Mata had loved having a Christmas tree in the house. She would climb it, paw the ornaments, sharpen her claws on the tree trunk, and drink the water from the stand.
As the night wore on, Ron’s sorrow turned to anger. He fantasized about running over Jack with his car and making it look like an accident. At one point, he even thought about making a voodoo doll and sticking pins into it. Then he felt guilty for having such dark thoughts. Ron used to be a sunny, optimistic person who always made the best of things and was rarely down or depressed for long. Now he was living beneath a tidal wave of grief and negativity that was drowning every aspect of his life.
Seeing Ron sitting alone on the couch, Judy walked toward him with a bottle of cabernet and two glasses and sat beside him. They had had a complicated and frosty relationship but, after years of friction, had warmed to each other.
“Howya doing?” she asked, pouring him a glass. “I don’t know what to say except that I feel terrible for you.”
“It’s so freakish,” Ron said, staring blindly at the fairy lights strung up over the mantel. “How could this happen twice? It’s like being struck by lightning twice. I’m sure it was the Neanderthal across the street . . . he’s unhinged. He probably killed her.”
“You don’t have any proof, and you can’t make an accusation like that go away,” Judy said, with a look of concern.
“I don’t understand why I have to share this city with vile savages like him.”
“You have to remain hopeful.”
“What do I have to be hopeful for?” he said irritably. “It’s been a terrible year. . . . I lose my cat once, barely have her three months after getting her back, only to have her snatched away again. And now I’m at war with a crazy person. I’m so done with 2012.” He felt guilty about complaining, knowing that Judy had spent days shopping and preparing for this gathering, and he didn’t want to seem self-indulgent or ungrateful. “It’s just like I have this raging storm inside my head that no one can see.”
“You don’t have to justify yourself,” she said, reaching for his hand and patting it. “Stuff happens. You just have to deal with it and not allow yourself to be crushed by it.” She put an arm around him and said, “Miracles do happen. Remember you got Mata back once.”
Chapter 10
Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere
On December 27 the snowstorm finally broke, and Sisters, Oregon, was a postcard of whiteness, the sky clear and blue. Michael and Tabor left the motel and went to a bus stop. He did not want to get back on the highway.
A bus heading south toward Eugene pulled in and Michael hopped on with the cat in his arms. The driver shook his head and looked at him as though he were carrying an assault rifle. “No way,” he grunted. “Can’t let you on my bus.”
Michael stepped off. He didn’t know whether the driver wouldn’t let him on because of the cat or because he didn’t want a homeless guy riding his bus. Having slept in his rumpled clothes for days, Michael did look the worse for wear, with his messy hair and dark circles beneath his eyes, but he was clean after holing up in the motel for three days.
The owner of a café beside the bus stop saw the interaction from the window and rushed out. “What happened?” she asked. “Why didn’t he let you on?”
“Dunno,” Michael answered. He was used to being shunned and didn’t want to cause any trouble.
But the lady was genuinely concerned and upset. “It’s disgusting,” she said, shaking her head. “I should’ve gotten his number and reported him. I can’t believe anybody could treat a pair of living souls this way.”
“It’s no big deal,” Michael said, forcing a smile. “I’m used to it.”
“It’s cold out,” she said. She was a lady of a past era, with frosted-pink lipstick and white hair twisted into a bun. “You come inside and warm up.”
Even though she smiled when she said it, her tone made it clear that she wasn’t interested in a debate, so Michael followed her inside the small old-fashioned diner. Stuck in the ’50s, the well-worn interior was a little dusty and in disrepair, but Christmas trinkets and potted poinsettias were arranged sweetly around the white Formica counter. The lady pointed Michael to a corner booth by the window.
Michael set Tabor onto the red vinyl seat and slid down beside her as the café owner poured him some coffee. Then she disappeared behind the counter, and Michael could hear the cappuccino machine steamer. After a minute, she brought out a teacup saucer of milk that she had warmed. Tabor watched her, purring.
“Aren’t you a sweet pussycat?” the lady said cheerily. Tabor’s eyes were fixed on the saucer as the woman leaned over to set it down in front of her. “She’s such a pretty kitty.”
“Yeah, she could easily make the cover of one of those magazines, Modern Cat or something,” Michael said, looking over at Tabor with a twinkle in his eyes.
“I don’t know that magazine. Is it a new one?”
“No, I made it up. . . . I was just saying.”
She watched Tabor scarfing up the frothy milk and said, “Cats are good for the soul.”
“Yeah,” Michael said, smiling and looking down at Tabor. She definitely got him out of himself. He worried about her so much that it stopped him from worrying about his own dark moods and small things like wet socks. She was teaching him to shut out the world and just chill out.
Michael told the café owner the story about rescuing Tabor, and the lady’s cornflower-blue eyes became misty. “Oh, bless your heart, darlin’,” she said. “So where do you live?”
“Out in the street. We’re heading to California to get away from the cold.”
“The way some people live on the street just isn’t right.”
He laughed. “At least I can say I live exactly where I want.”
“It must be hard. How d’you do it?”
“Well, every morning I feel my pulse, and if I still have one, I get up and carry on,” he said, trying to make light of things.
The lady smiled and went off back behind the counter. Michael overheard her talking to someone on the phone complaining about the bus driver.
When the next bus came, she walked out with Michael, ready to take up their cause. “Wait here a sec,” she said, and went to talk to the driver. She pointed at Michael and Tabor, and the driver nodded. She waved Michael over.
He flung on his pack, picked up the cat, and hurried over.
“You won’t have any trouble now,” she said to him.
With Tabor cradled in his arms, he stepped onto the bus heading to Eugene and glanced back at the lady and said, “Thank you for looking after me and Tabor. We’re very grateful.”
He thought back to something his foster father, Walter, had told him: “Never be inhospitable to strangers, because a little kindness can take you a long way and sometimes last a lifetime.”
The café owner clearly lived by these words. And Michael felt the continuing blessing of having stopped for this little lost cat. The kindness he had shown Tabor was now taking care of them both.
Chapter 11
California: Ride into the Sun
When Michael and Tabor got off the bus in Eugene a couple of hours later, it was noticeably warmer. Michael shed some layers. Then, with dusk setting in, he staked out camp under a canopy of dense, shaggy fir trees along the roadside, and they crashed for the night.
The next morning, by foot, bus, and car, Michael and Tabor continued south across ribbons of lonely highways on their one-man, one-cat expedition. After catching a short ride and then walking the rest of the morning, they reached Ashland, an arty liberal enclave also known as the People’s Republic of Ashland, sixteen miles from the California border. Michael was worn ragged and stopped by a roadside general store and gas station for some water and to rest his feet. Michael had passed through and squatted in fields around there on past trips, so after stopping in the store, he headed to a small sloping hill that customers would have to pass right outside. He had Tabor on her lead and a cardboard sign scra
wled with black marker—NEED RIDE TO VENTURA WITH CAT—pinned to his backpack. He didn’t want people to stop for him and then refuse to take him after they saw Tabor. But as it turned out, motorists stopped because of Tabor.
A young woman with a wavy pixie cut and wide smile in a little red Mazda swung in for some gas. “I’d like to offer you and your cat a ride, but I’m alone and probably shouldn’t be picking up hitchhikers. But I want you to have something,” she said, handing him a crisp twenty-dollar bill out the window.
“How about that, Tabor,” he said to the cat sprawled out across his bag. “Everybody loves you.”
Before he even had a chance to give Tabor a snack and roll a cigarette, a shiny RV with Texas plates rumbled up. “Hey, buddy,” a man in mirrored aviator sunglasses called out. “I saw you walk in. You and the cat need a lift?”
“Yeah, we do,” Michael said, picking up Tabor and collecting their things. As soon as he clipped on her leash and set her back down, Tabor sprinted toward the RV, like she’d been hitching all her life and understood what a ride was and was afraid of losing it. He wondered again about how she had wound up alone on the dark, dangerous streets of Southeast Portland.
“Hop in,” the guy said, swinging open the passenger door. He was about the same age as Michael, with cropped peppery gray hair. He wore black Levi’s and a faded gray, long-sleeve T-shirt with LOTTO, GUNS, AMMO, BEER in big letters across the front. “Name’s Ray,” he said, taking off his sunglasses to reveal steely gray-green eyes.
“I’m Groundscore.”
Ray extended his hand to take Michael’s bag. “Where you heading? I’m going just south of Santa Cruz.”
“That’s good for us, too,” Michael replied, pleased to get a good long hitch. He settled into the passenger seat with Tabor on his lap. Because he carefully maintained Tabor’s feeding-time routine while on the road, he never had to worry about having to stop for toilet breaks for her on the longer rides.
Tabor gazed up at Ray, blinking slowly, and raised a paw to touch his arm. “Tabor needs to win everyone over,” Michael said. “And she likes everyone as long as they touch her.”
“Cute cat,” Ray said, glancing down at her and ruffling her scruff.
“She’s my good-luck charm.”
Hitchhiking was always a gamble. Michael had no way of telling where any ride would take him, but most people had been pretty decent and kind to him. Michael had been picked up by all sorts: families with kids; stoned college students; a drunken sheriff who threatened to shoot him like a muskrat if he grabbed the wheel but then gave him a bed for the night at his house, since he had nowhere to go. On the other hand, one of his homeless friends had once hitched a ride with a guy who deliberately drove him fifty miles in the wrong direction and dropped him off in the desert outside a tiny town called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, out of pure meanness.
Ray had driven down from Seattle, more than 450 miles. As they rolled out along the snowy, twisting mountain roads past dense pine forests, Ray headed west on Oregon Route 66 and crossed over to I-5. The snow-capped mountains faded away as the Californian towns rolled by: Weed, Redding, Willows.
“So how’d you get the name Groundscore?” Ray asked with a sidelong glance.
“A bunch of hippies gave it to me,” Michael replied. “About ten years ago I was in Trinidad, California, hitchhiking up the 101, and this pickup truck with a bunch of hippie girls stopped. I told them I was heading to Arkansas for the Rainbow Gathering. And they were going there, too.
“On the way, we stop at a convenience store around three a.m. I see a grocery cart with a box in it. I take off toward it. And just before I reach the shopping cart, I look down and see a twenty-dollar bill, and I stop and pick it up. But it’s actually two hundred dollars, ten twenty-dollar bills, and at the bottom of the cart is a cold six-pack of Henry Weinhard’s. My name at the time was Montana Mike, but the hippie girls in the truck started calling me Groundscore. All my homeless friends in Portland loved it, so it stuck.”
All the folks who picked Michael up had their own stories—and some shared a little too much, pouring out all their midnight confessions like sinners to a priest, knowing they were unlikely to see him again.
Ray turned out to be a good traveling companion, mostly because he did much of the talking. He was an army dog and spoke with the gravelly voice of someone who smoked a hundred Marlboro Reds a day. “I left my wife. Made a mess of my life. It was good for a long while, then it all went to hell.”
Michael didn’t reply, since he was tired and concentrating on Tabor, who buried her little chin in her paws, half-asleep, and with a purring sigh, drifted off.
“What you running away from?” Ray asked him.
Startled by the question, Michael stumbled over his words. “I’m, ah . . . not running away from anything. Just trying to get away from the cold and the rain of Portland. There was a time when I’d hitch all over America, but now I’m just trying to survive another winter. That’s all.”
Ray looked at him and smiled. “Well, you look like some kinda outlaw.”
People had told Michael that before. The guy at the DMV who took his picture for his driver’s license had told him that he looked like Billy the Kid. Michael liked the thought of it.
“I’m just a drifter.”
“We’re all drifters,” Ray said, laughing, “fugitives from something or other. My grandparents escaped from the famine in Ireland, my parents from the poverty and dead ends of a small town. I ran away from the suffocation of my life and the brutalities of war.”
Five hours into their journey, in Sacramento, the smell of California farmland rose up around them. They passed rice paddies, walnut orchards, and cow pastures. With the sun shining and in the homey comfort of the RV, it was an easy ride.
Passing through San Francisco, they cut over to the scenic coastal Route 1 in Daly City. Rolling down the window as they headed south to Big Sur, Michael felt the chilly sea breeze on his face and thought about all the places Mercer told him he had visited during his time in the air force. The gusty draft woke Tabor, who suddenly sprung up, the hairs around her head fluffed out from sleeping.
“I always wanted to see the world,” he said to Ray, “to cross the ocean out of curiosity as much as anything else.”
“That’s what I thought when I went into the army. But I gotta tell you, curiosity sometimes kills.”
The Pacific came into view. “Look, Tabor . . . look, it’s the ocean,” Michael said, holding the cat up to the window. “That’s where we’re going.”
Sprawled across Michael’s lap, Tabor watched everything, owl-like, purring at the excitement of it all: the low-flying clouds scudding past, the shoots of puff plants waving in the wintry breeze, and the cars whooshing by. She was even unfazed by the big monster trucks and never flinched when she saw one approaching.
Beneath a hazy purple sky, Ray swerved along the twists and turns of Highway 1, frighteningly close to the cliff, the fierce, foamy water of the Pacific swirling below.
By the time they reached Half Moon Bay, a lovely coastal hamlet of misty bluffs and beaches, everyone was tired and quiet. A little further south, Michael smelled the kelp forests and listened to the elephant seals barking along the shore—Tabor slept, snoring away on his lap, her fluffy little head nestled on her paws.
They drove all the way down to Watsonville, listening to the Dead Kennedys, the Violent Femmes, and a mix of 1980s Californian punk bands, sharing a bag of Cheetos and a steady stream of Cokes.
It was dark by the time Ray let Michael and Tabor off in Watsonville, an agricultural town a short skip away from Santa Cruz. Michael found an out-of-the-way sleeping nook under a bushy black walnut tree on a patch of green off the main road. He gave Tabor her dinner, made a fire, and heated up some canned spaghetti hoops. Then they both fell sleep, exhausted after nearly ten hours in the RV.
Waking up in the sunshine the next morning with Tabor at his side, Michael felt a lightness and sense
of relief at being outside, even in the cold and gloom of dawn. Soon after Tabor guzzled her breakfast, he clipped on her leash and stuck her in his jacket and they explored the quaint little shops along Third Street before taking a short bus ride to Santa Cruz. The mellow beach town overlooking Monterey Bay—once a stopover for Jack Kerouac—prided itself as being the last holdout of ’60s counterculture, and it buzzed with old hippies, surfers, stoners, and college kids. University of California, Santa Cruz, even had its own on-campus trailer park for students.
Getting off in the heart of the city just off Pacific Avenue, Michael cruised over to a little mom-and-pop taco bar on the edge of the waterfront that he knew fed the homeless for free most mornings. The owner, a recovering alcoholic, ran the restaurant with his wife and two adult sons. He’d started his charity work about twenty-five years earlier, when he had seen an old man digging in the trash for food. He gave him something to eat and, ever since, had been handing out food to anyone destitute and hungry, in the spirit of Jesus Christ, he said. Every morning, the area’s homeless quietly lined up at the side window for a plate of freshly cooked food, in exchange for the pass code: “Beans and rice for Jesus Christ.”
After getting his bowl, Michael found a bench close by. He and the cat sat next to each other, and he gave Tabor her meal. She dug into her lunch as Michael ate his rice and beans. It amazed him how much he’d grown to love her. Calm and trusting, she was turning out to be the perfect road cat, adapting to everything and living life to the fullest.
With the whole day stretching ahead, Michael walked the length of Pacific Avenue with Tabor riding on his backpack, her eucalyptus-green eyes big and wide, absorbing everything, the colorful street musicians, the arty vintage storefronts shaded by tall trees soaring toward the sky.
They wove around the side streets named after trees—Willow, Maple, Laurel—and just when Michael thought he was beat from walking and carrying his pack with a shifting cat, he saw a little roadhouse-style bar tucked on a backstreet. It was a friendly, seedy neighborhood dive, the type of authentic crumbly bar found in small towns, with local color, heavy pours, and dark, snug corners where he could disappear with a cat. He had lunch at the farthest end of the bar and hung on for happy hour since it was New Year’s Eve. The dimly lit room had a musty elegance, with ripped wallpaper, a jukebox, and vintage surfing snaps on the walls behind the long wooden bar.
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