Jesus’s pit bull occupied most of the backseat and didn’t look too happy to see them. He glared at Tabor through the car window, but she glared back, unflinching, from her perch in Michael’s arms. She had a lot of dog friends in Portland, and Michael could only remember once when she hadn’t liked a dog. That dog had learned to stay clear of Tabor. But now that she was a badass road cat, even pit bulls didn’t scare her.
Jesus pushed the dog up into the front seat and swept his arms over the backseat to clear it of empty energy drink cans and candy bar wrappers. A dirty glass pipe was lying on the floor.
As they loaded their gear into the car, Michael said half-jokingly, “So are you gonna kill us or give us a ride?”
“We’re not gonna kill you. But if you wanna ride, you gotta hustle,” Jesus said. The guns were for protection, he explained, since he usually traveled alone. He had to cover the weapons with the burlap top in order to get into Walmart.
Jesus was just hitching a lift back to his own car, which he’d left two blocks away outside a huge monolithic white church. The tall neon-blue cross on top of the church shone like a beacon in the fading early-evening light. A gleaming mint-green, vintage Cadillac was parked in front. The license plate read: JC.
“Creepy,” Michael mouthed silently to Kyle.
As they glided up next to the Caddy, Jesus said, “My friend here will get you where you need to go.” Then he and his pit bull got out of the car.
After Jesus and his hellhound left, the guy twisted around to talk to them over the front seat, asking the usual stuff, where they were from and about the cat, and mumbling bits about himself. He claimed to be a farmer working in Idaho and heading back to Montana to visit his wife.
He didn’t look like one. Michael was sure he was a meth head—he had a tick, bloodshot eyes, and messed-up teeth—and they had some three hundred miles ahead of them. Michael told him they had been stuck in Mountain Home for nearly a week, but that their last ride had given them some weed.
The tweaker got excited about the weed. “We can all have a smoke first,” he said, his eyes darting furtively around the backseat. His manic intensity reminded Michael of a local addict he knew in Portland who’d snuck into people’s gardens and cut poppy plants open to get the seeds for opium.
Michael handed the tweaker the nearly empty jar. He rolled and lit up a fat joint, took several long puffs, spilling ash across himself, and then passed it back to him and Kyle.
“Blow all the smoke outside,” Michael said to Kyle, reaching over him to open his window. “I don’t want a stoned cat.”
After they finished the joint, Kyle moved up to the passenger seat, and Jesus’s drug-fiend apostle screeched away. He raced over back roads through the rolling farmland of white-tufted potato fields before accelerating onto the highway.
Thirty miles out of Mountain Home, the guy realized that he only had a third of a tank of gas left and would have to drive through mostly desert, so he made a hasty U-turn and went back into town to fill up. When he returned to the two-lane highway, he weaved recklessly around trucks and other vehicles. Michael gripped Tabor closely, even though she dozed away on his lap somehow undisturbed by all the swerving and the smell of burning tires.
“You know Jesus was homeless, too,” the tweaker said, looking at Michael in the rearview mirror. “He was out in the desert for forty-four nights.”
“I’m the guy who’s out here 24/7,” Michael said. “Not that I’m comparing myself to Jesus or whatever you believe in, but I’ve been out here for forty-thousand frickin’ nights for sure.”
The tweaker turned his head around to face Michael in the back as he drove. “I think, like sheep, we’ve all gone astray.”
“Look out,” Kyle shouted, “there’s a rabbit.”
Instead of avoiding the animal, the tweaker deliberately swerved toward it, crossing lanes on the dark highway. When he spotted another rabbit on the other side of the road, he steered toward it, with a jerky swing of the wheel, to try to hit it.
As someone who had hitched alone over thousands of miles, Michael relied on his instincts and had rarely felt in danger. But once his buzz wore off, he thought, What the hell was I thinking?
Kyle was sure that he was going to kill them, and seeing how scared he looked, Michael said, “Hey, you want me to take a stretch at the wheel? So you can rest?” He hadn’t driven in years, after getting a couple of DUIs in both Montana and Missouri, but he wanted to prevent the tweaker from killing the local wildlife—and all of them.
The tweaker seemed relieved, slammed on the brakes, and skidded onto the gravel shoulder, leaving the car running. He got out of the car, crawled into the back, and collapsed across the backseat. Michael handed Tabor over to Kyle, then slid into the driver’s seat. Sitting behind the steering wheel felt awkward at first, like something from a past life, but he slowly merged back onto the lonely two-lane black highway and drove the last two hundred miles through the desert.
The drive took him back to the only family holiday he ever had, one summer in the mid-1970s, driving with his parents, his sister, and his three brothers in a VW van through the muggy South. They’d driven through Louisiana’s moonlit bayou country to wake up in the Florida sunshine at dawn. When they’d left Missouri behind, it seemed like everything ahead might be better, but when they arrived, nothing had changed: his mother was still severe and his father distant. But he had never forgotten the feeling, the promise that travel could somehow change things.
Along the I-15 freeway, the mountainous Idaho desert turned into high plains and then into forests of beautiful centuries-old trees as they crossed the Montana state line. Moths flickered in the headlights. Kyle held Tabor asleep on his lap, her paws and whiskers twitching, as she dreamed her adventure-cat dreams. A warm wind drifted through the window.
Michael turned on the radio to Bruce Springsteen’s “Devils & Dust,” a mournful, meditative tune that somehow at one in the morning sounded surprisingly happy. It felt good, like what a family road trip should be like, at least if you ignored the meth addict passed out in the backseat.
Shifting over to the MT-41 highway, they rolled into Dillon, a pretty little prairie town in southwestern Montana’s cattle country. It was still too early in the morning to drop in on his brother, and JP had no room for them to stay, anyway. He had two cats of his own, a sick wife, and enough troubles. So Michael pulled over outside the Native American historical museum, across the road from JP’s house. He put Tabor in her carrier, and he and Kyle gathered up their packs, shook the tweaker awake, and thanked him.
They waved good-bye, watching the taillights of the car fade away. Michael shouldered his pack and picked up Tabor’s carrier, and he and Kyle staggered along the side of the road, ragged and worn. They decided to sleep out under the stars, on a patch of green near the museum, where Michael had camped out before. They had to climb over a fence, but there was a ladder on both sides.
Once they were over the fence, Michael clipped on Tabor’s leash and let her out of her carrier and down on the grass. With Tabor slinking alongside them, they walked to a huge, hollowed-out oak tree. “We can sleep here,” Michael said, looking up at the crescent moon. “And in the morning, we’ll hitch a lift to Helena.”
They dropped their packs and unrolled their sleeping bags next to some dense, trampled-down bushes. Michael put Tabor back in her carrier as Kyle kicked off his shoes and conked out on top of his bedroll as though he’d been dropped out of the sky. He was asleep instantly. Michael lay in his sleeping bag, listening to Tabor snoring in her mobile home beside his head.
Gazing up at the moon, Michael thought about what the tweaker had said: like those sheep in the Bible, Michael had gone astray. He’d been running away his whole life. He knew where this fury and restlessness came from, but not how to deal with it. For the past ten years, he’d thought of himself as essentially being alone, and he’d spent a lot of time feeling lost, constantly longing to be someplace else.
Now, with Tabor at his side, he wanted to leave the past behind and to live again, not drift like a ghost across the country. Tabor reminded him what an amazing feeling it was being with someone you cared about and the way it changed how you felt about everything.
The moon was so bright that it lit the splashy-red Indian paintbrush flowers that crowded around the tree beside him. Michael was wired and couldn’t sleep. He sat up in his sleeping bag to light a cigarette, thinking they should pass by JP’s in the morning, since he lived across the road. Michael fell in and out of sleep beside the hollowed-out tree. At one point, he heard hooting and looked up to see a huge, great horned owl. In the stillness, he could hear coyotes howling in the distance and small night creatures scurrying in the underbrush.
By the time Michael drifted back to sleep it was already getting light. Soon after Tabor started meowing to wake them. Michael and Kyle got up, gathered their gear, and walked across the road to JP’s. They met up with him and his partner, and some of their friends who lived in the same little apartment building. Afterward Michael got JP to drop them off in the pasture where he’d camped once before on previous visits.
They were on the last stretch home to Walter—and a long, relaxing break away from everything.
Chapter 18
Black Magic Woman
In Portland, Ron gazed out the bay window of his living room. It was a beautiful weekend in early June. The sycamores were full of crows, and the magnolia was in bloom. A warm breeze blew in through the open windows and screened porch door, making the gauzy white curtains billow like sails, and scattered petals across the pavement.
Ron normally felt a thrill at the first flush of summer, but now he rarely left the house except to go to work at his guitar store and to shop for food at the corner store. He had become self-absorbed and solitary, often with only the cats for company. His friends—who were throwing barbecues, going to music festivals, open-air movies in Berkeley Park, and weekends away on the coast—kept trying to get him to come out. His friend Evan had actually persuaded Ron to go out that night to Pok Pok, Ron’s favorite Thai restaurant, which was a few blocks away on Division Street, Portland’s buzzing culinary hub.
After finishing his weekend shopping and cleaning, Ron was hit by what he called the black wave. To lighten his dark mood, he tried to make himself get up to go to the park to get some fresh air and mix with the summer crowds, but he barely made it around the block. He wasted the whole afternoon slouching on the sofa and listening to 92.3 FM, the classic rock station. But Bonnie Tyler wailing away about a heartache, terrorizing him and the cat over the radio, didn’t help his mood.
“Is this really music?” he asked Creto, who’d buried himself deep in the folds of the sofa.
He needed to do something to make it to the evening when Evan would arrive.
Just at the right moment, Jim slipped through the screen door with his rusty meow and bits of leaves sticking to his tail. Jim sometimes pulled the porch screen door open with his claws—a trick that he’d taught Mata and Creto—so that they could sneak out of the house whenever they wanted. Ron calculated that between the first and second time Mata had disappeared, she had been gone for a total of fifteen months, and she was only three years old. Ron picked up Jim and stroked him, disentangling the leaves from his tail, as he purred away.
On the couch beside him, Creto was sprawled out grooming himself, balling up one small white paw into a little fist like a boxer, licking it, and then stuffing it into his ears. Usually Ron thought it was the funniest thing, but lately, Creto had started over-grooming himself, stripping the fur off his belly and the back of his legs. He looked like he had mange, but he had a feline anxiety disorder and was suffering from the loss of his sister. The vet prescribed various remedies and skin oils, but nothing worked. Since Mata had disappeared, Creto spent most of his time following Ron around the house and garden, and he waited mournfully on the porch every night for his sister to come home.
After nine months, Ron had not given up on Mata. Her loss still consumed him. He missed and mourned her daily—all the quirky little things she did: the way she draped herself around his shoulders when he sat at his desk; when she sat under the propped-up cat-flap using it as an umbrella when it rained; and how she liked extra-virgin olive oil and drank it out of an espresso cup with her paw. Everywhere he looked held a memory of her. Whenever Steve was out and Ron was home alone, the black wave crashed over him. Some days he hid in his attic sanctuary to cry in peace. He didn’t want his friends to see how depressed he’d become, to judge him, or to say things like “It’s only a cat” or “Why don’t you get another one?”
A few days earlier, Ron had called Rachel, the psychic, again and left her a message explaining that he had a nagging feeling his cat was out there somewhere, and it was driving him mad. When Rachel returned his call a day later, she said that she had had a dream so strong that it had left her with a debilitating twenty-four-hour migraine.
In that dream, she said, “Mata came to me from paradise. She told me that she’s quite happy there. She wants me to tell you that she loves you very much, misses you, and not to worry about her. She also said that her life with you was wonderful as short of a time as it was. But there are things that Mata doesn’t want me to tell you, like the details of how she passed away or where her corpse is.”
Ron listened quietly, but all he could hear were the words passed away and corpse and his heart thumping in his ears. “Oh, my God,” he said, freaked out. “I’m sorry, I’ve gotta go.” Deeply distressed, he immediately rang Suzy. They hadn’t spoken since Jack had moved away and vandalized his house and car. Ron relayed what the psychic told him, but Suzy reiterated what she told him months ago, that she and Jack were away for the Labor Day weekend.
Despite Rachel’s premonition, Ron couldn’t shake off the feeling that Mata was still alive.
As evening fell, Ron became strangely overexcited and jittery. He tried to calm himself down and remembered the story his grandmother had told him, passed down the generations, of how during the Civil War families had left candles in the windows for the return of soldiers who had left to fight. Like the glow of a lighthouse, the candles guided the war-ravaged men through the darkness to the safety of home. Since he could only find one half-melted candle in the house, he went to the corner grocer and bought a couple of dozen red votive candles, and he put them around the house, on windowsills, and the glass coffee table in the living room.
He lit the votive candles, and soon every space and surface was glowing red. As Ron was finishing, Evan came to the front door. Creto, who was now wary and suspicious of everyone and every noise, heard him before he even had walked up the porch and pushed open the screen door, and scrambled to get behind Ron, alerting him.
“My God,” said Evan, a slight, small-boned guy with short coppery-brown hair, a pale Irish-mist complexion, and arms inked with girly butterfly tattoos. He stood in the doorway, surveying the living room, stifling a laugh. “It looks like the house from The Exorcist. Are you trying to burn it down?”
“Funny,” Ron replied, breaking into a half-smile.
“Wouldn’t it be more sensible to go across the road and set that miserable bastard’s house on fire . . . preferably with him in it?”
Evan was always good for a laugh. Before moving to New York and becoming a photographer, he’d worked for a British tabloid and wrote the captions beneath the half-naked Page Three girls, things like DELICIOUS DEBBIE . . . SHE’S GOT BIG TITS. Ron called him “international man of mystery” and was drawn to him for his quick wit and quirkiness—he’d say things like: “They’ve chosen the new Bond and he’s only got one eyebrow.”
“And since when have you become such a mystic?”
“Since my life’s been ruined,” Ron said, picking up and cuddling Creto. “I just miss her so much.”
“Look, I know you miss her,” Evan said sympathetically, and slid down on the sofa arm beside Ron. “But this is a little crazy.”
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“Creto misses her, too. He won’t come in at night, and I hear mewling on the porch,” Ron said, setting down the cat, who curled into a black ball of fur on the sofa. “Look at him. He’s going bald and he’s half the cat he was. He creeps around the house and hides in the mattress, where he’s dug out a little hole for himself. Whenever the doorbell rings, he disappears into the basement. It’s so dank down there, but he pulled an old blanket off the shelf and made himself a nest. He never goes on little adventures or visits the neighbors like he used to. The only thing that makes him happy is mint gelato.”
“You feed the cat mint ice cream?”
“Yeah, he loves it,” Ron replied, distracted. “Maybe I need to find a cat whisperer.”
“For Creto?”
“No, someone who can communicate with animals to help find Mata.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“Yes, I think I have. The not knowing is killing me,” he said, and then proceeded to tell Evan about a dream he had the previous night in which he was lost inside a decaying old, cobwebby mansion sealed up like a time capsule, following a cat’s shadow up endless stairs. “The higher the floors, the more dilapidated and mysterious it is. Somehow, I end up outside in this wooded area that’s apocalyptic. There’s mud everywhere, and Creto and I are looking for Mata. In the distance, I keep seeing an emaciated little cat with bleeding paws trying to find her way back home through the woods.”
“Burning candles isn’t going to bring her back. And you have to prepare yourself that she might be dead.”
“Stop,” Ron snapped, “she’s not dead.”
Evan, seeing the despair in his eyes, gave Ron a big hug. He loved Mata, too, but he was increasingly worried about Ron’s sanity. “I’m sure she’s having an adventure out there in the blue yonder,” Evan said, humoring him.
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