Our apartment was on the third floor. I was painfully conscious of Lonnie limping up the stairs. There was an elevator at the other end of the building but I’d never used it. I felt almost ashamed that my body was sound and whole and that the climb didn’t bother me. As I unlocked my door, I automatically said, “Wipe your feet.”
“Du-uh!” Lonnie retorted sarcastically. She walked in just like a stray cat, with that sort of wiggle that says they’re doing you a favor to come in. She stopped in the middle of our living room. For an instant, the envy on her face was so intense it was almost hatred. Then she gave her shrug. “Nice place,” she said neutrally. “Got anything to eat?”
“In the kitchen. I’ve got to phone Mom.”
While I left my message, Lonnie went through the refrigerator. By the time I got off the phone, she had eaten an apple, drunk a big glass of milk and poured herself a second one, and taken out the bread and margarine. “Want a sandwich?” she asked as I turned around.
“I hate peanut butter and that’s all there is,” I said stiffly. I’d never seen anyone go through a refrigerator so fast. Especially someone else’s refrigerator.
“There’s sugar,” she said, spreading margarine thickly on two slices of bread. “Ever had a sugar sandwich? Mom used to give them to me all the time.”
“That’s gross,” I said as she picked up the sugar bowl and dumped sugar on the bread. She pushed it out in a thick layer, capped it with the other piece of buttered bread. When she lifted it, sugar dribbled out around the edges. Her teeth crunched in the thick layer of sugar. I winced. I imagined her teeth melting away inside her mouth.
“You ought to try it,” she told me through a mouthful. She washed it down with half the glass of milk, sighed, and took another sandy bite.
As she drained off the milk, I suddenly knew that Lonnie had been really hungry. Not after-school snack hungry, but really hungry. I had seen the billboards about Americans going to bed hungry, but I never grasped it until I watched Lonnie eat. It scared me. I suddenly wanted her out of our house. It wasn’t all the food she had eaten or the sugar mess on the floor. It suddenly seemed that by living near people like Lonnie and having her inside our house, Mom and I had gotten closer to some invisible edge. First there had been the real family and home, Mom and Dad and I in a house with a yard and Pop-Tarts and potato chips in the kitchen. Then there was Mom and I in an apartment, no yard, toast and jam instead of Pop-Tarts . . . We were safe right now, as long as Dad sent the support money, as long as Mom kept her job, but right down the street there were people who lived in cruddy apartments and their kids were in special ed and were hungry. That was scary. Mom and I weren’t people like that. We’d never be people like that. Unless . . .
“Let’s go hang out,” I said to her. I didn’t even put her glass in the dishwasher or sweep up the sugar. Instead, I took a pack of graham crackers out of the cupboard. I opened it as we walked to the door. She followed me, just like a hungry stray.
I felt safer as soon as I shut the door behind us. But now I was stuck outside with her on a cold and windy day. “Want to go to the library?” I offered. It was one of the few places Mom had approved for me to hang out on my own. Even then, I was supposed to say I was going there and phone again when I got back.
“Naw,” Lonnie said. She took the package of graham crackers, shook out three, and handed the stack back to me. “I have to pick up some junk for my mom. But we can do my route before that. Come on.”
I thought maybe she had a paper route. Instead it was her roadkill route. Lonnie patrolled for animal bodies. The only thing she found that day was a dead crow in the gutter. It had been there awhile, but she still painted around it and then moved the body reverently up onto the grassy strip. After that, we stopped at two Dumpsters, one behind Burger King and the other behind Kentucky Fried Chicken. They had concrete block enclosures and bushes around their Dumpsters. There was even a locked gate on Kentucky Fried Chicken’s, but it didn’t stop Lonnie. She made a big deal of waiting until no one was around before we crept up on them. “Warrior practice,” she whispered. “We could get arrested for this. You keep watch.”
So I stood guard while she went Dumpster diving. She emerged smelling like grease with bags full of chicken bones and half-eaten biscuits and a couple cartons of gravy. It amazed me how fast she filled up bags with stuff other people had thrown away. At Burger King, she got parts of hamburgers and fries. “What are you going to do with that stuff?” I asked Lonnie as we walked away. I was half afraid she’d say that she and her mom were going to eat it for dinner.
“Just wait. I’ll show you,” she promised. She grinned when she said it, like she was proud of what she carried.
“I’ve got to get home soon,” I told her. “Mom sometimes calls me back and I didn’t say I was going out. I’m supposed to be doing homework.”
“Don’t sweat it, sister. This won’t take long, and I really want you to see it. Come on.” She lurched along faster.
She lived on the other side of the main road and back two blocks off the strip. The sun goes down early in October. Lights were on inside the apartments. The building sign said Oakview Manor, but there were no oaks, no trees at all. Some boys were hanging out in the littered parking lot behind the building, smoking cigarettes and perching cool on top of a junk car. One called out as we walked by, “Hey, baby, wanna suck my weenie?” I was grossed out, but Lonnie acted like he didn’t exist. The boys laughed behind us, and one said something about “Scarface.” She kept walking, so I did too.
At the other end of the parking lot, three battered Dumpsters stank in a row. Beyond them was a vacant lot full of blackberry brambles and junk. Old tires and part of a chair stuck out of the brambles. The frame of a junk pickup truck was just visible through the sagging, wet vines. Lonnie sat down on the damp curb and tore open the bags. She spread the food out like it was a picnic, tearing the chicken and burgers to pieces with her fingers and then breaking up the biscuits on top of a bag and dumping the congealed gravy out on them. “For the little ones,” she told me quietly. She looked around at the bushes expectantly, then frowned. “Stand back. They’re shy of everyone but me.”
I backed up. I had guessed it would be cats and I was right. What was shocking was how many. “Kitty, kitty,” Lonnie called. Not loudly. But here came cats of every color and size and age, tattered veterans with ragged ears and sticky-eyed kittens trailing after their mothers. Blacks and calicoes, long-haired cats so matted they looked like dirty bath mats, and an elegant Siamese with only one ear emerged from that briar patch. An orange momma cat and her three black-and-white babies came singing. They converged on Lonnie and the food, crowding until they looked like a patchwork quilt of cat fur.
They were not delicate eaters. They made smacky noises and kitty
Lonnie enthroned on the curb in the midst of her loyal subjects smiled down upon them. She judiciously moved round-bellied kittens to one side to let newcomers have a chance at the gravy and biscuits. As she reached down among the cats, the older felines offered her homage and fealty, pausing in their dining to rub their heads along her arms. Some even stood upright on their hind legs to embrace her. As the food diminished, I thought the cats would leave. Instead they simply turned more attention upon Lonnie. Her lap filled up with squirming kittens, while others clawed pleadingly at her legs. A huge orange tom suddenly leaped up to land as softly as a falling leaf on her shoulders. He draped himself there like a royal mantle, and his huge rusty purr vibrated the air. Lonnie preened. Pleasure and pride transformed her face. “See,” she called to me. “Queen of the Strays. I told you.” She opened her arms wide to indicate her swarm, and cats instantly reared up to bump their heads against her outstretched hands.
“Oh, yeah? Well, you’re gonna be Queen of the Ass-Kicked if you don’t get up here with my stuff!” The voice came from a third-floor window. To someone in the room behind him, the man said, “Stupid little cunt is down there fucking around with those cats again.”
The light went out of Lonnie’s face. She stared up at him. He glared back. He was a young man with dark, curly hair, his T-shirt tight on his muscular chest. A woman walked by behind him. I looked back at Lonnie. She had a sickly smile. With a pretense of brightness in her voice she called up, “Hey, Carl! Tell Mom to look out here, she should see all my cats!”
Carl’s face darkened. “Your mom don’t got time for that shit, and neither do you! Stupid fucking cats. No, don’t you encourage . . .” He turned from the window, drawing back a fist at someone and speaking angrily. Lonnie’s mom, I thought. He was threatening Lonnie’s mom. We couldn’t hear what he said. Lonnie stared up at the
