By three o’clock, the lunchtime crowd of locals and out-of-towners had dispersed. Five people remained at the bar, the same old spooks and toughs who came regularly, putting in a hard day’s drinking, with golden oldies on the jukebox providing the soundtrack.
The bartender, a slim, brown-eyed boy with a soft dusting of freckles and trendy haircut and a goatee, recognized Michael and Tabor from sweeping past the bar earlier. He set out a shot of whiskey in front of Michael and said, “This one’s on me. Celebrating a bit early, aren’t you?”
Michael smiled and said, “I don’t need an excuse. I drink every day.”
Tabor enjoyed the fuss as the barflies reached across and stroked her and scratched her chin. But when she wasn’t getting any attention, she’d wander off and plop down in the doorway, greeting people passing by with a friendly chirrup. Michael worried that someone would step on her or she’d wander into the street, so he dragged her back inside. But whenever he looked away from her, she would scamper off to her self-appointed post by the door. When he brought her back for the third time and placed her onto the velvet bar stool and clipped on her leash, she protested with a series of loud, whiny meows.
“This is our first disagreement,” Michael said to the bartender. “I don’t force her to do anything. I think of her as a human being, but unfortunately I have to carry the little bastard around.”
“She’s a queen.”
“She’s the queen of frickin’ everything . . . thinks the world turns around her.”
The bartender spoke to Tabor in a high-pitched voice, “Are you all right there, kitty?”
Snippy and impatient with his customers, the bartender waited hand and foot on Tabor. He gave her fresh cream in a scotch glass. Tabor cupped it and drank it with her paw. The bartender screeched with excitement. “My God, that is the cutest thing ever.” He’d had cats back home in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where he grew up facing Mount Rushmore, a town that he’d found to be too small and too sleepy, so he’d moved to California.
Tabor finished her cream and looked up at Michael with drops on her chin. Still annoyed, she stared at him accusingly, as though he’d smuggled her into the bar and was holding her hostage.
“I haven’t chained you to the radiator,” he said to Tabor, smiling, and picked her up to prevent her from running off again. “She makes me look terrible sometimes, like I neglect her. She has everything she needs, but still meows for strangers.”
The bartender brought her a handful of maraschino cherries to play with. She hopped onto the bar to bat them around. Whenever she pushed them onto the floor, she’d wait for Michael to pick them up. After a few minutes, she lost interest and sat on his lap again.
“Look at your paws . . . they’re all sticky,” Michael chided her, but she just blinked at him.
“Cats aren’t wired for submission,” he said to the bartender. “They’re used to having servants. I have to say no to Tabor about twenty-five times before seven a.m. every day. Always has to have her way.”
He dug into his pocket and pulled out a bag of Purina Party Mix to appease her. He scooped out a handful, and she arranged herself on his lap, gobbling them up from his hand with an appreciative deep-throated purr. Then she moved onto the empty stool next to him, with one of her back legs dangling over the side, and promptly fell asleep.
The bartender placed another shot glass of whiskey in front of Michael and poured himself a shot.
“I’m on the clock and have to look after this one,” Michael said, gesturing to the sleeping cat curled up on the stool beside him. “I can’t overdo it, but thanks.”
They raised their tiny glasses up in the air, clinking them.
In the dimly lit coziness, Michael worked his way through a few whiskeys. Some jangly old Byrds tune about feeling lonely in the daytime played in the background. In his mind, he saw Mercer, handsome and unshaven, his calm blue eyes smiling at him.
Sitting at the far end of the bar with Tabor still drowsing and dreaming beside him, he watched people trickle in and thought back to happier times, before Mercer got sick. For a couple of years, wanting a break from St. Louis, they had lived on Mercer’s family farm by Lake Wappapello in rural southeast Missouri. Set on sixteen acres, the three-story house had a sprawling wild garden that spilled out toward the lake. Michael worked as a chef in a steakhouse, Millers House of Angus, just down the road, owned by an old St. Louis gangster named Lefty Miller, who had done time for tax evasion, and his wife, Anita. They served surf and turf fare, mostly to locals who came in for their weekly steaks. Michael got along well with the owners, but they were drunks, and there was always some sort of drama going on.
At the end of the night sometime around New Year’s Eve, Michael was tired and irritable. Someone had sent back a steak, complaining that she wanted it black and blue. Michael was squalling around the kitchen, when he heard a big crash in the restaurant and Lefty’s wife, Anita, stormed into the kitchen. “Michael, I need you now,” she shouted. “Come out here, you’ve got to get Lefty.”
“I’m busy,” he said. “Why do I always have to get him?”
“Because you’re the only one who can touch him,” she snapped, and stalked off.
When Michael had first walked into the restaurant looking for a job after seeing an ad in the local paper, Lefty hired him on the spot—and promptly anointed him the chosen one who was allowed to touch him when he fell.
Michael threw off his stained chef’s whites and left them in the middle of the kitchen. He went out to the dining room, where he found Lefty flat on his face by the steps leading to the bar where he’d fallen, cursing and grumbling to himself. With his limbs splayed out all over the place, he looked like one of those chalk outlines of a dead body at a crime scene.
One of the young waiters was trying to help pick him up off the floor. “Don’t fucking touch me,” Lefty snarled, pushing him away. “Get King out here.”
“I am here,” Michael said, and scooped up Lefty. He carried him out to his Lincoln and drove him across the street to their house. Lefty was so drunk he was crying. Michael carried him inside and poured him on the couch and then left to get back to work.
When he was walking through the parking lot around the back of the restaurant, Michael heard whimpering and snuffling coming from under the dumpster. Crawling down on his belly to look, he saw a little dog, a fluffy brown thing that looked like a tiny bear cub with filthy, matted fur. He picked up the scared, trembling pup and took it inside with him while he closed up for the night. He decided to call the pup Angus after the steakhouse and brought the little thing home to Mercer.
They cleaned up the puppy and took him to the vet, where they discovered that he was a she, nearly fully grown and pregnant, possibly the reason she had been ditched. Michael changed her name to Aggie. When she had her puppies, they found homes for them among friends and family but kept Aggie and one of the pups. A few months later Aggie got out of the house and was hit by a car, so they renamed the pup that they kept Aggie Jr.
He’d always been glad that he’d saved Aggie and her puppies. Aggie Jr. had been a great dog and given him so much love. That was long ago, and now he had Tabor to look after. And he hoped that they would have a good long time together.
The next morning, Michael woke up blinded by the sun under a magnificent old magnolia. He caught a whiff of cotton candy mingled with salty air from the boardwalk, and glimpsing the shimmer of sea, he packed up and headed for the beach. But when he saw a bus going to Salinas about thirty-odd miles away, he hopped on so that he could show Tabor Steinbeck’s hometown. Steinbeck was Michael’s favorite writer. The way he wrote about broken America still rang true and meant something to Michael.
Rumbling along the highway through Steinbeck country, the wooded canyons, valleys, and vineyards stretching out all around, Michael had Tabor nestled on his lap, with her paws neatly folded over each other. Every so often, Tabor stood up or swiveled her little head to the window to get a good loo
k at the new scenery. Her eyes grew large as the bus swept by the eighteen-foot-tall cardboard cutouts of farmworkers sprouting out of the fields like giants lining the highway.
When they got off the bus in the old downtown of Salinas, Michael walked down to Central Avenue, Tabor on his shoulder, to the house where Steinbeck grew up. Steinbeck’s presence was everywhere, on the street plaques, stone monuments, the “Steinbeck ate and drank here” signs in bars and café windows. Strolling around this preserved sleepy hollow with its maze of pretty streets, Victorian houses, and ancient oaks, Michael talked to the cat on his shoulder, pointing things out to her.
After exploring Salinas, Michael found out from the locals that there was a bus going to King City, so he and Tabor slept in the bushes along a grassy median to not miss the bus. He had told Tabor that they would stop when they reached the first warm town, and that happened to be King City.
Chapter 12
King City: Sweetheart of the Rodeo
A sleepy coastal town tucked among lettuce and strawberry fields, King City was a regular passage for Michael whenever he migrated down the coast to California. The whole place smelled of strawberries and summer, even in the winter. When they got there, the sun was shining and the temperature was in the 70s. The sweet scents and the warmth of the sun felt like Eden for the drifter and the cat with a vagabond heart.
On that first day, with Tabor perched on his shoulder, Michael wandered around the town center, an old-fashioned Mission-style shopping arcade. Taking in the myriad sights and scents, they passed artisan boutiques, folksy secondhand bookshops, and cute courtyard cafés, before settling in the shade of a lemon tree outside a grocery store to panhandle. The tree was in full bloom and shedding blossoms.
With white petals stuck in her fur, Tabor greeted the children and dogs who approached her like a world-class diplomat. She had to say hello to everyone, rolling over on her back and showing her white belly, which was becoming rounder by the day. The children chattered excitedly and squealed with laughter as they petted and cuddled the cat.
One little boy, dressed in a red cowboy hat and a plastic holster with a toy gun, told Tabor, “You’ve got patches like a cow. You’re the sweetheart of the rodeo.” Michael couldn’t help but smile.
When the sun got too hot, Michael found a shadier spot outside McDonald’s. A chubby perky young woman in denim cutoffs and flip-flops walked out of the store and right up to them and handed him a bag. “Here’s a cheeseburger for you and a small cheeseburger for the cat.”
Michael thanked her, but thought, Some people just don’t know. He’d never feed the cat garbage like a greasy burger. He used to get annoyed at Stinson for trying to give Tabor french fries. Then the woman reached into her purse. “And here’s twenty dollars to get whatever you want,” she said, handing him a crisp note. “God bless you both.” Michael thanked her again. He’d eat Tabor’s small burger and replenish his stash of cat food for her with the cash.
The local population was largely Latino and religious, very generous to the homeless. Someone gave him a pocket Bible with a ten-dollar bill wedged inside. “Thank you, Jesus,” Michael whispered as his benefactor walked away. The cat was a constant reminder of the goodness of people and he thought he would spend God’s money on her.
“Tabor, we’re staying here,” he said to the cat who had rolled on her back again, a little distance from him, in a patch of winter sunshine. She gazed up at him, her eyes vertical black slits in the brilliant sunlight. “We’re taking a vacation.”
Michael and Tabor stayed in King City for two relaxing weeks—exactly what they needed after all the snow and hardships of Oregon.
One late afternoon, after washing his dirty clothes, Michael settled outside the Laundromat near a back alley creeping with flowering vines. On a bench under a grapefruit tree, he sat there happily reading the local paper, smoking a roll-up spiked with the local pot, with Tabor spilled across his lap. A minivan pulled up alongside them with a man and a small boy in the passenger seat. The driver rolled down his window and shouted: “Hey, how much do you want for the cat?”
This annoyed Michael. “I’ll take the van and the kid,” he said, stunning the guy into silence.
Moments later, a young woman with long, dark hair wearing a snug black sweater and ripped jeans stopped to say hello to Tabor. “Well, aren’t you just adorable,” she cooed, petting Tabor. “Don’t you just love her?”
“Like crazy,” Michael said, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He put down his newspaper. “She’s a great cat. Some idiot just tried to buy her from me. He was expecting that I’d say twenty bucks or something. But the cat has no monetary value. She’s priceless.”
The woman patted Tabor and then asked where they were from. He told her the story of finding the cat and how she had appeared as if by magic in the rain. “From that very first night, Tabor and me got along like peas and carrots.”
“Sweet,” she said. “It’s written in the stars. You two were probably meant to find each other.”
“We’re the perfect match. We’re both mellow, and neither of us is ambitious.”
“Do you mind me asking how you became homeless?”
“Well, I hit the skids,” he said, suddenly glum. “It’s just one of those things.” He stared at the crack in the sidewalk, snagged on a memory of Mercer’s face when he was dying. Michael had been working at the restaurant two blocks away when he got a call from the hospice nurse he’d hired to watch over him, saying, “Mercer’s going, come home.” By the time he got to his bedside, minutes later, Mercer was fading in and out of consciousness, so he slipped away before Michael got to say good-bye.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry,” the woman said, seeing the despair on Michael’s face. “We all have our issues and our sorrows. Don’t lose hope. We can live for forty days without food, three days without water, and three minutes without air. But we can’t live seconds without hope.”
“Don’t know about that,” said Michael. Walter, his foster father, also talked about the importance of hope and always told him to expect nothing but hope for the best. It was a philosophy that Michael only partially lived by. “Hope is often cruel. . . . Food, water, beer, and cigarettes is usually enough,” he said, smiling. “But I’m not doing too badly. I’ve got the cat. And the friendship and feeling between us is as deep as the Mississippi River.”
Tabor stretched and hopped off his lap, giving him a look over her shoulder as she headed over to the flowering vines along the brick wall of a nearby alley. This struck a nerve, and the woman stepped back, tears streaking her mascara. “Your cat reminds me of my own little tabby,” she said, and then pulled some money out of her handbag, stuffed it in his hand, and said he should buy Tabor something to eat before rushing away.
Michael was surprised to see that she had given him a fifty-dollar bill. The people with the saddest stories always seemed to be the most generous.
Now feeling a little low, he noticed that it was getting dark. Tabor came up to him silently, nuzzling against his ankles. She smelled sweet and musky, and Michael noticed little white stars of jasmine sticking out of her fur; she must’ve been rubbing herself against the creeping vines of the alley wall.
“Let’s go,” he said, scooping up Tabor, who was still purring, and swung her onto his shoulder. He headed for the nearest liquor store with the woman’s cash. Minutes later, he’d got a bottle of cheap sour mash whiskey, a six-pack of Rainier, and a pack of American Spirit cigarettes.
The next day at dawn, cold and confused, Michael woke up, unsure of where he was. He could make out a deserted alleyway and a heap of sagging garbage bags, which had been ripped apart by coyotes or raccoons. He felt wrecked, with a crushing headache. Tabor was curled on his chest, paws tucked underneath her, staring down at him sleepily. Trying not to disturb her, he reached for his hat, a worn jade-green snap-brim he’d long ago found in an empty cactus-strewn lot in the Southwest, and put it over his face to block out the daylight.
Then he fell back asleep.
A little while later he felt a strong hand grip his shoulder. Michael moved his hat to peer up with glassy, unfocused eyes, barely able to see anything beyond a blur of navy blue through the haze of sunlight. A gruff, square-jawed policeman was standing over him.
“Goddamn it,” he grumbled to himself, rubbing the sleepiness from his eyes. He staggered up, dislodging Tabor, and fell back onto the ground. Tabor scampered off to sit and watch, a few feet away, beside the alleyway wall.
“You can’t sleep here.”
“I’m sorry, officer, I just passed out here.”
“I’ll have to fine you for blocking the sidewalk,” he said, and started writing up a ticket for loitering.
“I can’t make myself invisible. . . . Wish I could.”
The policeman asked for his ID and continued writing up the ticket. Michael, too hungover and groggy to think straight, took out a selection of state IDs and driver’s licenses, including long-expired ones showing him with varying lengths of hair and beards. He picked out his Montana ID and reached up to give it to the cop.
“Montana,” he said, looking down at Michael, “is this where you live?”
“Don’t live anywhere.”
The policeman handed back the ID with a ticket. Michael stared at the piece of yellow paper, stunned by the amount of the fine. “Um, seriously, $265 bucks for lying on the sidewalk? But this is an alley,” he protested halfheartedly, pulling out his sketchpad, where he kept other unpaid tickets he’d received over the last few months, and added it to the stack.
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