Cat Tales (3 page)

I already had a rep as a fighter at the school, and had spent more time in detention than any other girl in the history of Bethel. A record I was happy to leave behind me. But despite how tough I was, from the first day he came to Bethel, something about Bobby had called to me. He was like a day-old kitten, mewling in fear. I had fought for Bobby. Protected him. Made sure the other kids left him alone. With me gone, Bobby would have to fend for himself.

I had done what I could to see him safe, mainly by threatening the ringleaders of cliques that bullied the most. I’d be back to visit. And they didn’t want me unhappy when I did.

I wasn’t that tough—not really—though the years in the dojo learning street fighting proved I could kick butt when I needed to. While the other girls in the group home were taking ballet, piano, and French, I was getting tossed around by a sensei with black belts in three different martial art forms. I was pretty sure the general manager of the school, the dude who had approved the cost of the lessons, had expected the rigorous training program to knock some sense into me and teach me self-restraint. He had probably also figured Sensei would send me back with my antagonistic tail between my legs. Things had worked out a bit differently.

In the dojo, I had finally found a place where I belonged, where I fit in, with Sensei and the kids he groomed as fighters. I never stood for belt testing, but I stuck out the training program, living with the bruises, sprains, and occasional broken rib. I was good. But mostly, as far as the school counselors and their opposite number, the bully-masters, were concerned, I was just really good at looking dangerous.

I also worked after school at the dojo, my first real job, cleaning floors and the workout mats, washing windows, general handyman stuff. Sensei taught me how to do the books, pay the taxes, order supplies. He was my first real friend. Even if he did knock me silly when we sparred.

I took Bobby’s hand, his flesh soft and moist, and held it, drawing his unwilling eyes to mine. “As soon as I get the trainee position and get started, I’ll schedule a few days off and come back. I promise.”

Tears filled his eyes. “Okay,” he whispered. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And he wasn’t. Bobby’s parents had been killed in an automobile accident with a dn tent witrunk driver. Though his grandmother had taken in his three brothers and sisters, she had decided she didn’t have the strength to raise a kid with a seventy-four IQ. So she dumped him here, which I understood on one level, but it still made my brain boil. Bobby went home to Gramma’s to visit on Christmas, on Easter, and for a week in the summer. That was it. That was as much as his grandmother could take of her less-than-normal grandkid.

Of course I never went anywhere, but I was used to it. I had always been alone.

Weak. Prey, my inner voice whispered. My own personal demon, never acknowledged aloud, never alluded to, never hinted at. The counselors would have thought me insane or possessed, depending on their religious beliefs. Either way, I’d have been medicated and sent to more counseling sessions. And been subjected to more torment by my housemates. Again, I shoved it deep and silent.

“I’ll be bringing you a present,” I said. “Something from the mountains.”

Bobby’s eyes lit up. “From your spirit quest?”

I dropped his hand and chucked him on the chin. “Right. See you soon.” Before he could delay me more, I turned the key and gave the Yamaha a bit of gas. It spat for a sec and then shot me forward. Into the future. I wove through the grounds of the children’s home one last time. I would come back. But Bobby was right. This would never be my home again, and it would always-ever-after be different.

Bethel Nondenominational Christian Children’s Home was located near the Sumter National Forest in South Carolina, within spitting distance of Georgia and North Carolina, in a locale with more rednecks than all other ethnic groups put together, and ten times more livestock than people. Maybe a hundred times. Maybe a thousand. The place I was going was a lot less populated and a lot more remote.

I dropped down my face shield, cutting the hot wind but making a steam bath inside with my own breath. Speeding, I passed the main offices and lifted a thumb to the one person standing outside to see me go—Belinda Smith, one of my former houseparents. She smiled and waved, and I knew that of all the people at Bethel—besides Bobby—she really was sad to see me leave. She had liked my essays.

I glanced in the rearview to see her place a hand over her mouth, and I could have sworn that she was crying. Not possible. No way.

I looked back at the street and the road before me. Gunned the motor again. The outer gates neared, passed, and fell behind. The bike tore out of the grounds of Bethel, along the main road, and out of the city.

Soon I was gunning it up the mountains.

The quality of the air changed around every bend, freshening each time the elevation rose. The world changed as I two-wheeled into my future and—I hoped—my past.

I didn’t have a history. I had wandered out of the Sumter National Forest when I was somewhere near twelve years of age, traumatized, weak, skinny as a rail, totally unsocialized, and with complete amnesia. The newspaper that captured the ster tured tory and sent it out on the newswires suggested that I was raised by wolves, an accusation that contributed more than almost anything else to the drubbings I took until I could hold my own,. Well, except for the fact that I couldn’t speak a word of English. That had brought on a lot of pain and suffering too. I couldn’t even remember my own name.

All I had muttered was a Cherokee word that one of the park rangers who found me was able to interpret. Yellow Rock. So I became Jane Yellowrock Doe. Eventually they dropped the Doe and I acquired a birth certificate as Jane Yellowrock, birthday August 15, the day of the month when I had been found, and a presumed birth year that made me twelve. No records of me had ever been located, and no one had ever come forward to claim me.

The only memory I had was of a granite mountain cliff, a sunrise, and a white quartz boulder. It was as if I had been born with the vision of the mountain’s rock face as seen from above, standing on the crest and looking down on it, and also from far below it, looking up. The horseshoe-shaped granite had been pitted like tears and gray in the rising sun.

On the Internet, it hadn’t been that hard to find a mountain fitting the horseshoe description. Horseshoe Rock was in Jackson County, North Carolina, in the Nantahala National Forest. Not all that far from where I had been found. If the pictures were right, there was a gigantic curving rock face on the eastern front of Wolf Mountain. And if that was really true, then so were my dreams, my possible past, and any hope of a family I might ever have.

The memory of the white quartz boulder was more shadowed, hidden. No mention of the boulder was anywhere on the Internet, which had totally sucked. But at least I had a starting point. A place in my broken and lost memory that matched with reality.

Once I discovered that Horseshoe Rock really existed, I had spent hours in the school library researching the history of the mountain, trying to see why I was drawn there. For whatever reason, I had dreamed of the rock face of the mountain my whole life, though as far as I recalled, I had never seen it in person.

In my visions, the vision of the white quartz boulder threaded through with gold had been within sight of the mountain. I touched the gold nugget I wore beneath my clothes. Part of my past. The only thing I had from the “Before Times.”

But maybe I had family where I was headed. Who knows. Or maybe I had just been born with the pictures of it all imprinted on my mind. Whatever. But I was drawn there like a pile of metal filings to a magnet. I had harbored the need to go there forever, and now, the day I turned eighteen—according to my fictional birth certificate—I was finally on my way.

I had done my homework on Mapquest and TerraServer. I knew where I was going and how to get there. In the latched saddlebag compartments I had annotated Internet maps, a sleeping bag, enough food—mostly beef jerky—to last a few days, water, a rain-resistant backpack and slicker, and well-worn hiking boots. I was headed to my past.

I reached the Nantahala National Forest before dark and took State Road 281 through the hills, the coiling blacktop like the ridges of a dragon’s back, the bike roaring up and down and around, my excitelitd, my ement growing with each turn. The cooler air dried my sweat-soaked skin. Shadows lengthened and the air darkened. On a hairpin turn, I spotted a sign that said
WOLF MOUNTAIN ROAD
. It was a narrow blacktopped side road that curled up and out of sight around a fold of the mountain. Satisfied, I headed back into more commercial areas and a cheap hotel that catered to motorcyclists.

Bedding down, I lay staring at the ceiling. The sheets were older than I was. The room probably hadn’t been painted in decades. But the place was surface-clean, and for what I wanted to pay, that was probably okay. Still, the carpet smelled of mold, stronger than the reek of the fresheners the housekeeping crew used, and I couldn’t turn off my nose or my reflexes. When I finally slept, it was only poorly. I was hyperalert on some deep level, a sensation that seemed to prowl around inside me like a nervous, edgy cat, feeling the excitement still gathering, pulsing through me.

I was up at five, pretty much the only person awake except a waitress/cook at a Huddle House knockoff joint. I was so excited I could hardly think, and the breakfast of eggs and bacon I scarfed stuck about midway down and stayed there.

By dawn, the August heat already in the high eighties, I was tooling up 281. The sun, hidden by low clouds, threw diffuse shadows across the blacktop. Morning-cool air raced beneath my riding leathers as I turned on to Wolf Mountain Road, a winding asphalt tertiary street that morphed quickly into an unmarked narrow paved strip, and then to a two-rutted trail. The track was ground down and sloppy with mud from the last rains, scored with tire tracks from four-wheelers and off-road motorbikes. It wasn’t something my street bike was built for, but the Yamaha was in a good mood, agreeable to my spirit quest, as Bobby had called it, and I made okay time.

Wolf Mountain’s highest peak is more than four thousand feet above sea level, and the trail wound up and down at sharp inclines. I skidded and threw dirt and stone as I alternately gunned and braked my bike, balancing with my feet on my climb to the crest. I passed no one, saw no one. I was alone on the mountain. Totally alone. Climbing hard. Following my nose and some instinct I couldn’t name.

Once, when I took a break, I touched the necklace, the gold nugget that was the only thing I still had from the forgotten life before I was twelve. Holding the gold, its rounded shape a perfect match for my palm, I opened my mouth and sucked in the morning air, heavy with promised rain, pulling the scents in over the roof of my mouth, tasting, smelling, feeling in the way that worked so well for me. It was a method that had resulted in the other kids laughing at me until I learned to sniff with my nose only, like they did.

Taking off again, I breathed deeply as I roared along the track, through a low-lying cloud heavy with rain. Mist draped the landscape, hiding and revealing boulders, ferns, green-laden trees. The place smelled familiar. Felt familiar. My excitement grew. In the back of my mind a strange thought whispered, The world of the white man falls away.

I reached the crest of the mountain after lunch, sweating in the August heat and humidity even at such a high elevation, with the misty clouds burned away. I keyed off the bike and sat, listening to the hot metal pinging, my booted feet on the stony earth, breathing in the mist, letting it fill my lungiv>fill mys, my heart fluttering like a bird caught in a too-tight fist. Letting memory and reality merge.

The air was noticeably thinner, and the smells of hemlock, pine, fir, maple, and oak were stronger than the lingering smell of bike exhaust. Clouds were thickening in the east, and I knew there would be rain soon.

I stepped off the bike, locked it to a tree with a length of chain, hid my helmet in a pile of bracken, and grabbed up my supplies, sliding them into the backpack. And I walked off the two-track trail to the top of Horseshoe Rock. Standing in the lowering clouds, their mist snaking over the ridge and down into the valley below, I looked out over the world.

Horseshoe Rock was bigger than I had expected. Too big to see its scale in photographs. Bigger than the grandstand in a coliseum. Bigger than Horseshoe Falls in Canada. Bigger than anything I could ever remember seeing. Yet it was familiar. I had been here before. Several . . . no. Many times.

The sensation of a pelt rubbing against my flesh and bones grew. Rippling, uncomfortable. My breath sped, my heart tripping.

I walked the rock, sure-footed, as a thin rain began to fall. Thunder rumbled overhead. The misty drizzle damped my clothes, sticking them to me. Wet seeped into my braid and trickled along my scalp, adding weight to the long plait. I raised my face to the rain. Unlike the other girls in the group home, I had never cared whether I got rain-wet, because I didn’t wear much makeup and my hair had never been styled. It was black and straight, hanging way past my hips, worn most often in braids; rainwater didn’t cause me the problems it did the more socially upscale, high-maintenance girls.

Now, wet and uncaring, I walked all along the upper ridge of the rock, seeing the surface shapes that had caused such arguments among archeologists.

The cliff was marked with ridges of hard rock, veins of whiter marble, harder than the surrounding gray granite, standing up just a bit higher, running across the curvature like multiple spines ridging the stone. And it was pitted . . . .The pits were all uniform in direction, falling from the top of the stone across the almost-flat side, perpendicular to the marble spines, and down, down, around the curve of the mountain, like tears of rain and pain. Every single pit was flat bottomed, level, and nearly perfectly circular, though the sizes of each pit trail were different. Some tracks were small, starting the size of a Coke bottle bottom and falling away to holes no bigger than a quarter. Some began the size of a large can of . . . of ravioli, descending to the size of a can of cola. Always larger at the top and growing smaller as they trailed across and down the stone to disappear under the curve of the rock.