Catch as Cat Can

by Rita Mae Brown

  “I didn't sleep all day. That horrid blue jay perched on the windowsill. He called me a fat gray sow, a sea cow, a ponderous pachyderm. I'll kill him!”

  Mrs. Murphy walked back from the door, jumped onto the kitchen counter, trotting to the window over the sink. “I can't believe she left me! We worked today. We deserve a party.”

  “We were invited to Aunt Tally's tea party. Of course, that didn't turn out so good, did it?” Tucker thoughtfully added.

  “That's not the point.” Mrs. Murphy batted at the windowpane.

  Pewter jumped up on the counter, too. She headed for the large bowl of crunchies, stuck her head in, and munched away.

  “Noisy eater.” Tucker giggled.

  “Tailless wonder.” Pewter flicked a nugget on the floor for the dog. “I've endured enough insult for one day.”

  “It's a dumb time to coon hunt.” Murphy hoped to find a way to make her loss less. She adored any form of hunting, even if only to watch from the bed of the pickup. After all, she was the best hunter in central Virginia, maybe all of Virginia.

  Put out as she was, she should have been grateful to be left behind.

  The sodden ground sucked the boots right off the hunters' feet. The bushes and branches, loaded with droplets, soaked each person who brushed by. Durant Creek, a tributary of Beaver Creek, roared like a diesel dump truck on full throttle.

  Harry, hardened by outdoor life, didn't much mind. BoomBoom was a surprising trouper. Thomas bravely soldiered on in his expensive Holland and Holland outfit. Diego wore what Harry told him. He had bought a pair of Red Wing work boots after leaving the former ambassador to Great Britain and topped his outfit off with a pair of old jeans and a canvas shirt. Thomas thought Diego's boots were too country and not English enough. He regretted it now, though, as he tried to keep up in his green wellies, a wonderful high rubber boot for country chores but not for running behind hounds. Thomas was hard put to keep up, his flashlight bobbing as he labored. Boom stayed back with him, a sacrifice for her since she liked being up front.

  Jack's hounds treed two coons in rapid succession. He called them off, walked about a quarter of a mile, and set them to work again. Joyce, his wife, walked along, too.

  Fair enjoyed good hound work and was pleased to see shiny coats on the hounds. He wanted to stay behind Harry and Diego but forced himself to run ahead of them.

  Jim Sanburne brought up the rear along with Don Clatterbuck, both men moving at a leisurely pace, happy to listen to the music.

  Harry held the flashlight as she and Diego ran behind Fair.

  “They're on another one. Picked him up by the creek,” Harry said, but the words were no sooner out of her mouth than a rumble overhead surprised her.

  Low clouds moving fast presaged another storm. She'd felt the temperature drop but paid little attention to it. The cloudy skies held the scent down; the falling temperature, now in the high forties, made for a glorious night of hunting about to be cut short.

  A flash over the creek side stopped everyone in their tracks.

  “Folks, I got to pick up. We don't want to be out here.” Jack put his grandfather's huge cow horn to his lips, blowing in his hounds.

  Joyce peered up at the sky. “Sure hope it's not like last night.”

  As the people turned to head back to their trucks the thunder moved closer and a light splattering of rain began.

  Impulsively, Diego reached for Harry's hand, drawing her to him, and kissed her. She kissed him back, then they broke off, racing toward the trucks, laughing.

  A glitter caught Harry's eye. “Hold up.”

  The rain fell steadier now but she moved to the left, off the path. Diego followed her. She knelt down, picking up the Mercedes star and a snapped chain. “The hubcap thief.”

  “Odd.” Diego studied the object.

  “He wore it around his neck.” A bone-rattling clap of thunder convinced her to hasten back to the truck. Running, she pocketed the hood ornament. By the time she and Diego reached their safe haven they were drenched and shivering.

  They'd parked at the end of a gravel road northeast of Crozet, the boundary between Booty Mawyer's farm and that of Marcus Durant. Durant, out of town this weekend, was an avid coon, fox, and rabbit hunter. He'd hunt just about anything. He'd built a twenty-foot-by-sixteen-foot shack. With a tin roof, a wood-burning stove, and two sets of bunk beds by the walls, he could roll in and sleep if his hounds kept running late into the night. A generous man, he shared his shack with his buddies, so long as everybody cleaned up.

  Fair, using well-cured wood stacked outside under a protective overhang, started up a fire. Soon the little group was thawing out, passing the jug, and telling tales in the time-honored tradition of night hunters.

  Thomas and BoomBoom sat next to one another on the edge of a bunk bed, as did Jack and Joyce. The others sat on upturned milk crates and wooden chairs in front of the stove.

  Jim leaned back, putting his cold, wet feet in front of the stove. Everyone peeled off their shoes, boots, socks, hoping they'd dry before they had to put them back on.

  “Ever tell you about the first time I coon hunted with Mim?” Jim cast his eyes around the room. “Guess not. Well, I'd come back from Korea in one piece and I hadn't been home three days when I spied Mim coming out of Crozet National Bank arguing with Aunt Tally. I stopped my truck, hopped out, took off my hat to the ladies, and asked Mim out then and there. Heard her family broke off the romance with another fellow because he wasn't high-class enough. Hell, he was more suitable than I but faint heart ne'er won fair lady and to hell with suitability. Aunt Tally looked me over like I was a horse to buy. Well, Mim said yes. So Tally says, ‘Where you taking her?'

  “‘Coon hunting,' says I. ‘See that's what you hunt, young man.'” He laughed, imitating Tally's voice. “A fine night. Crisp, you could smell the leaves turning. Marcus's father, Lucius, had a good pack of hounds, turned 'em loose, and what a hunt.

  “Mim was a speedy little slip of a girl. She kept right up and the next thing we heard was screaming and cussing. Lord o'mighty. The hounds ran right up on Arnold Berryman, covering Ellie McIntire.

  “She was screaming. He held up his coat over her. Scared the hell out of the hounds. I thought that would be my last date with Mim.

  “She enjoyed herself so much she asked when we could do it again.” He slapped his thigh and laughed, the others laughing with him.

  “Ellie McIntire.” BoomBoom shook her head, remembering the spinster librarian who had struck terror in their hearts when they were children.

  “Thank you,” Thomas said as he received the jug from Fair. After a long draft he handed it to BoomBoom.

  “Thomas, how do you like our country water?” Jack, who didn't drink, asked.

  “Potent and smooth,” the older man replied.

  “Thomas, tell them how your grandfather brought the telephone to Montevideo.” BoomBoom slipped her arm through his, leaning into him.

  “Oh . . .”

  “Tell,” the others chimed in.

  “My grandfather saw the telephone in London. He was our ambassador there before World War One. He formed a company and started the first telephone service in our country. Then my father, not to be outdone, founded the first television station. I remember when I was a boy being very disappointed to find out that Jojo, the clown on the children's show, emitted the distinct aroma of gin.” They all laughed.

  “Tell them what you did.”

  “My dear,” he demurred.

  “Thomas brought satellite technology to their communications company.”

  “BoomBoom, it was the logical progression. That didn't take the intelligence or courage of Grandfather or Father. Or the determination of my mother, who took over the television business. She's slowed down a bit by heart trouble but really, she's smarter than I am.”

  “The Steinmetzes are quick to see the future and profit,” Diego said admiringly. “The Aybars are running cattle instead of satellites.” He laughed.


  “Nothing wrong with running cattle,” Jim said. “You come on over and look at my Herefords.”

  “Hunting down your way?” Jack politely asked.

  “Yes, and fishing. If you like deep-sea fishing, you must come down,” Thomas said, a hint of pride in his voice.

  “Sounds like machine-gun fire.” Joyce looked up at the tin roof as the rain intensified.

  The four hounds thought so, too, as they edged closer to their humans.

  “You know, I'd like to come on down and go fishing.” Jim smiled at Thomas. “Mim and I have never been to Uruguay. Is there something we could bring . . . like jeans? When you visit Russia you bring jeans. At least we used to in the seventies. People would pay a lot of money for jeans from the United States.”

  “Not a thing,” Thomas replied. “We'll take care of everything.”

  “Some things cost three times as much and some things are extremely inexpensive,” Diego added. “Now, we don't have foxhounds or coonhounds. Those would fetch a high price.”

  “They're my babies.” Joyce laughed.

  “Almost forgot.” Harry pulled out the Mercedes star.

  “Where's the car?” BoomBoom laughed.

  “That's the only part I could afford.” She laughed, too. “Actually, I found this on the path back a ways. When Tracy brought Wesley Partlow back to the house at Mim's party, he wore a star like this around his neck.”

  “Anyone report one missing?” Fair logically asked.

  “Not that I know of,” Jim answered, “but many of our guests were feeling no pain.”

  They all laughed.

  “It can cost two hundred and ninety dollars to replace that star,” Thomas said. “Hang on to it.” He stopped a moment. “Had to replace one once.”

  Harry didn't get home until one in the morning. She headed straight for bed, missing the shredded needlepoint pillow in the living room, compliments of Mrs. Murphy.

  18

  A series of thunderstorms crackled across Crozet for twenty-four hours. A few minutes of calm would ensue, and occasionally the skies lightened, but within a half hour clouds darkened again, the rains came down, and the roar of deep thunder reverberated throughout the mountains and valleys.

  Harry sorted mail amid peals of thunder. Tucker crouched under the small table in the back of the post office. Mrs. Murphy sat on the dividing counter between the public side of the room and the working side. The broad and smooth old wooden counter with a flip-up section so the postmistress could walk in and out had seen generations of Crozetians call for their mail.

  The advent of the railroad, built by the engineering genius of the New World, Claudius Crozet, brought the mail and news faster to the hamlet named for him. Residents no longer waited for the stage. They could stand at the station to watch the mail sacks being tossed off the train. The mail from Crozet would be picked up as it hung from a yardarm, the sack hooked so it could be grabbed from the moving train. Trains had cars outfitted as post stations and often money would be in the post station car, the postal employee taking the precaution of wearing a pistol.

  The town had built its latest post office at the turn of the nineteenth century, altering it only to make more room for parking, since cars take up more room than horses. The pleasant structure had been rewired three more times in one hundred years, the last rewiring occurring in 1998. Small though the station was, it was hooked into the national postal computer system. Miranda resisted using the computer. Harry, much younger, mastered it rapidly. Wisely, she never instructed Miranda in its use. She waited for Miranda to ask—which, finally, she did.

  Technology, so beguiling in its promises, often only delivers a new set of problems. The postal computers coughed, sputtered, and took to bed quite often with virus infections. While they could weigh packages, give an instant answer on postage at home and abroad, anyone handy with a scale, an instrument thousands of years old, could give the information in about the same amount of time. And wonderful though the blinking screen may have been, letters still needed to be hand-canceled at times, postage-due markings in maroon ink required human hands, and the process of sorting the mail once it arrived at the local postal offices was done the way it had always been done—one letter at a time.

  In short, the tasks of the postal worker had changed little over the last century. And the advent of the twenty-first century still hadn't altered those tasks.

  Harry owned a computer from which she sent e-mail or occasionally logged on to the Internet to look up something. She spent an evening once reading about Hereford cattle on the Internet. Then she switched to the Angus site and compared notes. But mostly she thought the information revolution was more hype than reality.

  And nothing could substitute for a love letter. The sensuality of the paper, the color, the ink, the contents, the privacy of it, were inviolate and perfect.

  As she sorted that Monday's mail she thought about writing Diego a letter. Maybe she'd mention their kiss in the rain or how wonderful it was to dance with him on a cool spring night. Then again she could talk about grass crops. She hummed to herself as Miranda carefully pulled the striped dish towel off the orange-glazed cinnamon buns she brought to work. The fragrance of Miranda's best creation mingled with the pot of coffee brewing in the back.

  “Heaven.”

  Miranda glanced at the old railroad wall clock. “Heaven at seven-thirty in the morning.” A clap of thunder made her laugh. “I don't remember so many storms. One after the other. I'll get over there in a minute to help you. Oh, tea?”

  “Yes, thanks. Don't rush. There's not that much mail, which is surprising. Enjoy the lull. The summer postcards will fire up soon enough. Before that we'll have the graduation notices. Never ends.” She sorted postcards as though shuffling playing cards.

  Miranda brought her tea. She herself poured a bracing cup of coffee. Miranda had let Mim talk her into joining a coffee club, so each month she received another type of pricey coffee from France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland. This delicious coffee was from a famous café in Vienna.

  A light rap on the door, next to the animal door, brought forth a “come in” from both women.

  “Hi.” Susan quickly stepped in, for the rain had intensified. “Have you ever?”

  “No,” they said in unison again.

  “What are you two, a duet?” Susan laughed, shaking the raindrops from her auburn hair, cut in a sleek pageboy.

  “Hogendobber and Haristeen. Has a ring to it. How about H and H?” Harry laughed.

  “That sounds like a candy.” Susan breathed in the moist aroma.

  “Vienna.” Miranda poured her a cup.

  “You'll be our expert. Next thing we know, Miranda, you'll open one of those upscale coffee shops where a cup costs three bucks.”

  “It is outrageous but a good cup of coffee is special, especially that first cup.” A louder boom lifted all eyes to heaven. Miranda cast hers down first. “Oh, Tucker, poor baby, it's all right.” She knelt down to pet the shivering corgi.

  Pewter, deep in the mail cart, said in a high-pitched voice, “I don't like it either.”

  Harry walked over to give love to the rotund gray kitty.

  “Chicken,” Mrs. Murphy tersely criticized them.

  “Hateful bitch,” Pewter promptly replied.

  “I'm glad I don't know what they're saying.” Harry laughed. “Hey, we all went coon hunting last night with Jack and Joyce Ragland. Got soaked. Hunted until the storm really hit, but it was a great night anyway. The voices on those Ragland hounds are something special. Goose bumps. I didn't get home until one this morning.”

  “You didn't shoot any, did you?” Miranda hated the thought of shooting animals.

  “No.”

  “Well, while you were coon hunting, I took my two cherubs to see their grandparents. Danny”—Susan mentioned her son—“wanted to see the new Audi sports car that Mamaw bought for herself. He told her she looked like a teenager in her TT. I think that's what it's called.
Anyway, it's a fabulous design and drives nicely. There's my mother, seventy-one, driving a high-tech sports car. I love it! What'd you do, Miranda?” Susan asked.

  “Sewed curtains for Tracy's apartment. He fixed my washing machine. Romantic. Actually, it was. We'd spent the weekend doing all the Dogwood Festival things. It was kind of nice to be home doing chores. You girls will have to see his apartment, right over the old pharmacy. He's got the entire floor for three fifty a month. It needs a lot of work but Eddie Griswald couldn't give it away. Everyone in Crozet wants their own house. Tracy's very happy for now.”

  “I can paint,” Harry offered.

  “He'd like that.”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Look what I found last night.” Harry walked over to her bag, an old Danish schoolbag, worn through in spots. She fished around in the bottom, retrieving the Mercedes star.

  Susan took it from her. “Remember there was a fad in the eighties and early nineties? City kids would snap these off and wear them.”

  “Before my time,” Harry joked.

  “Oh, puh-lease.” Susan's eyebrow shot upward as she dragged out the syllables.

  “Where'd you find it?” Susan asked.

  “Near Durant Creek, where we were hunting.”

  “That's what that boy had around his neck.” Miranda reached for her first and only orange-glazed cinnamon bun, an act of discipline. Last year she would have had three eaten by this time but she'd cut back dramatically on sweets and had lost over thirty-five pounds in the past year. She could have worn her high-school clothes if she'd kept them.

  “It might not be his,” Susan volunteered. “Then again, how many disembodied Mercedes stars are there?”

  “Here comes another one,” Mrs. Murphy warned Tucker and Pewter as a bright flash of lightning presaged a mighty rumble.

  “So,” Susan's voice rose merrily, “when do you see Diego again?”

  “Uh—I don't know. If not next weekend maybe the weekend after. I like him.”

  “That's obvious.” Susan smiled. “And he likes you.”

  “Seems to.”

  “What man wouldn't?” Miranda thought of Harry as her own daughter in ways.