Just before dusk, as the sun faded into the trees, they got out the radio and deck of cards. When it got too dark, Michael made a fire and they continued playing by the firelight. Tabor was dreamily immersed watching fireflies, swiping at them without leaving Michael’s lap. Afterward Michael grilled up some burgers, potatoes, beans, and greens and whipped up a little feast. But he didn’t enjoy any of it. For him, it felt like the Last Supper. For a long while, with Tabor between them, Kyle and Michael sat silently huddled around the campfire, watching it burn down.
Michael was inconsolably sad. Kyle didn’t quite know what to say to take away his pain. He’d grown fond of Tabor, too, and dreaded the thought of parting with her. They banked the fire and took to their sleeping bags, Tabor nestling in with Michael with a rumbling purr.
Waking the next morning, Michael fed Tabor and left her lying on his sleeping bag in a stream of sunlight that filtered through the sky-skimming trees. He wanted to enjoy every moment with Tabor while he could, but he had a keen sense of sadness as he prepared mentally to lose his best friend, his road trip buddy.
As he was riffling through their supplies to brew some coffee and fix them some breakfast, Michael caught sight of something dark and furry dipping in and out of view behind the pines on the other side of the creek.
“Oh, my God,” Michael said to himself quietly, “there’s a bear down by the creek.”
Tabor saw it, too, her eyes large. She sniffed the air, her head shifting side to side, and peered curiously at the dark, fuzzy shape darting through the trees. Michael called it her “ole ‘I smell a bear’ look.” But while Michael was getting anxious, Tabor remained calm and unruffled, watching. Having become a seasoned bear wrangler, she seemed to know this bear was not trouble.
The bear saw Michael and shot up a tree. His fur, shimmering in the light, was as black and shiny as onyx. He was mesmerizing, but much smaller and cuter than the brown bear that they encountered at Yosemite—not really an adult or a cub, but somewhere in between.
“We’ll have to leave,” Michael said to Kyle, who was tying his shoelaces. “If there’s a juvenile bear prowling the neighborhood, I’m sure he’s got a mother, too.” While there was a kind of unexpected thrill in running into a bear in the woods, he decided he ought to get Kyle and Tabor back to Walter’s.
Chapter 24
The Cat Was a Rainbow in a Dark World
On Saturday afternoon, when Michael, Kyle, and Tabor got back to Walter’s after camping, an elegant older gentleman sporting a silver walrus mustache was sitting at the kitchen table with Walter.
Walter was telling him the story of how he and Michael had met at AA in the fall of 1981. As the three of them came through the back door, Michael and Kyle caught the tail end of their conversation: “Michael was traveling through Helena at the time, and that started the journey.”
Then, looking up at Michael, he said, “This gentleman’s here to see you from the newspaper.” He got up, excusing himself by saying, “And I’ve got a hungry cat.” Gus was squalling grumpily in the living room doorway, and Walter got his food from the cupboard and filled his little porcelain cat dish on the counter.
The mustachioed staff reporter was Al Knauber, from Helena’s Independent Record. He stood up and shook hands with Michael. He had heard the story about Michael and the traveling cat from the Helena vet and wanted to talk to Michael before he and Tabor left town.
Kyle went outside to the garden for a smoke. Tabor leaped onto the kitchen table and collapsed on her side, purring, blissed-out and beat from her adventure.
“She’s worn-out. My friend Kyle and I took her camping up in the mountains,” Michael said, and then told the story of finding her. “I see cats all the time. I didn’t pick her up because I wanted a cat. She was wet, scared, thin.”
He looked at Tabor spilled across the table, her beautiful, fluffy chrysanthemum head drooping over the edge, her slanted eyes, half-closed, watching him sleepily, and choked up.
“I really needed the companionship,” he said, his eyes welling up. “I’m homeless. Depression is a big thing out there. The cat was a rainbow in a dark world.”
Michael paused as Gus walked out and then back into the kitchen. “She’s going to go back home where she belongs,” he said after a moment. “It’s going to be a sad day. There’s going to be six or seven men crying the day I give her away. I’ve grown attached to her. My pack will be twenty pounds lighter, but a big hole, a big hole.”
After their talk, Michael walked Al Knauber out to the front door to say good-bye. Tabor lifted her head drowsily and meowed, her eyes following Michael as he left the room. Soon afterward he checked his Facebook and saw that the cat’s owner Ron had sent him a message: Check out Mata’s baby photos, Mike, on my photo album MATA PLEASE COME HOME. Time to roll out the welcome carpet and celebrate.
Michael wrote back, Hi Ron, the local paper came to my dad’s today, they wanted a scoop. The story will be in Monday’s paper, the Helena Independent Record.
Ron replied back, Thanks Mike, They already called me and I talked to them this morning. Looking forward to reading it.
Before he even had a chance to have a good look at Tabor and her four littermates’ kitten pictures, the doorbell rang. It was the photographer from the Independent Record. Tall, lean, and clean-shaven with short, curly blond hair and sparkly blue eyes, Dylan Brown was usually the only Saturday photographer working for the town newspaper and had to dash from story to story. Walter let him in, and Tabor trotted in from the kitchen to join Michael in the living room.
As Brown hurriedly snapped a few shots of Michael with Tabor, he was immediately struck by the deep affection between the man and the cat.
Tabor loved the fuss, prancing and posing in the glow of the flash.
“I love this cat,” Michael said, beaming at her with his broken-toothed smile. “I don’t even think I should be in the pictures. Everyone wants to see the cat. Not a dirty old bum like me.” As if on cue, Tabor jumped on the TV stand right in front of Brown and stared directly into the camera, her eucalyptus-green eyes warm and soulful.
Two days later, on Monday, June 17, 2013, that was the shot that appeared in the Helena Independent Record, beneath the headline THE CAT WAS A RAINBOW IN A DARK WORLD.
On that Monday morning, Michael sat at the kitchen table and flipped through the paper to find the article about himself and Tabor. He showed it to Walter, who was hunched over the counter making coffee.
“Tabor looks so beautiful,” he said, and as he continued reading, he was a little stunned when he found out the cat had jumped in the back of a car and Ron got her back six months later. “Oooh, this makes me mad,” he added. “She’s done this before.”
Just as he said this, Tabor shot into the kitchen, scurrying across the tiles, kicking around a plastic water-bottle top between her paws. Kyle followed after her, lugging his backpack.
“I’m glad they used that picture of her,” Michael said, showing it to Kyle.
Peering over his shoulder, Kyle laughed. “They blurred you out in the background.”
“That’s exactly what I was hoping for.”
“Mornin’,” Walter said to Kyle, and set out a pot of coffee and a stack of waffles on the table in front of them.
They ate and sipped their coffee in silence. Tabor ran around their feet until she tired herself out. She sprang up onto the table and slumped onto her side. Walter got up and started making sandwiches for them for the road. He had also offered to take them to the nearest highway.
Michael had had a vivid dream. “I dreamed about these two elk,” he began telling Kyle. “It was the same dream I had when I stayed at Walter’s the winter before I got Tabor. It had snowed that night. I look out the window and I see two big female elk lying in the snow pack against the house. I see them getting down in the bedding, and then I went to sleep. Next morning, leaning out of bed, I look outside again and see these elk shake off the snowflakes. As they walk out of the front
yard, they start fading into rainbows and then turn into two Native American women dressed in buckskins.”
“Were you drunk?” Kyle asked, grinning.
“You know I can’t drink in Walter’s house.”
“Whaddaya think it meant?”
“I have no idea.” Without a word, Michael got up, cleared away the breakfast plates, and started loading their belongings into Walter’s Subaru. He was itching to get going.
Just as Walter was wrapping up the sandwiches in brown waxed paper, the phone rang. Walter answered it and called out the back door to Michael, “It’s Kathleen . . . your mother.”
Michael came in and dutifully took the receiver. He could not remember the last time his mother had called him and wondered how she knew he was there. “Hi, Mom,” he said into the receiver.
“Michael!” she shouted in her crisp English accent. “You’re in the paper.”
The story had been syndicated across the country.
“My neighbor saw you and the cat in the paper this morning,” she said. “So you’re returning the cat?”
“Um, yeah . . . today,” he said, stumbling on his words. “I’m taking Tabor back to Portland . . . back to her owner.”
“That’s very nice of you, Michael.”
It was the first positive thing she’d said to him in a long while. It felt good, though at the same time, he didn’t need her approval. He had Kyle, Stinson, and an extended family of drifters across the American West. He had Walter, and, for the time being, he had a cat that he loved. They all gave him the warm, nurturing sense of family that he had never felt from his own family.
“Thanks,” he said. “Well, we were just getting ready to leave.”
“Okay, love. Have a safe trip back.”
Hanging up, he turned to Kyle and Walter. “She saw the story in her local paper.”
Walter grabbed his cup of coffee and the paper and went to his armchair in the living room to read the article. Gus trailed along.
Kyle looked at Michael quizzically and said, “I didn’t know you were on speaking terms.”
“I call her once in a while to check that she’s okay,” Michael said, looking away as he did when he didn’t want to talk about something. “She’s the only mother I’ve got. I have to forgive her. She’s seventy-eight and all alone. I wasted a lot of time and energy hating her. Whatever she did to me, it doesn’t matter anymore.”
Walter came back in the kitchen and said, “Everybody has a story. It’s what you do with your life after you’ve recognized the fact you’ve had a tough time,” he went on. “There’s no place for bitterness. I hated my dad. He was a loving man who came from Montana. He was the oldest of five, and his dad used to whip him. He brought into his marriage and family what he’d learned. When I stopped to look back many years later, I saw that he was nineteen years old when I was born and had five kids while he was still in his twenties. He was putting a roof over my head, food in my stomach, clothes on my back, sending me to Catholic school. Here I am bad-mouthing him when he’d done the best he could.
“When I sobered up and looked at what this man had accomplished, I was ashamed of myself. Michael’s mother had a tough childhood, too. She had five kids, and Michael’s father had to support them all on a policeman’s wage. Of course she’d get frustrated like any normal person would. That’s why I say you need to put all this stuff back into perspective: people are going to do what they need to survive.”
Kyle shared his own story. “My mom had nine other children from seven different fathers,” he said. “Never met her or even know what she looked like. I heard she passed away in 2007. One of my half brothers, who I accidentally met at a friend’s house, told me that she was with some guy who shot her and then shot himself.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Michael said. “That’s too bad.”
“She was never part of my life, and, from what I hear, that’s a good thing,” Kyle said, leaning back in a mellow slouch in the chair. “So do you have a picture of your mother?”
Leaving Walter and Kyle at the kitchen table, Michael disappeared into his bedroom and brought out a yellowing photo album.
“That’s my mother on their wedding day in London,” Michael said, pointing to a black-and-white picture from the ’50s of a smiling young couple outside an ancient, soot-covered gray-stone church. She wore a high-necked, cinch-waisted lace gown, with her hair swept up in a wave. Beside her was a rakish, boyishly handsome man in an army uniform, with thick and disheveled black hair and the same pale, gleaming eyes as Michael’s.
Michael closed the album and took it back into his bedroom.
When Michael put the wedding album back under his bed, he flicked on the computer to have a quick look at his Facebook. He shared the Independent Record article about himself and Tabor so all his friends would be prepared for losing the cat before they got back to Portland.
While posting, he noticed a message from Ron from the night before: Mata’s definitely a rambler. Did my first newspaper interview readable online as of midnight. Go to Helena.air.com, it’ll be front page news.
He saw that Ron had posted a video, too, that morning and titled it “Mata Hairi 007.” When he played the link he realized Tabor was on the news on KGW Channel 8, the local Portland television station. The picture of Tabor and Michael from the Helena Independent Record flashed across screen, with a ticker strip sliding at the bottom, announcing: THE RETURN OF MATA HAIRI.
A glossy-maned, fortysomething newswoman came on and said: “After an adventure all over the Northwest, a cat named Mata Hairi is headed home. It doesn’t get more Portland than this,” she added, looking like she was trying to suppress a laugh. “Mata Hairi the cat was picked up by a wanderer in Portland who put a leash on her and took her all over the West Coast.”
“She ended up in Montana,” her male co-anchor cut in with a coat hanger smile, “and in a few days is headed home to Southeast Portland. Here our news anchor Erica spent the afternoon talking to the owner.”
A willowy, blue-eyed, blond reporter, standing in downtown Portland, came on: “Mata Hairi, you guys, has a knack for getting lost and then getting found. A wanderer who goes by the name of Groundscore Mike says he found her near 38th and Hawthorne in Portland last September. He took her camping to Ventura, California, all the way to Yosemite, before ending up in Montana, where he took her to a vet and they scanned her for a microchip. The vet called the cat’s owner in Portland.”
A picture of Ron Buss with a beard (when he still had hair) sitting on a sofa and holding Mata and her black-and-white littermate flashed on screen. Then Ron himself appeared, saying: “She traveled thirty-five hundred miles with him. She went to Yosemite National Park with him . . . and, um, went camping all over the United States. I’m hoping she doesn’t like him better than me when they get back,” he added with a nervous laugh.
Erica, the pretty blond reporter, came back on: “Now, the cat is expected to be back this Wednesday or Thursday. By the way, this isn’t Mata Hairi’s first road trip. Two years ago, the cat ended up in Vancouver, Washington, after she went missing for six months.”
Back at the television studio, the two newscasters were cracking jokes about the hitchhiking cat. “Somehow, you can’t quite believe that story,” said the glossy-maned newswoman.
Her grinning male co-anchor signed off with a raised eyebrow: “Well, catching mice will seem boring after that adventure.”
“Catching mice ain’t going to be the same again, that’s for damn sure,” Michael said aloud, and then posted those exact words to Ron, adding, We still have to hitch-hike back to Portland!!!!
Michael went back into the kitchen and told Walter and Kyle that he and Tabor were on television. His head was spinning a bit at the fact that they were all over the news in the Northwest.
It was a perfect summer day, sapphire-blue sky, shimmering bright sunshine, when Walter dropped them off on the edge of town near the on-ramp to I-90. He hugged Michael and patted Kyle o
n the back warmly.
“Behave yourself,” he said to Michael, and turning to Tabor, gently ruffled her fur. “Take care of him and make sure he gets home safe.”
“I will,” Michael said, grinning at Walter still referring to Tabor as a tomcat. He promised to call when they got to Portland.
As Walter drove away, the three of them waited by the side of the road. Kyle messed around with his skateboard, Michael chain-smoked furiously, and Tabor hunkered down on Michael’s backpack, purring. Michael thought of how much he was going to miss her and all her funny little quirks: the way she licked his face to wake him; tugged at his beard when he tried to sleep in; and sometimes scooped her food with her paw. Thinking these things while she purred there beside him only made the prospect of losing her even more painful.
Less than ten minutes passed before they got a ride to Missoula. And there as soon as they flashed their sign, NEED RIDE TO PORTLAND, they got another one. A small light-blue compact car stopped for them, driven by two smiling Native American women with a little tawny-brown puppy that looked like a baby version of Madison’s dog, Bobby, riding between them.
“Been there long?” the driver asked, rolling down her window.
“Wow, is that a cat?” said the woman in the passenger seat before they could answer.
They were heading north to Spokane, Washington, and offered to drive them all the way. As soon as Michael and Kyle hopped in the car, the driver, glancing back smiling, said, “We never see hitchhikers anymore.”
Michael smiled back at her, thinking, You don’t see them because they’re always getting rides. Although they looked clean and less rumpled than usual after staying at Walter’s, he was sure that Tabor was responsible for getting them the ride.
Sitting in the backseat, Michael looked at the back of the women’s heads and leaned toward Kyle, wide-eyed, to whisper, “Remember the dream I told you about the two elk? Déjà vu or what?”
It took a minute to register, but then Kyle said quietly, “Wow. That’s so weird.”
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