He drew a deep breath, thinking he could really do with a smoke to calm down, but first he needed to build a fire. He picked up the wood he’d gathered and went over to the protected corner he’d created with the blankets and cleared an area of straw on the ground near them. He set down the wood and stoked a small fire that would keep them warm through the night. Then, firing up the camping stove, he warmed his numb fingers and prepared two dishes: a can of beans and crackers lightly seasoned with sea salt and cracked pepper for himself, and a metal bowl of Meow Mix salmon pâté mixed with warmed-up cat milk for Tabor.
Once he’d been a chef at fancy restaurants, and now he was cooking for a cat in a falling-down barn in a blizzard. In some ways, it was an improvement—and it was nice to have someone special to cook for again.
At first, Tabor refused to come out of the sleeping bag for dinner, but Michael coaxed her with some small treats. She scarfed down her salmon and warm milk, all the while looking around furtively. Then, still licking her lips and burping like a trucker because she’d eaten so fast, she retreated back inside the sleeping bag.
“Coward,” Michael said, teasing her.
Normally he would fix himself a nightcap to deal with the cold and discomfort, but tonight he was grateful to have hot instant coffee. The beans and crackers barely filled the emptiness in his stomach. Despite his exhaustion, he knew he couldn’t sleep, so he sat up and rolled one cigarette after another to stave off his hunger. To get through the night, he remembered the dishes he used to make as a chef at Obie’s restaurant back in St. Louis: his Texas French toast with cream cheese and strawberry jam and his Italian omelets with provolone, pepperoni, green peppers, and onions.
The sound of the snowstorm outside grew wilder, rattling the rickety old barn door. The wind howled shrilly, and tree branches scraped against the roof. Michael kept looking apprehensively at the dark, shadowy stalls at the other end of the barn, wondering if something else was going to leap out. He waited tensely, listening out for every sound, getting a little paranoid in his anxiety. At one point, he even thought he heard muted footsteps crunching through the snow, and his mind looped to horror movies about isolated houses in the woods and psychotic killers.
In the firelight, cobwebs glistened with drops of condensation. The flickering flames illuminated the walls, which he now could see were covered by decades’ worth of graffiti, as well as scrawls of skulls, crosses, and band names. He could just about make out the crude hearts with initials and dates carved into the decaying woodworm-eaten planks, which got him thinking about Mercer when they were teenagers, smoking weed and laughing about everything. After they’d first met in the school hallway, they’d seen each other every day in between Michael’s runaway trips, cutting classes and sharing cigarettes, beer, or dope in the park.
The thought of Mercer made him smile and calmed his fears.
As the fire burned down, Michael slid into the sleeping bag and eventually dozed off into a disturbing dream about Mercer and the day he’d almost blown up their house. A week before Mercer died, Michael had come home from work to find him so zonked out by the morphine that his chest was covered in a trail of cigarette ash, which had burned slowly all the way up his T-shirt. An oxygen tank was two feet away from his bed. Shaken, Michael told him, “You can’t have cigarettes anymore. Somebody has to be here if you’re going to smoke.” Mercer was shocked to realize that he could’ve blown up the house and killed their cat and dog.
When shards of light filtered through the broken slats and the fogged, half-moon window in the hayloft above, Michael’s eyes snapped open. It took him a moment to figure out where he was. Then he felt a warm, gentle pressure on his chest and face. It was Tabor standing on him and looking down at him, kneading his beard and drooling into his eye. He smiled, scratching her fluffy head, and she purred loudly and rubbed her face against his.
They’d survived the blizzard through the night, and by morning their love for each other only deepened.
Chapter 8
Backwoods Oregon: Memory Motel
Michael and Tabor were back on the road before the cold blue light of dawn had fully broken. Michael shivered in his four layers and worn hoodie, over which he wore a well-worn old UPS driver’s work jacket. He’d wound a wool scarf tightly around his neck. The cat was swaddled in her tiny fleece blankets in her carrier with only the tips of her ears sticking out.
Trudging along the highway, he got a short ride back to Sisters, where he and Whip Kid and Jane had parted ways the day before. He needed to get some coffee and supplies.
In the center of town, the main street looked like it hadn’t changed much since the 1800s, with covered walkways and bars with names like Bronco Billy’s and Three Creeks Brewing. Outside a grocery store, Michael sat on the pavement as tourists and shoppers hurried past. He took out a handful of colored markers and a piece of cardboard and drew a Christmas tree, snowman, snowflakes, and the words happy holidays. thank you for caring on it. He set out the festive sign beside the dented tin cup that he’d had since 2005 when an older homeless black guy named Mystery had first shown him how to panhandle. Then he made a little stack of homemade Christmas cards from bits of cardboard to hand out to people.
It was Christmas Eve. Tabor lay in Michael’s lap under her pile of blankets, half-asleep. Only her head and one paw she’d extended on his arm were visible, but this drew people to them. Upon spotting the cat, they gave Michael food for himself and for her, as well as blankets, hot drinks, spare socks, and sweaters. As Michael sat there, he remembered when he used to buy Christmas presents back in St. Louis at Grandpa Pidgeon’s, a quirky retro discount store long gone out of business. Until he’d gotten together with Mercer, Christmas had had little meaning for him. As a chef, Michael had usually worked over the holidays anyway.
On that Christmas Eve, people were especially generous, handing out ten- and twenty-dollar bills, and, by the time the daylight was fading, he had gathered well over a hundred dollars. He was thinking about packing up when a big, burly woman, who looked like a bricklayer, came out of the store, and her young daughter sprinted ahead of her, excited to see the cat. As the little girl bent down excitedly to pet Tabor, the woman yanked the child back and hissed, “Don’t touch that cat.”
Michael glanced over at Tabor, who looked hurt and confused, and said, “Oh, Tabor, I’m sorry!”
The woman gave him a hate-filled look and started screaming at him for showing her up in front of her child. Tabor got scared and tried to run away, but she had her collar and leash on, so Michael was able to grab her in the nick of time.
That nastiness threw him a bit. Having been homeless for so long, Michael had learned not to take personally the snickers and taunts some people directed at him. Most people avoided him, but he had his share of abuse, mostly from carloads of kids flipping him off or clean-shaven but drunk young men who’d had a bad day, yelling, “Get a job, hippie.”
Sometimes Michael reminded himself what Sister Maureen Teresa had told him: “When people say mean things, it’s usually how they feel about themselves. Don’t take it to heart.”
But now that he had Tabor, it had become harder to let that stuff roll off his back. He felt a rush of anger at this woman who took her aggression out on an innocent little cat. He wanted to scream insults right back at her, but instead he stood up, swept his bag and belongings off the ground, put Tabor back in her carrier, and called it a day.
Normally whenever he gathered a fair bit of money, he blew it all on booze, but tonight, restraining himself, he bought just a half pint of Wild Turkey. He was responsible for someone else now, and he had to consider Tabor’s needs first: her hunger, her fears, and her discomforts. He was going to treat Tabor to a proper bed for once.
He walked to the edge of town, where, through the snow flurries that had started up again, he spotted an old-style motel, which looked faded and run-down, and was likely the cheapest place around. Eager to get out of the cold, he rushed toward it, but slip
ped on the icy concrete of the motel parking lot and fell headfirst. As he hit the ground, Tabor shot out of her carrier and vanished into three feet of snow.
“Shit, shit!” He flung off his pack and staggered back to his feet. “Taaa-bor, I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry,” he said as he pawed through the snow on his hands and knees. He didn’t see anything. “Tabor, where are you?”
Then he heard a low, anguished cry from deep within the snowdrift. He dived into the drift with his whole body, waved his arms around until his fingers brushed against something warm. He grabbed her and scrambled out, pulling Tabor free. She looked bewildered and had a pile of snow on her head like a little cap.
“I’ve got you. I’m here,” he said, brushing her off and cradling her in his arms. He headed for the front door of the motel.
Inside, Michael was greeted by an old lady with blue-rinse hair and ’50s-style cat-eye glasses on a chain around her neck sitting behind the counter. She looked at Michael a little disbelievingly when he walked through the door dusted with snow, Tabor stuffed inside his jacket, her little wet cat head peeping out.
Michael had enough cash to stay for three nights. He lay the money for the room on the counter and, as the woman counted it out, said to the cat, “Look, Tabor, we’re outside.” It was a silly little in-joke among his pals. Since he lived outside, and everyone from Walter to Portland social services tried to get Michael off the street, whenever he took the cat indoors he would refer to it as the outdoors.
Moments later, he slammed his motel room door shut against the blustery wind. Tabor was ecstatic and immediately hopped onto the bed. When Michael went into the bathroom and turned on the tap to fill up his water bottle, she came rushing in and leaped onto the sink to sip from the tap. He gave Tabor her dinner and then spent a long time in a hot bath trying to thaw out and soothe the blisters on his feet.
The floral bedspread was frayed, the orange carpet was stained, and the bathroom had patches of mildew, but to Michael it was as good as the Ritz. Tabor seemed at home, too. She knew exactly what to do and where to go, and she’d meow by the door to be let out whenever she wanted to relieve herself, which made Michael think again that she was housebroken and definitely belonged to somebody. The motel room had a sliding patio door that opened onto a small patch of grass that was buried in snow deeper than the cat. Seeing it was a struggle for her trying to pee in a foot of snow, Michael borrowed a shovel from the front desk to create a pathway for Tabor so she could do her business and then get back inside out of the cold. But it was so chilly and windy outside that every time Michael slid open the patio door, a small blizzard blew in.
That first night in the motel room, Michael turned on the TV, settled into the bed, and flipped through channels. He had rarely watched TV, even when he had owned one, as he thought most Hollywood actors were unbelievable and terrible. But Babe was on, and Tabor was glued to the screen, mesmerized by the talking barnyard animals. Every so often, she’d leap toward the TV and look behind the screen to investigate how to get to the talking pig and her pals. She made Michael laugh.
On Christmas Day, they ate dinner in bed: a cheese and tomato pizza from the vending machine for Michael and a can of pink salmon for Tabor. He checked his Facebook and read all his Christmas messages from Walter and his friends around the country. This was one of the nicest Christmases he’d ever had, shacked up with a cat in a musty motel.
After his father died, Michael had tried to make amends with his mother. For many years he hated her, and their relationship seemed beyond repair. She had moved to a gated retirement trailer park in a small, dusty Arizona desert town, where she lived alone with two dogs for a while before meeting a retired truck driver named Burt, who moved in with her. She never married Burt because she didn’t want to lose her husband’s police pension, and after Burt passed away, her life revolved around the dogs and the Cowboy Church, a simple white steeple in the desert that had live blue-grass bands and social events, where you could even take your horses.
Michael felt sorry for her and thought she might be lonely, particularly since his brothers had stopped speaking to her. A few years back, Michael had drifted through Arizona twice and called her. Once, he had met up with her in the middle of the desert while she was out walking her dogs, but she didn’t invite him to visit. She later told him that she didn’t think the guards would let him in her trailer park looking the way he did—grubby and unshaven. Ever since then, Michael just kept in touch by calling her on Sundays after her church service. Often, she didn’t answer, and when she did pick up, their conversations were usually short and stilted.
Now, sitting against the plump pillows with Tabor cradled in his arms, he switched the channel to The Wizard of Oz. Tabor couldn’t take her eyes off the army of monkeys with red jackets and the green-faced witch.
“And that’s how I learned that you can melt mean people with water,” he said to Tabor as she watched, wide-eyed, as the wicked witch shrank till nothing was left of her but her hat, robe, and a puddle of steam.
As the credits rolled, Tabor made a nest under the covers and nodded off. Michael watched her as she chattered to herself in her sleep. She was a really heavy dreamer. Sometimes her ears, whiskers, and paws twitched at the same time as her teeth clicked, making a crunching ack ack sound that cats make when they see a bird out the window, out of reach.
It all reminded him of a past life, a time when he slept in a normal bed with his boyfriend and the warm furry bodies of their cat, Mau Mau, and dog, Aggie Jr. At moments like this, he thought he and Tabor must have sought out each other.
As they lay together in the blankets, snow filled the street outside and the red neon sign cast a warm glow across the frosted windowpanes. Michael stared at the red reflection, thinking that things were getting better. That night, he had a dream. He saw a house with a wood-burning stove, a cozy bed, cupboards, and a fridge full of fresh food. Tabor was lying on a basket full of clean laundry.
When he awoke, he felt the memory of someplace half-known sink out of reach.
Chapter 9
Baby Please Come Home
Ron’s father, Donald, and his wife, Judy, lived in a big, rambling, two-story house surrounded by rolling lawns. In a gated community in the upscale West Hills of Portland, their lavish but cozy home was stuffed to the rafters with art and antiques. The living room, a wash of dazzling whiteness with cathedral ceilings, had big picture windows that overlooked the garden and a koi pond and let the evening light stream in. Vases spilling over with white flowers were arranged on every table. A white baby grand piano took up one corner of the living room, and a giant beautifully decorated Christmas tree, glittering with silver and gold ornaments, took up another.
From early December until Christmas Eve, Ron was usually caught up in a whirl of shopping and parties. But this year, he didn’t have the heart for it and simply went with Creto to his father’s house for the family’s Christmas gathering. Ron was hoping that visiting for a couple of days would be a welcome distraction for both of them, and he was afraid that if he left Creto alone in the house, even for an evening, he would be abducted, too. His father was allergic to cats but felt so bad for his son that he allowed him to bring Creto. They put the cat in the guest room, which had a bathroom en suite, where Creto found comfort in curling up in the bathtub.
Donald, Ron’s father, was mourning the death of one of his closest friends, who had died a few days earlier. At eighty-two, Donald was of an age when he was losing old friends, one after another, like falling leaves. Ron had known this family friend since he was a kid and had gone with his father to the funeral. As they had sat in the Catholic church during the somber service the day before, Ron broke down and wept uncontrollably—not for his dad or his dad’s dear friend John—but for Mata and what she had suffered, and for what he thought she might still be suffering. He couldn’t shake off the sadness that he might never see her again or know what happened to her.
The Christmas party the next day o
nly made Ron more anxious and lonely. He couldn’t switch off his sorrow to make small talk. His two adult nieces, whom he barely knew, and Judy’s son, who was close in age to Ron, tried to cheer him up. He could see that everyone thought he was losing it.
While they were all chatting happily, Ron sneaked away to check on Creto, up the graceful sweep of staircase covered with holly and garlands like overgrown ivy. During the course of the evening, everyone at the party had visited the bathroom to say hello to Creto and make a fuss over him. Someone had given him a stocking with a stash of wrapped-up toys—a windup mouse, balls that lit up, and a catnip cigar, which he had sniffed sullenly and batted once or twice before losing interest.
Judy had followed Ron upstairs, carrying a huge carpeted scratching post wrapped with a big red bow. “Look, Creto,” she said, placing it in front of the cat and stooping to stroke his head. “Look what I got for you, pussycat.”
But Creto turned away. Ron sat down on the floor beside him twirling the feathers attached to the scratching post to catch his interest, but the cat jumped out of the bathtub into his lap and buried his head like an ostrich in the crook of Ron’s arm.
“I’m sorry,” Ron said, looking up at Judy, knowing she had made a special effort, particularly as she wasn’t an animal lover. “This is what he does when he’s sad and depressed.” Creto missed his sister and it showed. Judy persuaded Ron to go back downstairs for dinner.
After a long dinner feast, everyone exchanged gifts and then settled in the living room for homemade eggnog and sugar cookies shaped like angels, stars, and snowmen. A vintage Christmas song played in the background, a wistful Motown number, “Baby Please Come Home,” and the yellow tree lights twinkled.
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