Only in Portland, Ron thought. Over the next couple of weeks, a few people phoned to say they’d seen a white tabby with gray patches. One man had seen her rummaging through his trash cans. “She’d looked bone thin, like those strays in Mexico,” he’d said. “You could see her ribs.”
As the weeks went by with no further sightings, though, Ron was devastated. He became more and more despondent, a drifter in his own life.
Chapter 3
Gimme Shelter
While Ron was searching for Mata Hairi those first several weeks after her disappearance, she was a few blocks away on the scuzzier edge of Hawthorne Boulevard, settling into her new digs in the UPS parking bay.
Her rescuer, Michael King, had not wanted a cat. Depressed, alcoholic, and homeless, living outside and begging for scraps, he had a hard enough time feeding himself. Yet now he found himself wanting to take care of this little, injured creature. Every morning Michael would wake up with the cat lying beside him, stretching and letting out a sweet, breathy little yawn. And every day he thought, She’ll probably run off on her own. Part of him wished she would, but part of him looked forward to seeing her.
Michael and Stinson developed a little routine with the cat. Michael would stash his sleeping bag in the bushes and head out with Stinson on their daily rounds, leaving the cat alone in the shrubs to do her own thing. First they would find an outlet at a diner or café to charge up their phones. Like many of their homeless friends, they used pay-as-you-go cell phones and social media for day-to-day practicalities like finding meals, beds when the weather turned bad, bits of work, and vital social services. Some shelters in Oregon even gave free secondhand phones to rough sleepers, which helped them to stay in touch with friends and family.
Michael, Stinson, and many of their friends used Facebook. For them, like everyone else, it was a virtual home. There, they felt visible; they kept up with their buddies and built support networks. It was free and easy. All they needed was a phone and access to Wi-Fi, and Portland was full of Wi-Fi hotspots.
Usually Michael and Stinson went to El Cubo de Cuba, a bright-orange stucco café-canteen on the corner of Hawthorne and SE 31st Avenue. In the morning before the café opened, they sat at picnic tables tucked along the side to charge their phones and brew their own coffee. In the early autumn, they would pilfer apples, plums, strawberries, and tomatoes from community gardens, collect half-smoked cigarette butts, and forage for discarded, partly eaten breakfast burritos, pastries, and grilled-cheese sandwiches behind the food trucks on Division Street.
And every morning for that first week the cat watched them go and, when they returned at sunset, was waiting for them there. “Damn it,” he’d grumble to Stinson, in spite of his happiness at seeing her, “this cat’s sticking around.”
After a few days, Michael took to calling her Tabor, the name of the café where they’d found her.
“Tabor,” he’d say each evening, “we’re home.” She would shoot out of the bush where she’d been hiding, tail up in the air, and run over to welcome them, meowing all the way. Always hungry, Tabor would slink around Michael’s legs, sniffing for treats. Stinson would feed her a piece of egg sandwich or other morsel he’d dug out of the trash behind the food trucks, and the cat would devour it in twitchy, panicked bites. When it was gone, she’d lick the pavement for any crumbs she may have missed. Then Michael would feed her a can of cat food. At first Michael thought it was just the food that made her stay. Even though he grumbled about her, it comforted him to be able to help someone in the same position as he was in.
By the end of the first week, he found himself worrying about Tabor and thinking of ways to make her comfortable. He lined an empty produce box with one of his sweatshirts, converting it into a sort of crèche where she could sleep undisturbed. He hid it in the bush and set a bowl of water and dried kibble beside it in case she got hungry while they were away for the day.
Michael noticed that the cat now looked at him differently, purring at the sight of him, and, when he spoke to her, her eyes widened as she listened intently.
“Tabor, look what I got for you,” he said one day, showing her a can of tuna. Stinson and he had had a good day panhandling, and he wanted to treat her. Tabor jumped up and meowed with squeaks of hunger, winding herself around his legs impatiently as he tried to open the tin.
Before Michael could even finish scraping the tuna from the can into her dish, she had dived in headfirst and was hungrily snatching mouthfuls of tuna. He bent down to pat her back, which she arched as she kept on eating.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Michael said, as if seeing her for the first time.
“Yeah, she is,” Stinson said.
She was a beauty, perhaps no more than three or four years old, with tiger-striped gray patches and soulful green eyes the color of eucalyptus leaves. She’d cleaned herself and looked healthier, her coat glossier, and her puffy eye and the wound on her face were healing.
Stinson bent down to feed Tabor one of his cold fries. “It’s cool to have a cat around. I love it when they scoop food with their paws. It’s so damn cute.”
Michael blocked Stinson’s hand, saying, “You can’t give her junk like McDonald’s. It’ll mess with her liver.”
“Whaddaya know about cats?” Stinson asked.
“I know enough.”
The two drifters were easygoing and agreed that Michael would take over Tabor’s care, since he knew how to look after a cat properly. In fact, ever since reading the Dr. Seuss books The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham as a little boy, Michael had been a bit obsessed with cats. He wasn’t allowed to have a pet as a child, but he had known there was nothing else like the peace of being with animals. Michael had three brothers and a sister, but he was the quiet one who sneaked home broken-winged fledglings that had tumbled from their nest and sneaked out food to alley cats. Before he’d become homeless, Michael had doted on his own pet cats and dogs, bringing home fresh meat and fish from the restaurants where he worked.
Every night after feeding Tabor, Michael and Stinson sat side by side in their makeshift sanctuary at the UPS loading bay, silently puffing on their roll-ups, watching the cat play. They’d split a half-eaten pizza, a bag of cold fries, or whatever food they had scavenged, on plates made out of ripped-up pieces of cardboard. And they drank from a thirty-two-ounce water bottle filled with Sidewalk Slam or what Michael called “a wake-up”—a mix of any available alcohol they’d found or bought.
As they ate, Tabor might play football with a scrunched-up cigarette pack or commandeer an empty box and pretend to ambush invisible prey, plunging into the box with her paws stretched as if she were diving into a swimming pool. She would have ten-minute bouts of feline mania, zooming around the lot, mumbling and meowing to herself. One evening, Michael tossed Tabor a red catnip mouse he’d bought her. She pounced on the toy and batted it around with her paws. Then she tucked it into the bed Michael had made for her. “She’s funny,” he said. “Last night she dug out a can of sardines from the trash and tucked them into bed, just like she did with that catnip mouse. She’s basically more a raccoon than a cat.”
Stinson smiled and said, “Maybe you should keep her.”
Michael didn’t look too enthusiastic. “That’s a bad idea.”
“Why not? She’s cool, cute, and doesn’t complain much.”
Michael didn’t answer.
Even though Michael was his closest friend, Stinson didn’t know much about him, aside from what he’d gleaned through bits and pieces of conversation. Michael said little about his past and didn’t like to talk about his feelings, the things that made his heart ache. While he seemed pretty grounded and easygoing, he was deeply depressed a lot of the time. It was pretty clear that, at some point, something devastating had happened to him. He’d lived on the street a long time and had good advice on how to get by, and he told some funny stories. Yet Michael was withdrawn and deeply depressed at times. Stinson would’ve liked to see him h
appier, so he was glad the cat made Michael laugh and gave them something to focus on.
At night Tabor was like a moth—she’d go back and forth between Michael and Stinson until they went to sleep, and at any little light she would go nuts. She was also easily distracted by sounds of passing cars and scared by police car and ambulance sirens. But she liked to wake early and expected everyone else to get up with her—sometimes she would go off like a broken alarm clock, meowing loudly at 4 a.m. At the first hint of light, she would hop from sleeping bag to sleeping bag, trying to roust the men. If Michael didn’t get up when she wanted, she’d pull his beard or swat him across the face with her paw or lick his eyelids.
One late September morning Tabor tailed Michael to the back of the UPS building, where he washed his face and brushed his teeth at the spigot. She meowed and looked at him in a way that seemed to ask, “Are you leaving me again?” That day, as Michael and Stinson walked to the edge of the UPS lot, she followed them. Clearly, she didn’t want to be left behind.
Michael stood in front of her and sighed, not sure what to do. In a whoosh, she zipped up his leg and clawed her way up to his shoulder and onto his beat-up beige backpack.
“Guess that’s telling you,” Stinson said, laughing.
“Okay, Tabor,” Michael said, reaching up, and ruffling her head. “You’re coming with us today.”
But the minute they stepped from the parking lot into the street, she flew off Michael’s pack and ran back into the bushes where she usually waited for them. Michael decided he couldn’t spend his days worrying that she’d get into the road and get hurt or hit by a car, and so that afternoon he spent all the money that he and Stinson made from panhandling on an elegant red-and-orange checked dog collar and leash. He figured dog collars were more secure than cat collars, which were flimsy and easy to break out of.
The following morning, as he prepared to leave the squat, Michael hoisted on his backpack and put the collar and leash on Tabor. At first, she didn’t like it and pulled away from him. “Nope, you’re coming with me now,” he said, scooping her up again onto his pack, where she immediately balanced herself and calmed down.
As Michael walked down Hawthorne, Tabor alternately perched on the backpack or his shoulder like an oversize parrot. Michael turned to Stinson. “You see this?” he asked, pointing to the cat riding happily. “Isn’t that awesome?”
“She’s a gypsy cat,” Stinson said with a grin. “I wonder if she belonged to travelers.”
“Or maybe she’s a circus cat.”
After that, whenever they were heading out, Michael would strap on his pack, say, “Get up,” and stick out his leg. Tabor would scoot up his leg and onto his pack. She didn’t quite get the hang of walking on leash like a dog at first, and preferred to hitch a ride on Michael.
With Tabor on his shoulder, Michael and Stinson were stopped every few blocks. People gravitated toward them, handing them money or food. Stinson started calling Hawthorne Boulevard the Green Mile for the money they made just walking around with the cat.
Every time they passed a sidewalk café or restaurant, people smiled. It had been a long time since anyone other than another hobo was happy to see Michael, and most people did their damnedest not to look at him for fear that he might ask them for something. Once he started walking around with Tabor, though, lots of people wanted to talk to them or take their pictures. At first, Michael hated it and got grumpy. But Stinson would tell him, “Relax, Groundscore, and be nice to those people.”
The cat, on the other hand, soaked up all the attention.
Tabor lightened their moods. Around the cat they were happier, less on edge. They laughed more. Sometimes, the sight of Tabor brought tears to Michael’s eyes. She was so sweet and affectionate. Still, Michael felt that he shouldn’t get too attached to her, because sooner or later she might run off or her owner would find her.
October arrived and the leaves turned. The scarlet oaks and Japanese maples were a shimmer of ruby reds, and the Norway maples shades of gold and copper. The shop windows along Hawthorne filled with witches on broomsticks, plastic flying bats, glowing goblins, and ghouls. Posters around town advertised zombie walks, haunted houses, and scary movie nights. Pumpkins were for sale outside the New Seasons supermarket.
Opposite the pumpkin display, as Michael and Stinson left the UPS lot one morning, they saw a friend, a skinny, shaggy-haired teenage drifter named Kyle, who sometimes squatted at the bay with them. Sitting alone on the pavement near the fire hydrant, dressed in denim overalls and a ragged red sweater, Kyle had an upturned cap holding a few dollar bills and coins in front of him. Next to the cap was a cardboard sign with SPARE A LITTLE KINDNESS scribbled on it.
Squinting up at them with tired, bloodshot eyes, Kyle said, “Wow, you got a cat. Didn’t know you wanted a cat.”
“I didn’t,” Michael said, hovering over him with Tabor in his arms. “I found her on the street. If I left her, she probably wouldn’t have survived. When Stinson and I grabbed her, she didn’t meow, hiss . . . nothing. She knew right away that she’d been saved.”
“She spends all day hanging out with us. She’s kind of like a small-community cat,” Stinson said, flopping down beside Kyle.
Michael set Tabor down, flung off his pack, and joined them on the sidewalk. Tabor clambered onto his bag, where she curled up with Buddha-like calmness, and remained for the rest of the afternoon.
“So, you back on the street?” Stinson asked Kyle, who had just returned after spending a couple of weeks looking after his sister’s cat while she was on vacation.
“Yeah, pretty much,” he said. The tenth child of a woman in prison who gave birth to him while she was behind bars, Kyle never knew his father. He had been adopted as a baby by a Harvard-educated software engineer and his social-worker wife and grown up just a few blocks away, but he had lived on and off the streets of Southeast Portland since he was fourteen. After his parents had eventually separated and moved to opposite sides of the city, he had shuffled back and forth between them but never felt a sense of belonging anywhere and kept running away. On the street, he had taken a liking to Michael and Stinson. Since they were older, worldlier, he saw them as kind of mentors and sometimes tagged along.
“So how have things been in the hood?” Kyle asked.
“Well, no one’s been stabbed for a while,” Stinson said with a laugh.
“For at least two weeks,” Michael added, with his broken-tooth smile.
Petting Tabor, Kyle asked, “So whaddaya gonna do with the cat?”
“Beats me.”
“Got a snipe?” Kyle asked.
Michael pulled out a couple of half-smoked cigarette butts from his pocket and lit them. His hands were scarred and callused, his fingernails crusted with dirt. “I was thinking if we carry her around, maybe her owner would spot her more quickly.”
“Do you really think she has an owner?”
“Yeah,” he said, handing the lit half-cigarette to Kyle. “And I figure since she’s recovered from her injuries, she’ll go back to where she came from eventually.”
“Maybe we should look,” Stinson suggested.
“I guess we should,” Michael said, a touch reluctantly, petting the cat by his side. Tabor looked up at him, blinking drowsily. Then she clasped his hand between her forepaws and began licking it with her raspy tongue.
After that, whenever they walked around town, Michael and Stinson scanned the lost pet posters on trees and lampposts. A lot of cats and dogs had gone missing in the area. A sign for Freddy, an emotional-support dachshund “snatched from a handbag,” read: Even if you find Freddy and he’s dead, send him back home anyway so he can have a proper burial.
“I think some of these guys must’ve been stolen,” Stinson said, as they surveyed a cluster of faded, weather-beaten posters plastered all over one telephone pole.
“Probably,” Michael said, remembering how his own dog, Wylie Coyote, had been taken outside a store in St. Louis and never foun
d. He had left him for only a minute to buy a pack of cigarettes. He’d lived in a rough neighborhood, where criminal gangs stole family pets to serve as bait for fighting dogs and suppliers of medical research labs also routinely paid thieves or dog dealers known as bunchers to steal animals.
Some of the flyers, like a child’s drawing of a black kitten, were pleading and heartbreaking. “ ‘My name is Rosemary and I am twelve years old,’ ” Michael read out loud from a poster. “ ‘I lost my kitten outside the Goodwill store.’ I mean, how simple is that, she’s twelve years old and she put up a flyer?”
He was mystified and a little annoyed that they didn’t see a single poster for Tabor. “I just don’t get it.” They couldn’t know that they were eight blocks from Tabor’s home near Berkeley Park. Somehow the cat had ended up all the way across the chaos and traffic of Hawthorne before Michael stumbled upon her.
On October 8, about three weeks after they found Tabor, Michael had to go to Montana to attend a court date for unpaid tickets for drunk and disorderly charges, for essentially sitting on the sidewalk and drinking in public. While he was away, Stinson looked after the cat and continued to try to trace her owner. One of their street buddies, Crazy Joe, tried to help them by going on Facebook. He posted, What to do if you get stuck with a stray cat that won’t leave?
Someone posted back: Rescue it, you moron.
Stinson took Tabor over to a girlfriend’s house, hoping she’d want to keep her, but Tabor fought with one of her cats, so that didn’t work out. Then Stinson snapped a few pictures of Tabor and posted them on Craigslist. But despite his efforts, there was no sign of an owner.
When Michael returned from Montana a week later, Stinson said, “Well, Groundscore, looks like she’s yours.”
You can’t own a cat, Michael thought, especially when you don’t own anything else. But he smiled.
Strays Page 3