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Barn Cats

Mark Vickers

    I could see Pawpaw Johnson peering at us through a crack between the boards of the old barn. Having just awakened, I rasped out a warning meow that made the old man duck back.
    After his stroke, Pawpaw was always coming round. He’d shuffle along with his three-pronged cane past his weed-choked duck pond and shit-stained chicken coops till he came to our barn, which was just off his property and on the long-abandoned Davis farm. Then he’d stand staring, trying to pick out the shapes of cats lounging in the shade of the shaggy, sprawling desert willow tree or hiding amid clumps of bush or, in the winter, sunning ourselves in the red, hard dust of the abandoned—except for us, of course—barnyard.
    He typically focused on me, though there were two dozen or so of us. He’d be careful, trying not to startle us. Slowly, he’d remove his hat, wipe his sun-wrinkled brow with faded red bandana and call to me.
    “Hey there, boyo,” he’d say, keeping his voice low. “How ya’ll doing today? Hungry maybe? Maybe you come home, maybe I cook you up some good grub, real people food, yeah?”
    I would mostly just stare at him, even when he bent over and gently patted his knees. He would look sorrowful if I simply remained motionless and something close to appalled if I began licking myself.
    “Oh, Jesus wept,” he’d say sadly. “Fucking Jesus wept.”
    Then he’d slowly turn and shamble away the way he’d come.

* * *

    It went on this way for a time before he brought two other men, the ones who chased me through the creosote and apache plume till they got winded and I was able to hide in the dirt of the low plain.
    I got slashed up good that day by thistle, cacti and greenbriar. From then on, I was more wary of people, even Pawpaw. He’d approach, I’d flee and he’d shout “Sorry, boyo, sorry! Had to try. Couldn’t not try!”
    He worked to win back my trust, the trust of all of us, by bringing gifts of food: not just dry mix but fish and chicken parts, and jars of milk. Even pan-fried sweetbreads, which I typically had to myself.
    Things might have gone back to the way they’d been if not for the orange-haired stranger some locals called La Naranja.
    It was in the early autumn when, though the winds grew cool, the earth was still warm as a recently abandoned bed. My friends Squirrel-slayer and Roof-sleeper were sprawled to either side of me, the three of us napping in the thinning afternoon sun.
    Roof-sleeper was a mischievous gray tabby with black stripes and soft, sweet-smelling fur. My best friend. He was always ambushing me out of dark corners or thick brush, batting at me lightly with soft paws, his nails retracted, then darting away, urging me to give chase. Which I often did, with love in my heart.
    Squirrel-slayer was an elegant, blue-eyed Siamese mix whose great joy was to throw herself down on the pages of whatever battered book I was trying to read and then turn up her belly to me in an almost lascivious way, demanding to be stroked.
    But that day, we were doing nothing more than taking our siesta. Amid such contentment, none of us heard his approach until he shouted, “What the fuck!”
    Roof-sleeper, the most agile of us, sprung away in a gray-black blur into the creosote, while Squirrel-slayer came up hissing and hair-raised, her blue eyes flashing like pulled knives.
    “Get the fuck...” La Naranja said, viciously trying to kick at her before she too darted away.
    By then, I’d clambered to my feet and fled into the bush as La Naranja yelled, “Yeah, you’d better run you filthy, cat-fucking nut job. If I see you again, I’ll...” But by then I could no longer hear his words, only feel his rage.
    The next day, we were still on edge, crouched with our ears up and tails restless, when Pawpaw appeared. He stood silhouetted in the doorway of the barn and, though he could not have seen me huddled in a dark corner in one of the stalls, began speaking, his words echoing like those of a prophet.
    “I came to warn you, boyo. You got to go careful. That orangutan-looking bastard you seen yesterday, he is a bad one. Bought the old place that Gonzalez sold when his wells went salty.
    “He says he’s going to grow hay and corn but we all know what else. Putting up wire and signs everywhere, like he’s one of those compound cult crazies. Wants you gone, too. Says you too close to where the three properties meet. Got drunk and told them at the Oak Bar that the cats here spread sickness, rabies, AIDS, even the Covid. And raid the bird pens, too, like he’s never heard of coyotes, never seen a fox. Says you a danger, too, boyo—to the local kiddies, no less. Just cuz you run naked where no one even sees you.
    “Listen, Michael. You come home and I’ll protect you. I will this time true! Blow the balls off that fucker if he comes anywhere near.”
    I choked out a laugh, not meaning to. But the idea of Pawpaw protecting Michael was lunatic. As if he’d ever protected Michael from his mezcal-guzzling daughter, the one who spent most of her days passed out in a dusty, dark room and her nights who-knew-where.
    Back when Michael had been a boy, Pawpaw had barely spoken to the child. The man came home in the evenings stinking of dried sweat, chicken shit, sulfurous well water and pesticides. He barely had time to drink a beer and eat a microwaved meal before falling into his lonely, hard bed.
    Still, he must have noticed the bruises on the boy. He said nothing, the brown-skinned, curly haired bastard boy none of his concern.
    Then came the cuts. The gouges from Mary’s dirty hand trowel were the worst, one growing so infected that even Pawpaw couldn’t ignore it. The twelve-year-old boy was feverous and crying out in the dark when Pawpaw got home one evening, and Mary was gone as usual. So Pawpaw drove Michael all the way to the ER in Phoenix and slept in his truck for a week, waiting to see if the boy would survive.
    On the truck ride back home, Pawpaw had said, “She’s a demon drunk alright. Crazy as hell, even as a girl. But see now you’re old enough to know when she’s worst. Stay away then. Hide, boyo. Go on somewhere, anywhere else.”
    Michael tried. But Mary knew all of the boy’s hiding spots and would hurt him just for not coming when she called.
    Then Michael finally learned of her dread of the cats living on the old Davis place. She’d shudder when she saw those barn cats, calling them restless spirits, ghosts of the damned. She’d sooner dance in a graveyard than take a single step near the place. In the barn, Michael discovered three plastic milk crates full of books riddled with dust, roach holes and silverfish. After school, when Mary was often at her worst, he took shelter in that one true sanctuary, reading the brittle texts—a motley collection of literary classics, children’s books and middle-school textbooks—and petting whatever wild cats were bold enough to approach.
    So, I laughed at Pawpaw’s promise of protection, already being in the safest place of all, the one filled with the wild, shadowy guardians who had saved Michael from his mad mother long years before.

* * *

    Pawpaw was right about La Naranja. He installed a woven-wire fence topped with barbed wire all along his property line, as if he were running a prison. Since the cat barn was near the intersection of the three farms, his fence cut our crucial hunting territory in half.
    We were confounded. First, we cautiously sniffed it, then some of the males sprayed it. As I puzzled, Roof-sleeper jumped up and began to scale. I told him to get down but he was always a stubborn one. He got his back caught in the barbed wire as he was squeezing over the top. Even worse, one of the barbs sank more deeply into his flesh when he tried to back out again. He started yowling. I made soothing noises and started to climb, intending to help. But the shaking fence panicked him, whipping him into a frenzy that set yet another barb tearing into his soft belly.
    When I got to him, I could barely look at, much less untangle, the bloody viscera that hung from his stomach. By the time we were down, his breathing was fast and shallow.
    I carried him behind the barn. His eyes were half closed and his bloody mouth open. I cradled him for a time, rocking and keening, my throat soon raw. Then, I wrung the neck of my best friend, Roof-sleeper.

* * *

    The cats began to evaporate. Some left to find better hunting grounds or easier access to rubbish. Some died of poison left near the barn by La Naranja, or maybe by the neighbors who’d been convinced that we somehow, after all these years, imperiled them—we who caught their vermin while their fat house cats lay idle. We who often visited local rural folks when they were lonely and comforted them when sad, who became their pets if we deemed them worthy, who bridged that wide gulf between the unknown and the familiar, the wild and the domestic, who modeled the freedom they themselves could have if only they dared. We who created the kind of successful, close-knit community seldom, if ever, achieved by humans. Or who—if nothing else—added small scenes of drama to their mundane lives: teasing their dogs by day, knocking over trash cans by night, or just opening up their closed-off souls to superstitious excitement when we crossed their paths. We, the natural citizens of the land, who were somehow suddenly transformed into alien enemies.
    In response to La Naranja, other farms put up tall fences as well (though none of the others used barbed wire). A six foot fence even went up around Pawpaw’s place, probably to safeguard his property lines from the other fence builders.
    For a time, though, I kept hoping they would just forget about us again. But one winter day when we could see our breath, a shotgun-toting La Naranja walked up on the other side of his monstrous fence. On our side, I crouched and arched my back, staring with unblinking eyes.
    “Bet this is yours, cat-fucker,” he said, pulling something from the deep inside pocket of a green-and-tan camouflage hunting jacket. He used an underhand motion to throw it high up and then over the fence, where it landed near my feet like a bag of trash.
    It was the corpse of the once-beautiful Squirrel-slayer, whose narrow dark face—bereft of her slightly crossed but piercing blue eyes—looked like a grotesque, sharp-nosed mask. I looked down at her, then back up at him.
    “Keep your filthy fucking felines on your side of the fence,” he said, then turned and walked back the way he’d come.
    After that, I chased the other cats away, all except for the very old and the orphaned young, the ones unable to fend for themselves. Those cats I tried to keep fed. Some nights, when the hunting was bad, I walked miles down a local dirt road to get to a large, blue, stenciled dumpster near a local campground. I hated it. The sheer reek was bad enough without the dangers of broken beer bottles, cut tin cans, greedy rats, angry raccoons, diseased food and, above all, drunken campers. To protect my feet and keep people from calling the police, I’d taken to wearing clothes again, or at least a couple of mismatched sneakers and a pair of discarded shorts with yellow paint stains on them.
    One time, a couple of teenagers holding Schlitz beer cans started shouting at me.
    “What you doing, man?” the shorter one asked.
    I had been crouched down, using a plastic knife to scrape various types of meat (tuna, beefy dog food, and some pork from a half-eaten taco) into a single soup can. I stood up straight.
    “Dude, it’s that crazy cat man. Look how skinny that sonovabitch be,” the taller one said.
    “Get out of here, man!” said the shorter one. “You cat-AIDs-carrying bum.”
    Slowly, I did start to climb out, watching them carefully.
    “Catman has some gray chest hairs there,” said the taller one. “Wonder how long he’s been crazy.”
    When my feet touched ground, the shorter one shouted, “I said get the fuck out!” and whipped his mostly empty beer can at me. It hit my shoulder and, instinctively, I hissed at them. The second boy threw his fuller beer can at me. Though it missed, the beer itself drenched me, and I sprang forward as if on the attack.
    As they startled backwards, I veered away and skittered off into the night before they had time to grow ashamed and give chase.
    Not long afterwards, while I was on another night hunt, someone set fire to our cat barn. I smelled the smoke first, then saw the orange glow, then sprinted homeward. By the time I arrived, it was little more than a giant bonfire. I crawled up as close to the flames as I could bear, feeling my eyelashes melt and shrivel and my face expand like hot coals.
    A sheriff’s car eventually showed up and I hid away. But they were there only long enough to make sure there was no danger of the fire spreading. No firetruck ever came.

* * *

    The next morning, I discovered two live kittens under the singed willow tree. There had been five of them, so my guess is that one of the elderly cats had rescued these two and then gone back into the flaming barn for the rest.
    The tabby kittens had been weaned weeks ago and were well on their way to adolescence, but not yet old enough to feed themselves. Not knowing what else to do, I carried them by the scruff of their necks in my teeth as I climbed Pawpaw’s fence, returning to the place of truly restless spirits, ghosts of the damned.
    We found the little farmhouse, with its juniper siding and tin roof, locked and deserted. It’d been years since I last saw the place but found a spare key under the same flat piece of sandstone where Pawpaw had always hid it.
    I stood at the front door on the rickety old porch for long minutes, the two kittens squirming in my cradled left arm as I held the key with my right. I nearly panicked when, beneath the sound of the whistling wind, I thought I heard my mother’s drunk mutterings. But no. It was only the gusts blowing over through the slates of the decaying front gate and graying, wind-sanded picket fence.
    Once inside, I put down the kittens and investigated, still half expecting Pawpaw to appear before me, his shotgun pointed at my chest. But the place really was abandoned, with most of the furniture gone except for a round, rough-hewn pine table in the middle of the living room.
    On the table were some papers weighed down with a few pens and Pawpaw’s favorite double-barreled 16-gauge shotgun. It would have pained him to see the skeins of rust on the gunmetal that he’d always kept well-oiled. There was another small key as well.
    Under the gun was a short note:
    Michael, They about to wheel my carcass to a government dump for useless old bastards. I sold some land but the house is yours. I should have done more, boyo. Pawpaw
    The other papers were, as far as I could make out, a deed to the property that, according to a little sticky yellow piece of paper, only needed my signature.
    I took the small key outside and tried it on the shed’s padlock. Inside were not only a rusted set of farm tools but many stacked bags of cat chow wrapped up in multiple sheets of thick plastic. When I uncovered them, I found that mice and bugs had eaten their way into three of the bags. The rest were long past their expiration dates, though that meant nothing to barn cats. I moved all the unopened bags into the house.
    Next I found the gun oil and shotgun shells in the shed and cleaned Pawpaw’s shotgun. I’d never done it myself but had watched him do it many times when I was a kid. I cracked it open, loaded two shells, and climbed the stairs to Mary’s room.
    Was there anything left there for me?
    I placed the butt of the gun down on the wood floor and put the barrel in my mouth, just to see what it felt like. Yes, my arms were just long enough to reach the trigger, and there was something satisfying about the cool, smooth, blank taste of gunmetal.
    But I still had business to attend, so I stood up, took aim at the head of the battered, lumpy mattress and pulled the first trigger, blowing a hole and sending a filthy confetti-like cloud of dust, cotton and gun smoke into the air. It felt good. I could see why people enjoyed it. So I shot the center of the mattress as well, before laying the dead gun lengthwise on the mattress.
    Downstairs, I broke a window in the living room and cleared away the glass, before getting a hammer out of the shed and smashing a jagged hole in the bottom of the back door. The cats would be able to come and go as they pleased. I jammed the hammer claw into one of the bags of dry mix. That also felt good, so I continued until I was breathing hard and the bag was nothing more than a mangled mess. Over time, the two young ones would claw open the rest of the bags on their own. They’d have to find water on their own.
    As a boy, I’d never learned to write well, but I was able to sign my name to the deed and then make a note: I give Pawpaw’s place to the cats who live here. Michael Johnson
    Then I walked out the front door, locked it, and threw the key into the brush.

* * *

    It was a long way down from the branch of the Emory Oak that hung over La Naranja’s place. I’d seen nimble Squirrel-slayer jump from the high limb onto the fence itself, then quickly claw her way down in a fluid movement. I considered trying to use the same trick but lost my nerve, sure I’d slice my fingers off even if I sprang as far as the fence.
    Instead, I hugged the underside of the long branch with my arms and legs, then let go with my legs until I was just hanging there by my arms. It was then that I knew it was a mistake. It had to be a twenty foot drop or more. Frightened, I kicked up my legs, trying to wrap them around the limb again.
    To no avail. It was hopeless and I was losing my grip anyway, so I just dropped.

* * *

    These days, my ankle has long since healed. If La Naranja discovers me, I will run swiftly and he will not catch me. I have made his territory my own, the greatest of cat insults. I shit in his sand, piss on his boundaries. All the animals know who I am.
    There are rodents aplenty in the hay, lizards in the rocks, worms in the corn, and edible beetles everywhere. I quench my thirst with his irrigation pipes, and sleep in hollowed gopher tortoise burrows his men do not notice even when stumbling over them. My days are spent napping, hunting and watching. Especially watching. With patience, I watch the long, crooked, invisible lines of brown harvester ants carrying their seeds. I watch many kinds of lizards—spiny, horned, whiptails, fence and fringe-toed—go through their busy days of fighting, fucking, eating and flaunting their many mating displays—more like people than cats.
    I devour La Naranja’s barely ripened corn, and I chew his bitter cannabis leaves, which help me see the wondrous variations of brown and green, the stark blueness of the sky, the zigzagging patterns of the land. I walk stealthily and never succumb to the temptation of his trash bins. When the fields are sprayed, I tightly shut my eyes and breathe through woven cloth. It makes me sick for days, yet I also enjoy the sourness of the spewed poisons. I savor all these things because I know he himself will not, cannot. He is a lifeless bag of orange wind, rich but impoverished, shrewd but obtuse, sane but demented in ways beyond counting. He is humanity writ small, puffed with spite and gluttony.
    Someday, perhaps even soon, I will lie still on this land as unmourned and unremarked as a fallen sparrow, crumbling into the dusty ground, and my vengeance will be complete.

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