Cat Running (11 page)

“You goin’ ter wear this here dress?” she asked.

Cat shook her head.

Sammy nodded. “Too little,” she agreed. She looked down at Marianne-Lillybelle in her crib. “Too big?” she asked.

Cat nodded.

Sammy took the dress off the ledge and held it up in front of her and when Cat smiled and nodded, her face lit up in the Shirley Temple smile. In a minute she had stripped down to a pair of flour-sack underpants and was pulling the blue dress over her head. But while she was carefully buttoning the flower-shaped buttons and backing up for Cat to tie the sash, Cat kept seeing something else—the pale blue-white skin and sharply defined ribs of Sammy’s skinny little body.

“Wished I had me a lookin’ glass,” Sammy was saying, looking down at herself and running her hands down her front and then out to the side to pull the full skirt out into a half circle. Then she started parading around, twirling now and then to make the skirt stand out and twisting to see herself from every angle. She looked absolutely thrilled and delighted—but cold.

Cat worried about the cold. The overalls and shirt had been little enough, but the short-sleeved, summery dress was even worse, and when she tried to get Sammy to put the shirt on over the dress she refused.

“Raggedy old thing,” she said, pushing it away, and when Cat insisted she said, “In a minute. I got to go home in a minute, anyways. Afore they all gets back from work.”

“Before who gets home from work?” Cat asked.

“All of ’em.”

“On Sunday? And your brothers too? They’re all working on Sunday?”

Sammy nodded absently, still admiring herself. “Till the grapes are done. Mr. Otis got to get the grapes in afore the rain gets bad. So everybody has to work, ’cept me.” Sammy twirled one last time before she went to the window, looked out, sighed, and then began to unbutton the dress. “I got to go now,” she said.

When she was back in her shirt and overalls, she folded the dress carefully and put it back on the ledge. Then she hurriedly thanked Cat for the picnic and, looking anxious and worried, started for the door.

“Wait a minute,” Cat said. “You can take the dress with you. And those things on the table too. I brought them for you.”

Sammy came back. She picked up the Kewpie doll and the dog and examined each one carefully as if for the first time. Then she went back to the dress. Running her fingers over the fancy buttons she looked at it longingly before she turned to Cat with what might have seemed like a cheerful smile if you didn’t look at her eyes.

“I think I’d jist as lief save it for when I’m here,” she said. “For when I comes here agin to visit. And them toys too.”

Cat frowned. “But I wanted you to take them home,” she said. “Why can’t you take the dress home?” She thought she knew the answer but she wanted to see what Sammy would say.

“Cause I got to be a boy till we gets back to Texas,” she said firmly.

“And the toys? Why can’t you take the toys?”

Sammy rolled her eyes thoughtfully. “Roddy would break ’em?” she said in a questioning tone, as if she were asking Cat if she’d go for that explanation. And when Cat pursed her lips skeptically, she added, “And ’cause of Zane. Zane don’t like folks givin’ us stuff. Zane don’t like us to be beggin’ like.”

Cat thought so. She shrugged impatiently. “Well, I don’t see why you have to do everything Zane tells you to do,” she said.

Sammy nodded uncertainly. Then she stuck out her chin and nodded more firmly. Going back to the table she picked up the Kewpie doll and tried to put it in her overall pocket, but it was a little too big. The celluloid dog fit fine. “I’ll take this here one,” she said, patting her pocket triumphantly. Then she threw her arms around Cat’s middle, gave her a quick hug, and ran out the door.

Cat sat down on the ledge and stayed there, just thinking, for a long time. She thought mostly about Sammy. Almost entirely about Sammy. She went on thinking about her most of the way home. It wasn’t until she was crossing the empty pasture behind the Kinsey house that she remembered the reason she’d taken all those things to the grotto in the first place. Right at first she’d mostly been thinking about paying Zane back. Paying him back for being too mean to let his little sister have a measly old stick of chewing gum, just because someone gave it to her.

At least that had been the reason in the beginning. It was funny how she’d almost forgotten about paying Zane back.

C
AT WAS SURE, PRETTY
sure at least, that Sammy had kept their Sunday meeting a secret. Or maybe not—because Zane was obviously angry about something. Either he thought he had something to be mad about, or else he was just naturally getting meaner all the time. Because all that next week at school it seemed as if he was trying his best to make Cat’s life as miserable as possible.

For one thing he had suddenly started joining in when people pestered her about racing with him. “Come on, Cat Kinsey,” he started saying. “Let’s you and me have a little ol’ race.” And of course everyone else would chime in. “Yeah, Cat. Come on. Why don’t you race with the fast Okie? Be a good sport, Cat.”

And then Zane would say, “Yeah, Cat. How’s about it? Be a good sport.” That made her madder than anything—when Zane Perkins called her Cat, like they were old friends, and told her to be a good sport.

And when Zane wasn’t tormenting her about racing with him, he was apt to be hanging around looking at her. When she took her turn on the bars he usually just stood there watching, but once or twice when her skirt came untucked from the legs of her underpants he joined right in with the other boys who liked to say nasty things like “I see London, I see France. I see someone’s underpants.”

He also started making a nuisance of himself when she was trying to beat her record on Janet’s new paddleball—a fancy twenty-five-cent one that had a nice thick paddle with a special coating to made it less slippery.

Cat was almost as good at paddleball as she was at running and she’d kept the ball going once for almost five hundred strokes, which would have been a new Brownwood record. She’d have broken the record easy if Janet hadn’t gotten so excited she started jumping up and down and squealing, which ruined Cat’s concentration and made her miss. But recently she hadn’t been able to get anywhere near five hundred because of Zane. It was hard to keep her mind on hitting the ball squarely and counting the strokes when she knew he was staring at her, just trying to make her miss. Watching and counting out loud in his dumb Okie accent. Saying things like “tyou” when he meant two and “fahve” instead of five.

Usually she simply tried to ignore him, but once in a while she’d get so fed up, she’d turn around and stare back. And then he’d just grin and pretend he was looking at something else.

It was rainy on Wednesday and again on Thursday, and having to stay indoors every recess gave Zane Perkins a lot of new opportunities to make a nuisance of himself. Like for instance choosing
Cat’s pigtail
to be the answer in a game of twenty questions. Cat hated for anyone to call her braid a pigtail and she hated it even more when Zane did it. But the worst thing of all happened when they were playing musical chairs. Just as Miss Albright stopped the music, Zane pushed his way into a chair that Cat was headed for, so that just for a moment she was sitting in his lap. Of course everyone had to tease her about that all the rest of the day.

By Friday the rain had stopped but Zane’s pestering didn’t let up. It was during the noon recess on Friday, when Cat was playing dodgeball, that she fell down and skinned both her knees, and it was Zane Perkins’s fault.

The game had just started and there were a lot of dodgers still in the circle. Hank Belton was on the outside team. Hank was a good thrower and when he played dodgeball he threw hard and fast—and usually right at Cat. So this one time when Hank got the ball he wound up like crazy and threw at Cat, and just as she started to dodge Zane Perkins jumped right in between her and the ball. The ball missed Cat and hit Zane, but Cat hit Zane too. Ran right into him in midjump and crashed down on the blacktop and skinned both her knees.

It hurt a lot, but if there were tears in her eyes when she got to her feet it was mostly from anger. She pushed aside the hands that were trying to help her up and stormed off to the office, where Mrs. Jayne, the principal, kept her first-aid kit.

Mrs. Jayne was not very sympathetic. “Not again!” she said when Cat limped into her room. “You’re just going to have to slow down a little, child. I never in my life knew anyone with such a full-tilt-ahead approach to life. You’re not going to have any knees left if you keep this up.”

Cat didn’t appreciate the lecture, particularly since this time the skinned knees weren’t her fault. But she didn’t say anything. She wasn’t going to be a snitch, not even about an Okie. But at least being angry helped her to keep from crying when Mrs. Jayne dabbed on the iodine.

A few minutes later when she was on her way back down the hall, with her knees hurting worse than ever from the iodine, she passed Spence Perkins, sitting on the railing as usual.

“Wooee!” Spence said as she went by. “That must be ahurtin’ some,” and there was something in the way he said it that made her stop and look at him. He looked and sounded so much like Zane—but with a mysterious difference that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. He was younger, of course, eight or nine instead of twelve, but there was more to it than that. For one thing he certainly seemed friendlier and a little less ornery. Cat decided to sit down on the railing for a minute until her knees stopped hurting.

Pausing every few seconds to blow on her knees, she said, “How do you—and your brothers—like Brownwood School, now that you’ve been here awhile?”

Spence nodded slowly, smiling with that same wide Perkins mouth—
but
with the mysterious difference. “Jist fine,” he said. “Leastways a lot better than the last place we tried to go to school.”

“Where was that?”

“Down south a ways. Town name of Cottonville.”

Cat was intrigued. She’d hadn’t expected him to say they liked it at Brownwood. How could they when everybody, or nearly everybody, called them Okies, and made fun of their accents and bare feet and raggedy clothing? “What happened at Cottonville?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Teachers made us sit on the floor at the back of the room. And some of ’em wouldn’t let us have books, nor paper and pencils even. This one teacher wouldn’t even call any of us camp kids by our rightful names. Jist pointed and said, ‘Okie. Hey you, Okie.’”

It was a peculiar thing. Listening to Spence’s soft, shy voice, Cat kept on hearing the difference and guessing how Zane would have told about Cottonville. It would have been, she guessed, with the same shocking fierceness that had been there when he made Sammy spit out the gum. But Spence didn’t sound fierce or angry at all when he said
Okie.

She turned away, embarrassed by the hurt on Spence’s face, and when she looked back he was sitting quietly, looking down at his hands. For no reason at all Cat suddenly felt guilty—and angry that he’d made her feel that way. She’d always hated it when people made her feel guilty.

“Well, people call you Okies here too,” she said. “And that’s what you are, aren’t you?”

She’d meant to make him mad but when he looked up he was smiling. “No siree,” he said. “Not us Perkinses, anyways. We’re from Texas. From Panhandle country right ’nough, but ’cross the border in Texas. So we’re Texans, not Okies.”

“I know that,” Cat said impatiently. “But when people say
Okie
they don’t just mean people from Oklahoma.”

Spence laughed shortly. “You’re shorely right ’bout that,” he said. “When Californians say
Okie
they mean
dumb
and
dirty
and
lazy
and most everthin’ else bad they can think of.”

It was true, of course. Cat wanted to say it wasn’t but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It would be too much of a lie. Trying to change the subject—just for something to say—she asked, “How’s Sammy?”

Spence sighed and shook his head. “Sammy’s sick,” he said.

“Sick?” It was like a squeezing hand had caught at something in Cat’s chest. “What’s the matter with her?”

“Don’t know for sure,” Spence said. “But it might could be her lungs agin. Back in Texas she had dust-lung real bad jist ’fore we left.”

“Dust lung?” Cat’s hand went to her chest and she breathed deeply, feeling a sort of dry stiffness there, just from imagining what “dust lung” must be like. Then, remembering Granny Cooper and her long naps, she asked, “Well, who’s looking out for her? Who’s seeing that she doesn’t go wandering around in the cold making herself worse?”

“Ma is,” Spence said. “Ma stayed home from work yesterday and today too. She’s fixin’ to work tomorrow, though, lessen Sammy’s worse.”

Cat nodded and sat for a while thinking. Then she got down off the railing gingerly. Her knees weren’t hurting quite as badly, but they’d started to stiffen up a little. She shook one leg and then the other before she asked, casually, as if for no particular reason, “All you folks going to be working again this weekend?”

“Yep,” Spence said. “All of us ’ceptin’ Sammy. And Ma, maybe, if Sammy’s real bad in the mornin’.”

Cat said, “Well, good-bye. I got to go now.” She limped off down the hall thinking about Sammy and making plans. Planning a visit—to the grotto first—and then maybe on down to ... She couldn’t believe she was actually thinking of visiting Okietown—but she was.

O
N SATURDAY MORNING MAMA HAD
one of her sick headaches. As soon as the others left for the store, she went back to bed. Cat pulled down the blinds in Mama’s room and brought her some aspirins, a glass of water, and a wet washcloth. She waved the washcloth in the air to make it nice and cool and then arranged it carefully on Mama’s forehead. Mama opened her eyes, smiled weakly, and patted Cat’s hand.

“You’re being very kind and thoughtful today,” she said. “You’re a good daughter, Cathy.” Cat wanted to jerk her hand away angrily but she didn’t. The anger was because Mama was being helpless and pitiful as usual, and making Cat feel guilty. Even more guilty than usual this time because, down deep, she’d been at least a little bit glad when Mama said she was getting sick. Not because Mama’s head was aching, of course, but a little bit glad that now she’d sleep most of the day, which would leave Cat free to do whatever she wanted.