look much like the picture. When Janie and Teedie came crashing through the bamboo, though, we could see they’d had better luck — each one was carrying a big yellow cat.
“That’s him!” Patty said, holding the picture next to the bigger cat’s face — one Teedie had found near the barber shop. “That’s gotta be Otis! Says here, to call Sandy at the police station. Let’s go get our money.”
Teedie’s arms tightened around Otis. She seemed reluctant to give him up. “Our money?” she asked, like she’d forgotten what the whole plan was about anyhow.
Patty frowned. “We said we’d use the money for the fort.”
It only took a minute of facing possible suspension from Sha-La-La before Teedie remembered, “Oh all right. Here, you take him. I carried him all over town and he’s heavy.”
“What do we do with these other two?” I asked.
Patty, in the middle of taking possession of Otis, said, “We’ll put ’em back.”
“Back where?” Janie asked.
“Where you found them.”
Janie looked at me — both of us holding squirming cats who’d lost all interest in us or our plans. “I don’t remember where we found them — we just found them,” Janie confessed.
“This one was in the bushes near the church,” I volunteered.
The look on Patty’s face changed slowly from aggravation to, as my mother would say, revelation. I should’ve run then. But since Patty was our chosen chief, I decided to be a good Indian.
“Well, these cats must be lost, too.” She ran a hand over Otis’s matted fur. “We’ll go get our twenty dollars for this one and save the others until someone puts up another sign. We need a place to
put ’em ’til then.”
“My mother won’t let me have a cat,” Janie said. “My sister’s allergic to ’em.”
“I can’t take two cats home,” I said in a hurry. I couldn’t lie worth a flip. I knew if I even tried to sneak our two extra cats into the garden shed behind our house my mother would get to the bottom of everything in nothin’ flat. I would be the betrayer of Sha-La-La.
That’s when Patty picked up the broken flashlight, turned toward the path and said, “Follow me.”
Sooner than I wanted, I found myself facing the empty-eyed stare of the old house. “We’ll keep them in there.”
I don’t know about Janie but I was ready to drop my furry contribution to the cat round-up and, twenty dollars or not, let it take its chances. The sun was already sinking below the top of Mount Colchik and shadows were filling every unfriendly place with darkness and dire possibilities.
“We’ll be lucky to make it to the police station before sundown. I’ll be in trouble if I’m not home soon.” It was easier to blame my mother’s rules than my fear for not wanting to go in the old house.
“Here, Teedie, stay here and hold Otis.” After securing our paying customer in Teedie’s lap, Patty waved me and Janie forward. “Let’s get going, then.” She set off through the tunnel lined with ever darkening air, expecting us to follow.
I didn’t know whether I wanted to be first or last, then decided it was safer in the middle. I swallowed back any confessions of being a sissy and headed up the walk behind Patty. I could hear Janie’s hesitant footsteps behind me.