"That"s stupid," I told her bluntly.

"Oh, Sheila, don"t you ever try anything new? Look, it"s only going to take a minute or two. Come on. Have an open mind."

I looked at her, unable to believe what I was hearing.

"In the interests of science," she added, as a finishing touch. She spun away from the car, leaving the door open. As I leaned across the seat to reach the handle, I saw her dumping water onto the cat in the pot. Yes. It had been a Persian with good tire tracks. Gotta give it to the man, he sure knew his roadkills. Dougie dug in his jacket pocket and came out with one of those camp knives that unfold a spoon at one end and a fork at the other. He prized the spoon out and began poking the cat down into the pot with it. That did it.

"Cheryl. I"m leaving. Either get in or get your stuff out of my car. You, too, Dougie."

They glanced over at me, then back at their cat. It was gently steaming now, and the smell of simmering cat blended with the smell of rainy freeway. Dougie spoke, but not to me. "For me, it"s the fifth neck bone down from the head bone. Now, I don"t know what one it"s gonna be for you. Too bad you never had your aura done with a crystal, so"s you"d know. But what we can do, Miss Cheryl, is just try the bones one at a time, keeping track of which one is which, until we get the right one. Okay?"

I slammed the door on it. d.a.m.n, I was mad. Furious. Because they knew, both of them, that my threats were empty. They weren"t even worried. I am not the kind of person who can drive off and leave two people stranded on a freeway, even if they"re sauteing a dead Persian. Because I"m a sucker. A wimp. I closed my eyes and worked on my anger. Remember the time I asked Cheryl to quit calling back orders for chicken t.i.ts? Remember how she smiled at the trucker and said that it was the girls with little t.i.ts who got offended about t.i.t jokes, because they didn"t have anything to laugh about? Remember the night her drunk boyfriend threw up all over the men"s room and I had to clean it up because she had to drive him home and none of the guys would touch it and Ernie was coming in any second? Remember that I am almost sure she"s the one who snitched all my tips out of the coffee mug I was keeping them in?

Remember that she"s the one who has a cousin in New Mexico for me to stay with while I job-hunt?

So I heaved out a big sigh and lolled my head back on the headrest and looked at the ceiling. I have always been a spineless wimp. And I think I give off some signal that attracts people who prey on spineless wimps. I despised myself. And I despised those a.s.sholes out there boiling their cat. Cretins. But then, I thought, Oh, well, what the h.e.l.l, and slid to the pa.s.senger seat and watched. It couldn"t be any worse than what I was imagining.

It was raining in a misty, invisible way. Damp made a sheen on Dougie"s wool jacket and jeweled Cheryl"s hair. They were hunkered down beside the pot in cheerfully primeval companionship. The cat had softened and sunk into the pot. Maybe it had been dead longer than I thought. Dougie kept poking at it with his spoon and nodding approvingly. He noticed me watching them and waved the spoon at me and said something. Cheryl laughed. A few minutes later she got up and came back to the car. She opened the door, letting in rain and cat steam.

"Dougie says he"s not offended or anything. Come on over and he"ll figure out which cat bone is right for you."

Like Mommy tapping at your bedroom door and saying, "Okay, you can come down to dinner now if you promise to behave and not call your brother *snotnose" anymore." Same answer to both.

"No. Thanks."

"Suit yourself, then." She turned and went back to her stewpot, leaving the door open. She whispered to Dougie and he shrugged elaborately. They ignored me a.s.siduously.

She"d make someone a great mommy someday. Now, Priscilla, don"t sulk in your room. Come down to the family room and suck on your kitty bone like a good girl. What a crock!

I slid out of the car to stretch my legs. The afternoon was fading. We could have been in California by now. Unremarkable stretch of freeway. Pavement, gravel shoulder, chain-link fence, nondescript woods beyond it. Cretins stewing a cat.

"There now! See how that"s falling apart. I think she"s ready. Now, you hold that cardboard steady."

I turned involuntarily as they fished out the cat. Soggy, steaming fur slipping off gray boiled meat that was sliding off bones. Dougie burned his fingers as he arranged it on the cardboard. It was falling apart, legs going different ways, the trailing guts swollen shiny.

"Usually I ain"t so careful," Dougie exclaimed as he laid his patient out. "Usually I just count down from the head bone. But we gotta be careful until we find out what bone is right for you. And for your friend there." He tipped his head at me, but his eyes never left the stewed kitty. I folded my arms and watched from a distance.

"Hope you don"t mind I go first, Missy Cheryl. I"m an old man, and it"s been two days since my last fifth cat. My Vital Essences need recharging bad." The blade of his camp knife lifted the cat"s neck and spine free of the clinging meat. I stepped closer to watch. He counted and coaxed free one tiny spinal bone. A gobbet of cord dangled from it when he picked it up in his thick fingers. He popped it into his mouth.

He closed his eyes, rocked back on his heels, and glowed. Glowed like a jack-o"-lantern with a candle inside it. The light outlined the bones of his skull, glowing redly through his nose and eye sockets, showing his teeth against his cheeks. Cheryl gazed at him raptly. I stumbled back until I felt the chain-link highway fence cold against my back.

The glow faded as slowly as embers being masked by ash. Dougie smiled and opened his eyes. He looked more like forty than seventy. My heart was hammering in my chest and the skin of my face went hot with blood. But I wasn"t scared, or even awestruck. I was furious.

See, I"d never respected people who hung crystals from their rearview mirrors and suspended pyramids over their beds and read their horoscopes every day. I laughed at their ignorant hope that they could get through life that way. I respected people who knew the world was real and lumpy, and that you had to make your own way in it, not look for some mystical shortcut. Practical, realistic people who worked hard and bettered themselves with education and saved money for the future. People like me.

I was angry at the monstrous unfairness of it. It worked. It was real. But the whole thing was too d.a.m.n easy. It wasn"t fair for anything in life to be that easy, for anyone. I didn"t want it to be real, and I was p.i.s.sed off that it was. It"s tough to find out you"re wrong about something as basic as that.

Cheryl"s eyes were wide. "What happened to the bone?"

"Gone," he told her, and opened his mouth wide to show her. She craned her head to peer into his mouth.

"So it is!" she exclaimed delightedly. "Okay. Now me. How do I start?"

"Well, let"s just start with the tip of the tail and work forward from there. May take us a while, Missy Cheryl. These cats gotta lotta bones, specially when you get down to all their little toesie bones and such. Let"s hope it ain"t the head bone. Be awful hard to get that under your tongue."

They laughed together over their feline box social. The mesh fence was cold against my fingers. I let go of it, crept closer. Dougie was neatly laying the tail open, lifting the thread of bones out skillfully. He set it carefully on the grubby piece of cardboard. The tip of his knife blade freed the end one. "Here ya go," he said, picking it up. "Number one tailbone. Now we gotta keep track, unless you wanna try every bone in every number five cat you ever use. So pay attention. Just pop this under your tongue. If it takes, you"ll know. If not, just pa.s.s it on to your friend there. Maybe it"ll be the right one for her."

"Well, come on, Sheila, don"t just stand there! This is gonna be fun!" Cheryl waved me over excitedly, then opened her mouth to receive the first bone from Dougie"s grubby fingers.

I swallowed as I watched her take it like she was receiving communion. She shut her eyes and rocked back on her heels. After a few seconds she opened them. "Nothing," she said matter-of-factly, and reached fingers into her mouth to fish out the bone. "Here, Sheila." She held it out to me.

"No." I crossed my arms on my chest.

"Yes," she said simply. "You have to believe it. It works. You saw it. You"d be crazy not to try it."

"It"s not that." My skepticism was hanging in tatters. No hiding behind that. "It"s sick. The whole idea of spending your life that way. What are you going to do, Cheryl? Go hiking down freeways forever, sucking on the tailbones of every fifth squashed cat? Is that what life is going to be for you?"

"You"re making it out a bit bare, missy," Dougie interceded. "It ain"t all asphalt and exhaust, it ain"t even all freeways. A lot of time it"s backcountry roads, with the birches turning gold along the shoulders, or bare white stretches of snowy highway in Utah, or the hilly streets of San Francisco. I mean, squashed cats are everywhere. Crisscrossed this country ten or more times; seen a lot of Canada and Mexico, too. I"ve had blue-sky days and thunderstorm nights; I"ve waited out hailstorms under overpa.s.ses and slept in deep sweet-smelling hayfields under harvest moons. My time belongs to me. I get lonely, I hitch a little. Sure, I get a little cold, I get a little wet. But as long as I get my number five cat bone, I don"t get old. Don"t get tired, don"t get sick. It may not be a fancy-dancy way to live. But it ain"t a bad life, and you got no right to go scaring Missy Cheryl away from it."

Cheryl"s chin had come up. She looked me straight in the eye and spoke with a dignity I"d never known she possessed. "No one"s scaring me away from this. You and me, Sheila, we worked a few months together. You think you know all about me. But it"s me who knows about you. I seen how you are. You"re looking. You believe you"re gonna end up doing something better. Being something better than I"ll ever be. Well, maybe you will. But I won"t. I know that. I"ve seen myself in every truck stop we pa.s.sed. All those old waitresses, swollen ankles and big behinds. Still getting pinched by the truckers, still putting out cups of coffee for guys who don"t tip. That"s as good as it"s ever going to get for me. And frankly, this looks better."

She set the rejected bone down on the dusty cardboard and took the next one from Dougie"s fingers.

A curious embarra.s.sment overtook me. I"d always known I was smarter than Cheryl. No. Smarter"s not the right word for it. But the world"s a different place for me. I"ve known hundreds of girls like her. Guys, too. High school was full of them, and all the seedy little jobs I"d taken since s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up my college had put me right alongside them. The biggest dream the guys ever have is, like, rebuilding the "66 Thunderbird that"s rusting behind Uncle Joe"s shed. For the girls, it"s always something to do with a guy. A handsomer guy, a richer guy, a s.e.xier guy. The biggest change they ever make is going on a diet or dyeing their hair. I had plans and dreams they didn"t understand. I"d always felt both pity and scorn for them. What I"d never realized was that Cheryl had known, all this time, that my future was brighter than hers, that the things that would work for me would crumble to pieces in her hands. She had always known it and lived with my secret scorn for her shopworn hopes and generic dreams.

What Cheryl was doing right now, placing the second bone under her tongue, took a sort of grubby courage. She was reaching for something a little better than she believed she was ent.i.tled to. And I, who had always believed that when my chance came, I would boldly seize it, I was hugging myself with cold hands, shivering in the gliding caress of the raindrops sliding down my arms.

Wimp out.

So I stepped into their magic circle and picked up the bone that Cheryl had discarded. It was warm from the pot and slick with her saliva, but I slipped it under my tongue and waited. Nothing. I set it aside and reached for the next one. Nothing. Now she was waiting for me, and I took the bone she fished out from under her tongue and put it under my own. Nothing. But there was an excitement building, an electrical current jumping and sparking from Dougie to Cheryl to me and yes, to the dead cat, and around again. A mystic togetherness that was warm and friendly. We three would soon be free of the world"s bonds. Another bone. Nothing. We would walk with our heads bare under the bright blue skies of autumn, the scent of falling leaves blowing past us. Another bone. Spring would sprout about our feet. We"d see the Grand Canyon, hike across Death Valley. Nothing. Another bone. The snows of winter might chill us, but the ways of man, of jobs and money and petty rules, would no longer bind us. Nothing. True freedom to see the world with eyes uncluttered by schedules and obligations. Like the old G.o.ds, like fey folk. Another bone.

We were about halfway through the cat, going down the ribs, when Cheryl lit up. Twice as bright as Dougie, like a blast furnace. I felt the warmth radiate from her body before I even turned my head to see her transfigurement. She had a halo like a catechism saint. The bra.s.sy blondness burned out of her hair, and it went a rich mahogany. Her complexion cleared as if her body were casting off all impurities. I stared at her as the glow gradually faded. I crouched long moments in the rain, blinking the drops from my lashes, waiting for the last light to fade from her face before I realized it wasn"t going to. That new light would stay, a vitality burning inside her, giving off the same aura of health and determination that had made me stop and pick Dougie up. She smiled, and it was like someone pulling up the blinds to let in a sunny day. I felt blessed.

"Well, go on," she told me, and it took an instant for me to realize what she was talking about.

"That there was the sixth rib on the left side, Missy Cheryl. You"re going to want to remember that now."

Cheryl smiled her beatific smile and gestured toward me. Dougie pa.s.sed me the next bone. We worked slowly through the rest of the ribs. I felt a shiver of excitement as we started down the left front leg. Soon. Only the leg bones left. Cheryl and I exchanged a smile as I started on the right front leg. Soon now. She was watching me closely, waiting for it. She reminded me of a lover I had who always tried to look at my face during o.r.g.a.s.m. It seemed a very personal thing, but I wasn"t bothered by it. Cheryl and Dougie and I would soon share a very unique bond. I didn"t mind her witnessing my initiation.

The left hind leg. Dougie was handing me the bones more slowly now, and I held each under my tongue a few seconds longer, just to be sure. As I took the first bone of the right hind leg under my tongue, my heart began hammering against my ribs. I felt heat rise in my face. For a moment I thought this was it, but it was only my building excitement. "Come on, come on!" Cheryl was chanting as I continued down the leg bones, the fine thin bones of the leg, and then the smaller, knuckly bones of the foot and toes, and then . . .

There were no more bones.

I stared in disbelief as Dougie dropped the last remnant of boneless cat onto the heap of discarded fur, meat, and entrails. It still steamed faintly in the fading afternoon light.

"What happened?" I asked groggily. I felt as if I were just coming to after a faint. The blackened burner of the camp stove, the scorched pot, the slithered flat cat remnants, the mounded bones on the road, dusty cardboard. It was like a videoca.s.sette tape snapping, or s.e.x suddenly interrupted. I couldn"t grasp what had happened. Dougie looked like a man who had suddenly lost his erection just before his partner climaxed. "What happened?" I demanded again. "What went wrong?"

"Ain"t gonna work for her," Dougie announced, and turned away.

"What do you mean?" I cried out, and Cheryl asked, "How come?"

Dougie jerked open the car door and started dragging his stuff out. "Look at her," he said gruffly. "She"s not like us. I shoulda seen it. Bones don"t work for someone like her."

I swung my gaze to Cheryl. I tried to meet her eyes, but her look roved over me, summing me up. "I see," she said slowly.

I looked back to Dougie. I felt like the family pet at the moment when the car door swings open on the country road and Bubby pushes you firmly out. Dumped. Cheryl stood up, took the kettle, and emptied out the liquor of cat.

"Wait a minute," I said as she handed Dougie the empty kettle. "I probably just missed a bone. Just missed it, that"s all." I grabbed one at random, slipped it under my tongue. Nothing. Go on to the next one.

"Nope." Dougie"s voice was final as he picked up the camp stove. "Don"t work for people like you. And you knowed it all along."

"No!" I wailed around a mouthful of ribs. I spat them out, grabbed another handful of tiny bones, and shoved them into my mouth. "Wait," I choked as I struggled to get my tongue over them. "Eweul see."

"What"d she say?" Cheryl asked Dougie.

"I don"t know. Who cares? Now look, missy, you can"t take all this stuff. You got like a pack or something?"

"I got a pillowcase," Cheryl said brightly. She dug through the back of the car, came up with her pillow. "And a sleeping bag."

"Well, good. Now that"s real good. Dump out the pillow, "cause you ain"t gonna need that. Keep the sleeping bag. Now, in the pillowcase, you put a change of clothes, a comb, that sort of thing. Nothing much, "cause you ain"t gonna need much no more. No, forget makeup, you"re prettier without it. Sure, take the Cheetos. Not that we"ll be hungry, but snacking"s fun as we walk along. Now let me tie it up for you."

The bones were wet with rain, and grit from the cardboard clung to them. I calmed myself, forced myself to do one bone at a time. They"d see. Any minute now, they"d see. As I watched them hike away, I thought how I"d jump and shout and they"d look back to see me glowing like a torch, brighter than either of them, burning like a bonfire. I"d show them. The rain pelted down faster. It grew harder to see them through the dusk and falling water. It didn"t matter. I had the car, I"d catch up with them. I picked up the next bone.

I don"t know how many times I went through the bones. I stopped when blue and white lights started flashing before my eyes, wondering if I"d hit it. A blaze of white light hit my face and blinded me, and a cop asked, "You okay, miss? I saw your dome light on and stopped. You sick or something?"

He took his flashlight beam off my face as I staggered upright and leaned against my car. I"d never closed the door, and the dome light inside was still burning. Cheryl"s stuff was spilled half out of the car. I told him something about the stuff in my backseat falling over so I stopped to rearrange it. He couldn"t have believed it, not with my clothes soaked to my body and my hair dripping down my back. He played his light over the deboned cat while I stuffed everything back into the car. Probably decided he didn"t want to know what was going on. He stayed behind me while I got my car started again and watched me pull out onto the freeway before he spun off the gravel shoulder and pa.s.sed me in a flicker of headlights.

I drove on, not going anywhere special now, just counting the cats. I never saw Dougie or Cheryl again, but I did once find another stewed cat by the side of the road. I gathered up what was left of it and took it to a motel that night. I tried every bone. Probably two or three times. Nothing.

I never got to New Mexico, either. I stopped off in San Rafael, to live between my car and the women"s shelter there until I found a computer firm that would hire me.

They"re paying me to go to night school now, and I know that things are getting better for me. If I study hard and pay attention to my job and get along with my coworkers, I"ll get ahead. If I work at it.

There are still times when I think about it. Sometimes, when I"m lying in bed, semiawake after a restless night, waiting for my alarm clock to go off, I think of them, rising from a peaceful night in some dewy field, glowing with health, to start their daily trek down the highways and byways of America. No clocks to punch. No cla.s.ses to study for. Nothing to do but hike down the road in the fresh morning air, looking for that fifth squashed cat. That"s what works for them. And what works for me is getting up at five to leave the house at six so I can fight traffic and get to work by eight. Who"s to say which way is better? Who"s to say who has the better life? But sometimes, on those mornings when I wonder, I step out of my door early, at five thirty, into the fresh morning air. I look at the wide blue sky, at the sun just opening the day. And I get into my car and drive slowly and carefully to work.

I wouldn"t want to hit someone"s cat by accident.

Strays.

Theme anthologies are gold mines for some writers. Give them a topic, and they can write a story around it. Cat story, horse story, a story about a magician with a sword, a haunted house story, a story about a mermaid . . . And oh, how I envy those writers.

I just can"t do it.

Lord knows I"ve tried. But it"s sort of like the fable about the emperor who would give his fortune to the man who could look at a white horse and not think about its tail, but in reverse. The more someone gives me a theme, the more those stories elude me.

But once in a great while, I still manage to wriggle and wrangle a story into a theme anthology. "Strays" is a tale like that. I was approached by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, a longtime friend and fellow writer. She was editing an anthology to be called Warrior Princesses. Surely, as a fantasy writer, I could come up with a story that had such a character.

Well. No. Or rather, yes and no. I was working on a story. And with a touch or two, perhaps I could convey a bit of royalty to my protagonist.

And once I did, I perceived that she"d actually been a princess all the time. For every female cat is a queen.

Lonnie Spencer looked like a boy. She sat on a rusty bike, one foot on the curb, the toe of her other ratty sneaker in the gutter. She had scabby knees, a smoking skull on her baggy sweatshirt, and a baseball hat backward over her chopped black hair. What"s wrong with that kid"s face? was my second thought when I saw her. My first had been to avoid him because he looked like he"d kick gutter water at you just to get it on your school clothes.

As I edged past, she spoke in a clear girl"s voice, "Take a picture, it"ll last longer."

I had been staring. I"d never seen anyone my own age with a big scar down her face. It ridged her Native American skin, pulling her cheek and her eye to one side. It was hard not to stare. So I looked down and saw the Barbie doll lashed to the front of her bike. It had a fur skirt and one b.o.o.b. Her clumpy hair was tied back with gold thread. A tiny wooden bow was slung over her shoulder.

"Amazon," I said without thinking.

"Yeah!" Lonnie grinned and suddenly didn"t look so scary. "She"s an Amazon warrior. That"s why I cut off her t.i.t. So she can shoot a bow better. I read that they really did that."

"I know. I read about it too."

Our eyes met. Connection. We both read, and we read weird stuff, stuff about women who were warriors. It"s so simple, when you"re a kid.

In her next breath, Lonnie announced, "I"m a warrior too. I been teaching myself martial arts. Ninja stuff, swords and pikes, too. I want to learn to shoot a bow. Scars are okay, on a warrior. Hey. My name"s Lonnie Spencer." She stuck out a grubby hand. She had a boy"s way of doing things. "What"s yours?"

Her hand was scratchy, scabs and dirt and dry skin. "Mandy Curtis."

"Mandy, huh. Bet you get teased a lot about that in school. Handy Mandy. I hate school. All the teachers hate me and the kids tease me all the time. "Cause of my scars, you know, and because I don"t dress like they do. They think if you don"t have the right kind of clothes, you"re nothing. Lower than s.h.i.t."

Her words spilled forth. I sensed she needed to talk but didn"t find many listeners. I"m a listener, like my mom. She says it"s our curse, to have total strangers tell us their darkest secrets. I glanced at Lonnie again. Not many of the girls I"d met at school would want to be seen talking to her. My clothes were a lot better than hers were and I was still having trouble making friends.

I kept walking. I was supposed to come straight home from school every day. We were new to this neighborhood and Mom was jumpy. Our building was okay, but two blocks away was a commercial strip, and the apartments that bordered it attracted what Mom called "a rougher element." Mom had never defined that but I looked at Lonnie and knew. She coasted her bike alongside in the gutter as I walked. "I didn"t get my scars in a fight, though," she volunteered abruptly. "My mom threw me through a picture window when I was two. She was pretty drunk and I was fussy. That"s what she says, anyway. Cut up my face and cut my leg muscles, too." She watched for my reaction. Her words challenged me. "That"s why I limp when I walk. They had to put over a hundred and seven st.i.tches in me. After that, they put me in a foster home, until my grandma came and got me. Now Mom has me."

Kids ask the questions that adults swallow. "Why do you want to live with someone who threw you through a window?"

Lonnie lifted one shoulder. "Well, you know, she"s my mom. She went to counseling. And the court says it"s okay, and Grandma is getting pretty old. So." Again the one-shoulder shrug.

So. That could sum up a lot of Lonnie Spencer. So.

The conversation lagged awkwardly. Mom wouldn"t want me hanging around with Lonnie. I knew it. I think Lonnie knew it too. But I was as desperately lonely as she was. "You go to Mason School?" I asked her, just as she exclaimed, "Oh, no! Not Scruffy, oh, man . . ."

She hopped off her bike, letting it clatter into the gutter. Without a look at me she hurried to a sodden calico body at the edge of the street. I followed her, reluctant but curious. Lonnie crouched close over it; I stayed back. The cat"s mouth was open, white teeth and a sprawling tongue. I wouldn"t have touched that sunken body with a stick, but Lonnie stroked it, smoothing its soggy fur.

"I hope his next eight lives are better than this one was," she said quietly.

"You really believe a cat has nine lives?"

"Sure. Why not? One old lady, a foster mom, she told me if a cat really likes you, it can give you one of its lives. Wouldn"t that be something? Get to live a cat"s life?"

I looked at the dead cat. "Doesn"t look like he enjoyed it much," I pointed out.