How to Moon a Cat

by Rebecca M. Hale

  “To begin with, there’s the pedals,” Monty said, pointing at the bike, then at the soles of his feet. “You have to fasten the brackets on the bottom of your shoes into little nubbed clips on the pedals—all while balancing on top of the bike. It’s darn near impossible to keep the thing upright while you’re trying to get your shoes hooked into the pedals. That was the first time I fell off . . .”

  I tucked my hand into my jacket pocket and fingered the pointed tip of the latest toy bear’s flag. Bears with flags, I pondered to myself. The state flag of California . . . commonly referred to as the Bear Flag . . .

  “Then I had some problems with the gears. As it turns out, it’s not so easy to shift between twenty-five settings. You flip a lever the wrong way, and everything gets gummed up.”

  I continued with my internal bear musings. The first bear’s flag had directed me here to Nevada City, where I’d found a Mark Twain impersonator discussing the Bear Flag Revolt. Uncle Oscar had been absolutely enamored with Mark Twain, but it had to be a coincidence that I’d run into the impersonator at this specific time and place—or was it . . . ?

  “Once I finally got moving, the disc brakes nearly did me in. All it takes is one light squeeze of the handle, and the wheels freeze up immediately. I went flying over the handlebars down the hill there in front of the National Hotel. Ripped the sleeve of my jersey . . . ”

  I turned my attention to the second toy bear. The stuffed animal was similar in size and shape to the one I’d found behind the wall in the kitchen. The writing on this flag was directing me to Sutter’s Fort in downtown Sacramento.

  Monty continued to babble about his injuries as I pulled Clem’s flier from one of the stroller’s side pockets to check the location of his next venue. I sucked in my breath as my finger skimmed the performance listings. The following afternoon, Clem was scheduled to appear at Sutter’s Fort.

  Staring at the night sky above Monty’s head, I summed up my observations. There was something disturbingly contemporary about this trail of clues that Oscar had presumably laid out before his death over a year ago—and, not to mention, strikingly convenient. Sutter’s Fort, in downtown Sacramento, was also near the finish line for tomorrow’s stage of the race.

  “ . . . somersaulted through the air and landed with a splat on the pavement. Knocked the wind right out of me. It was a near death experience, I tell you.”

  Sutter’s Fort, Sutter’s Fort. I repeated the phrase, searching for a connection in my memory banks. Somewhere in Oscar’s book collection, I’d read about the fort’s involvement in the Bear Flag Revolt. If I remembered correctly, Captain Frémont, the Pathfinder Clem had described in today’s stage performance, had spent time at Sutter’s Fort.

  Monty was beginning to wind down his tale of woe and endangerment. “It’s a good thing I brought along some spare shirts,” he said in a more practical tone. “Wouldn’t do to show up for the opening ceremony looking like this.”

  “Let’s get you back to the hotel,” I said suddenly. “I packed a first aid kit in the van.” Monty’s inability to operate the mechanics of a high-end bicycle was not entirely unexpected.

  “Bandage me up, Florence Nightingale,” Monty said, swooning dramatically.

  “All right, all right,” I replied absentmindedly as I wrapped my hands around the stroller’s handlebar and steered Monty and his wounded bike back down the hill.

  My next course of action would be to brush up on the details of the Bear Flag Revolt. I just hoped I’d brought along the right book.

  WE RETURNED TO the parking lot about ten minutes later. While still packed with vehicles, the earlier bustle was beginning to die down. Most of the riders were off to dinner and an early bedtime so they would be fresh for the one-hundred-plus miles they would spend on the road the next day.

  From the back cargo area of the van, I dug out the first aid kit and handed it to Monty.

  Then, I reached for a bag of books I’d tossed in when we loaded the cat supplies, and began searching for a certain dog-eared paperback that might have the information I was looking for. After a moment’s digging, I found it on the bottom of the sack.

  Rupert sat on the van floor next to Monty, closely watching as he began dabbing his wounds with an alcoholsoaked towelette. I crawled into the front passenger seat and found Isabella perched on the driver’s side cushion, staring longingly up at the steering wheel.

  “Wran,” she insisted.

  “It’s not physically possible,” I replied, shaking my head at her. “Look at how far down the pedals are. Trust me. No cat could drive this van.”

  “Ruh,” she muttered grumpily, clearly unconvinced.

  With a sigh, I flicked on the van’s interior light and laid open the book on the center console between our two seats.

  Bernard DeVoto’s The Year of Decision 1846 was over five hundred pages of small, dense font. Even in paperback form, it was a hefty weight to lug around. The volume had been written in the early 1940s by a historian whose wry crankiness rivaled that of my Uncle Oscar’s. The book was packed with obscure details mined from every possible source its author could dig up. Suffice it to say, DeVoto had been Oscar’s kind of history buff, and it was no surprise that the book was well-worn from constant reference. My uncle’s nearly illegible pencil marks were scrawled across many of the margins.

  Isabella scanned the upside-down text as I flipped through the pages, looking up index citations to the Bear Flag Revolt.

  I stopped at an entry with extensive doodling across its top header. The page described the creation of the original Bear Flag, which was raised on June 14, 1846, by a group of American rebels who took control of the tiny town of Sonoma.

  The flag was constructed by William Todd, nephew of Mary Todd, the wife of then-senator, and later, U.S. president, Abraham Lincoln.

  For the rectangular base of the flag, Todd cut a stretch of white fabric from an old shirt. Next, he sewed a strip of red flannel across its bottom length. In the upper left-hand corner, he used red paint to create a five-pointed star—an imitation of the emblem then associated with the independent state of Texas. Facing the star, Todd sketched the upright figure of a bear. Across the lower-middle of the flag, Todd printed the phrase California Republic.

  According to DeVoto, the original flag was destroyed during the devastation of San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake when the building where it was being stored burned to the ground.

  I tried to block out the overwrought expressions of pain coming from the cargo area as Monty painted his elbow rash with iodine. Having seen enough of the bandaging process, Rupert hopped over the center console and crawled into my lap. Stroking his head absentmindedly, I pulled the latest bear from my pocket and studied its miniaturized version of the California state flag. The Bear Flag, as it was commonly referred to, was meant to simulate the one raised by the rebels at Sonoma.

  “Wait a minute,” I murmured slowly, returning my attention to the section of the book describing William Todd’s flag. The bear on the state flag was depicted on all four feet, but the description in DeVoto clearly stated that the original bear had been “standing on its hind legs.”

  A dense block of my uncle’s scrawled handwriting was crammed into the margin next to the text. I grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment and shone it down onto the page, trying to decipher Oscar’s annotation. After a minute’s squinting, I finally translated the writing. The words read as if they had been copied from another reference:

  Local Indians, passing through Sonoma after the revolt, ridiculed the animal on the flag, calling it a pig or a stoat.

  “Stoat?” I asked, puzzling at the last underlined word. “What’s a stoat?”

  I looked questioningly at Rupert, who was now flopped across my lap. The tip of his tail lightly tapped my leg, the extent of his response.

  “Wrao,” Isabella offered as I pulled out a pad of paper and tried to recreate the original flag using DeVoto’s description. Monty was a much better art
ist, I thought, but, judging from the whimpers still emanating from the back of the van, his skills were temporarily unavailable.

  My lips rolled inward in concentration as I sketched a large rectangle with a colored stripe across its bottom length. The star on the left-hand side was relatively easy to place, but the bear was a far more difficult challenge. After several attempts, I finally traced the crude outlines of an upright grizzly bear. I scrunched up the side of my face, trying to see the pig resemblance.

  “I can’t say I’ve ever seen a pig standing upright,” I said, still perplexed by the Bear Flag anomaly. With a shrug, I shaded in the area around the bear’s stomach, filling out a more piglike belly.

  “Stoat, stoat, stoat . . . ” I repeated the word over and over, but no image came to mind. “I have no idea what a stoat looks like.”

  I looked up through the front window of the van to the back side of the hotel. It was the same historic vintage as the other venues up and down Broad Street and, I suspected, would have some sort of lobby or sitting area that might offer a bookshelf to its guests.

  Isabella followed my gaze. “Mreo,” she said encouragingly.

  “Yep,” I agreed with her. “I bet they’ve got a dictionary.”

  Chapter 22

  THE NATIONAL HOTEL

  I CALLED OUT to Monty, who had almost finished dressing his wounds in the back of the van. “Can you stay with the cats while I check on something inside the hotel?”

  There was a loud clunking as he clambered up toward the front seats.

  “I’ve still got to check in,” he said, his head appearing over the center console. He’d put on another clean cycling shirt that was identical to the one he’d torn earlier. “How about we all go in with you?”

  I twisted my head around to look at him. “All of us?” I asked skeptically, trying to avoid Isabella’s affronted gaze. I lowered my voice to a tense whisper. “Wouldn’t it be better to sneak them in after we get the room keys? I’m sure they don’t allow cats inside.”

  Rupert looked up from my lap with a questioning grunt.

  Monty waved off my concern. “Pop ’em in the Cat-mobile. No one will know the difference.”

  He backed out through the cargo area and unfolded the stroller on the pavement beside my door. I removed the CATS ON BOARD sign from its side. We’d have better luck sneaking the cats into prohibited places, I reasoned, with a more incognito approach.

  Rupert was still making disgruntled noises about the hotel’s feline exclusionary policies when I loaded him and his sister into the carriage. After I double-checked that the mesh cover’s zipper was securely fastened, we headed off across the parking lot to the hotel’s back entrance.

  A swinging gate in a white fence opened to a concretepaved courtyard behind the hotel’s main building. The combination of brick and wooden siding had been painted in sections of white and dark forest green, the same motif as the front balcony that overlooked Broad Street. We walked past a couple of smaller cottages that flanked the courtyard’s rear side and approached a screen door leading into the hotel’s main wing.

  Bold block letters greeted us on a hand-painted sign affixed to the middle of the door: NO PETS.

  Monty waved it off dismissively. He leaned over the stroller and whispered reassuringly to its furry occupants, “I’m sure they don’t mean you.”

  Nervously, I unzipped the net cover and reached inside to fluff the towels up around Rupert and Isabella.

  “Stay very quiet,” I cautioned the cats as Monty propped open the door and helped me lift the stroller over the threshold.

  We stepped into a narrow hallway lined with plaques, most of them black-and-white photos featuring Gold Rush scenes of Nevada City. At the end of the hall, we arrived at a longer corridor that ran the length of the building. After conducting a quick recon, Monty directed me to the left.

  Following the clumpity-clunk of Monty’s cycling shoes, I pushed the stroller past the top of a staircase that dropped down to the hotel’s lower-front street level. The stairs were accompanied by a pair of heavy wooden banisters that matched the overall theme of red carpeting and fleur-delis-covered wallpaper we’d encountered thus far.

  The hotel’s somewhat primitive administrative offices were positioned just opposite the stairs. A gated window provided guest access to the registration desk, whose office equipment, while not dating back to the Gold Rush, definitely qualified as antiquated.

  Farther down the hall loomed a large salon. If the abundance of wallpaper I could glimpse from this angle was any indication, that room seemed the most likely location for a bookcase and, I thought hopefully, a dictionary.

  As quickly and as nonchalantly as possible, I pushed the stroller past the registration desk and scooted down the hallway to the salon. The woman seated in the area behind the gated window took no notice. She was facing the opposite direction, poring over an appointment book as she spoke into a phone’s large plastic receiver. Monty leaned against the counter, waiting for her to finish so he could check into the suite of rooms that had been reserved for the Mayor.

  “We’re all booked up for the weekend,” the woman told the caller plaintively. “I’d say that goes for everything within a thirty-mile radius. There’s a bike race here tomorrow, you know.”

  I parked the stroller in the center of the salon and turned a slow circle, taking in the surrounding furnishings and décor. Outside of Oscar’s kitchen, I’d never seen such a heavily wallpapered room. I counted three, no four, different patterns plastered across just one wall. Only the glass windows that framed the balcony had escaped the wallpaper’s plastering reach. Perhaps this, I thought wryly, was where Oscar had acquired his fascination with the stuff.

  Back at the front desk, the woman hung up the phone’s receiver and turned to face Monty. Snippets of their conversation floated out into the salon as I continued my search for a dictionary.

  “You say you’re checking in for the Mayor of San Francisco?” the clerk asked skeptically.

  The middle of the room had been left open to facilitate guest traffic, but a clutter of antiques and memorabilia were stacked up around its edges. Several humongous pieces of wooden furniture were cloistered against the walls, including a heavy wood-paneled piano that looked to weigh at least half a ton. Brass trinkets and lace doilies decorated every flat surface.

  I found a vintage typewriter tucked into a recess behind the stairwell, which continued from the salon to the hotel’s upper floors. The machine’s lettered keys pronged out from the keyboard like fangs—the device looked as if it were more suited for eating a piece of paper than printing on it.

  As I bent over the typewriter, the desk clerk’s words echoed into the salon, the volume of her voice rising in tandem with her suspicions. “You don’t look like the Mayor of San Francisco. Your hair’s too curly,” she protested. “I’ve seen pictures of him. He’s got that swept back gangsterstyle hairdo.”

  I moved on from the typewriter to a photo album spread open next to a stack of pamphlets advertising wedding services. Nuptials appeared to be the hotel’s main focus—that is, when the town wasn’t hosting a cycling event. I put my hands on my hips as I scanned the area. Where might they be hiding the dictionary?

  “Assistant life coach?” The woman now sounded truly perplexed.

  “Ahem.” Monty corrected the clerk, the sound of his voice increasing to match hers. “I said I was the Life Coach Apprentice.”

  “What in tarnation is a life coach?”

  I smothered a giggle as I spotted a small credenza squeezed into an empty space behind the piano. On it lay a thick age-crusted dictionary. I quickly thumbed through the pages to the S section.

  “Is this a joke?” the clerk demanded warily. “Are you with one of those reality TV shows? Am I on Candid Camera?”

  I ran the tip of my finger down the column until I found the listing for stoat.

  “Ermine,” I reported in a loud whisper to Isabella, who was watching me closely through t
he stroller’s mesh netting. Rupert had curled up for a nap when I’d tucked him into the towels and was now happily snoring away, oblivious to the commotion at the front desk.

  My lips puckered in thought as I studied the picture of the creature next to the listing in the dictionary. “It looks like a mink or a ferret. It’s kind of slender—with a long furry tail.” I reflected back on the DeVoto description of the animal on the original Bear Flag. “It is standing up on its hind legs . . . ”

  Returning to the stroller, I pulled out the tablet with my earlier sketch of the Bear Flag. I rotated the drawing of the pig-modified bear to the left and right, trying to figure out how to modify the animal to make it resemble a stoat. After a couple minutes of attempting to mentally superimpose the stoat image over that of the bear, I used my pencil to add a long, thick tail.

  “Wrao,” Isabella said thoughtfully when I showed her my drawing.

  “I know,” I replied, puzzling at the picture. “That doesn’t look like any bear I’ve ever seen.”

  Chapter 23

  THE BRICK

  A WAVE OF white-haired patrons poured out of the Nevada Theatre, happily chatting about the evening’s performance as they strolled down Broad Street. While there were a few dissenters, most agreed Clem had made an admirable attempt at his Mark Twain impersonation.

  The citizens of Nevada City were quite particular about their Twain impersonators—the town had hosted dozens of Twain-inspired actors over the years. This, however, was the first time anyone could remember a Twain character working the Bear Flag story into his routine.

  Trailing behind the departing theatergoers, Dilla and Wang were the last of the audience to leave the theater. Dilla skipped looping circles across the sidewalk as Wang, with the support of his cane, hobbled a slow straight line.