Chapter One
The man spent a week trying to get rid of the cat on the
front porch, then he gave up. For that week, he hissed
every time he walked out the front door. He lobbed
firewood over her head, let his dogs chase her up trees.
He told his wife to leave the cat food across the road
in the woods.
None of it worked.
In the morning-every morning-the cat would be there to
curl around his leg when he came out the door, and after
a week he gave up hissing and lobbing firewood, but he
did not give up wishing she would go away.
He said to his wife, “As soon as it warms up, quit
feeding her and maybe she’ll go someplace else.” He said
that in January.
Two months went by, and it got warmer. The wife quit
leaving food. The cat got pregnant. When she rubbed her
stomach against his leg now, he thought he could feel
the kittens. He didn’t say anything when his wife began
feeding her again.
The cat was gentler than the other cats that lived in
the woods. They showed up from time to time on the front
porch too. She was also cleaner than the others. The man
noticed that. He had a year-old daughter, and he didn’t
stop her when she moved to hug the cat. And he had lost
things that mattered before and was not inclined to take
chances with his child.
The litter of kittens came in the middle of April. There
were five of them, all except one looked like the
mother. They were white and had brown and black circles
on their heads and shoulders and tails. The fifth one
was gray.
The delivery occurred behind a pile of stacked bricks in
a neighbor’s yard. The neighbor had a German shepherd,
and the man’s wife climbed the fence between the yards
to move the kittens into a cardboard box near his front
porch.
As she was going back over the fence for the second one,
the mother cat was coming under the fence with the first
one, carrying it back to the bricks.
The wife worried about the kittens at night. The man
said he was worried too. “I don’t know what we’ll do if
the dog gets them,” he said. “Imagine being down to
eleven cats again. Oh, Christ, I can’t think about it …”
But when he looked again one afternoon a week later and
there were only three of them left, the feeling he got
stayed with him through supper.
A day or two later he moved them to a pile of scrap wood
in his backyard. He had been planning to haul the wood
away for eight months, which meant-conservatively-that
the kittens had another half-year before they had to
worry about finding a different place to stay.
That was the way the man was.
The hawk was waiting in a high limb of one of the
tallest pine trees in the woods across the road. The man
had seen her hunt from there before. She was brown in
the face and wings and a redder color across her chest.
When she left the limb, her wings would pump the air
slowly, and it was the nature of her power that you
could see the effect of each of the strokes on her
flight.
Tip to tip, those wings were five feet across.
Right now, though, the man wasn’t watching the hawk. He
was watching the cat, who was moving her kittens away
from the wood pile. There were only two of them left,
the gray and one that looked like the mother.
The cat picked up the white one by the skin around its
neck, walked to a tree. She dropped it, picked it up
again to get the right hold, then moved up the tree and
onto the flat part of the roof. She found a protected
spot behind a roll of tar paper that the man had left
there-planning to fix a leak-and put the kitten down.
The man was watching all this in the garden, wondering
what had eaten his bean sprouts, and that didn’t make
him any happier about having a nest of cats on his roof.
He began working on the two plans at the same time, one
for the beans, one for the cats. The mother came back
down the tree.
She was close by when the hawk got the gray kitten. It
had been nursing when she’d decided to move and it had
held onto a nipple for a couple of seconds after she’d
gotten up. The kitten had dropped off in the sunshine, a
foot or two from the pile of wood.
It was too young still to move without its mother, so it
lay in the grass and waited, half again the size of a
mouse.
The mother cat was almost back to it when the shadow
blocked out the sun. She ducked, then looked back. There
was the shadow, the sound of the hawk’s wings, pine
needles and dust blowing off the ground, and then the
gray kitten was gone. It seemed to happen all at once.
The hawk carried it in her talons out over the lake,
banked through a long circle and disappeared behind the
trees across the road.
The man walked over to the cat. She searched his face,
then came up on her hind legs, asking for her kitten
back. He held out his hands to show her he didn’t have
it, then started for the house to get her some milk.
As he moved, his shadow crossed the cat and she cringed,
and that is what he would lie awake thinking about that
night, and the next.
The man had lost things that had mattered before, and he
knew what it was to cringe at sudden shadows, the ones
that just drop on you out of the sky.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Paper Trails
by Pete Dexter
Copyright © 2007 by Pete Dexter.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Copyright © 2007
Pete Dexter
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-118935-7
