Stars Always Shine (6 page)

Cats are, for the most part, nocturnal. Gatita, as unusual as she was, was no different. Salvador respected this, and he wedged a beer can between the front window of his cottage and the sill to allow his cat to respond to the nightly callings as the urge demanded.

In the night, other living beings come out too. The stillness of the slowly moving water in Miwok Creek, the leaning trees that drape a shadowy shroud along the banks, and the thin fog that rises from it like a long, gasping breath, harbor a night life of stealthy ambition as creatures awaken and seek out warm bodies that would be nourishment for their own families. It is a place that requires one to walk deftly and alertly, and still others are always watching and waiting.

They were prehensile claws that ripped into the silent night air and with a swift force seized the curious cat and lifted it from the muddy bank. The cat’s initial shriek was devoured by the stifling fog as it twisted its body and flailed at the ascending creature in a desperate effort to pull itself free from the clutching and crushing power. The round, feathered body swooped low as it wavered out of control. Slamming into the murky ground, the fierce talons automatically spiked into its prey and weighed heavily on its capture as it tore at the struggling, squirming feline. The hooked claws lacerated fur and flesh like a slitting gust slashing through the thick air.

From behind the slaughtering animal came a low but vicious growl, and then a tearing sensation at its neck as it cleaved at its own victim. The three-linked struggle rolled and reeled in the savage chaos of the dark and turbid landscape. The quiet waters of Miwok Creek broke the feral silence with desperate thrashing splashes that muffled the squeals and yelps and cries.

A hideous screeching shriek hit threatening high notes and evaporated into the trees as the fight for life ended. The cat clawed at the bank in a drenched attempt to pull itself from the creek. The animal lay in the mud as blood and life slowly drained from it.

Warm, panting breaths flowed over her body as Rosa curled by her side.

Early the next morning, Place and Salvador walked down to the end of the ranch where Salvador had volunteered to explain to him the intricacies of irrigation. As they approached the southernmost pastures, the ones nearest Miwok Creek, they talked freely, revealing more about themselves. The sound waves of their voices flew into the cool air where they landed in the auricular senses of the sleeping dog. In return, Rosa sent out a stream of dot-dashed barks. Curious, Place and Salvador jumped the fence and walked down to the creek. In the muddy bank sat the maternal Airedale with the dying cat at her paws.

“What the hell is—” Place started and then switched. “Rosa! We thought we lost you. What are you doing down here?”

Salvador knelt down to inspect his bloody and mud-caked cat. “Va a morir,” he said, offering a grim diagnosis as he shook his head. He looked at the muddy bank, and noticing a spray of feathers, picked one up. “Tecolote,” he whispered with an air of reverence as he held the owl’s feather in front of him.

But there was life in Gatita’s glassy eyes. There was a fortitude that asked for one more chance. Salvador picked up his cat, and he, Place, and Rosa walked back to the ranch house.

“Put her down here,” Mitch instructed as she pointed to a folded blanket on the floor of the washroom. She had scissors and gauze in her hands, and she was as ready as an emergency room doctor. “That’s a nasty tear. Her whole side is virtually ripped open. At least it’s not too deep. But she has a star-shaped puncture on her other side. That one could be deeper. All we can do for right now is cut away some of that fur, and then I’ll clean her up and put some peroxide on her. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”

“Why don’t we just take her to a vet?” Place asked.

“Because I don’t want to move her around too much,” Mitch answered. “Besides, she may not make it, and just think how much it would cost. Does Salvador have the money to pay for what it would cost to fix her?”

“¿Tienes dinero para el doctor?” Place asked Salvador.

“No,” he answered, and looked down at his dying cat, ashamed at not having taken better care of her.

“Tell him we’ll do our best to save her,” Mitch said. Then, attempting to clear the air of gloom added, “You never know, she might make it.”

“How weird, huh?” Place mused at the developments of the morning. “And that damn Rosa was sitting there like she was guarding her. It was like she called us over there.”

“Where is that prodigal mutt, anyway?” Mitch asked. “We’re going to have to clean her up too. She’s a mess. Or did she leave again?”

As the suffering cat lay on the thick blanket, Salvador, Place, and Mitch walked out to the deck where Rosa was stretched out in a leisurely way, convalescing in a swath of sunlight. Patches of fur were torn from her hide and clumps of dried mud were mortared to her legs and sides. Her eyes twitched as she fell deeper into the darkness of sleep. The two men walked back to the pastures while Mitch rolled up her sleeves and prepared to scrub the tired terrier clean.

Each day was a tentative one for the injured cat. Her eyes remained glassy and tired, at times seeming to ask for death. She ate slowly and very little, but drank gratefully from a bowl of water tipped toward her to ease the pain of movement. Daily, Mitch cleaned the gaping wounds with peroxide and then applied drawing salve to extract some of the infection. She also groomed the rest of Gatita’s fragile body, gently pulling mud from her and fluffing the spade of fur that represented a tail. She took some time to slowly stroke her, scratch her head, and whisper soothing words to her. And often Gatita responded by looking up at Mitch and opening her mouth to mew a silent cry.

As the week progressed, Place and Salvador asked about Gatita each morning before they headed out to the pastures. They popped their heads into the washroom to take quick looks and tell her she was not going to die. Each morning Gatita stared with fixed eyes gazing into a vacuous future.

“What do you think?” Place asked. “You think she’ll pull through?”

“She’s a survivor,” Mitch said, shaking her head in disbelief. “She’s eating more every day. And she drinks a lot of water. I think she’ll make it. But we just have to wait and see.”

“Salvador thanked Rosa for saving his cat,” Place said. “He says cats and dogs get along better than most pet owners think. It’s people who mess up the relationship.”

I
t was a pleasant first week for Mitch and Place on StarRidge Ranch. Salvador had offered his services for free and introduced the couple to the immediate needs of the property. He was eager in his willingness to teach and help, and Mitch and Place concluded that he was simply lonely. It had been over a month since the previous owners had fled the ranch, and Salvador had remained in his little house alone during that time. He did not bother to look for work because the harvest season had ended a few weeks earlier, and winter would soon chill the county as well as the job market. Farms and ranches would be settling into the long nights and hibernating months.

He was meticulous in his instructions. Irrigating the eighteen pastures was a synchronic art. The intent of irrigating was to release the treated sewage water more than to grow pasture. Salvador explained that the green pasture grass was not that nutritious anyway due to overgrazing and a general lack of proper management over the years. Of course, the water they constantly soaked it with didn’t help, but the grass was primarily something that kept the horses preoccupied between feedings—it was not their main source of sustenance and it kept them from chewing the fence posts.

He also told Place that the local water district maintained holding ponds which filled with, after being chemically treated, the effluent of the encroaching settlements known as housing developments that were cropping up and consuming what was once ranch and farmland. More recently, so many new homes were affecting the ponds that regular relief through irrigation was vital. After the wastewater was treated and the ponds became full, it was then circulated through its own pipelines to various ranches. The ranchers received the water for free as long as they agreed to certain stipulations. One of those stipulations was that ranchers and farmers who did not strive to be marketed as organic growers agreed to use a specific minimum amount of water each day during most of the year except some winter months. The goal was to constantly diminish the levels of treated water in the holding ponds so that the winter rains could be accommodated as well as the continual human waste that flowed through the sewer lines.

But irrigating pastures was not as Place had presumed it would be. It was not merely a matter of turning on a sprinkler as one watered a lawn. This was especially true when the main purpose was just to use up the water. Salvador explained that the hoses, which were each a hundred fifty feet long and had a sprinkler about every fifty feet, needed to be strategically placed before the water was turned on. For StarRidge Ranch, an important stipulation was that runoff from the irrigation could not, must not, run into Miwok Creek. Nor could there be any ponding left by the watering, as this attracted mosquitoes and other vermin. Irrigating the ranch required a diligent eye and a sharp mind.

Salvador and Place started in one of the bigger pastures—five-acre squares of which there were six. These pastures required three hoses each, and the method was to water one side of a pasture for a day and then pull and tug and trudge with the hoses to the other side of the pasture, and hook them up for the next day’s watering. The smaller pastures used fewer hoses, but the same monotonous and moiling one-side-at-a-time method was employed. This allowed for horses in pastures to remain and graze on the unwatered side while the other was being soaked. To add to the task of hooking and unhooking hoses, there was the constant strain on the legs, as Place found out, from hopping over the six-foot fences into the adjacent pastures. It was too time-consuming to walk out of a pasture, slip through the gate, and then walk into the next pasture. Salvador pointed out that that luxury was not available. Working half-days on a ranch could reasonably mean working twelve hours.

Since it was StarRidge Ranch’s commitment to use up twenty-five hundred gallons of water a day, the pastures were watered for approximately seven hours each day. On each sabbath, the effluvial rains subsided.

It took Salvador hours to teach Place about the proper placement of the irrigation hoses and to explain to him how to set the timer at the pump house. There was also a logbook at the pump house, and the figures of the meter on the pump had to be recorded daily. The water district had full privileges to check the logbook at any time on any day.

When they broke for lunch, Salvador assured Place that within a few weeks he would have the sequence of moving and setting hoses completed in two to three hours. He would show Place how to repair sprinkler heads and patch hoses as the need arose.

After lunch, Salvador showed Place that sweeping a barn did not mean literally or traditionally sweeping a barn. It was more like raking the barn, but after the cobwebbed ceiling and walls were first swept. As a neat-looking touch for the center of the barn where vehicles could drive through and horses’ tack was put on, Salvador showed Place how to rake from the center of the drive-through, raking from the left and then from the right. When the job was completed, there would be uniform lines in the hard-packed ground. Hundreds of chevron-lined strokes added order and symmetry to the insides of the barns.

Place was amazed by the details with which Salvador worked. He taught and worked with Place in an exuberant manner. He had a dignity about how he approached his tasks, and to him, they were important chores. They sustained the ranch, and if the ranch were sustained, that meant livelihoods would be too. “Todos tenemos que vivir,” Salvador explained. “La gente y la tierra también. Todo está unido. Y ellos que no tienen respeto por eso no van a sobrevivir.” Place listened attentively to Salvador’s postulations of living evenly.

On another day, Salvador suggested that it would be a good idea to prune some of the unkempt shrubs and trees. They spent the better part of one day carefully pruning the three tall pine trees, and when they had finished, Salvador remarked that they looked like three skinny teenage boys who had just had their hair cut.

The entire week they cleaned and raked and wiped and yes, they irrigated. Hoses burst, and Salvador taught Place how to patch up or splice a blown hose by attaching glue and plastic couplers to it. Sprinklers became spasmodic, and a pebble that made its way up the water line had to be removed or a spring reattached to the slapping mechanism that splash-sprayed the water onto the thick, long grass. When the hoses were fixed, Salvador waved an emphatic finger at Place, warning him that the tool kit with couplers, glue, springs, wrenches, and cutters had to be returned to its place in the hay barn. It was time-consuming to walk all the way back to the barn, Salvador pointed out, but the tool kit could not be left in a pasture for curious horses to hurt themselves on. Plus, he added, it was considerate to the other workers who found a burst hose and needed to use the kit. As long as tools were returned to their usual place, things ran more smoothly.

It was hard work, as Salvador had promised.

As he worked, Place paid attention to the cars that did not appear on Sweet Wine Road. He listened for the clangor of more progressive and civilized city life, which he did not hear and did not miss. He noticed too that when a vehicle did drive by, it was usually a slow, chugging tractor or an old truck loaded with hay or pulling a trailer with animals in it. And the drivers of these vehicles, if a person was in sight, always raised an acknowledging hand, usually a rough and worked hand. The wave alone said so much to Place.

In the silent moments of steady shoveling or symmetrical sweeping, Place found himself wondering about Salvador. How peculiar, he thought, that Salvador could look so primitive, so simple, and yet know so much. He possessed an uncanny, naturalistic wisdom with animals, and his philosophy was rooted in a common sense that expressed that it was much easier for a human to know what an animal needs than it is for an animal to tell a human what it needs. In this way, you work with and not against each other. And since many of the people that Salvador had dealt with acted only a little better than animals, it was quite relevant to apply the same approach to them too. Place was also impressed by how much Salvador knew about his own language. He had been educated in Mexico but nothing close to the level or equivalence of education Place had received. He could explain and teach with an encouraging effectiveness that kept his pupil interested, immersed, and enthusiastic.