“There isn’t enough money anywhere. But aren’t there regulations about the number of cats that one person can own?”
“You own these?” she asked.
“Didn’t you just tell me that they’re my problem? Didn’t you say they have to stay on my property?”
“Hmmm,” she said. “I see what you mean. But then the cats would all have to be put down.”
“I thought that’s what you did anyway,” he said.
“Oh, no,” and then she started into another endless monologue about feral cats. Because he wanted her on his side, he didn’t interrupt. Instead, he thumbed through the want ads in the Oregonian.
When she finally finished, he said, “I need to get them off the property.”
She was silent for a long moment, and he could feel the disappointment echo through the line. He wasn’t sure why he cared. Normally he bulldozed past other people’s emotions. But this time, he recognized his own hesitation, and he wondered if he was being gentler than usual because he was fragile himself.
“Before we invoke that state law, which might get you fined and maybe even arrested—” she suddenly sounded like arresting him was a good choice— “let me put you in contact with a local woman who is starting a no-kill shelter. Maybe she can help you.”
He couldn’t imagine these wild creatures being sheltered, but he figured he would go through the hoops.
What else did he have to do? And if he got arrested for having too many cats, so be it. It would give him a few days to examine the local jail and pretend he had moved somewhere else.
“Fine,” he said. “What’s this woman’s name?”
“I’ll call her,” the supervisor said. “She’s skittish with people. If she wants to come, she’ll come. If not, you’ll see an officer in a day or two.”
A day or two. The wheels of government worked slowly no matter where he was. He tried not to sigh, thanked the supervisor for her time, and hung up, disappointed that his great foray into the bastion that was Animal Control had only taken an hour.
Maybe he would start the afternoon papers early and go through all of his languages. He’d have to struggle with Arabic—it was his newest language and his poorest—and he hadn’t tried reading Serbian in almost a decade, so he’d see if his skills had atrophied.
But it would be good to revisit old ties. He was supposed to be writing a memoir, after all; that was his official, nonmedical excuse for hibernating.
He hadn’t started. But now, after two weeks of his own company, without deadlines or explosions to run toward or meetings to set up with the general staff, he needed something to occupy his mind.
Something besides cats and exploding cameramen and shrapnel, raining like hot flame all around him.
* * *
Two days later he had made his own nest in what had once been the library. He had no idea where all the books had gone; his parents had probably sold them along with the furniture when his grandparents died.
He hadn’t come home for that funeral. His grandparents had had the misfortune to get hit by a tanker truck on the same day as the Beirut barracks bombing that killed all those marines. He hadn’t even been in his quarters for his parents’ frantic intercontinental phone calls. When he heard the news, nearly a week after it happened, he flashed on his grandparents’ bodies burned beyond recognition like the men he’d seen around the compound, and he didn’t even feel guilt.
People died. The living went on. That was the way of things.
He felt guilt now. He had loved his grandparents, and he had loved this library. Maybe he would spend the year refilling it with books. Or maybe a half year, so that he could enjoy them.
He finally decided to go into town—his first foray since he had discovered that these days all a man needed was an internet account and a credit card to make grocery stores deliver.
Feeling decadent and a little rich (he never really spent his pay in all the years he’d gone from country to country), he bought himself two computers—a desktop model, which he hadn’t had since laptops were introduced, and a brand new lightweight laptop that made the battered ones that had gotten him through two separate war zones feel like anvils.
He was just driving back when he saw her standing in his driveway, her arms stretched out as if she were giving a benediction to the dozens of cats that surrounded her.
When the cats realized his vehicle was coming through the gate, they scattered. She whirled—and he got a momentary impression of an angry goddess, creating her own tempest. Then her arms dropped, and she tilted her head, looking like an ordinary and somewhat plain American woman.
He got out of the gas hog that Roxy had leased for him and felt a bit of embarrassment. He had planned to get something that didn’t guzzle as much fuel— after all, he’d seen what the greed for oil could do— but he hadn’t gotten around to that either.
And he hadn’t thought of it, not in all the times he’d driven the thing, until this woman, whom he’d never met, stared at him as if she owned the property.
“I take it you’re Joshua Clemon?” She had a bit of an accent that he couldn’t quite place, which was odd for him, since accents were his specialty. More than his specialty: They were necessary in his trade.
“And you’re the woman with the no-kill shelter,” he said.
She laughed, a sound like the bells from a French cathedral. “I am the woman who dreams of a no-kill shelter. Right now, I have a twenty-acre ranch just outside of town where I pretend that the animals I take in are safe.”
“So you can’t help me.” He opened the back of the gas hog and removed both computers, marveling that he could carry the boxes as if they were briefcases.
“I didn’t say that.” She watched him, hands on her hips. She probably saw him as a rich, uncaring American.
A man who bought expensive toys and had a dilapidated mansion to fix up because he had nothing better to do with his time.
“Come on in,” he said, nodding toward the front door.
She glanced at the gate, then at the woods beyond, where the cats had disappeared. He sensed a reluctance.
“We can talk out here if that makes you more comfortable.”
“No,” she said, as if she just remembered how to be polite. “It is better if we go inside.”
Better for whom he didn’t know, and if he had been on a story, he would have asked. But this woman was not in some war-torn country. Each remark she made did not have to be pursued and examined as if it were a puzzle to be solved.
He pushed open the door he had forgotten to lock and stepped into the hallway. His grandmother used to keep the wood floors shining, the occasional table beside the door spotless, and the entire place smelling of lemon polish. Now the floors were scuffed and covered with dirt, there were no occasional tables, and the entire place smelled faintly of cat.
He almost led the woman to the formal living room, where his grandmother had presided over her home, but the living room hadn’t worn its formal dress for twenty years. Old habits, he was amused to note, died hard.
Instead, he went to the library. It at least had been cleaned.
“I still have some work here,” he said.
“It’s nice to see someone rebuilding the place,” she said. “It used to be so loved.”
“You knew my grandparents?” he asked.
“No, but I have seen photographs.” She extended her hand. “I am Galiana, by the way.”
He took it. It was work-hardened, the first he’d encountered in this country.
“Galiana with no last name?” he asked.
She smiled. “It’s all consonants. People here just call me Galiana.”
He nodded, not satisfied. But he would find out in his own way, in his own time. He set the computers beside his new desk, grabbed a wooden chair and slid it toward her. Then he sat on a step of his work ladder.
“You’ve seen my problem,” he said. “What do you think?”
“That the cats aren’t a problem.” She sat
with her back straight, hands folded in her lap.
“What do you mean, not a problem? There’s a thousand of them.”
“Maybe a hundred, tops,” she said, “and this is their home. They’ve lived here for generations. To them, you’re the interloper.”
She clearly didn’t understand the scope of the problem.
He’d met a lot of these well-meaning do-gooders in his travels. They were naïve and energetic and they had a vision, which often didn’t correspond with reality.
“They haven’t been here for generations,” he said.
“There were no feral cats on the property when my grandparents were alive.”
She blinked, a surprised look. It was appealing. Different, maybe, from anything he’d seen before. She wasn’t conventionally pretty. Her features were pleasant, her face one that dozens of women had at her age—pale skin, blue eyes, rounded cheeks made rounder by the unflattering cut of her brown hair.
Yet there was something about her . . .
“I meant cat generations,” she said after a moment.
“How long has this place been empty? Twenty years, right? For feral cats, that can be twenty generations. Think in terms of a hundred of your years. That’s a long time.”
“So you’re saying I should just let them live here?”
He rolled his eyes. “Is this that politically correct thing I’ve been hearing about from overseas? Because if it is, it’s gone to ridiculous lengths. They’re just cats. If we were in Southeast Asia, I’d be perfectly justified if I killed one every day and ate it.”
Spots of color appeared on her face.
“I thought you wanted to save them,” she said in a small voice.
“I want them off the property. The supervisor at Animal Control wanted to save them.”
“Oh.” She studied her folded hands for a moment.
Then she stood. “I misunderstood.”
He was sorry he had offended her. He had no social skills any more, not for real people. Only for people he was using to get a story or people he was interrogating for information. People he’d encounter a few times and then abandon, as he abandoned cities.
“Can you get them off the property?” he asked.
“I was hoping that they could stay,” she said. “The woods are large. I was thinking maybe we could find a way to keep them safe, feed them, and let them live their natural lives.”
So she wanted to use his property as her no-kill sanctuary. Not a shelter at all, but some kind of farm or ranch or something. “And have kittens every year? I’m already overrun.”
“We’d fix them, of course,” she said.
“And then what? They’d invite all their little friends, and suddenly I’m living in cat heaven. This is my grandparents’ home. I’ve already neglected it too long. I need to fix it up, not make it a palace for strays.”
She smoothed her hands along her jeans. He’d seen women who wore skirts do that, but he’d always thought it was to smooth wrinkles. Jeans didn’t wrinkle.
“I can guarantee that they won’t bother you. You’ll never see them,” she said.
“Or smell them? Or deal with their poop and their destructiveness? They’ve broken almost everything in the courtyard.”
“I think I can broker some kind of truce, yes,” she said.
Truce? Is that what he wanted? A truce? How many truces had he seen over the years? Every single one of them had failed.
“You make it sound like I’m at war with the cats,” he said.
“Aren’t you?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “All I want is for them to leave my land.”
“It’s their ancestral homeland,” she said.
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” he said. “It’s mine too.”
She shrugged and extended her hands. “See? Truce is the only answer.”
“They’re cats,” he snapped. “Cats can’t own property. They are property, and I want them gone.”
“What if I can make them disappear?” she said.
“Then do it,” he said, sorry he’d ever thought she was attractive. Sorry he still thought she was attractive, even now.
“Are you hiring me?” she asked.
“If you can guarantee that none of those creatures will ever bother me again,” he said.
“I can do that,” she said softly, although her tone seemed a bit doubtful. “I’m sure I can do that.”
That night, he had dinner with Roxy because he sure as hell didn’t want to stay home. After Galiana left, the cats returned to the courtyard and had a virtual orgy. Or maybe an actual one. He couldn’t tell, and he certainly didn’t want to investigate.
Roxy was one of his oldest friends. They went to summer Bible school together as children, and then when they were old enough to realize that coloring cardboard cutouts of Jesus wasn’t fun, they ditched Bible school together.
He thought he loved her when he was twelve. When he was thirteen, he realized she was too much woman for him. When he went to college, her letters kept him steady. When he went overseas, he realized just how provincial her world was.
She married twice, both local men, both terrible conversationalists. She visited him in Paris once—not as a sexual thing (after puberty, there was nothing sexual between them, not even a thread of attraction)—but because she wanted to escape her humdrum life.
Everything frightened her, from the double-decker tourist buses (giving guided tours in English, German, and French) to the Louvre (It’s so big, she said. How can you see it all? That’s the point, he said, You can’t.) to the restaurants with their deliberately slow service and complicated French cuisine (what is a cassoulet? she asked. A casserole sort of, he said. But what’s in it? she asked. Whatever the chef wants to put in it, he said.).
She left, deciding that foreign countries were for adventurous people like him, and he went to Somalia because Paris had been too civilized. It had always been too civilized, just as Oregon was too provincial.
Whenever something happened in these places, it was too structured. Even the chaos had order—and what fun was that?
“I heard you met Galiana,” Roxy said, pushing her chair away from the table. They were in a local Italian place that had surprisingly good cuisine. The chef had studied in Rome, and it showed in the lightness of the sauces and the delicacy of the spices.
The restaurant itself wasn’t light or delicate. It was dark, paneled, and discreet. He liked it for that. He didn’t feel as exposed as he usually did in American restaurants.
“How did you hear that?” he asked.
“Because I’ve known her since your mother died. She was a nurse in the ICU. Don’t you remember?”
He remembered almost nothing of his mother’s death and funeral. He had flown in from Kuwait, eyes still stinging from the burning oil fields, and sat in the fluorescent lights staring at a woman who looked just like his great-grandmother. Nothing of his mother remained.
He had been too late, and part of him had spent those last few days wondering if it had been on purpose.
“I don’t recall,” he said, but he had a sudden flash of a memory: the doctor introducing a “healer” who could ease his mother’s pain.
“Just as well,” Roxy said. “Galiana wasn’t at her best in those days.”
And she was at her best now? Psychically in tune with stray cats? He was glad he hadn’t met her then.
Although he should have remembered a woman with such an appealing presence. He usually did.
“Well,” he said, “she’s pretty strange.”
Roxy laughed. “And you’re not?”
Not among his peers, he wasn’t. He was just like they were, tough and broken and relentless. Sometimes he forgot that the whole world wasn’t that way.
“I figure you two had a lot in common.” Roxy grabbed a toothpick and shoved it between her teeth as a substitute cigarette. “That’s why I kept trying to set you up.”
It all clicked into place now. The dinners th
at Roxy staged during his first week home, the ones he was too busy to attend, weren’t just because she worried that he wasn’t going to eat well. They were also designed to take some of the pressure off their friendship.
“So she knows all about me,” he said.
“Not all.” Roxy waved a hand for the waitress, then pointed at her coffee cup. “But she knows you can be a prick.”
“Can be,” he repeated. “Hell, I was a total ass this afternoon.”
“She mentioned that too,” Roxy said, “and wondered why I even thought you two would be suited.”
“Why did you?” he asked.
She shrugged a single shoulder. “You both have the same look,” she said. “Like you want to be somewhere else.”
* * *
That night he did want to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Someplace where cats didn’t scream their pleasure at the half-moon.
He had fixed the floodlights outside, but the light didn’t stop them. Instead, they copulated as if they were the floor show at some expensive Italian villa.
Didn’t mating season end eventually? Was there a period when kittens got born and kittens got raised and the adults became serious and quiet?
At one AM, he gave up on sleep for a second night and went to his newly set up computer. The vast and mysterious Internet informed him that female cats went in and out of heat often, especially if the cats were well fed or in a warm climate. They also could go into heat shortly after giving birth to kittens. Males prowled for a sexually willing female their entire lives, copulated with her, and then got their faces slapped for the effort.
By three-thirty, the yowling died down, and he finally dozed off only to wake up at seven as the orgy chorus started all over again.
He refused to get earplugs. He hadn’t needed them during the bombings in all the various war zones he visited. He wasn’t about to get them now.
But in all those war zones, he’d slept when he was exhausted, not when he was supposed to. He used to say that a man could sleep through anything.
Obviously, the cats were proving him wrong.
* * *
He was rereading the Oregonian, obsessing that he wasn’t in the Middle East during this latest crisis, when a car pulled in front of his fence. He was outside by the time the gate opened.
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