Stinson stroked her. “She’s all bones,” he said, looking over at Michael.
Michael didn’t say anything, but, after a moment, he stood up.
“Whaddaya doing?”
“Going to the store for some cat food.”
Stinson watched him walk off. It was the first time in a long while that Michael had spent his last few dollars on something other than booze.
Michael and Stinson had first run into each other in a doorway in Santa Barbara in the spring of that year and were drawn together by their rambling spirit, dry sense of humor, and love of animals. Stinson had done four years in the navy before getting kicked out for smoking pot. Just prior to moving to Portland, he had been a mailman in Japan—he still had his Japanese driver’s license.
Fifteen minutes later, Michael came back with a pint of milk and a can of Meow Mix. The little cat woke up and, when she saw the food, opened her mouth and let out a faint, hungry squeak. Michael lifted her off Stinson’s lap and set her on the sidewalk. He opened the can, spilled the mushy contents into an empty burger container, and put it in front of her. She meowed weakly and nibbled at the food, but within seconds, she was gulping it down in giant bites. Michael poured the milk into a plastic lid he found on the ground and she lapped that up quickly, too.
Both men sat quietly, watching the cat. After she ate, she nuzzled each of them and kneaded their chests to show how grateful she was. She snuggled back into Stinson’s lap, purring loudly. Then she shifted to Michael’s lap, purred some more, and fell back asleep.
“That cut on her cheek looks pretty nasty,” Michael said, looking closely at her war wound.
He dug into his backpack without waking the cat and took out a stack of napkins from Taco Bell and a mini first-aid kit. One of his friends had bought the kit for him because Michael was always scraping himself up from stumbling over after drinking. He carefully cleaned the red cut across the cat’s face and then cleaned mites out of her ears with a little iodine. The cat didn’t even flinch, barely stirring from her sleep. She seemed to know what he was doing.
He rummaged through his bag again and dug out some evening primrose oil, which another friend had given him to heal the eczema on his arms. He never used it himself but thought it could help the cat’s injury.
“It’s not too deep,” he said, dabbing a bit of the oil on her torn cheek. “She was probably attacked by another cat. Or at least I hope it was a cat.”
Handing her over to Stinson, Michael unrolled his ratty sleeping bag on a pad of cardboard and slid wearily inside. He’d been sleeping on the hard ground for years—the only way to make it comfortable was to get wasted, but he had drunk all the Sidewalk Slam and just spent his bedtime booze money on cat food.
The cat had woken up as the men prepared to sleep. After Michael was settled, she crept to the edge of the bag and sniffed around him. Then she came closer and sat to the side of the bag, in front of his face, her tail twitching slightly.
“What do you want? I don’t have any more food.”
“I think she wants in your bag,” Stinson said.
Got to be desperate if she wants to bed down with me, Michael thought. His buzz was wearing off and he just wanted to crash. He closed his eyes for a while but sleep didn’t come. When he opened his eyes, the cat was still there, staring down at him.
“Okay, kitty,” he said, lifting the flap. “You can sleep with me tonight.”
She crawled inside and snuggled up against his chest, purring softly, like a hypnotizing personal heater.
Michael looked over at Stinson, who shrugged. “She likes you,” he said.
Whatever, Michael thought, she’ll be gone by sunrise.
But in the morning something rough wiped across his cheek, and Michael awakened to find the cat standing on the pavement, licking his face. Not yet alert, he pulled an arm out of his sleeping bag and rubbed behind her ear. She looked at him, one eye still swollen, and meowed, clearly hungry.
“You should find someone else to take care of you,” he said, getting up for the day. He didn’t have anything else to give her. He stashed his gear and picked up and held the cat for a minute, stroking her. Then he set her down near the bushes and walked off to do some panhandling. He didn’t expect to see her again.
But later that afternoon, he came back to squat, and the cat was waiting for him. He had half hoped she’d be there and had bought a couple of cans of cat food from the supermarket, as well as flea treatment and a compress to put on her swollen eye.
After they’d both eaten, they settled contentedly into the sleeping bag, to make it through another night, at home with each other.
Chapter 2
Stray Cat Blues
“Maaa-ta,” Ron Buss called out, peering into the gloom of the crawl space beneath a neighbor’s porch. His cat liked to hide there and disturb the nests of mice. He got down on his hands and knees so that he could shine a flashlight into every shadowy corner, but all he saw were spiderwebs, dried leaves, and crickets.
He got up and shook a bag of crunchies to tempt her out of hiding. Usually Mata could hear treats rattling from a block away. He’d been searching for her for hours, but there was no sign of her anywhere. Ron was beginning to suspect the worst.
He rubbed his shaved head and straightened his black Ministry rock T-shirt. A short, stocky man in his early fifties, Ron still had an earnest, boyish look, to which a gap between his front teeth contributed. As a kid, he had dreamed of becoming a successful musician and traveling the world, and that wide-eyed sense of possibility had never left him, even after he joined the family business, a storage locker company.
After twenty-five years, he sold his share of the company to his sister and brother-in-law and used his earnings to begin a career as a collector, eventually opening a guitar store, Boojumusic Guitar & Crazy Crap Inc., in a disused office of the family storage company. He wallpapered the insides with tattered posters of Bowie and Bolan and ’70s concert memorabilia. A Beatles fanatic, he specialized in collectible Beatles records, vintage mikes and amps, and rare ’60s Fender Stratocasters worth as much as $10,000 each. It wasn’t much of a business, but it reignited his passion. He collaborated with other musician friends, putting out small-scale indie R & B albums, and kept his dream alive.
The only things Ron loved more than rock ’n’ roll were his two cats, Mata Hairi and Creto. He raised them almost like children, giving them enriching experiences. He took them to the beach (waves scared them, but Ron thought the exposure was “character building”); he threw them fancy birthday parties (“cats are thrill seekers, too”); and he wrote songs for them on his acoustic guitar (“cats are rockers at heart”). He also cooked for them, buying organic chicken and wild-caught salmon from Whole Foods.
His father, a retired lawyer, was mystified by his obsession. He thought it was pathetic and often told him: “You can go anywhere, do anything, but you just want to be around your cats.”
Ron never had pets growing up, despite constantly begging his parents for a cat or dog. Once, when he found a stray dog as a kid, his mother said it had to stay out in the garage. When Ron came home from school the following afternoon, the dog was gone. His mother had taken it to the pound. It broke his heart. He didn’t get his own cat until after he graduated from college and moved in with his first boyfriend. That cat, a black charmer, got him hooked. Now his cats meant the world to him.
Ron had spent the morning at the auto-repair garage collecting his 1967 Chevelle and running an errand for his father, Donald, who lived less than half an hour away across town. Not long before, Ron and his sister Teresa had promised their dying mother that they’d look out for their dad, even though she had divorced him decades earlier. After the divorce, Donald had married a woman named Judy, his former secretary, who was a good decade and a half younger than Ron’s father. For a long while, Ron had thought of Judy as a home wrecker and hated her for causing his mother so much pain, but his mother had let go of her animosity by the ti
me she died. Eventually Ron had as well.
Ron had rushed to get home from his errands in anticipation of the long weekend ahead. It was a bright, balmy Indian summer afternoon, the Saturday before Labor Day. He had plans to meet up with friends at the annual Last Chance Summer Dance along the Willamette River—and to take along his cats. Most of the summertime tourists had left, so Portland felt like a ghost town. The only sounds in his neighborhood were the crows cawing, the scuffle of falling pinecones, and the distant whistle of trains.
But when Ron pulled up to his white-and-gold Craftsman bungalow on the corner of SE 37th Avenue, in the lush, leafy Richmond neighborhood near Berkeley Park, he knew something was wrong. The picnic table on his front lawn where Mata usually waited for him was empty.
Thinking that Mata might have been chased off by a dog or was taking shelter from the heat somewhere nearby in a shed or under a shrub, Ron started searching his neighbors’ front yards, calling her name. Her littermate, Creto, a black-and-white tom, shadowed him, sniffling and calling out plaintively for his sister.
On hearing Ron, Ann, his next-door neighbor, came out to say that Mata had been following her around earlier that morning while she was trimming her roses, but she hadn’t seen her since then. Ann had a big black, yellow-eyed pirate cat named Gordon that Ron had rescued. Ron was constantly finding and rescuing strays.
“Maaa-ta,” Ron called again, gingerly sifting through the prickly holly hedges that fringed Ann’s front yard, where Mata sometimes liked to nap.
“Come on, Mata,” Ron said. “Don’t do this to me.”
Mata had always been a bit of rambler, spending her days roaming a three-block patch in the peaceful neighborhood of neatly pruned roses and shady sycamores, but she never went too far. And she always came when Ron called her. Both she and Creto stayed close to the house, and if they didn’t come in before dark, he grounded them for a day or two. So they tended to listen to him.
Mata and Creto were part of a litter of five that had been dumped under a neighbor’s porch. When Ron had peered down into the box in his neighbor Stefanie’s kitchen at the five trembling kittens—tiny weakly mewing bundles of fluff and bones with gummy eyes—he knew he had to help them. She was in the middle of packing up and moving out, and Ron’s last two cats had recently died, so he took over caring for the kittens. He fed the malnourished two-week-old orphans with an eyedropper several times a day and saved their lives. Two months later, he found homes for two of them and Stefanie took one. Ron kept the remaining two and named them after characters from his favorite children’s TV show from the ’70s, Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, starring chimpanzees dressed in clothes who ran a detective agency: Mata Hairi was the glamorous sidekick of Lancelot, the star, and Creto, their mustached chauffeur, was a double agent and archvillain.
Now Ron fished out his cell phone from his shorts pocket and anxiously called Evan, a thirty-five-year-old photographer and Irish transplant with whom he’d become fast friends. Evan and Ron had met the previous spring at a sunset picnic on Rooster Rock beach on the Columbia River Gorge. They clicked instantly and became each other’s wingman.
“I think Mata’s gone again,” Ron said, tremulous and close to tears. “I’m worried that psycho across the street has done something to her.”
Evan did his best to calm him, but Ron had reason to fear for Mata. Ron had lived in the area quite happily for more than twenty years, even when it was grittier and less gentrified, way before the shinier hipster Portland emerged. Back then, a Mexican gang leader had ruled the area, and there had been a halfway house for mentally ill people, both long since gone. Ron knew most of his neighbors, and no one ever gave him any trouble until a big guy named Jack had moved in a couple of years before and quickly developed a reputation around the neighborhood as a sketchy character with a hair-trigger temper.
A hulking, muscular ex-wrestler in his midtwenties, Jack was an out-of-work welder and construction worker who lived off his girlfriend. He took perverse pleasure in tormenting Ron, whom he hated for being gay, overweight, and a cat fancier—and everything that’s gone wrong with America. Tall and tattooed, with a scraped-back fascist haircut and long hipster beard, with face piercings, Jack towered over Ron, and he made it obvious that he didn’t like animals. Ron had not thought that he would actually try to hurt the cats, but whenever Jack walked by his house, Mata hissed and Creto ran to hide. And when friends with their dogs visited Ron, the dogs growled at the sight of Jack.
Mata had disappeared almost a year earlier, on December 21, 2011, one of the coldest, snowiest days of the year, and Ron suspected that Jack had something to do with it. That morning, when he left for work, he had locked both cats inside the house. But when he got home early that evening, the back door was ajar, and when he crept cautiously inside, he saw his bedroom door, which he had closed, was also open. The bedroom was a mess, his things overturned, and a water bottle that wasn’t his was on his nightstand. What was particularly disturbing was that a blanket had been stuffed into the space under his dresser—something someone might do in order to try to trap a small animal. Creto was hiding in the closet, freaked out. Mata was gone.
Someone had clearly broken into the house and taken Mata. Nothing else was missing. But Ron didn’t call the police because he didn’t think they would believe that someone would break in just to steal a cat or let her out of the house.
Ron searched frantically in the neighborhood from morning till evening for three days. On the third day, Jack drove onto the street and got out of the car. Seeing Ron searching and calling for Mata, he told him that if Mata was still alive, she was probably in a forest in nearby Washington State. Jack claimed that Mata had stowed away in his trunk, and he had driven her to his girlfriend Suzy’s place in Vancouver. Jack insisted it had been an accident and he had no idea she was in there until he popped the trunk to get his things and Mata shot out and into the woods behind Suzy’s house.
Ron immediately called Suzy, who he knew and liked from seeing her in the neighborhood whenever she stayed at Jack’s. She always apologized for her boyfriend’s moodiness and barbed comments. Suzy told Ron that she suspected that Jack had something to do with Mata’s disappearance because he’d been acting strange, as if he were hiding something. As soon as he got off the phone, Ron drove the forty-five minutes to Vancouver, and he and Suzy, and Suzy’s neighbor, a former cop turned detective, walked through the woods until dark, searching for Mata.
When the three of them turned back toward Suzy’s, the ex-cop said that Jack’s story sounded ridiculously improbable. “I know from experience that things like he said just don’t happen,” he told them. “It doesn’t make sense. Cats don’t jump into trunks of idling cars, especially cars owned by people they hiss at.”
For weeks afterward, Ron went back to those snowy woods again and again, looking for Mata and leaving food out for her. After several months with no sign of her, Ron became convinced that Jack had killed her.
But six months later, on June 21, 2012, Ron got a call from the microchip company letting him know that Mata had been found and handed over to the Humane Society for Southwest Washington in Vancouver, which he’d already visited several times during those first fraught, desperate weeks. He immediately drove there to pick her up and took her home. For a while, she seemed almost feral, skittish and shell-shocked, but she had slowly settled back into her home life with Ron and Creto.
Now she was gone again.
Ron stayed up all night searching for her. The next day, he saw Jack’s car parked in his driveway and crossed the road to knock on his front door. Since Mata’s return, they had maintained an uneasy peace after Ron apologized for accusing Jack of kidnapping his cat and gave him a case of beer. But Ron was still scared of him. Sensing that even asking if he’d seen his cat might spark another war, he wanted to gauge his reaction, so when Jack answered the door, he simply told him that Mata had strayed and asked him to keep an eye out for her.
Jack was annoyed by
Ron’s neutral request. “I’m not a cat snatcher. Now get the fuck off my porch,” he snarled and slammed the door in his face.
His hostility made Ron more suspicious.
For weeks, Ron walked up and down the streets, looking for Mata. He called her name until his voice was hoarse. He sat in the nearby park at night with open cans of cat food. Whenever he saw similar-looking or tabby cats lounging on porches, he’d check to see if they were Mata, then knock at the house. He’d show a picture of her to whoever came to the door, asking if they had seen her. He jumped at every mewing he heard outside and at the screeches of cat fights. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he would suddenly wake up, worried that Mata was locked in a basement or trapped in a shed. Then he would crawl out of bed and walk from one of his neighbors’ backyards to another, even venturing onto their porches to peer inside windows, hoping to spot Mata inside.
Ron left dried kibble and water for Mata on his back porch every night, contacted all the local vets and shelters, and printed up “Lost Cat” posters, plastering them around his neighborhood. Beneath a photo of Mata, he’d typed: MISSING, MISSING $$$ REWARD $$$, Have you seen me in SE Portland? Mata’s very sweet and intuitive and will come up to anyone she senses won’t mean her any harm. She also has a chip, so any vet or humane society can scan her. I miss her sorely. He included his phone number and Facebook link, since he had heard stories of lost pets being reunited with their owners via social media.
As Ron posted his flyers, he surveyed the other signs. There was a flyer for a missing teenager, a strawberry blonde fourteen-year-old girl. Among this patchwork of little mysteries was another runaway, an intelligent-looking brown alpaca with huge liquid-black eyes and a crazy fuzzy cloud of fur that looked like an Afro. Along with the promise of a $1,000 reward was a warning: Check your backyards and sheds. If you see him, don’t surprise him, he’ll spit on you. But lure him with dandelions and wheatgrass.
Strays Page 2