Cat Running (4 page)

“Well, I mean it about not being in the races,” she said. “And I don’t want anyone to watch today either. Okay?” Janet quickly agreed.

On the playground a bunch of girls were playing hopscotch and some others were practicing backspins and dead-man drops on the bars. Down by the driveway Mr. Alessandro, the janitor, was getting the sawdust pit ready for the broad-jump contest. Nearly all the fifth- and sixth-grade boys were in a clump in the middle of the kickball diamond arguing about something. All except for the new boy, an Okie kid who had just started going to Brownwood School a few days before.

Dressed in worn-out overalls and the raggedy remains of a man-sized shirt, the new boy was sitting on one of the lunch tables all by himself, swinging his bare feet and staring at Janet and Cat as they went by.

As they headed for the starting line Cat was watching Janet closely to see if she was about to try to get anyone to come watch the race. If Janet yelled, “Hey, everybody. Cat’s going to run,” or anything like that—that was it. Cat was just going to turn around and march right back into the classroom.

Janet didn’t yell anything, but as they were getting on their mark, crouching down at the starting line, it did seem like the whole playground suddenly got a little bit quieter. There was definitely a little less giggling and shrieking from one direction, and not quite as much yelling and cussing from the other. Cat almost looked back over her shoulder to confirm her suspicion that Janet had somehow gotten people’s attention—except that might look like she wanted them to watch. So she put it out of her mind and tried to concentrate on the race instead. “On your mark! Ready! Set! Go!” Janet yelled, and they were off.

Cat was expecting to be out of practice. Before last year’s Play Day she’d practiced nearly every recess, but this year she’d not been racing at all. Not even a quick sprint to get her favorite bar at recess, or the best playground lunch table at noon. So she wasn’t expecting to win by very much.

But the minute she started to run she forgot everything except the swift, certain thrill of running. The pounding feet, tingling lungs, and, against her back, the familiar swish and thud of her heavy braid. And, up ahead, the quickly diminishing distance to the school yard fence. Touching the fence, she whirled around and sent her feet flying back in the other direction.

She was almost halfway back to the starting line when she passed Janet, still running the other way. But even Janet’s gasping, giggly face barely registered—at least not until Cat had reached the blacktop and slid to a quick stop. Then, as the tingling excitement died away, she gradually became aware of a lot of other things.

Of Janet first. Janet on her way back now, all flopping legs and arms and Shirley Temple curls. A laughing Janet who, when she finally reached the finish line, grabbed Cat and collapsed, dragging them both down onto the blacktop.

“Gee whiz, Cat,” she gasped. “Gee whiz.” She grabbed Cat again and shook her, panting and laughing, until she got enough breath to say, “You fibbed to me, Cat Kinsey. You
have
been practicing, haven’t you? You must have been. You’re faster than ever. À lot faster.”

“No, I haven’t,” Cat said, but even as she said it she knew it was only partly true. She hadn’t been practicing on purpose, perhaps, but she had been running a lot—stretching her lungs to their utmost and training her feet to fall swift and sure—along the rough, rocky trail to the grotto.

Everybody else said she was faster too. It seemed that everyone had been watching, and as the recess bell rang and Janet and Cat made their way back to the classroom, they all crowded around to say that Cat was better now than she’d ever been. The fastest girl at Brownwood. Probably even the best runner at Brownwood ever—boy or girl. Everyone said so, that is, except the new boy.

The new boy, the Okie kid in the raggedy overalls and bare feet, was leaning against the wall just outside the classroom door when Cat went by. When she just happened to glance in his direction he grinned and said, “Purty fast for a gal, but I could whup you. Real easy.”

Cat let her eyes drop down past the worn-out shirt and the knobby bare knees sticking out through the holes in the outgrown overalls—and then on down to the dirty bare feet. She stared at the bare feet for a while before she slowly brought her eyes back up, grinned right into the sharp-boned face, and said, “Sure you could.” She didn’t say,
Sure you could, Okie,
but she thought about it.

I
T WASN’T UNTIL TWO
or three weeks after her discovery of the grotto that a thrilling new idea occurred to Cat. She was in the old garden shed at the time looking for a tool to use in leveling the rocky ledges into smoother, flatter shelves. She had found a small pickax and was about to leave when her eyes fell on something she’d seen so many times it had become almost invisible—a stack of dusty, cobweb-draped wooden panels. But now suddenly she put down the pickax, dashed out of the shed, ran to the house and down the hall to the living room. Sitting down on the floor in front of the bookcase, she pulled out a photo album and leafed through until she found what she was looking for. An old photo of a solemn little girl standing in front of an unusually large and fancy backyard playhouse.

The little girl was Ellen almost twenty years ago, and the playhouse had once stood in the Kinseys’ backyard. Father had built it for Ellen from a kit of partly assembled panels that had once been sold at Kinsey Hardware. When nailed together the panels formed an especially elegant playhouse with bright yellow shingled walls, a slanting roof, and fancy wooden trim that made it look like a fairy-tale cottage.

Cat had never actually seen the little house except in the photograph, since it had been taken down and stored away when Ellen got too old to play in it. But she’d seen the dusty panels hundreds of times, sitting there in a neat stack against the back wall of the old garden shed.

Cat put away the album and went back to the shed. Staring at the stack of panels, she was seeing in her mind’s eye a quaint fairy-tale cottage tucked away at the back of a secret grotto. It wasn’t as if she would be stealing it either. In a way it already belonged to her, because Father had once offered to put it back together for her as a birthday present. At the time Cat had politely refused. For one thing she’d never been the playhouse type. Not the ordinary backyard affair, anyway, with little flower boxes in the windows and, on the inside, doll cradles and cardboard kitchen appliances. And besides, she especially
didn’t
want an old secondhand playhouse that had been bought as a gift for somebody else. A secret shelter in a hidden grotto, however, was something entirely different.

It wasn’t going to be easy. For one thing, even though the various sections were fairly small, they were much too big to go through the rabbit-hole tunnel. But on her next trip to the grotto Cat found a solution. On the downstream end of the thicket the vines could be pulled away from the cliff face to make a narrow passageway through which the panels could be pushed. That left only the problem of getting them down the canyon.

Although the panels weren’t large some of them were quite heavy, and the glass windows were a particular problem. She came close to giving up the whole idea after an almost disastrous attempt to carry a wall section down the first steep trail to the canyon floor. But then the possibility of another route occurred to her.

Not far below the grotto Coyote Creek flowed out of its narrow canyon, under a bridge on the old Brownwood Road, and into the flat land beyond. Perhaps it would be possible to go down the old Brownwood road as far as the bridge, and from there back up the canyon. Now that the new highway was built Brownwood Road was seldom used. Which made it perfect since there would be little danger that she’d be seen by someone she knew.

The very next day Cat went exploring. After reaching the grotto by the usual route she went on past and continued down the canyon. Curving between gradually widening banks the creek soon reached less rugged land. After making its way down a shallow gully in the last wooded slope, it flowed out into the valley toward the Naranja River. And there were no steep drops or boulder-strewn rapids between the grotto and the valley.

Standing on that last wooded hillside Cat could see the line of trees and telephone poles that bordered the old Brownwood Road. And just down the hill was the bridge where the road crossed the creek on its way toward town. It would be easy to come down the road with a wheelbarrow and then, just before reaching the bridge, turn up toward the canyon.

There was, however, one obstacle that she’d forgotten all about until the moment she reached the last slope above the bridge—the Okie camp. From there on the hillside Cat had a good view of it—the cluttered, ramshackle village where a bunch of dust-bowl refugees had been living for the last several weeks while they worked on the Otis ranch. A settlement that most people in Brownwood referred to as Okietown.

Cat had seen Okietown before, but only distant glimpses from the window of a car. Now she was looking directly down into its midst—a straggling collection of sagging tents and shacks made of cardboard and tin, huddled together beside the creek just before it flowed under the bridge.

She moved forward cautiously, being careful to keep behind bushes or in the shadow of a tree. As she got nearer she heard high-pitched voices and saw three small children playing at the edge of the creek. A little farther away a woman stirred something in a pot that hung over an open campfire. There was a mysterious faded grayness about all of it, the road, the tents, the shacks, and the woman and children as well. A lack of color, as if a thin layer of dust covered everything, not only in the houses and clothing, but in the pale, pointy faces as well. Bending over the pot, the colorless woman looked like a thin, ghostly puppet. A witch puppet, stirring her cauldron. Cat shivered.

She’d heard that there were such places all over California these days. Places where dust-bowl emigrants set up temporary camps while they worked on a particular crop, and then moved on when the harvest was in. But how could people live in such an awful way, cooking out of doors and sleeping in shacks and tents without electricity or running water?

Even people, she realized with a sudden shock, that she actually knew. Or sort of knew, anyway. Like that new boy in her class at school. The one with the ragged overalls and the smart-alecky mouth.

Cat shivered again and stepped back farther among the trees. Suddenly she was seeing Ellen’s face. Ellen’s face with her lips tightening as they always did when someone mentioned the Okies. “Those disgusting Okies,” Ellen called them, and she and Father, too, had often reminded Cat not to play with their dirty, diseased children, or go near the terrible filthy places where they lived. The way Father and Ellen carried on, you’d think the Okies were all robbers and murderers.

But Cat wasn’t afraid. Of course, she would be careful and not go any closer to the camp than absolutely necessary. If she came this way with her wheelbarrow, she would turn off the road before the camp was in sight, which would make things much harder since the only remaining route was across a plowed field. Not nearly as easy as it would have been if the camp hadn’t been right there in the way. Not easy but possible, if she planned carefully.

Because the wheelbarrow trip would take more than her usual hour or two of freedom, Cat planned it for Mama’s next Saturday in town. On one Saturday a month Mama rode into town with Father and Ellen and Cliff. On those days she usually helped out at the store for a while, went shopping, and in the afternoon attended the Ladies’ Missionary Meeting at the church. When she was younger Cat had to spend such days at the store, too, but recently she’d been allowed to stay home if she had something special to get done. She would think of something special—for school, perhaps. A book that had to be read, or a report to be finished.

The next Saturday morning, as soon as the Model A had coughed and clattered down the driveway, Cat dashed out the back door at a dead run. First to the garage where the wheelbarrow was kept and then, with it bouncing ahead of her, out to the old garden shed. She had decided that she would need only three walls, since the house could be set up so that the back of the grotto would form a fourth. So, by loading carefully, she was able to get all the larger sections tied down across the wheelbarrow. The small pieces she could manage later. After a last testing of the stability of her load, she set off down the driveway.

It wasn’t easy. It was a hot day, the wooden panels were heavy, and the huge old wheelbarrow sometimes seemed to have a stubborn mind of its own. Trudging along the shoulder beside the old road, Cat could feel her shoulders aching before she was even halfway to the turning-off place. She stopped to rest once in the shade of the big trees that grew in front of the Ferrises’ burned-out farmhouse and again at the edge of the old plum orchard. By the time she finally approached the valley and could see the bridge in the distance, the sun was high in the sky, her face was wet with sweat, and her arms felt as if they were being pulled out of their sockets.

And then, because of the Okie camp, she had to turn off the road and make her way across a field of plowed land—and that was the hardest part of all. Dragging and pushing the heavy load, with the big wheel thumping down into each furrow and having to be wrestled out, she puffed and panted and ached—and clenched her jaws every time she thought about how much easier it would have been if she didn’t have to avoid that stupid Okietown.

Next came the short journey up the creek bed to where she could unload the panels and push and pull them through the narrow opening into the grotto. The worst was over then. The trip home with the empty wheelbarrow was much easier. And, in the days that followed, she was able to get all the smaller pieces down to the grotto by the old route.

The next step was to reassemble the pieces, a job which she might never have accomplished if it hadn’t been for the instruction booklet that she had found in a heavy envelope tacked to one of the sections. It was just like Father to have attached the instructions to the playhouse in case someone wanted to put it back together. Sometimes Father’s careful, methodical ways drove Cat crazy, but this time she had to admit they had come in handy.