I still kept my back to her. “You don’tknow that!”
“He’s been gone for five days now, and the signal’s on top of Peavine. He has to be dead. A coyote got him and dragged him up there. He’s never gone that high by himself, has he?”
She was right. In the year he’d had the transmitter, Bobo had never gone anywhere much, certainly not anywhere far. He’d liked exploring the neighbors’ yards, and the strips of wild land between the developments, where there were voles and mice. And coyotes.
“So he decided to go exploring,” I said, and zipped my pack shut. “I have to go find out, anyway.”
“Michael, there’s nothing to find out. He’s dead. You know that.”
“I donot know that! I don’t know anything.”Except that David’s a piece of shit. I did turn around, then, because I wanted to see her face when I said, “He hasn’t been home since Monday, Mom, so how do I know what’s happened? I haven’t evenseen him.”
I guess I was up to fighting, after all. It was an awful thing to say, because it would only remind her of what we were all trying to forget, but I was still happy when she looked away from me, sharply, with a hiss of in drawn breath. She didn’t curse me out, though, even though I deserved it. She didn’t even leave the room. Instead she looked back at me, after a minute, and put her hands on my shoulders again. “You can’t go out there. Not in this weather. It wouldn’t even be safe to take the SUV, or I’d drive you-”
“He could be lying hurt in the snow,” I said. “Or holed up somewhere, or-”
“Michael, he’s dead.” I didn’t answer. Mom squeezed my shoulders and said gently, “And even if hewere alive, you couldn’t reach him in time. Not all that way; not in this weather. Not even in the SUV.”
“I just want to know,” I said. I looked right at her when I said it. I wasn’t saying it to be mean, this time.
“I can’t stand not knowing.”
“You do know,” she said. She sounded very sad. “You just won’t let yourself know that you know.”
“Okay,” I told her, my throat tight. “I can’t stand not seeing, then. Is that better?”
She took her hands off my shoulders and sighed. “I’ll call Letty, but it’s not going to do any good. Is your brother home?”
“No,” I said. David should have been home an hour before that. I wondered if he even knew that the satellites were back up.
Mom frowned. “Do you know where he is?”
“Of course not,” I said. “Do you think I care? Call the sheriff’s office, if you want to know where he is.”
Mom gave me one of her patented warning looks. “Michael-”
“He let Bobo out,” I said. “You know he did. He did it on purpose, just like all the other times. Do you think I care where the fuck he is?”
“I’m going to go call Letty,” Mom said.
David hated Bobo the minute we got him. He was my tenth birthday present from Mom and Dad. The four of us went to the pet store to pick him out, but when David saw the kittens, he just wrinkled his nose and backed up a few feet. David was always doing things like that, trying to be cool by pretending he couldn’t stand the rest of us.
David and I used to be friends, when we were younger. We played catch and rode our bikes and dug around in the dirt pretending we were gold miners, and once David even pulled me out of the way of a rattlesnake, because I didn’t recognize the funny noise in the bushes and had gone to see what it was. I was six then, and David was ten. I’ll never forget how pale he was after he yanked me away from the rattling, how scared he looked when he yelled at me never,ever to do that again.
The four-year difference didn’t matter back then, except that it meant David knew a lot more than I did.
But once he got into high school, David didn’t want anything to do with any of us, especially his little brother. And all of a sudden, he didn’t seem so smart to me anymore, even though he thought he was smarter than shit.
I named my new kitten Bobcat, because he had that tawny coat and little tufts on his ears. His name got shortened to Bobo pretty quickly, though, and that’s what we always called him-everybody except David, who called him “Hair ball.” By the time Dad died, Bobo was a really big cat: fifteen pounds, anyway, which was some comfort when David started “accidentally” letting Bobo out of the house. I figured he could hold his own against most other cats, maybe even against owls. I tried not to think about cars and coyotes, and people with guns.
He started going over the fence right away, but he was good about coming home. He always showed up for meals, even if sometimes he brought along his own dessert: dead grasshoppers, and mice and voles, and once a baby bird. Dr. Mills says that when cats bring you dead prey, it’s because they think you’re their kittens, and they’re trying to feed you.
Bobo was a good cat, but David kept letting him out, no matter how much I yelled at him about it. Mom tried to ground David a couple of times, but it didn’t work. David just laughed. He kept letting Bobo out, and Bobo kept going over the fence. It took me four months of allowance, plus Christmas and birthday money, to save up enough for the transmitter chip and the handheld. David laughed about that, too.
“He’s just a fuckingcat, Mike. Jesus Christ, what are you spending all your money on that transmitter thing for?”
“So I can find him if he gets lost,” I said, my stomach clenching. Even then, I could hardly stand to talk to David.
“If he gets lost, so what? They have a million more cats at the pound.”
And you’d let them all out if you could, wouldn’t you?“They don’t have a million who are mine,” I said, and Mom looked up from chopping onions in the kitchen. It was one of her days off.
“David, leave him alone. You’re the one who should be paying for that transmitter, you know.” And they got into a huge fight, and David stomped out of the house and roared off in his rattle trap Jeep, and when all the dust had settled, Mom came and found me in my room. She sat down on the side of the bed and smoothed my hair back from my forehead, as if I was seven again instead of thirteen, and Bobo jumped down from where he’d been lying on my feet. He’d been licking the place where Dr. Mills had put the transmitter chip in his shoulder. Dr. Mills said that licking would help the wound heal, but that if Bobo started biting it, he’d have to wear one of those weird plastic collars that looks like a lampshade. I hadn’t seen him biting it yet, but I was keeping an eye on him. When Mom sat on the bed, he resettled himself under my desklamp, where the light from the bulb warmed the wood, and went back to licking.
Bobo always liked warm places. Dr. Mills says all cats do.
Mom stroked my forehead, and watched Bobo for a little while, and then said, “Michael-sometimes you can know exactly where people are, and still not be able to protect them.” As if I didn’t know that:
As if any of us had been able to protect Dad from his own stupidity, even though the pit bosses knew exactly where he was every time he dealt a hand.
I knew that Mom was thinking about Dad, but there was no point talking about it. Dad was gone, and Bobo was right in front of me. “I’d keep him inside if I could, Mom! If David-”
“I know,” she said. “I know you would.” And then she gave me a quick kiss on the forehead and went downstairs again, and after a while, Bobo got off the desk and came back to lie on my feet. Watching him lick his shoulder, I wondered what it felt like to have a transmitter.
I’m the only one in the family who doesn’t know.
Letty is Mom’s best friend; they’ve known each other since second grade. Letty works for the BLM, and they have really good topo maps, so she could tell me exactly where Bobo was: just inside the mouth of an abandoned mine.
“He could have crawled there to get out of the snow,” I said. The transmitter signal still hadn’t moved.
Mom and Letty exchanged looks, and then Mom got up. “I’m going upstairs now,” she said. “You two talk.”
“Hecould have,” I said.
“Oh, Michael,” Mom said. She started to say something else, but then she stopped. “Talk to Letty,” she said, and turned and left the room.
I listened to Mom’s footsteps going upstairs, and after a minute Letty said, “Mike, it’s not safe to go out there now. You know that, right? It wouldn’t be safe even in a truck. Not in this weather. And in the snow, you can know exactly where something is and still not be able to get at it.”
“I know,” I said. “Like that hiker last year. The one whose body they didn’t find until spring.” Except that the
