Chapter 24

“Suck egg mule,” he whispered reverently, as though such a find needed the awed respect of Uncle Aaron’s expressions instead of the forceful punch of old Henry’s curses. “Three little baby bobcats all by theirselves . . . suck egg mule.” He picked up the nearest kitten and began to fight and tear at the vine until he had made a space large enough to turn around in. He headed back the way he’d come, reasoning, without even consciously thinking about it, that the mother would most likely pick a route that he hadn’t used, she would most likely steer clear of a tunnel with man-smell in it. He found he was being slowed by holding the hissing and snapping kitten in his hands so he took the scruff of its neck between his teeth. The kitten became immediately calm and swung placidly from the boy’s mouth as Hank sped through the blackberries as fast as elbows and knees could carry him. “Beat it out; beat it!” When he emerged from the thicket he was scratched and bleeding from a score of places on his hands and face, but he didn’t remember any pain, he didn’t remember any of the scratches; all he could recall was the soft flutter of panic beneath his chest. What would have happened had that old bitch bobcat suddenly run smack dab into a boy toting one of her offspring in his mouth? A boy pinned down and practically helpless under fifteen feet of blackberry vines? He had to sit down and breathe deeply before he could manage the ten more yards to the empty blasting-cap crate where he put the kitten. Then, for some reason, instead of securing the box and beating it back to the house as he advised himself, he hesitated to inspect his catch. Carefully he slid back the lid and bent to look into the box. “Hey you. Hey there you, Bobby the Cat . . .” The little animal ceased its frantic scurrying from corner to corner and lifted its fuzzy face toward the sound of the voice. Then uttered a cry so tragic, so pleading, so frightened and forlorn, that the boy winced with sympathy. “Hey, you lonely, ain’t you? Huh, ain’t you?” The kitten’s yowled answer threw the boy into an intense conflict, and after five minutes of reminding himself that nobody no-body but a snotnosed moron would go back in that hole, he gave in to that yowling. The other two kittens had fallen asleep by the time he reached the nest. They lay curled about each other, purring softly. He paused for an instant to catch his breath, and in the silence that descended, now that the brambles were no longer scratching and resounding on his oilskin hood, heard the first kitten crying from its box at the edge of the thicket; the thin, pitiful wail penetrated the jungle like a needle. Why, a noise like that must carry for miles! He grabbed up the next kitten, clamped his teeth over the fur at the back of the neck, thrashed quickly around in the little turning space that was already beginning to take on a smooth, used appearance, and once more sprinted on elbows and knees for that opening to safety that lay an ever farther distance away through an ever smaller tube of thorns and terror. It seemed to take hours. Time got snagged on a sticker. The vines hissed past. It must have started to rain, for the tunnel had grown quite dim and the ground slick. The boy squirmed through with eyes straining, that bobcat’s child swaying and swinging in his mouth, keening a shrill plea for help, the other in the box echoing and relaying the plea. The tunnel got longer as it grew dimmer, he was certain of it. Or the other way around. He gasped for breath through the fur in his teeth. He battled the mud and vine as though it were water drowning him, and when he broke into the clear at the end of the tunnel he drew a huge breath like a swimmer coming after many minutes into the glorious air. He placed the second kitten in the box with the first. They both hushed their yowling and became quiet and drowsy against each other. They began to purr quietly along with the soft swish of rain through the pines. And the only other noise, through all the forest, was the brokenhearted wailing of that third kitten, alone and frightened and wet, back in that nest at the end of that tunnel. “You’ll be okay.” He called assurance toward the thicket. “Sure. It’s rainin’ now; mama’ll be hustlin’ back from huntin’, now it’s rainin’.” And this time even went so far as to pick up the box and walk a few yards toward home. But something was strange; safe as he knew himself to be— he had picked up the .22 from the hollow log where he always stashed it during his forays into the thicket—his heart still pounded and his stomach still heaved with fear, and the image of that mother cat’s wrath still burned in his head. He stopped walking and stood very still with his eyes closed. “No. No sir, by gosh, I ain’t.” Shaking his head back and forth: “No. I ain’t such a dummy as that, I don’t care what!” But the fear continued to shake against his ribs, and it occurred to him that it had been shaking that way constantly from the moment he’d found the three kittens playing peacefully in their nest. Because it had known—it, the fear, the being-awfulscared-of-something—had known the boy better than he knew himself, had known all along from that first glance that he wasn’t going to be satisfied until he had all three kittens. It didn’t make any difference if they were baby dragons and mama dragon was breathing fire on him every step of the way. So it wasn’t until he emerged the third time with the third kitten between his teeth that he was able to sigh and relax and peacefully start toward the house, triumphantly shouldering the explosives box as if it were spoils of a mighty battle. And when he met the old coon waddling toward him on the muddy path he saluted the inscrutable animal and advised him, “Maybe you better leave off the thickets t’day, Mister Jig; it’s fierce in yonder for a old man.” Henry was in the woods. Uncle Ben and Ben, Junior—a boy called Little Joe by everyone but his father, shorter and younger than Hank and already showing his hell-raising father’s heavenly good looks—were staying at the house while Uncle Ben’s present woman cooled off enough to take them back into her home in town. They saw the kittens and Hank’s scratched and bleeding condition and both arrived at the same conclusion. “Did you really?” asked the boy. “Did you really, Hank, fight a wildcat for ’em?” “No, not really,” Hank replied modestly. Ben looked at his nephew’s scratched and muddy face and triumphant eyes. “Oh, you did. Oh yeah you did, kid. Maybe not head on. Maybe not a wildcat. But you fought something.” Then surprised both Hank and his own boy by spending the rest of the afternoon helping build a cage out near the river’s edge. “I don’t care much for cages,” he told them. “I’m not keen on cages of any kind. But if these cats are ever to get big enough to hold their own against those hounds, it’s gonna have to be in protected confinement. So we’ll make it a good cage, a comfortable cage; we’ll make the world’s best cage.” And that short, beautifully featured black sheep of the family, who prided himself on never working with more than his wink and his smile, slaved away all afternoon helping two boys build a true paragon among cages. It was made from an old pick-up-truck box that had once been on Aaron’s pick-up but had sucked too much dust to suit him. When finished, this box was painted, calked, reinforced, and stood majestically a few feet from the ground on sawn four-by-four legs. Half of it, including the floor, was of wire mesh to make it easy to keep clean, and the door was large enough that Hank or Joe Ben could get right in with the regular tenants. There were boxes for hiding, straw for burrowing, and a burlap-covered post for climbing to the peaked top of the cage, where a wicker basket was lined with an old pair of woolens. There were a little tree to climb and rubber balls hung from the mesh ceiling with string, and a dishpan full of fresh river sand in case bobcats, like other cats, were inclined that way. It was a beautiful cage, a strong cage, and, as comfort in cages went, the goddamned cat cage—as Henry came to call it whenever smell indicated it was past time for cleaning—was as comfortable as a cage could be. “The best of all possible cages.” Ben stepped back to regard the job with a sad smile. “What more can one ask?” Hank spent a large part of that summer in the cage with the three kittens, and by fall they were all so accustomed to his morning visit that if it was delayed by so much as five minutes there was such a howl raised that old Henry would pardon his son from whatever chore he was doing and send him running to attend to that damned menagerie in the goddam boogering cat cage. By Halloween the cats were tame enough to bring into the house to play; by Thanksgiving Hank had promised his classmates that on Playday, the day before Christmas vacation, he would bring all three to school. The night before this event the river had risen four feet in response to three hard days of rain; Hank was worried that the boats might be swept loose from their moorings, as they had been last year, and prevent him from making it across to the school bus. Or, worse, that the river might even rise clear up to the cage. Before going up to bed he put on rubber boots over his pajamas and pulled on a poncho and went out with a lantern to check. The rain had slowed to a thin, cold spitting that came with occasional gusts of wind; the worst of the storm was over; the white blur above the mountains showed the moon trying to clear a way through the clouds. In the buttery yellow light of the lantern he could see the rowboat and the motorboat covered with green tarpaulins, bobbing in the dark water. They tugged at their ropes, pulling to be away up river, but they were safe. The tides at the river’s mouth were flooding, and the river was flowing inland instead of toward the sea. The current usually flowed four hours toward the sea, then stood an hour, then turned and flowed two or three hours in the other direction. During this backward up-river flow, as the salt water from the sea rushed to embrace the mud-filled rainwater from the mountains, the river would be at its highest. Hank noted the water’s height on the marker at the dock—black water swirling at the number five; five feet, then, above the normal high-tide mark— then he went on to the end of the dock and followed the rickety plank walk around the edge of the jetty to the place where his father was clinging with a crooked elbow to a cable, seemingly glued to the side of the foundation by the sticky light of his lantern while he hammered spikes into a two-by-six he was adding to the tangle of wood and cable and pipe. Henry held his hammer and squinted against the blowing gusts of rain. “Is that you, boy? What do you want out here this time of night?” he demanded fiercely, then as an afterthought asked, “You come out to give the old man a hand at floodtime, is that it?” The last thing in the boy’s mind was freezing for an hour in this wind, hammering aimlessly on that crazy business of his father’s, but he said, “I don’t know. I might, then I might not.” He hung, swinging outward by the cable, and looked past old Henry’s streaking features; by the light coming from his mother’s upstairs window he could see the outline of the cat cage against black clouds. “No sir, I just don’t know....How much higher you reckon she’ll raise tonight?” Henry leaned out to spit his exhausted wad of snuff down into the water. “The tides’ll shift in an hour. At the rate she’s risin’ now she’ll come up two more feet, three at the darnedest, then start easin’ back. Especial now that the rain’s quittin’.” “Yeah,” Hank agreed, “I reckon that’s about the way I see it.” Looking at the cage he realized that the river would have to rise a good fifteen feet to reach even the legs, and by that time the house, the barn, probably the whole town of Wakonda would be washed away. “So I guess I’ll go on in an’ hit the sack. She’s all yours,” Hank called over his shoulder. Henry looked after his son. The moon had finally made it through, and the boy moving away down the planks in his shapeless poncho, black outlined in glistening silver, was as much a mystery to the old man as the clouds he resembled. “Feisty little outfit.” Henry dipped out another charge of snuff, jammed it into the breech, and resumed his hammering. By the time Hank was in bed the rain had stopped completely and patches of stars were showing. The big moon meant good clamming at the flats as well as colder, drier weather. Before he fell asleep he could tell by the absence of sound from the river that it had crested and from here on would drain back to the sea.