by Debra Dixon
Patty stopped halfway there to wait for us. “Come on, you guys!” she whispered fiercely. That was when I realized that Patty might not be as brave as she acted. It wasn’t a particularly comforting thought.
In a triple knot of trepidation, we stepped up onto the creaking porch. The stairs had long since fallen in. I had a little trouble balancing my cat and keeping my knees from knocking. The dark open door stood before us.
Patty switched on the flashlight and the dim beam lit the front room. Without taking time to think, I imagine, she stepped inside and we followed.
The floor boards were littered with leaves and old newspapers. In the back corner of the room an old kitchen table and one chair had collapsed into a pile of rust and Formica. The place smelled like the attic at my grandma’s old house — the nose-wrinkling smell of dust older than dirt, sun-baked wood, and families of mice.
“We need to find something with a door to close them up,” Patty declared and headed for the short hallway that had only half a floor left.
“Be careful,” I said and watched my own feet. I had the feeling that if I fell through the floor in this old place, I’d never get out. I’d be fertilizer for the sea of ivy, or worse.
Turned out there wasn’t a door in the place. As a matter of fact, the last room at the end of the hall didn’t even have a floor. Patty shined the light down into a hole at least six feet deep that had been dug out of the clay. It was a smaller version of my grandmother’s cellar except there were no stairs — only hard clay with a few floor boards and leaves resting at the bottom.
“What do we do now?” I asked, wanting to get out of there as fast as my feet could move. Cat or no cat.
“Stay here while I go get the bucket and the rope.”
Janie and I both spoke at once. “What?”
“Just stay here.” Patty shoved the flashlight in my hand and headed for the front door.
As Patty’s footsteps faded away, the wind picked up and the house squeaked and creaked. I kept the flashlight aimed at our feet to watch for snakes and silently vowed to vote Patty out of Sha-La-La if she’d left us there for a joke.
“Are you scared?” Janie whispered.
A popping sound of a branch or a few acorns dropping onto the roof made me jump and tighten my hold on the flashlight. Fear can be a great motivator for the truth.
“Yeah,” I answered. “I wish she’d hurry up.” Actually, I was beginning to wish the old house had a bathroom. I didn’t want to wet my pants if we had to face a snake or worse. That’s something that would be pretty hard to live down.
Then, the flashlight began to dim.
“Oh, great!” I said, and shook it. The light blinked and brightened slightly. I figured we had about two minutes of light left. It seemed like the shortest two minutes of my life because before I was ready, the light faded again.
“Here I come!” Patty called. I suppose she didn’t want to scare us into jumping into the hole. She came through the door with the bucket and the plastic bowl in her hand.
She held the bucket out to me. “Here, put your cat in here.”
I was glad to put down my burden — that would make it easier for me to run if the occasion called for us to skeedaddle as my grandpa used to say. Then I watched in amazement as Patty lowered the cat into the hole.
“We can keep them in here ’til we find a better place.”
I didn’t know what to say. Since I didn’t have any better idea, and I wasn’t required to lie to my mother, I nodded and kept quiet.
“We’ll have to bring them food and water,” Janie said as she deposited her cat into the bucket for the ride to the bottom.
I shined the flickering flashlight into the hole. The cats didn’t seem alarmed by their new home. As a matter of fact, they looked relieved to be set free from our sweaty arms.
Patty smiled. “Now, let’s get over to the police station and collect our first reward. It’ll cost us a dollar, but I bet I can talk my older brother Davey into coming back with us to feed them. In case you two scaredy cats are afraid of the dark, that is.”
I was so happy to be leaving I wasn’t going to bring up the fact that she could come back by herself to feed them if she was so much braver than we were.
* * * *
We were the he-roes — I mean her-roes — of the day. When Sandy produced a cat cage for Mr. Otis and his owners showed up with our twenty dollar bill, we were suddenly famous. We even got to smile and pose with Otis, his owners, and our moola, for the front page of the Mossy Creek Gazette.
Patty’s brother earned his dollar by going in the old house all alone to deliver water and two cans of cat food we’d bought with our reward. He grossed us out by telling us one of the cats had already caught a mouse on its own. The next four days we took turns delivering cat food — two of us went at a time. Whammer, who’d come into our cat-wanted business late, tagged along whenever it was Teedie’s turn to open the cat food. He was a nuisance, but the cats seemed to like him. The other team — the one not feeding the cats — was supposed to keep an eye out for the next wanted poster and pick up any other lost cats we found.
By the end of the week we had ten cats.
“How come nobody is looking for those cats?” Janie asked the following Saturday. We were gathered around our pile of sticks in the center of Sha-La-La Land pretending to have a campfire. Janie had come up with the idea when her dad installed what he called fake logs in their fireplace so they wouldn’t have to tend a woodpile. We knew better than to start a real fire. We didn’t go into the ‘cat house’ as we called it now except to feed them because they made so much noise when we showed up. All they had to hear was the pop and hiss of a can being opened and, oh, brother! We’d used most of our reward money to buy cat food, which was bad news for Sha-La-La. Besides, Patty said we needed our privacy to do some more plotting.
“Maybe we should go back down to the police station,” Patty said, poking the fake fire with a stick. “Maybe they put the fliers up on that side of town first.”
“What if these are Bigelow cats and nobody in Mossy Creek will take ’em?”
“They couldn’t have walked all the way up here from Bigelow,” Teedie said. “They can’t even climb out of a broken-down cellar.”
“We could ask Sandy or Miz Katie Bell — they know all the news. Or, we could put up our own fliers.”
That seemed to be the best we could come up with. We re-walked our original path of glory to the police station. Of course we had to stop at Mossy Creek Hardware and Gardening and buy Coca-Colas in the short bottles for our temporary reward. Whammer used his own nickel to buy a piece of bubble gum. That’s when we saw the flier taped to the inside of the glass near the front door.
WANTED: CAT NAPPERS
There’s been a sudden outbreak of missing cats. If you or anyone has information, please call Officer Crane at 678-555-MOSS or dial 911. A $50 reward has been offered for the capture of the perpetrators. The theft of a family pet is a misdemeanor which carries a $100 fine and five days in jail.
“What’s a per-pe —”
Patty interrupted Whammer’s painful sounding out of our doom. She ripped the flier down and headed out the door. Janie, Teedie, Whammer and I followed. My heart was doing it’s own boom, boom, boom. But then, worse, old Mr. Rufus, who ran the livestock feed section for the store’s owner, Mr. Anglin, was sittin’ and rockin’ in his usual spot near the bags of chicken feed and bales of hay. He grinned his toothless grin and said, “Ew gurls know anythang ’bout them kets?” On most days I couldn’t understand a word he said because of his lack of teeth, but somehow today each word was as clear and cold as the water in Mossy Creek.
“No, sir,” Patty, Janie, and Teedie said in unison. Whammer and me stayed quiet.
We ran all the way back to Sha-La-La.
“What are we going to do?” Janie wailed, while Patty paced the grass near the front door of the cat house.
“We’ll just let ’em all go. Nobody’ll kn
ow it was us,” our fearless leader decided. “Let somebody else find ’em.”
We took the flashlight from it’s hidey-hole and hurried inside. The cats, as usual, set up a rowwwl! when they heard our footsteps. Patty and I worked on a way to charm each cat into the bucket for the trip to freedom — this involving our last half-can of cat food — while Whammer stooped down to yowl back at the prisoners. He always did this and I secretly wondered if the cats and Whammer might actually understand each other. As we fretted over the length of the rope, I saw one calico, who must’ve recognized Whammer’s voice, leap toward him from the bottom to the top. She almost made it, at the last second snagging her claws into Whammer’s tennis shoe. Whammer must have thought that was cool because he laughed and let out with his trademark, “Wham!” before turning to see if we’d all witnessed the cat on the flying Nike trapeze.
Less than a second later, the cat gave a squirm, part of the packed clay at the edge gave way and Whammer’s feet went out from under him. He tumbled into the hole, scattering cats and kicking up red dust. The boards at the bottom broke his fall but for a moment we all stood stunned.
“Wham,” he said weakly before Teedie set to wailin’.
“Whaaaaammer!”
The cats, after initially scrambling out of the way, returned to sniff and stroke and rub all over him as though he was a kitten who needed their attention. Whammer’s fearful look disappeared and he did his best to smile. “They like me,” he said as he tried to pet each one in turn.
“We’ve got to get him out of there!” Teedie said. She kneeled at the side and reached down her hand. “Grab my hand, Whammer.”
Reluctantly, he pushed the cats off him and did his best to stand on the broken boards beneath him.
That’s when the boards shifted and he slipped up to his armpits into an even deeper part of the hole. There was no way he could reach his sister’s hand.
“Here, catch!” Patty slung the bucket toward him and he managed to grab ahold of it, but when he did he pulled the rope out of Patty’s fingers. Now the bucket, the rope and Whammer were all at the bottom of the hole.
Teedie started crying and I did the first thing I could think of. “I’m goin’ to get my daddy!” I yelled and headed for the door. My dad had belonged to the Mossy Creek Volunteer Fire Department since I could remember. And one of the things he always said was — when there’s trouble, get a fireman.
I ran so fast I tripped on the porch boards and fell with an oof onto the walk. My knees stung like fire but I got up and ran on. By the end of the tunnel I thought I heard someone yell but then again, maybe it was my imagination. I didn’t want to think that it might have been Whammer being eaten by the cats. I ducked under some bushes and ran faster.
I popped out of the tall grass like a deer in hunting season with dogs on my trail. That’s when I experienced the twin feelings of terror and relief. There was a Mossy Creek police car parked on the street at the beginning of our trail to Sha-La-La. The first thing I recognized beyond that was Patty’s brother Davey, next to him was Officer Mutt Bottoms, Sandy’s brother. And, standing next to Officer Mutt was Chief Royden. I didn’t even care that I would surely go to jail. I started wailing as loud as Teedie. “Whammer fell! He’s being eaten by cats!”
Let me tell you, that got their attention. I had to stop and bend over my stomach was hurting so bad but I still managed to point. “In the old house . . . in the back. . .”
They didn’t wait for me. Both Officer Mutt and the chief set off through the bushes without regard to their pressed uniform pants and shiny shoes.
Davey hung back for a moment to torment me. “You’re gonna go to jail for stealing cats. I told them the whole thing. I’m gonna get fifty dollars.”
I didn’t have enough spit in my mouth to speak, so I watched him parade down the path toward the house in silence. I decided then that Davey was a mean boy; he didn’t even seem to care that Whammer was being turned into cat food.
Unable to escape anyway, I followed everyone back to the scene of our crime.
“Are you hurt anywhere?” the chief called down. Whammer looked unhurt enough to me — still for once, and up to his armpits in worried, yowling cats.
“Unh-uh,” he answered.
“Stay still,” Amos told him. “We’ll get you out of there.”
Then Officer Mutt sneezed. The chief just looked at him. “Somebody has to go down there, Mutt,” he said, and smiled. “I’m the chief. You’re not.”
Officer Mutt’s eyes were turning red and watery. He handed the chief a flashlight and pulled out a handkerchief from his back pocket to blow his nose. He shoved it back in his pocket and sighed. “Allergic to cats,” he said then sat down on the edge of the hole and slid down the side.
Man, I knew we were in deep trouble then because that red Georgia clay stuck to his backside like spitballs on a dry erase board. He sneezed again and I winced. When he stopped sneezing and saw what had happened to his clean uniform he was gonna make us stay in jail even longer.
He reached down, pulled Whammer out of the tangle of boards, then stooped down to look him over. The cats took this as a sign that they might get food or pets from this stranger and proceeded to rub and climb on Officer Mutt. He sneezed three times and I could have sworn the chief laughed. It was so quick though, and I was so worried about our immediate future I couldn’t be sure. Officer Mutt lifted Whammer by his armpits and handed him to the chief.
The chief told Teedie to hold Whammer’s hand, then he crossed his arms and looked down at Officer Mutt. Now the cats were trying to climb up his legs, making claw holes in his uniform pants.
“Looks like we found the Cat Nappers, and the cats,” Chief Royden said.
Officer Mutt sneezed again and reached a hand toward the chief. After a small hesitation, the chief took it and pulled Officer Mutt out of the cat house. Tears were running down Officer Mutt’s face. I wondered why he was so sad.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” was all he said.
The chief nodded. “I guess it won’t hurt the cats to stay here until we can get Hank Blackshear on the scene. He can probably identify them and track down the owners through the vet clinic’s records.”
But Officer Mutt didn’t answer. He was already stepping out onto the porch and away from the house.
The chief looked at us then. “Ladies, come with me. And bring Raymond.”
Uh-oh. It was true what our parents told us: The chief knew everything about the bad kids of Mossy Creek, even Whammer’s real name.
* * * *
We didn’t go straight to jail like I thought we would. We did have to do something Sandy called community service, though. Whenever someone needed their dog walked or cat box cleaned, one of us would have to show up and do the job. In a way, we were even more famous than when we found Otis. Although, cleaning cat litter is not a job of the stars. Personally, I didn’t care if I never saw another cat close up again.
I didn’t get my backside warmed either — mainly because I told the truth, my mother informed me, and because I was running to get help for Whammer when I got caught, rather than running away. I did get grounded with no TV. But Daddy took me to watch the volunteer fire department burn down the old homeplace. They called it a practice burn, and my father was the officer in charge of it. He even got Wolfman Washington to bring over his bulldozer the next day and bury the ashes and flatten the old cellar so that no one would ever fall in it again. Or, use it for a life of crime.
Patty’s brother Davey got his money though. And it was gonna take a long time for me to forgive him for being such a sissy tattle-tale. On the other hand, I’d been willing to sacrifice any reward in order to save Whammer, and finding that police car without having to run all the way into town was a good thing.
I swear, the older I get, the more complicated things look. Just when I thought we’d never see Sha-La-La Land again, my dad built us a brand new fort in our back yard — way up in an old Mulberry tree. It’s waaa
ay better than Sha-La-La — it’s got a roof, a door and during the summer all the mulberries we can eat. And it’s all mine.
The Mossy Creek Gazette
215 Main Street • Mossy Creek, Georgia
From the Desk of Katie Bell, Business Manager
Lady Victoria Salter Stanhope
The Cliffs, Seaward Road
St. Ives, Cornwall TR37PJ
United Kingdom
Dear Vick:
Here’s a handful of clippings I call the “I remember my childhood summer club.” It seems summertime in Mossy Creek has a magic effect on people. They never forget those lazy, flower-colored mountain days and watermelon-scented nights. The weather’s been cold lately, with more rain. All the leaves are off the trees now, and Mount Colchik looks awfully forlorn outside our windows. I decided my readers needed all the warm memories of childhood blessings I could give them. Enjoy this trio of “good times back then” stories.
Katie
Chapter 8
In Mossy Creek, you can’t judge a book by its cover.
The richest man in the county is just as likely to be buried in his overalls as a fine suit.
The Pulleybones
Chapter 8
My daddy was a Baptist when my mama fell in love with him, and Baptist he remained. And though she’d loved him enough to marry him, there’d never been any question of Mama forsaking her church for his. Every Sunday of her life she took her place beside her mother and her two sisters on the third-row pew of Mossy Creek’s Mt. Gilead Methodist Church. I went with her, of course. There’d never been any question about that either, not in Mama’s mind. As for what was in my daddy’s mind, he never said, but it was a condition of their marriage that any children would be Methodists.
Of course, from time to time some cousin or other from Daddy’s side of the family suggested I ought to attend their church every other week. “The way I see it,” they’d say, “it’s only fair to let the child try ’em both, then when she’s older, she can choose for herself.”