Strays

by Britt Collins

  An anxious, worried child, Michael attended Mary Queen of Peace Catholic School with his twin brother and their three older siblings. All the nuns there were fiercely protective of Michael. They saw the welts on the back of his legs and knew he got hit at home, so they made sure he was never touched at school. His second-grade teacher, Sister Maureen Teresa, took him under her wing. Michael adored her, and for a while school was a refuge from his troubled home. As he got older, however, he became more willful and withdrawn, skipping school and hanging out by the railroad tracks near his house, nurturing dreams of escape.

  After all the kids were in school, Kathleen took a job working night shifts as a nurse’s assistant at the local hospital. Left alone and unattended, Michael and his brothers prowled the railway and parks at night—although Michael spent most of his time by himself, kicking around the back alleys, reading books about animals and plants, daydreaming, and learning how not to be lonely.

  When he was thirteen years old, in June 1978, Michael ran away for the first time. School was out for the summer, and he told his friends he “was getting the hell out of that house.” He packed a little duffel bag and sneaked out in the middle of the night along with his twin brother, John Patrick, who went by the nickname JP. They walked down the railway tracks and out of St. Louis. Without any money or place to stay, they raided vegetable gardens and apple trees, ate wild blackberries, and slept in derelict garages or dense thickets. They got as far as New Mexico before being arrested for truancy and hauled back home in handcuffs.

  By fourteen, Michael would often sleep in bushes along the train tracks and survive by dining in local restaurants and skipping out on the bill. For a while he lived with neighbors, a family called the Bekemeyers who took pity on him, but he always got dragged back home.

  When Michael was fifteen, his father caught him and JP smoking weed in the backyard. They were just experimenting, but he flew into a rage. Thinking the boys had a drug problem, he checked them both into a month-long, lockdown treatment program.

  A few days later, Michael, along with another fifteen-year-old kid, Mike, escaped and hitchhiked out of town.

  The boys headed to Seattle, where Mike said they could live with his mother, but they got arrested in Wheatland, Wyoming. Since they were minors, the boys were placed in a holding cell. The sheriff called Mike’s parents first, who said he was a runaway and they wanted him back.

  Then the sheriff got on the phone with Michael’s parents. His parents had put out police reports initially but then had stopped searching. At the end of the call, the sheriff hung up and uncuffed Michael: Clancy didn’t want him back and Kathleen was resigned to the fact that Michael was unhappy at home and liked to roam and sleep under the stars. For her, it was probably a relief to have one fewer child to deal with. The sheriff took Michael back to the car, drove him out of town, gave him twenty dollars, and said, “Good luck, kid.”

  Sometime in the summer of 1981, Michael wound up in Montana. Its sawtooth mountains and sun-scorched plains were the wild, uncultivated place he was looking for. “All you could see is a little landscape and a lot of sky, and not a soul for miles,” he wrote on a postcard to JP back home. He got a job delivering milk for a local dairy farm in Helena, found a cheap apartment, and forged his dad’s signature on the enrollment form at the local high school.

  Michael thought of himself as an old soul, and, in some ways, he was mature beyond his years. He could easily pass for eighteen or nineteen, but after a few months he was found out by the authorities and told he couldn’t stay in Montana without a legal guardian.

  He returned to St. Louis but hated being home and, after a couple of months, hitchhiked back to Montana, determined to find a legal guardian. The dangers of riding with strangers never occurred to Michael. He was convinced that multiple angels followed him and nothing bad would happen to him—besides, he’d already been through the worst. Once he got to Helena, he jumped in the first battered pickup that stopped for him. The driver turned out to be a beer-swilling hippie on his way to his AA meeting. Having nowhere else to go, Michael joined him, figuring that Alcoholics Anonymous was as good a place as any to find a legal guardian. During his own short stint in the rehab program the year before, he had appreciated the honesty of the adults he’d observed.

  That Tuesday afternoon in October at the AA meeting, Michael met Walter Ebert, a Vietnam veteran and divorced recovering alcoholic who worked as a recruiter for the army.

  Michael sensed Walter was a good guy. He had an earthy wholesomeness about him. Michael asked if Walter would pretend to be his dad so he could stay in school, explaining that he’d run away from a bad home but had a job and could take care of himself. He just needed a signature. “Sure, I’ll help you,” Walter had said, but insisted on talking to Michael’s mother first. Over the phone, Kathleen told Walter that if Michael wanted to live in Montana, that was fine by her. His parents signed him away.

  Walter would become Michael’s foster parent and a caring presence for the next three decades. Having had a Jesuit education and spent some time in a Franciscan seminary, Walter often told Michael that “in nourishing others, we sometimes find ourselves.”

  Shortly after moving in with Walter, Michael got his GED while continuing to work as a gardener during the day and occasionally as a dealer for an illegal underground casino in Helena at night. Those first few years that they lived together they split the rent, food, and bills. Michael went on to the state university in Bozeman, Montana, studied business and horticulture, but dropped out when he realized he didn’t need a degree to start his own landscaping company, which he did. He would live and work in Montana for nearly a decade.

  Over those years, Michael had minimal contact with his family, aside from JP, who’d also moved to Montana, but he went back to St. Louis for his dad’s funeral in August 1990. He intended to stay in town for only a couple of days, but on the night of the funeral, after skipping the service, Michael and his brother Robert went out to a bar in St. Louis to get wasted.

  As Michael knocked back his drink, he spotted an old high school friend, Michael Mercer. His hair was shorter, his face a little thinner and older, but Mercer was just as good-looking as ever. They had first met when Michael was sixteen, in the linoleum-lined hallways of Mehlville High School in St. Louis. Their connection was electric. Mercer was a couple of years older than Michael, and they looked very similar, both six-two, with dark, messy hair, sharp cheekbones, and sparkling blue eyes. After Mercer finished high school and joined the military, they kept in touch briefly through letters.

  It seemed like those nine years apart passed in a blink. In a matter of minutes, they were doing shots together, smoking, talking, and laughing like nothing had changed since high school. The next day, Michael and Mercer met up again, and Michael decided to delay his return to Montana. His friend was laid-back, generous, funny and fun to be around. He felt more at ease with Mercer than anyone else. With Mercer, Michael finally felt at home.

  He returned briefly to Montana to pack up his stuff and shut down his landscaping business, then moved into Mercer’s place in St. Louis in a ramshackle row house apartment building in a rough black neighborhood. The owner, who was a friend of Mercer’s, offered Michael a job as building manager, so Michael collected the rent, did routine maintenance, and tended the grounds in exchange for a very low monthly rent for several years.

  Eventually Michael got a job as a chef at a fancy bistro, and Mercer worked as a cable guy installing cable TV into people’s homes. They settled into a quiet, domestic routine, punctuated by poker games and occasional drug binges. They took camping trips and enjoyed being outdoors. They even talked about eventually retiring to Montana. On television after work, they watched as the Soviet Union fell apart and South Africa abandoned apartheid. A host of countries signed nuclear nonproliferation treaties. It seemed like the whole world was actually improving; things could change.

  In this new comfortable existence, Michael was able to admi
t something he would have hidden before: he was in love with a man. Michael was raised to think of it as a sin, but this new, unexpected love felt like a blessing.

  For five years, they enjoyed a fairly peaceful and contented life until Mercer confessed that he was HIV positive. He’d gotten it a couple of years before they had reconnected and now was struggling to cope. Almost overnight, Michael went from having the beginnings of a life and a future with Mercer to preparing for his partner’s death.

  Michael held out hope that they could contain the disease and, for almost thirteen years, they did. They got on with their lives. Then, in the summer of 2003, Mercer got very sick and was hospitalized. Michael felt a rising panic, then a numbing sadness as he waited for the inevitable.

  Michael was working sixty-hour weeks, but every morning before work, he would go to the hospital and have breakfast with Mercer, making sure that he had everything he needed. One day he found out that the nurses were forgetting to give Mercer his pain medication. Michael flipped out. He didn’t like the way Mercer was being treated, so he pretty much kidnapped him and took him home. The doctors warned, “You can’t do that—he’ll die in two weeks.” But with Michael’s care and a hospice nurse to look after him while he was at work, Mercer lived four more months.

  Almost every day, when Michael got home from the restaurant, Mercer looked worse: skinnier, paler, and weaker. When Mercer started having trouble breathing, Michael got him an oxygen tank. All throughout this time, he kept contacting Mercer’s family to let them know that he was dying and hoping they would help look after him or at least visit him. But they were in complete denial and refused to accept that his death was even possible. They didn’t come to see him once during his illness.

  Mercer died on October 20, 2003, at the age of forty. Michael held him as he passed, gazing at his one great love through tears, memorizing the details of his face and the way his dark, silver-flecked hair fell across his cavernous cheekbones.

  Five days later, Michael managed to stay calm through the ordeal of the funeral and burial. He had been grieving for Mercer months before he died, as well as during those last days when he had felt his fragile body crumbling in his arms. But after the burial that Saturday afternoon, he went home shell-shocked and sank into the sofa on which they had talked so many nights together. He turned on the television and muted it. And for the next few days, little by little, he fell apart—his eczema flared out of control, his hair came out in big silver-dollar clumps when he ran his fingers through it. He barely moved off the couch.

  When he finally did get up, he faced the many little losses in the wake of the enormous vacuum that Mercer had left in his life. In the bathroom, he spotted Mercer’s toothbrush. As he tried to throw it away, it hit him that Mercer would never use it again.

  Everything he looked at—the chairs, the ceramics, the art they had started collecting not long before Mercer passed away—had meant something while they were together, but now it was all oppressive clutter.

  Michael thought, There’s too much stuff in the world and most of it’s pointless.

  He started pulling things off shelves, making a pile in the bedroom and a pile in the kitchen. He made a mental inventory of all the things in their driveway: the brand-new Subaru, the Ford F-150, the trailer, the boat. They had accumulated about $250,000 worth of stuff. He thought about having a garage sale, but then immediately felt guilty about making money from Mercer’s death.

  Still, Michael had the heartbreaking task of emptying their house. Only a week before Mercer died, he had given away their cat, Mau Mau, a big-boned tabby girl, and dog, Aggie Jr. to Mercer’s brother. He’d already known he would be leaving St. Louis.

  Now, a week after the burial, Michael went upstairs one last time to sift through their photos, snippets of their life together. His eyes lingered over a picture of Mercer, smiling with Mau Mau in his arms. Mau Mau, named after the African rebels, took up half the sofa and fetched like a dog. Mercer had adored her. Aggie Jr. was one of the puppies of a brown stray mutt Michael had found beneath a restaurant dumpster in southwest Missouri. Flicking through all the happy memories, he came apart again.

  He went back downstairs and grabbed a bottle of whiskey. He collapsed on the couch, staring into space, and swigged straight from the bottle, lying there until the whiskey ran dry. He looked up at the muted TV and caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the screen, his face wet and swollen from crying.

  Not long after, in the middle of the night, Michael packed a backpack with a few clothes and precious photos. He emptied the contents of the fridge and wandered around the backyard, leaving the food in heaps for the squirrels and raccoons to eat. He filled all the bird feeders with seeds and then sat by the pond he had built under the willow he had planted, next to the lovely brick courtyard he had constructed with its honeysuckle, mimosa, and rose garden. Michael and Mercer used to sit there in lawn chairs in the summertime, talking and smoking, with Neil Young songs floating from the house.

  He went back into the house to grab his backpack. He wanted to be light on his feet again, and unsure of how to escape this sadness, he did the only thing he knew and ran away.

  Leaving the front door unlocked, Michael left the house for the last time and put his thumb out on the nearest highway. It felt strangely liberating to be walking away with nothing.

  Chapter 6

  On the Road Again

  In Portland, by late November, winter had blown in, turning the landscape gray and ghostly. The wind coming down the Columbia River Gorge brought the type of chill that cut to the bone and made eyes water. Michael struggled to keep dry as the frequent rains seeped into his tatty, moth-eaten sleeping bag.

  Sometimes five of them were sleeping out in that UPS bay or banding together in the doorways on busy streets: Michael, Stinson, their friends Kyle and Whip Kid, and Tabor. Rough sleepers on their own were vulnerable to attacks, particularly in city parks and secluded areas, which was one of the reasons some kept dogs—to have some sense of protection as they slept.

  Almost ten years before, when Michael had walked away from his home and life—everything—he had thought that a few months on the road would help him escape his grief. He hadn’t planned to walk into homelessness. But he’d become a heavy drinker and, after lightning strikes of bad luck, had nothing to fall back on. He found himself broke and alone on the streets and eventually fell in with the community of other drifters and adapted to their way of life.

  Living outside also meant drifting with the seasons. Ordinarily, Michael rolled out of Portland by mid-November to find somewhere where the elements weren’t so fierce, but he had hung on a little longer this year, hoping someone might reclaim Tabor as their missing cat.

  One morning during a brutal cold snap, Michael woke up to find frost covering his bag. Tabor had climbed inside his sweatshirt, shivering, to press against him and absorb as much warmth as possible. She couldn’t live out in the cold for much longer. They had already endured too many wild and windy nights. Michael knew it was time to head south for the winter.

  After the hard freeze, on December 3, his forty-eighth birthday, Michael started the day bright and breezy with a can of Steel Reserve. He wanted to have a birthday party and a farewell party. Before he got on the road with Tabor, Michael went with Stinson, Kyle, and Tabor to several drinking spots around Hawthorne, but they were kicked out or moved along after owners called the police. They wound up at the Lone Fir Cemetery on Morrison Street, where they would be left alone to celebrate.

  Crazy Joe and the other pals had collected enough money to buy Michael a bottle of Wild Turkey, as well as a few six-packs of beer and store-bought sandwiches. Deep in the heart of the old pioneer cemetery, beneath the three tall ponderosa pines, they huddled in a circle, listening to classic old country music and passing around the bottle, each taking a swig. That way, if the police showed up, they would only have to pour out one bottle.

  Near a large crypt, Michael stood swaying under the win
try, moonless sky, and Tabor wandered around in the shadows. When they were among friends in calm, empty places like the cemetery, Michael let her off her kitty leash to roam a little. She batted around acorns and pinecones that littered the muddy, threadbare grass, swished her tail, and slunk in and out of the choke of weeds at the base of the mossy graves.

  From behind the crypt, two figures suddenly materialized out of the inky darkness, like vampires, sending everyone scattering. Crazy Joe, a small, whippet-thin guy in his late forties, with short, peppery dirty-blond hair, leaped up, spilling beer all over his trousers.

  The vampires were actually Whip Kid and Jane. A slouchy indie kid, Whip Kid wore green army pants and a flannel shirt beneath a sweater and a denim jacket. His girlfriend Jane, cute, pale and freckled, with short chestnut hair and skinny as a colt, stood beside him, shy and watchful.

  “Y’all scared the bejesus outta me,” Crazy Joe said in a thick southern accent. “Thought you’d both risen from the dead.”

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” said Whip Kid as he joined the group.

  “Are you from the South?” Jane asked Crazy Joe.

  “Sure am, mama,” he said as he ripped open another can of beer. “Georgia . . . from the sticks . . . from a town you ain’t never heard of.” Crazy Joe looked like a tough guy, tightly wound and highly strung, and he traveled with a big black mellow female rottweiler, who was curled up against a weeping stone angel nearby. “My mama was a redneck, my daddy was a scumbag, and I ain’t no good.” He had come to Portland to find work painting, picking fruit, anything. When he couldn’t find work, he scratched out a living growing and selling pot and magic mushrooms in the community gardens.