An hour later, all the hapless toads had been placed under an old mesquite tree behind the flimsy tin shed in the yard of the bungalow, but something was horribly, horribly wrong.
Though it was somewhat light, and the glow of the sun still remained in the western sky, Stacie and Yadira used Stacie’s flashlight to skim ahead to the bottom of a dark hedge where they discovered a furry tail, a dirty paw, and a humongous orange tabby, lolling stupidly on its back.
They recognized the cat. An annoying six-year-old girl who lived next door had a simpering way of calling it constantly, “Mr. Biggs! Oh, Mr. Biggs!” and in order to escape her, the cat often crouched in their oleander hedge masquerading as a salmon loaf, sometimes with a light seasoning of dry twigs and moldy leaves stuck to its back. As silly as it looked upside down with its paws stuck in the air, certain fleeting peeks of the tip of the cat’s pale pink tongue and a peculiar snip-snap of its needle-sharp teeth warned that any instant the ridiculous-looking fur blob could snap out of its daze and happily try to slaughter the nearest toad. The girls knew Mr. Biggs would have a good chance of dying if it licked the glands of the toads, and most cats did lick them before they tried to bite. Yadira, Stacie and Tiffany knew they had to try to save the cat’s life, if only for the sake of the silly six-year-old.
“God damn you, you stinker,” Yadira cried, dashing directly at Mr. Biggs, pumping her outstretched arms up and down and walloping her thighs with stinging slaps that wrenched her shoulder sockets and sent her lurching sideways. Both girls were wearing gloves, a necessary precaution when touching the toads. Weird whoops and goosey hisses poured out, along with the unconvincing obscenities.
But they’d left the toads under the mesquite’s lowest, crisscrossed branches; Stacie couldn’t get her hands on the cat and pitch it headlong over the hedge or against a sharp rock wall without groveling across the dark toad-covered mud. A single misstep and she’d squish one of them! So she stood outside the umbrella of the tree branches, leaping up and down, her ponytail jouncing jauntily.
After a shocked moment, during which Stacie’s view of the cat was obscured by Yadira’s flying elbows and bouncing butt, Stacie made a decision to help. She crept forward, still gripping the flashlight, searching relentlessly for the damn cat. When she finally located it, it was exactly where it had been, completely unfazed and unaware that anything was expected of it, perhaps dully hoping for an affectionate pat.
Stacie squatted and waddled as close to the cat as the low branches allowed. Placing the flashlight at her feet, she leaned forward and smacked her outstretched hands. Well satisfied with the cracking spank, she picked up the flashlight and aimed the beam where Mr. Biggs should not have been, just in time to see the peachy cat barely flick the last millimeter of his plump tail. Slamming the flashlight down angrily, Stacie clapped her hands again, so hard the second time that it left her palms tingling. A quick check with the flashlight showed Mr. Biggs as he twitched an ear.
Yadira dropped to her knees and dragged her fingers over the sticky mud. Gathering a handful of goo, she packed it together furiously and when the ball was very large and firm, she adopted a catcher’s stance and flung it. The mud bomb sailed over the dumb cat and splattered against the tin siding of the shed. Not a muscle rippled on the furry physique of Mr. Biggs.
A frustrated Yadira raked the mud madly and bombarded the impassive cat, peppering it with flying mud gobs and dry grass tuffs and mesquite beans, all of which in her haste went wide of the mark.
“No,” whispered Stacie, restraining her friend’s arm, “waaaaaaaait. I’ll get him.”
Shuffling away quietly, Stacie rounded the mesquite and reconnoitered to the south. There the cat’s right flank was exposed. Approaching gingerly from alongside a slouching picket fence, sneaking closer and closer, Stacie’s stooped figure stole up on Mr. Biggs. Yadira watched her friend in silhouette against a streetlight as she appeared to wade knee-deep through the same cholla patch that her dear T.J. had so stupidly sat upon only the night before. It was only an optical illusion; Stacie was nowhere near the patch.
Stacie almost had the cat when, as she leaned down to make the grab, she rested her hand ever so slightly on the fence. The picket she touched was so blighted and rotted, so eaten away and undermined, that its wasted length could not withstand an ounce of weight. A crack, a great happy pop, sounded. Her hand broke the brittle picket, severing its backbone and bringing her full weight onto a horizontal board. After thirty years of desiccation in the Arizona sun, and having any remaining wood fibers eagerly devoured by half-starved termites, this board’s honeycombed bones, waited to fulfill one mission before returning to the earth. To snap now was its fate. To snap with the loudest most definite snap imaginable was the perfection of its existence. So, perfectly and exactly it broke, dropping the whole length of the fence precipitously careening over and carrying the unfortunate Stacie toppling with it.
Down, down, down she plunged into that muddy hole where earlier she had concentrated the hose. Luckily, she didn’t land directly on a toad’s fragile frame, though one shuffled ahead of her sizeable splash.
“Stace!” Yadira called.
Stacie wallowed in the goop, pitching in farther and plumping down several times.
“Stace! Did you hurt yourself?”
Eventually, rolling onto her knees, Stacie dragged herself out of the brown ooze, shaking her head dazedly. She struggled to her feet and, wiping long brown mud smears on her thighs, began to curse. She expended a large number of obscenities at the offending fur ball, which disdained to even glance in her direction, though a mysterious transcendentalist masseuse who lived behind them and who no one had seen in months appeared in hair curlers at her window and tapped an angry warning at the screaming girl.
“I hope Mr. Holmes doesn't come back here for a while,” said Yadira, referring to his probable reaction to the fence Stacie had just smashed. Mr. Holmes was sensitive about the junk at the back of his old home.
Feeling braced after her tirade, Stacie strode to a heap of rusting yard equipment that leaned against the side of the shed. “Let’s get something to poke that stupid cat with.”
“I am so wasted,” said Yadira, joining her in the search.
Together they groped through the dark jumble for a suitable weapon. When a long shaft Yadira grabbed turned out to be attached to a heavy lawn mower, they began clawing desperately at anything upright. Then with a grate, a creak and several loud clanks, something twanged and parts of the pile slumped away. The pile hit the flimsy shed.
For a moment nothing happened, and then the entire shed shifted with a loud grating groan.
“Shit,” cried Stacie, looking up in the night sky and seeing the shadowy bulk of the shed slumping sideways.
They froze in horror. When the shed finally stopped moving and groaning, it was still upright, barely. “Mr. Holmes is not gonna like that. He’s gotta thing for that stupid shed,” said Stacie.
A black spot scrambled away. They had left the flashlight somewhere on the ground, but they were certain they wouldn’t have wanted to see what happened to the shed or what ran from them.
“Now I really hope Mr. Holmes doesn’t look back here,” said Stacie.
“It probably only looks like it’s gonna fall over,” added Yadira hopefully.
It took a moment for Stacie to work up the guts to put her hand in the pile again and immediately she touched a vintage rake, square-headed with widely spaced teeth. She drew it up and bandied the thing, wielding it like a sword, brandishing it upward and whisking it about. To and fro, up and down, wibble-wabble, it flew through the air toward the spot where the fat cat laid. Raising it high like some giant baby comb, she worked it through the branches. When it was above the cat, she dropped it.
The falling rake glanced off an unseen branch, changed course, slid down and hit the mud quite far from Mr. Biggs (and the toads) where it promptly broke into two short pieces. Mr. Biggs, believing he was about to be brushed, rolled obligingly onto his
side and purred.
At this point the urge to pummel the cat overwhelmed Yadira’s wasted sense. She scuttled forward, crab-like. Unfortunately several unyielding branches of the big mesquite tree were jabbing toward her. After only a few shuffling lunges she had neatly skewered herself. With an agonizing wail, she stumbled back, clasping her injured forehead.
“Goddamn, my head!” she yelled as she stepped in some of the pieces of cholla cactus which had been swatted off T.J. the night before.
Where nothing else had worked, Yadira’s agonized shriek infuriated the cat.
The marauder yowled several long hideous howls of grave insult and murderous fury as it scuttled away, a few feet at first, and its big belly low to the ground. Rotating its head back at them, it snarled and hissed and zipped toward the low brick wall between their yard and the masseuse’s.
“Get!” shouted Stacie, running happily after it. Yadira limped along. She had knocked the big piece of cactus off her foot, but she could feel the teeny glocoids.
“We saved you a visit to the vets,” said Yadira. “The least you could do is leave us alone.” Her logic was not operative on the single minded Mr. Biggs.
Having lured them to the wall, the cat circled around and scurried back to the toads. Stacie and Yadira were hampered in their attempt to follow him by the fact that all they could glimpse were running images of its creepy golden eyes and every few feet corroded lengths of iron pipe poked out of the soil from a long forgotten goldfish pond.
From Stacie’s point of view the situation was deteriorating. She was muddy and disheveled; they had made a hash of rescuing the toads and all she could think of was having something to drink. Her hung-over head throbbed from the run-in with the fence and an impotent kick she managed every so often in the cat’s direction made her aware that the bottom of her platform sandals were coated with big sloppy biscuits of unwieldy mud. The cat on the other hand had triumphed in so many backyard clashes with other cats that it wasn’t about to be driven away from so marvelous a treat as an entire yard full of interesting, live lumps.
“We'll have to take them all back inside,” cried an out-of-breath Stacie.
Yadira started to limp back to the house. “I’ll get the pails,” she said.
“Forget the pails. We don’t have the energy. Let’s just carry them with the gloves.”
“I'm too wasted,” agreed Yadira, “We have to get this done or I’m gonna collapse.”
Returning the toads to the house meant waging a moving war. Nothing stopped the adamant cat. No amount of kicking or strange human sputtering could keep Mr. Biggs from trailing the toads as one by one they were carried back to the house and dumped into their pails.
At one point Tiffany joined them, remembering a bowl of cat food always left out for Mr. Biggs. She vaulted through the hedge and snatched a smelly handful.
“Here, puss, puss,” she said unconvincingly.
Mr. Biggs gobbled the red, green, and yellow treats, crunching the dry food hastily with its creepy head held sideways. But as quickly as they threw the food down it gobbled it and began another skirmish, clawing their bare ankles and tripping them up.
With each journey, when they got to the back door, Mr. Biggs tried to push past them to get into the house. “Get, get. Get away,” they screamed.
At last all the toads were in and they closed the door on Mr. Biggs who continued to yowl outside and batter the rear doors and windows.
They counted the toads. “Only seven! We’re missing three!” Yadira said.
Itzel came into the bathroom. “So now you’re losing them?” she said drily.
“The ones that crawled away—they’re on their own,” Stacie explained.
“Is that more karma shit?” asked Itzel.
Yadira closed the toilet top and collapsed onto it. Her chest was heaving. “I am so wasted. I have never done this much crap when I was so wasted.”
Chapter Nine