How to Wash a Cat

by Rebecca M. Hale

  Oscar had a ‘true believer’ theory about antiquing. Worthy shoppers, he felt, should appreciate the challenge of digging through his haystack piles in the hopes of finding a single, precious needle of antiquity. If they were not up for this task, he would grumpily direct them to one of the many well-lit, neatly arranged stores down the street.

  “Amateurs,” he would harrumph with derision at the end of this oft-repeated rant. To my untrained eye, the Green Vase showroom looked a lot more like a flea market than an antiques store, but I kept this opinion to myself.

  The Green Vase sat in a quiet corner of downtown San Francisco, just to the north of the financial district, in a neighborhood called Jackson Square. Tucked behind the city’s signature Transamerica Pyramid Building, this area was mostly forgotten by both local San Franciscans and the city’s crowds of tennis shoe tourists. Only a few pedestrians and the occasional delivery truck shadowed its sidewalks. A sophisticated hush blanketed the (mostly) high-end antiques stores that filled the shady, tree-lined streets.

  Amid this placid, sanitized atmosphere, it was hard to imagine what the scene had been like during the raucous days of the Gold Rush. But in the warm, comfortable kitchen above the Green Vase, Oscar’s stories brought the colorful characters from that time to life.

  According to Oscar, gold was first discovered in the Sierra foothills in the spring of 1848. As more and more nuggets began rolling into San Francisco, rumors of the California El Dorado circled the globe, escalating in scale on each re-telling. Reports of miraculous riches, sparkling in the riverbeds for anyone to scoop up, spurred many to hitch a ride west by any means possible.

  Before long, a desperate mass of humanity had inundated San Francisco. This eternally optimistic crowd had convinced themselves that they were but one day away from hitting the mother lode. While they waited for that eventuality, they spent their meager vials of painfully collected gold dust in this ‘anything goes’ corner of the city.

  Saloons were crammed into every spare foot of available space—in ramshackle buildings, lean-to shacks, and leaky canvas tents. These establishments offered patrons far more than a good stiff drink. Gambling, prostitution, and tawdry sideshows were the norm. Blatant criminal activity carried on unhindered by any police deterrent. The unwary were quick to lose their shirts, if not their lives.

  Nowadays, the historic Jackson Square neighborhood contains some of the only buildings to have survived the infamous 1906 earthquake and the subsequent firestorm that swept through the rest of the city. Three story red brick structures predominate, with many having undergone extensive renovations. Elaborate ornamental trimmings frame the windows, eaves, and gutters of several of the storefronts.

  Uncle Oscar couldn’t have cared less about such architectural details. He was far more interested in the people who had calculated, connived, and caroused their way through this corner of the city. He knew everything there was to know about everyone who had come to San Francisco during the Gold Rush.

  Oscar had read countless books on the topic, studied every historical map he could find, interviewed local historians, and sifted through the remains of endless estate sales. He was well known at the San Francisco library, where he had combed through their entire historical documents section. His knowledge on the Gold Rush period was encyclopedic.

  After dinner, Oscar would dig around downstairs in the store, bring up a recently acquired item, and entertain us with a lively narrative about its past and the people who might have used it.

  I am sure that the ghosts of the free-spirited characters from Oscar’s stories still wander other parts of the city, but they have long been expelled from Jackson Square.

  A collection of high-end art galleries and antiques stores have moved into this once derelict, now dressed up, neighborhood. Rows of pretentious storefronts line the streets, displaying a range of high-priced settees, credenzas, vases, maps, prints, engravings, pewter pieces, and historic trinkets.

  Uncle Oscar had blatantly ignored this trend. Plopped down in the middle of a row of these highbrow stores, the Green Vase could not have been more out of place. The bright and shiny storefronts on either side blushed with embarrassment at its faded awning, cracked glass, and crumbling brick exterior. Oscar had not cared much about appearances, his own or the store’s.

  While I found his cavalier spirit endearing, others did not—particularly his new next-door neighbor, Frank Napis. From the moment he moved in, Frank began filing complaints about the Green Vase with the city-appointed board responsible for ensuring the historical preservation of the buildings in the Jackson Square neighborhood.

  Oscar’s attorney usually represented him during these board meeting confrontations. He rarely attended.

  “I don’t like to give Frank the satisfaction,” Oscar would say, spitting out the name as if it tasted bitter and unpleasant.

  Even as Oscar finished preparing our dinner that last Saturday night, he was still fuming about the board meeting that had been held earlier that week.

  “What a bunch of nonsense,” he said bitterly, aggressively whipping a large, wooden spoon through a bowl of mashed potatoes. Oscar turned his attention to the sizzling sounds of the chicken simmering in his heavy, cast iron skillet. “This time, he’s complaining about my gutters.”

  Oscar’s cheeks began to flush. “Historical preservation! What do they think the gutters on this street looked like during the Gold Rush?”

  I ducked as Oscar sloshed more cooking oil into the pot, creating a shower of oil-splattering sparks. Oscar’s gutters were so beaten up and full of holes, they looked as if they had taken on artillery fire, but I nodded along supportively.

  “My gutters are fine, thank you very much,” Oscar said defensively. “They’ve been through a couple of rainy seasons, that’s all.”

  Oscar had been ranting about his neighbor for months, but I had only seen my uncle’s loathed antagonist once. Oscar had been out of town, and I had stopped by after work to pick up his mail.

  It was early evening and the afternoon’s bright sun was quickly fading to dusk. The streets of Jackson Square were quiet and abandoned, with most of the shopkeepers having gone home for the day. I stood in front of Oscar’s heavy, iron-framed door, grappling with its rusty latch. As I knelt down to get a better look at the lock, I sensed a movement on the edge of my periphery. My head turned to see a man closing up the store next door.

  He had a short, Napoleonic figure with a pot-bellied middle and stout, round legs. The downy, maple-brown fuzz of his thinning hair gave his head a hawk-like appearance—an effect that was further enhanced by the beaked nose that hooked out from his otherwise flat face and cast a shadow over his thin, deflated lips. Crouched on the sidewalk, the darkness closing in, I’d felt an uneasy squirming in the pit of my stomach as the man turned to stare at me.

  His thin lips curved upwards in acknowledgement, followed by a strange twitch that spasmed the pale skin hiding beneath his enormous nose. I managed a weak smile in return as the lock finally submitted to the bent and twisted spare key.

  I stepped inside the dark store and stooped over to pick up a couple of letters off of the floor where they had fallen through the mail slot. When I rose to leave, Napis’s short, stumpy legs were already carrying him down the darkened street. I watched him disappear from my vantage point inside the Green Vase before heading back outside.

  Oscar was still muttering biliously about the dispersions to his gutters, but his mood seemed to lighten as he loaded several steaming dishes onto the kitchen table, and we sat down to eat. I dove into the plate of fried chicken while the cats curled up at our feet, contentedly crunching on a mixture of tender, juicy chicken and rice. Below us, Oscar’s antiques collection glimmered in the faintly lit showroom.

  Unlike most of the Jackson Square antiques shops, which carried items from a wide range of time frames and geographic locations, the Green Vase’s collection was narrowly focused on pieces from the Gold Rush era. Within this specific genr
e, however, Uncle Oscar had accumulated far more than the typical antiques fare. Artifacts from almost every aspect of life were strewn throughout the store.

  For example, Oscar had an extensive collection of teeth. Successful miners had been anxious to show off the results of their labors, and gold teeth had been a favored vanity. Dentists had been called on to sacrifice countless healthy teeth in order to make space for gold replacements. Some unfortunate chops had been stripped of every last bit of enamel so that their owner could showcase a solid gold smile. Oscar’s display of gold teeth was complemented by a wide array of painful-looking dental instruments as well as a Gold Rush-era dental chair.

  San Franciscans had incorporated gold into every possible form of self-ornamentation: watches, cufflinks, pins, rings, seals, compasses, and chains. Gold-headed canes had been extremely popular (and useful to many given the backbreaking labor involved in mining). Gold inlays had been embedded into revolvers, knife handles, saddles, plates, dishes, and even a somewhat out of tune fiddle. The Green Vase had it all.

  The peaceful silence of the dinner table was broken by a loud clanging.

  “Blast!” Oscar jumped up and lumbered grouchily towards the phone.

  The cats were licking up the last drops of chicken broth from their tiny bowls on the floor. Isabella looked up politely; Rupert kept slurping.

  Oscar appeared to recognize the voice on the other end of the line, but I didn’t pick up much more than that from his side of the conversation.

  “Uh-huh.” There was a long pause. Then another, somewhat more interested, “Hmm, uh-huh.”

  The tip of Oscar’s index finger thoughtfully stroked the stubble on his chin. “Okay, I’ll see you first thing tomorrow.” And he hung up. He was still lost in thought when he rejoined us at the table.

  One of Oscar’s construction buddies, I figured, and helped myself to another drumstick.

  Part of Oscar’s success in the antiques world derived from his network of contacts within the local construction industry. Downtown San Francisco was undergoing a rapid building boom, and new high-rise office and residential projects were rapidly changing the skyline. To steady the structures through coming earthquakes, strict building codes mandated that the construction be fortified by metal pilings drilled deep into the earth. Each scalping pit provided the opportunity to unearth more Gold Rush-era artifacts.

  Prior to the discovery of gold in the inland hills, the Golden Gate—the name given to the natural opening of the bay long before the famous bridge was built—had sheltered only a sparsely inhabited cove called Yerba Buena. The name change to San Francisco happened around the same time as the first gold discovery, and the newly named city nearly burst at the seams with the subsequent mass migration.

  From an antiques perspective, San Francisco’s explosive and unscripted growth during the late 1800s had left a trove of underground treasures. Situated on the tip end of a peninsula, the city had quickly exhausted the nearby supply of naturally occurring land, and the booming metropolis began swiftly sprawling out into the bay on a foundation of hastily constructed landfill. As a result, several blocks of the downtown area were built up on land that had originally been under several feet of water.

  In the days before railroads spiderwebbed across the continent, there were only two ways to reach the gold fields of Northern California—stage or other cloven-hoofed transport across a hostile interior, or cramped, disease-ridden ocean passage. In the eyes of the gold-seeking masses, the quicker they got to California the better, no matter what the cost or discomfort. Desperately afraid that all of the gold would be carted away before they arrived, many of the early Gold Rush immigrants chose the faster ocean route and entered the city through its harbor.

  As each ship approached San Francisco, passengers and sailors alike abandoned the vessels and headed straight to the Sierra foothills. It was impossible to find anyone to unload the cargo, much less sail the ships on to their next destination. A backlog of rotting hulls blockaded the bay. Some were converted into hotels, storefronts, and other forms of storage or residence, all of which were in short supply. Many were dismantled and the pieces used for scrap. Others were simply sunk in their moorings, drifting down into a man-made sediment of ship hulls, sand scraped off of nearby dunes, and anything else the residents of this growing shoreline wished to get rid of.

  All of this debris formed the bedrock of the landfill that was now being excavated by modern day construction crews. As each new high-rise building sank its roots into the muck of this underground garbage dump, many long-discarded items were being disgorged. Most of these relics had been tossed into the mire as unwanted trash, but—every now and then—Oscar uncovered an item of far greater historical significance.

  I don’t know how Oscar developed his contacts in the construction industry, but he seemed to have cornered the market. As soon as the remains of a ship or any other item of interest emerged, Oscar would receive a discreet phone call. He would meet his contact at the construction site, usually after hours or early on a Sunday morning, peruse the findings, and pay cash for any items that interested him.

  Nothing in the phone call that night had seemed unusual. We had continued on with dinner in typical fashion, Uncle Oscar teasing Rupert about his insatiable appetite and ever-expanding waistline.

  At the end of the evening, I cleaned up the kitchen the best I could. Oscar’s living quarters were not any more organized than the store downstairs. I turned around from the sink to see Oscar cradling a well-fed Rupert in his arms.

  Rupert was in a state of bliss. His eyes were closed and his legs hung limply in the air as Oscar lightly rubbed his stuffed stomach.

  “I can leave that one here with you, you know,” I teased.

  “Hrmph,” Oscar grumped unconvincingly, gently rolling Rupert into my arms. “Filthy creature needs a bath.”

  I carried the snoozing Rupert down the stairs, carefully sliding around the shipping crate as Isabella trotted behind us. After securing the cats in their carriers for the trip home, I turned to hug my uncle goodbye.

  “See you next week?” I asked.

  “Yup. I’ll see you then,” he replied.

  I remember waving to him after I loaded the cats into the car and started the engine. He stood on the sidewalk, a faint breeze picking up a couple of strands of the gray hair on his forehead. I thought he looked a little tired, but not noticeably so. He always seemed so tough, so durable.

  I guess I just somehow believed that he would go on forever.

  Chapter 2

  THE NEXT MORNING, he was gone.

  Oscar must have been heading out the door for his Sunday morning appointment when it happened. One of his neighbors walked by and saw the body sprawled on the floor just inside the Green Vase. The paramedics broke in, but they were unable to resuscitate him. The police found my number on Oscar’s refrigerator and called me late Sunday night.

  By Monday afternoon, the coroner had conducted a preliminary autopsy to determine the cause of death.

  “Looks like he had a stroke,” the voice crackled over the phone line. I swallowed silently on the other end, still choking on the flood of emotions brought on by Oscar’s sudden departure.

  “Did he—,” I began my question, but couldn’t finish it.

  “It was probably over in a couple of minutes,” the voice said in a soothing tone. “I don’t think he suffered much.”

  I spent the next couple of days marching through a numbing parade of end of life formalities. Trudging into the funeral service at the end of the week, I was emotionally drained and physically exhausted. I stared woodenly into the casket at my uncle’s waxen face; then watched silently as they lowered him into the ground.

  I fled the cemetery as soon as the service was over and caught a bus to the city. I sat in my seat like a stone, staring at the floor, numbly listening to the creaking frame and grinding gears as the bus wound its way down into the financial district where I was scheduled to meet Oscar’s lawyer
for the reading of his will.

  I drug myself up the polished front steps of a high-rise office building and squeezed into a crowded elevator. My empty stomach lurched as the stifling cube zoomed skyward, finally pausing to hover at the 39th floor. My head woozing, I stepped gratefully out into the refrigerated air of an expansive lobby. A wall of windows spanned the left side of the room, framing an opulent view of the bay.

  The receptionist took my name and motioned me towards a seating area, but I was drawn to the view. Looking out, I could see down past the sparkling surface of the water into the brooding, blue depths below.

  I was positioned near the top of a building that sat right on the water’s edge, at the farthest limit of the city’s precarious crawl out into the bay. A row of piers lined the opposite side of the street. Beyond them, the bed of the bay dropped off precipitously, plunging down into deep shipping lanes.

  The windowpanes were so transparent—so clear—they created a false sense of oneness with the bay below. The flip-flopping in my stomach subsided as I placed my right hand against the window, lightly touching its cool, flat surface. I could sense the twisting currents powerfully churning through the convolutions of the bay’s underwater geography. The lunar forces puppeteering those swirling tides hooked into the prickling tips of my fingers, suctioning them against the glass. For a moment, the weariness inside me evaporated.

  A disapproving cough summoned me back to the front desk. The receptionist led me across an expanse of thick, sound-smothering carpet and into a maze of corridors, cubicles, and coffee stations. Several minutes later, we arrived at the prestigious office of Miranda C. Richards, Esquire.

  The receptionist hesitated outside the open door, but appeared to receive a signal and ushered me forward. I stepped nervously inside the office where Oscar’s attorney paced in front of another wall of equally impressive windows.