Strays

by Britt Collins

  While everyone was drinking and talking, Tabor had come to sit inside the circle, grooming herself. Whenever she heard her name, she paused, with tufts of damp fur sticking out of her side. The rottweiler, a sweet-natured dog, kept looking at Tabor with her soft, cow-like eyes and wagging her tail. Then, the rottie rolled over across a carpet of pine needles and dried leaves, trying to persuade the cat to play. Tabor ignored her and just kept grooming.

  “We found twenty dollars outside of Rite Aid,” Whip Kid said, taking out two beer bottles from his bag and handing one to Michael. “And you know what that means—”

  “The sound of angels,” Michael said with a laugh, and clinked his bottle against Whip Kid’s.

  Jane had slumped against a pine tree to sit beside Michael and was now crouched over her phone. “Why are you having your birthday in the cemetery?” she asked with a giggle, without taking her eyes away from her phone.

  Michael grinned and said, “Guess cemeteries are the natural ground for strays.”

  “It’s the right place to be diggin’ yer own grave,” Crazy Joe broke in.

  “And the cops kept kicking us out of all our usual spots,” Michael added.

  Crazy Joe took another swig of beer and cast his mournful gray eyes around the circle. Then he looked at Michael and said, “I got some produce here if you’d be in-ner-rested,” he said, opening a crinkled brown paper bag of magic mushrooms.

  “Don’t need ’em. I got the cat and plenty of brew,” Michael said, turning back to his beer and to Tabor, beside his bag, playing with an acorn like it were prey. “Just glad you’re here.” He never had birthday parties as a kid, so he was touched that all his regular street buddies had showed up. He took a slug of Wild Turkey and checked his phone. He had birthday texts from other friends around the country and tapped out a quick message on his Facebook page in response: Wet in Portland . . . cat is sooo good.

  It was a bone-chilling night, a little above freezing with a light rain falling. The whiskey could only do so much. Michael realized he needed to get away from the bitter chill as much as from himself. He imagined Tabor wearing tiny red sunglasses and a cardboard sign around her neck that said CALIFORNIA BOUND.

  As he passed the bottle, he announced, “Tabor and I are going to Cali.”

  “We’ll go with you,” Whip Kid said. “Me and Jane are heading south, too, for some sunshine.”

  “Yah, I can see that,” Crazy Joe said, nodding. “In my heart, I’m on a tropical island in a hut. I think it’s better for y’all’s sake and the cat’s. But how d’you plan on travelin’ with a cat? First class or coach?”

  Everyone except Kyle and Stinson laughed.

  Traveling with the cat wasn’t as far-fetched as it seemed, sure she was going to make Michael’s trip harder to do, but he couldn’t leave her behind. “I want to show her the sights,” he said.

  Tabor had stopped her ramble and returned to Michael. He zipped her into his jacket, and he and Stinson and Kyle started back to their squat. They left Crazy Joe passed out with his dog inside the grandest crypt, a redbrick pile with spires and stained glass windows.

  “Taking Tabor on the road south,” Michael said to his friends as they walked out of the cemetery, “is a compulsion of the heart.”

  Chapter 7

  Oregon to California: Riders on the Storm

  A couple of weeks after his birthday party in the Lone Fir Cemetery, Michael and Tabor were hitchhiking with Whip Kid and Jane on the side of Interstate 5 in Oregon in the middle of a snowstorm. Michael had strapped a durable zip-up nylon pet carrier firmly to the top of his backpack, inside of which Tabor huddled under a fluffy fleece donated by one of the sympathetic shop owners along Hawthorne.

  Earlier that morning, Michael had filled his battered backpack with scavenged winter clothes from the discarded boxes outside the Buffalo Exchange thrift store. He packed a small camping stove, a pan, a can opener, some spices, beans, and saltine crackers, a jar of Nescafé, a blanket, a rain tarp, a portable radio, a handful of paperbacks, his notebooks, pens and markers, a tin cup for panhandling, and cat food and accessories.

  He had left a cardboard box of fifty-odd cans of cat food under a note pinned to the maple tree on the street side of the UPS lot: FREE CAT FOOD. Please take this to the local humane society. People were very kind to me and the cat, but I cannot carry all this. Over those three months since he’d rescued Tabor, Michael joked he carried around enough food to feed a whole herd of cats. His buddies had helped him carry some of the surplus at the bottom of their packs, and they also hid some in bushes along Hawthorne, in case they ever ran low. But since her first outing on the top of his backpack, he hadn’t had to worry about providing food for her.

  Michael had said good-bye to Kyle, who was being taken in by friends, and Stinson, who had bought a used car and was heading to New Orleans to spend the winter with his girlfriend. Then he strode over to Hawthorne Cutlery, to see the owner, a former Miami cop he’d become friendly with, who had asked him to drop by before leaving town. The shopkeeper gave Michael fifty dollars for helping to prevent a robbery.

  Just before finding Tabor, Michael had passed out beneath a food truck across from the cutlery store and woke up when two guys tried to break into the food truck. Michael shouted, “Hey, whaddaya doing?” and they took off. He reported them to the police and told the officers to be on the lookout for those guys. He had a feeling they’d be coming back, and, sure enough, they had returned the following evening. Shortly afterward the cutlery-store owner saw Michael sitting in a doorway and told him, “I heard what you did. You’ve been looking out for us, and I’m going to look out for you.” He gave Michael fifty dollars and, later, when he found out Michael was going to California for the winter, wanted to give him something more as a send-off.

  After collecting the money, Michael and Tabor met up with Whip Kid and Jane. It started snowing lightly, so they got some 7-Eleven coffee to warm up and struck out south. Oregon is the only western state where it isn’t illegal to walk on highways.

  Between them, they had enough money for train tickets, but they couldn’t sneak a chatty, overly friendly cat on the train without drugging her, which Michael wasn’t about to do. So they had to hitchhike.

  Whip Kid was great with maps, directions, and bumming rides, but the highway was mostly deserted, except for an occasional truck. Truckers rarely picked up hitchhikers, trucking companies didn’t allow it since their insurance wouldn’t cover riders in an accident. They walked for miles on the side of the highway, and theirs were the only footprints in the snow. Every now and then, Michael stopped to check on Tabor by shoving his hand through the zipped opening and into her nest of blankets.

  By the afternoon, the snow was swirling in all directions. It had covered the highway and piled up on their clothes and packs. Big rigs blasted past them, splattering them with more snow and slush. Whip Kid waved his sign, SOUTH OR CALIFORNIA, to try to attract their attention, but no one was even slowing down, let alone stopping.

  By mid-afternoon, they saw a strip of dilapidated outlet stores and fast-food restaurants surrounded by straggling fir trees. But they decided to keep walking to the next exit, off of which they knew there was a bare-bones convenience store and gas station. When they got there, though, the businesses were closed. Racing against the fading light, they got back on the highway, hoping they would get to a cheap “hodey”—what drifters call a motel—where they could bed down for the night.

  “We need to find somewhere to crash soon,” Michael said every couple of miles. “I don’t want to keep hitchhiking with a cat in a snowstorm. Someone might call the cops on us. And Tabor is not liking this.”

  “Don’t worry, Groundscore, we’ll find something,” Whip Kid kept telling him. “I’ll get us a ride soon.”

  But it had gotten dark, and they still had no ride. Hours before, the patchwork of suburban neighborhoods south of Portland had turned into rolling, forested hills. They were beat, so they found shelter be
neath a thick border of shaggy fir trees on a grassy median strip. It was dry and cushy with pine needles underneath the trees, so they spread out their bedrolls. Jane, Michael, and the cat instantly fell asleep from exhaustion. But Whip Kid wrapped his sleeping bag around his shoulders and sat on the side of the road, leaning on his pack with his cardboard sign and phone flashlight, waiting for passing cars.

  Around 4 a.m., the snow still falling hard, Whip Kid woke Jane and Michael. He had not slept at all, and somehow he’d gotten them a ride to the next rest stop, in Wilsonville. They scrambled to collect their things and walked toward the small pickup waiting for them on the road. Jane, Michael, and Tabor could cram into the front seat with the driver, but there was no room in the cab for Whip Kid. They had to roll him up in a piece of carpet in the bed of the truck, and hope that would protect him from the cold.

  The guy was a terrible driver, and the truck kept slipping and sliding through the slushy snow. Michael kept Tabor in her carrier on his lap, trying to keep it as still as possible. But she rode in the car peacefully, without complaint—most cats would’ve meowed from Oregon all the way to California. Michael and Jane were more worried about Whip Kid the whole time, thinking he might be jolted out onto the freeway and then run over by a car. Luckily, the rest stop was only about forty miles down the road.

  “That was sketchy,” Whip Kid said to Michael when they unrolled him from the carpet at the end of the ride. He’d been tossed back and forth in the cold truck bed for almost an hour.

  The Wilsonville rest stop—where Michael had hitchhiked many times—was freezing, but it had free coffee, a service to drivers provided by nonprofit organizations. Because Christmas was just days away, Oregon rest stops were also handing out cookies and doughnuts.

  Michael took Tabor out of her carrier and put her on his lap. He warmed his hands on a cup of coffee and pressed them against Tabor to warm her up. She purred and rubbed her cheek against his face.

  It was still so early in the morning that they couldn’t get a ride, so Michael led them through the snow to a nearby squat just off the highway at the edge of some woods where they could crash. A long-deserted shell of a house with a screened-in back porch, the moss-covered ruin smelled of dust, mold, and cedar. Trees grew through its broken windows, and weeds pushed through warped cracks. The woods were slowly reclaiming it.

  When Whip Kid and Jane stepped inside, carefully skirting the broken floorboards, they brushed against a doorway. Paint chips fell from the ceiling like autumn leaves.

  Clinging to the cat carrier, Michael followed behind. “I think the Zodiac Killer lived here,” he said with a laugh.

  It did look like a fugitive’s hideout, but its back porch held a couple of collapsed sofas, which they pushed together, and then they laid their sleeping bags close together for warmth. Tabor curled up with Michael inside his bedroll, and they hunkered down for the rest of the night, getting a couple of hours of deep sleep.

  As soon as the sun came up, they continued their march south to another rest stop. After a few coffees and doughnuts, they hitched a series of rides in quick succession. They were south of Salem heading east to Prineville, a former logging town with alpine valleys and glacial-green lakes, when their luck ran out. Still, they were able to make it to a friend’s house in Prineville and crash in her living room. The next day Michael posted a Facebook message: In Prineville with Whip and Jane . . . raging it in the snow. After three days, their friend got sick of them and the four companions went back to the highway, hitching and ending up in Redmond, a high desert city once famous for slaughtering wild and unwanted horses. Horse blood overflowed the local sewage system, and locals constantly complained about the stench and the screams of horses before eco-saboteurs burned down the slaughterhouse.

  From Redmond, they caught another ride all the way to Sisters, a picturesque ski town in central Oregon backcountry, cocooned by swaths of evergreen forests and bustling with people. The three of them spent that night, half-frozen and wearing virtually everything they owned, sleeping outside on the cold concrete, with Tabor buried in blankets inside her carrier alongside them. Whenever Michael stuck his hand in her carrier, she’d place her paws on his hand to warm him. She was toasty, even though it was about eighteen degrees outside.

  The next frosty morning, they rolled up their gear and settled outside a local grocery store scraping up some money. After collecting about eighty dollars, they bought food and coffee and waited along the roadside trying to hitch. After a long wait, Whip Kid and Jane, desperate to get out of the deep freeze, got into a car that Michael didn’t like the look of. The driver held a beer in one hand and appeared half-drunk. Michael said good-bye to his friends. He and Tabor would take their chances with another ride.

  Now it was just Michael and Tabor—alone together for the first time in the months since they had met. Few cars were on the road. After a couple of hours of walking with no ride in sight, Michael felt like he was about to collapse. Aside from several coffees, he had eaten only a sandwich early that morning. His stomach was grumbling. He could barely feel his fingers and feet. Mostly, he was seriously worried about Tabor. Every now and then, she mewed as though she wanted to let him know she was still there. Whenever he set the carrier down to check on her, she blinked at him through its mesh window.

  A sudden gust of wind nearly swept Michael off his feet. They needed shelter or they wouldn’t make it through the night. When he checked on Tabor again, she looked anxious, her eyes wide and searching as she peered from beneath her blankets.

  “I’ll find us someplace warm,” he promised the cat, sticking his hand through the zipper to rub her ears and chin affectionately. “Soon we’ll be in the sunshine by the sea, and you’re gonna love it.” Tabor gazed up at Michael and slowly closed and opened her eyes, giving him the feline equivalent of a kiss.

  He gave her an eye kiss back and then bundled her up in her blankets and zipped up her carrier. He glanced around, raising his hand to shield his eyes from the blowing snow. On either side of the freeway, there was only a blinding sweep of snow and trees—spruce, yews, and hemlock everywhere. Below him, just off road, Michael saw a ramshackle barn through the jumble of snow-dusted pines.

  He hoisted the cat carrier and hurried down the incline from the highway to the barn. It looked deserted, but it would give them some protection from the wind and snow for the night. Rotting pasture fences surrounded it, like the ruins of an old horse farm. An upside-down horseshoe hung over the nearest stable door, which was blocked by an immense drift of snow. Michael dug through it frantically and cleared enough so that he could wrench open the door, which was rusting off its hinges. He scanned the dark interior to make sure nothing was lurking inside, then shrugged off his pack and set it down along with the carrier with Tabor inside. He pulled the door shut as tightly as he could, shutting out some of the fierce wind.

  The stables smelled of manure and mildew, although they looked as if they had been abandoned long ago. The barn was dusty with straw and seed husks, but it was dry. In the farthest corner, he found a thick pile of dirty, decomposing old horse blankets and empty burlap grain sacks. He slumped down against the wall on the blankets and checked on Tabor, taking her out of the carrier and rubbing her back to warm her up. He held her as he fumbled with his bedroll and small bag of belongings. His fingers felt like icicles beneath his gloves.

  Even inside the shelter of the stables, it was so cold that Michael could see his breath. The wind blew puffs of snow through the broken wooden slats and the cracks between them. He wrapped Tabor up again and set her in her carrier as he tried to block the blasts of cold air by propping some of the horse blankets against the corner walls to cover the openings. Then he pulled out his orange-and-black North Face sleeping bag and foam sleeping pad and spread them on the ground.

  He had acquired that sleeping bag on his birthday the previous year. He had been on the sidewalk, midway through writing a sign saying It’s my 47th birthday, December 3rd 1964. He
lp a brother out, when a man in a Mercedes stopped and asked, “What do you need?” Michael had said, “A new sleeping bag,” and the man replied, “Hop in,” and drove him to a sports store across town. Even though the bag was one of the nicer ones, after so much wear and tear from living on the streets, it was already giving way at the seams.

  Michael set Tabor on the bag and gave her a snack of dried kibble. While she was busy eating, he sneaked out into the pitch-blackness to gather some firewood. From living in the city, he had almost forgotten how dark it got in the country. He crossed a small clearing to the nearby woods, where he quickly gathered all the fallen branches and twigs he could carry. Something about being alone in the woods at night had always scared him. It brought back the fear he felt as a kid walking out of the woods near his house after dark by himself.

  Just as he turned to go back to the barn, he saw a flash of shadowy movement from the corner of his eye. It was Tabor, flitting between the trees and sprinting toward him.

  “Tabor,” Michael shouted out as she ran over. “And where do you think you’re going? Don’t you worry your little head, I’d never leave you.” She was too scared to stay on her own in that spooky old barn.

  Michael walked back as quickly as he could, Tabor following close behind. He paused inside the doorway cautiously. When he stepped farther inside, he had an unsettling sense that they weren’t alone. He heard straw rustling, and Tabor’s eyes were wide, her ears flicking and whiskers twitching. The noise seemed to be coming from the hayloft above: either it was rats, bats, or some other mystery guest. Michael suddenly thought: What if it was a serial killer?

  Panicked, he glanced around for a heavy object. He put down his armful of wood and pulled out his battered old phone. But he’d run out of credit, the battery was almost dead, and there was no reception anyway out there in the sticks. Who could he call?

  Suddenly a flock of roosting crows erupted from the hayloft above their heads and flew outside through a hole in the roof. Michael nearly jumped out of his skin, and Tabor scurried off in a flash, bumping her head into the wall, then burrowing into the deepest pocket of the sleeping bag.