Emily stopped dabbing her nose with the bandana. “There are kittens in the back seat of my car?”
“See for yourself,” I said. While she looked I rested my left hand on the seat back, then rubbed a thumb over the upholstery. It reminded me of a sweater my mother had given me when I left for college in the East. “Is this cashmere?” I asked.
Nina had been lounging against the stagecoach, trying not to look impatient. “Cashmere!” she hooted. “Listen to you, cowboy.”
Emily ignored this. “Yes. Archer—my husband—chose it. First he insisted on buying a Pierce-Arrow because the hood ornament is a little man with a bow and arrow. Then he said we couldn’t have it unless it was upholstered in cashmere. I said leather was more practical. Then he said, ‘Practical? That’s rich, coming from you.’”
“Sorry about the mess,” I said. “Cats like to kitten in dark places.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “When I get back to San Francisco I’ll buy another.”
Huh. Until this very moment it had slipped my mind how easily Emily tossed that off when I brought up the damage to her upholstery. Not, “It will take a lot of elbow grease and prayer to get those stains out.” Or, “When I get back to San Francisco I’ll have the back seat reupholstered.” At the time I just thought I couldn’t have heard her right. “Buy another what?” I asked.
“Another car,” she said. “Nina, come and see the kittens. Aren’t they the cutest things?”
“If you like cats,” Nina said, not looking. She’d been shifting her weight from one foot to the other for a while by then and couldn’t take it anymore. “Emily, please. You have to change before we leave.”
Emily looked down at her funereal black visiting-the-lawyer outfit, now tinseled with silvery filaments of Wally. “It’s just cat hair,” she said.
“It’s not the cat hair, it’s the dress. I’m changing, too. Pants. Come on. We need to hurry.”
The variable in their escape plan, the “flaw in the ointment,” as a beloved malapropism-prone guest of yore had been fond of saying, was the imminent return of Max and the other ladies. While Emily and Nina changed I busied myself with the kittens. Soon I was sunk in a battle of wills with Taffy, née Catastrophe, over the relocation of her brood.
There wasn’t time to hunt up a box, so I’d opened the stagecoach boot, spread a saddle blanket over the bottom, and eased a couple of her babies in. They’d be safe there for the time being. Taffy hadn’t pretended to be happy about this, but I’d put on a pair of the gloves we wore to stretch barbed wire before I started so her protests were for naught. When I came back for more kittens she’d abandoned the field of battle. This made it easier to help myself to her progeny, but it worried me a little. Sometimes when you move newborns the mama cat will abandon the litter, and no amount of reasoning will make her admit she has any connection to the kittens you insist on saying belong to her. Keeping the poor abandoned mites going with cow’s milk and eyedroppers was an iffy business. When they’re that young cow’s milk is too much for their digestion, and cats are so hard to milk.
Luckily my fears were laid to rest when Taffy and I crossed paths halfway between the coach and automobile, me with a kitten in each hand and her headed back to the Pierce-Arrow toting one of her relocated infants by the scruff of its tiny neck. It was a Sisyphean struggle, but she had the one mouth to my two hands so the numbers were on my side.
When I heard the ranch house station wagon’s engine in the distance I’d just slipped the last furry little packet of protoplasm in and had propped the boot’s lid open with another blanket, leaving a crack plenty big enough for Taffy to squeeze in and out of unless she tried to negotiate it with a mouthful of kitten. By the time I hotfooted it to the door of the shed, the station wagon was just a question mark of dust working its way up the ranch’s long driveway. I didn’t want to derail Nina and Emily’s escape by getting myself tangled up with the other ladies, so I closed the shed door and applied an eye to a crack in it to see what would happen next.
I remembered then my mother taking me shopping in Memphis once when I was a kid, for what I have no idea anymore. Someplace in our travels we’d come upon a kinetoscope, even then an old-timey contraption that motion picture technology had rendered obsolete, but not so obsolete that a storekeeper who’d invested in one was ready to retire it. You put your money in a slot on the side of the machine, pressed your eyes to the viewfinder, cranked, and, miracle of miracles, a little movie played, just for you. I’ve heard tell some kinetoscopes showed a lady peeling her clothes off, but I never saw one of those, particularly not while out shopping with my mother. The one I saw that day showed two cats in a miniature prizefighting ring wearing harnesses to lift their forequarters high enough to allow them to go at each other with tiny boxing gloves.
That day at the ranch the scene that unspooled for me when I pressed an eye to the crack in the shed door began with Nina at Coyote’s window, gesturing vigorously. Emily joined her; they registered dismay at the fast-approaching automobile and ducked low behind the windowsill. As we watched from our separate vantage points, Max parked and hopped out to hold the passenger door open first on one side, then the other for the ladies fresh from Reno. Once all were under the overhang of the porch, Nina and Emily stood up again. Emily started to say something, but Nina held a finger to her lips and tilted her head, listening.
From my angle across the barnyard I could see what they couldn’t, Max hurrying ahead to hold the front door for the ladies and closing it once the last had filtered through. A story above, Nina nodded when the door banged shut, then held up a hand—wait. I counted ten, same as she must have before raising the window sash and stepping through in her aviatrix ensemble of jodhpurs, white blouse, and high boots. Emily followed. She’d changed into more or less the same thing, aside from the equestrian boots. The first thing Emily put over the windowsill was her life insurance policy, the red varmints.
“I wish Portia were here to see,” Emily said, looking petrified.
Nina had bounded off to find the keeper of the keys while we waited in the car. I’d parked alongside the hangar that housed her airplane to take advantage of a skimpy slice of shade. There hadn’t had been time to clean up after the kittens before we left, so all three of us had piled into the sedan’s front seat, Emily in the middle with her knees swept right so I could work the stick shift. Nina held her arms above the windshield like a kid on a roller coaster as we beat it out of there, hitting just the high parts of the bumpy gravel drive. “We’re leaving this hot old world behind at last,” she said, cupping her hands to catch the wind. “You’ll love flying, Emily. Since it’s your maiden voyage, we won’t go high or stay up for long. The first time’s free, chickadee, but every time after that I’m going to have to charge you the going rate, a dollar. And I won’t charge you for the loan of the accessories this time, either.”
“Oh? What accessories?” Emily asked.
“Goggles and a parachute.”
“Why do I need a parachute?”
“In the unlikely event that you do not love flying, the quickest way down again is over the side.”