Cat Cross Their Graves Read Free Page B

considerate folk sat by their open windows tuning their radios to the local station, or stood in their miniscule front gardens asking their neighbors what was happening.
    In the village library, which should have been empty at two in the morning, the racket jerked a little girl sharply from her troubled sleep. She sat up flinging herself off her thin mattress and against the cement wall, scrambling like a terrified animal. The sirens screamed overhead nearly above her, heavy vehicles thundering down the street as if they were right on top the basement. Sounded like the rumbling engines were coming down at her. In the tiny, hiddenbasement, she wondered if she would die crushed by trucks and by fallen concrete.
    She didn’t flick on her little flashlight, she was afraid to. There was no window into her hiding place, no one could see her, but still she was afraid. Was there a fire somewhere near? She pulled the thin blanket tighter around her. The basement was always cold. A damp cold, Mama would say. She missed Mama terrible bad.
    She hadn’t run away until Pa boarded up the kitchen window, long after he’d nailed plywood over the other windows and locked the doors with key bolts that she couldn’t open. When he covered the kitchen window, too, she knew she couldn’t stay there anymore. He’d nailed that plywood on after the neighbor saw her looking out, a big, bony, nosy woman, saw her at the window and came over to ask him if she was sick and why wasn’t she in school. That’s when Pa found her footprint on the tile counter where she’d climbed up to see if she could unlock the window, where she forgot to wipe away the waffle mark of her jogging shoes. He told the neighbor she was home with the flu but afterward when the neighbor was gone, he was white and silent, and he locked her in the bathroom all night. She didn’t know what was wrong with Pa except he didn’t love her anymore and wasn’t like that when she was little.
    She was six when he’d started yelling at her and locking her in the house and wouldn’t listen to Mama, and that was when Mama packed a suitcase and the two of them slipped away after he went to work and drove clear across the country to NorthCarolina to live. Where Pa wouldn’t never think to look. They’d lived in Greenville for five years.
    After Mama died and the social workers put her in foster homes one after another and she kept running away, that was when she told them she had a father in California, and they sent her back.
    She’d thought he’d be different, anyway better than foster homes. But then she was sorry. Pa didn’t hurt her like some of the kids had told her about, but he kept her like an animal in a cage, and the cage seemed smaller every day. She was afraid to call the social worker, though, call the number they gave her, she didn’t like social workers.
    The rumbling had stopped, the sirens were fainter. Lying in the dark listening to them move away, she hugged herself. She wished she had another blanket. She imagined growing old in this basement, living her whole life here and no one knowing. She thought that over the years everyone must have forgotten this small space behind the library’s basement workroom, the way it had been walled off to itself. It was just a cubbyhole with rough concrete calls, not smooth walls like the workroom, and it wasn’t as big as their little bathroom at home. She’d known about it since she was six, though. She’d found it when Mama worked in the library; she’d used to come in here to play, slip in behind the bookcase and no one knew.
    Now it wasn’t play anymore.
    She only had enough food for another week. The welfare woman took her money, that Mama gave her. The welfare woman in Greenville, with the big nose,said she’d keep it for her but she never gave it back. Twenty dollars Mama gave her, and Pa never gave her even a nickel.
    Now when she