How to Moon a Cat (25 page)

My eyes popped open as the bear morphed into—a kangaroo.

THE STATUE’S IRON
face gazed down at the wet woman standing on the sidewalk below him. He read her puzzled thoughts as her head tilted, eyes closed, toward the gray sky.

I know a thing or two about this Bear Flag story, he thought proudly, feeling the furl of the stone flag across the back of his shoulders.

“When Captain John Frémont, the illustrious Pathfinder, returned to Sutter’s Fort, he learned that the Mexican Army had requisitioned a large herd of horses from Sonoma and were moving them south to Santa Clara. Frémont told us this was a clear sign that Castro was preparing to gather his troops and round up the American settlers in the Sacramento Valley. Coming from a man of such standing and experience, we took his assessment seriously. Frémont had been warning us for some time that Castro was up to no good, so when he gave the word, we were ready for action, ready to defend our homes and families—ready to declare our independence from Mexico.

“On June 10, 1846, under orders from Captain Frémont, a group of us rode out from Sutter’s Fort, tracked down the herd of horses, and ambushed the Mexican Lieutenant supervising their transfer.”

The statue’s brow furrowed as he listened to the woman’s internal commentary.

“Horse thieves? I should think not,” he huffed indignantly. “Really, whose side are you on?” He cleared his mental throat.

“We brought the horses straight back to Sutter’s,” he said defensively. “Captain Frémont declared them the property of the United States government, and it was only as a show of gratitude for our services that the members of our regiment received a few head a piece to take home to our farms.”

The statue straightened his already-stiff shoulders in affront. “Well no,
I
wasn’t actually there when all this happened. This is well-established folklore—stop interrupting me.”

With a last harrumph, the statue continued his tale.

“Now that we had begun our path to independence, we looked to Frémont to guide us on our next course of action. He suggested Sonoma as the best place to stake our territorial claim. That sounded like a good plan to us. Mariano Vallejo wouldn’t hurt a fly, and it had been several years since he’d had troops in his barracks. What’s more, we knew he was secretly on our side. He would not take up arms against us.”

The statue looked out across the rainy intersection as it replayed the historic events of the day. “All night, we rode through the back hills and valleys, picking up more and more men at each stop along the way. We decided our group needed a name—something fierce, fearful . . . ” The statue’s face took on a dreamy expression of reminiscence. “Something that would capture the essence of our fearless leader. After much discussion, we settled on
the Osos
, the grizzly bears.”

The woman on the ground below jerked as if she’d been startled by a sudden realization. The statue snorted at the image that flashed into her head.

“Kangaroos? Are you absolutely mad, woman? Why would brave patriotic men such as ourselves pick such a ridiculous animal to represent us?”

The woman sighed thoughtfully. As she bent toward the stroller to check on the occupants hidden beneath its nylon cover, there was a loud squawk from the opposite side of the park. The woman rose back up, pushed her wet hair away from her face, and looked out across the plaza.

Seeing nothing of concern, she wrapped her hands around the stroller’s handle and swung the buggy resolutely toward the interior of the plaza’s green square. Before she could set off down the path, however, the statue offered one last piece of information.

“If you’re interested in the Bear Flag, you really should check in at the barracks across the street. They’ve got one on display in there that goes back almost to the time of the revolt.”

I BENT DOWN
in front of the Bear Flag Memorial to check that the cats were still dry beneath the cover of the stroller. Isabella glared up at me, more perturbed by her reduced visibility than the moisture that had begun to collect on the surface of the cover. Rupert rolled over, exposing his stomach, hopeful that I would reach in and rub his tummy.

“
Wran
,” Isabella called out sharply. She reached up to paw at the netting over her head.

“Don’t worry,” I said soothingly. “We’re headed back to the van.”

Just then, there was a loud squawk from the opposite side of the park, and I was again struck by the impression that someone, somewhere in the trees, was watching me. Anxiously, I craned my head to look around the edge of the monument, but the plaza’s park was just as rain-soaked and empty of pedestrian traffic as before.

As I gripped the handle of the stroller and angled it in the direction of the van, I glanced up at the statue. It’s fiercely proud expression looked out toward the street corner and, beyond, a collection of historical buildings. I twisted around to follow the eyes of the statue, staring first at the Sonoma Mission and then at the barracks next door. Squinting through the downpour, I saw what appeared to be lights on inside the barracks.

“Just one more stop,” I murmured down to Isabella as I turned the stroller toward the nearest street corner.

“
Wrao
,” she replied, sounding pleased.

 

 

HAROLD WOMBLER’S PICKUP
rolled slowly through the rainy streets of Sonoma, its cracked—and leaking—windshield a watery portal to the outside world. His windshield wipers wagged back and forth ineffectually. At this state of wear, they were more for show than function.

Harold clamped down on his dentures as his wrinkled hands gripped the steering wheel, trying to guide his balding tires across the slick road. He needed to find a parking place soon. The truck wasn’t really safe to drive in these conditions.

He glanced down at his amphibian passengers. The frogs gazed happily at the water droplets streaking across the windshield. “You two can’t get enough of this weather,” he said with a chuckle.

Harold circled his dilapidated truck around the exterior of the plaza until he found a large white van parked across from a small bistro. He swung the pickup into a slot next to the van and let the engine idle as he craned his neck to look out through the truck’s back window.

Beneath the restaurant’s waterlogged awning, Harold’s eyes honed in on the curly hair of a patron seated at a table near the front window. The man’s long, stringy arms flailed about as his head bobbed and swayed. Monty was presumably relaying his experience at the starting line earlier that day to the gentleman seated across the table.

Harold grimaced to himself as he shifted his gaze to Monty’s dining companion.

“So that’s what a life coach looks like,” he mused to his frog companions.

Harold untwisted his torso and reached for the gearshift. As his face turned toward the plaza, he saw a woman with long brown hair pushing a cat stroller along a sidewalk. She was headed toward the opposite side of the park—to the Bear Flag Memorial, he presumed.

“Something doesn’t feel right about this,” Harold muttered uneasily as he cut the engine and engaged the parking brake.

“You two stay in here,” he said, slipping a few crickets into the frogs’ terrarium. All this rain, Harold thought with a painful wince as he locked the cab of the truck and hobbled off across the plaza, was not good for his arthritis.

The woman reached the memorial and circled around to its front side. She appeared to be focusing all of her attention on the statue and the plaque on the boulder beneath it, but Harold stayed off the main path, just in case, to avoid being seen. He sneaked around the edge of a pond, gimping from tree to tree as quickly as he could.

“She’s taking an awfully long time to find this one,” he grumbled under his breath. “Come on,” he said impatiently. “It’s not
that
well hidden.”

Harold didn’t see the mother duck and her brood of goslings until it was too late. He was concentrating so keenly on the woman standing in front of the monument that he nearly stepped on the feathery pile of young fowl. The mother duck squawked loudly and flapped her wings as if she were about to charge him. He dove face first into the wet grass, silently cursing the bird.

“I’ll stuff a pillow with you and your lot . . .” Harold muttered threateningly.

After a long minute, he slowly lifted his head. The mother duck was still eying him fiercely, but the woman had turned away from the Bear Flag Memorial and was crossing the street for the historic Sonoma Barracks.

“What’s she headed over there for?” he asked, his concern mounting.

Harold’s gaze traveled across to the barracks’ breezeway entrance. He issued a troubled grunt at the sight of a rotund man with enormous side-whiskers standing inside beneath the eaves.

THE SONOMA BARRACKS
sat low and nondescript across from the northeast corner of the Sonoma Plaza. It was a two-story adobe-style building with a red tile roof, creamy white stucco, and a rickety wooden balcony that ran along the exterior of the second floor. A breezeway cut through the center of the building, forming the main entrance.

By the time of the Bear Flag Revolt in 1846, the barracks had been vacant for several years. Vallejo was left alone to guard the town’s makeshift presidio and crumbling mission. It was here, in his attached living quarters, that the Bear Flaggers found the General, still in his pajamas, at sunrise on the morning of June 14.

As I walked under the building’s broad eaves, I reflected on what I had read about Mariano Vallejo from Oscar’s history books.

By most accounts, Vallejo was an open advocate of American annexation, particularly for this portion of Northern California. Despite his posting with the Mexican Army, he saw the U.S.’s western expansion as the territory’s inevitable future.

One of Oscar’s reference texts had contained Vallejo’s black-and-white portrait. He’d been a full-figured man with a soft fleshy face and kind un-affronting eyes. He wore his facial hair curiously styled in the shape of broad swooping side-whiskers. The poufs of thick bristly growth formed watermelon-shaped slices on either cheek, giving him the whimsical appearance of a humanized walrus. Above, below, and in between the side-whiskers, he kept his skin immaculately groomed in a close shave, leaving his nose and mouth clipped free.

It was exactly this figure that the cats and I met as we entered the shadowed corridor of the barracks’ breezeway.

Isabella saw him first. “
Mreo
,” she murmured quietly as my eyes adjusted to the darker interior light.

I was only momentarily thrown off by his presence. There was a familiarity about him, a certain
je ne sais Clem
in his eyes. My Sonoma search wasn’t so fruitless after all, I thought with relief. I pushed the stroller forward, smiling timidly.

After watching Clem’s performances in Nevada City and Sutter’s Fort, I felt, somehow, as if I knew him. Subconsciously, I kept thinking of how much he reminded me of my Uncle Oscar.

“Ah, hello there,” he greeted us warmly. “
Wel-kome
to the Sonoma Barracks.” He bowed, spreading his arms wide. “
Comandante
General Mariano Vallejo at your service. I’ll be your
per-son-nal
guide here this afternoon.”

The suit that covered his portly figure conveyed the cut of an earlier era. Its wide lapels rested smoothly across his round barrel chest. The raised collar of his starched white shirt rose to meet the dimpled roll of a double chin.

The man before me seemed slightly taller than the Twainimpersonating Clem. Perhaps, I reasoned, it was simply a matter of the elevated heel on his knee-high boots.

His voice, too, had an oddly different tenor. But I chalked that up to the artificial Spanish accent he was using, heavily trilling his
R
s and overemphasizing each syllable of every word. His command of Twain’s dialect, I thought ruefully, had been better than his command of the General’s.

Vallejo’s stubby finger pointed in a swirl down to the stroller’s wet nylon cover. I grimaced guiltily as he tilted it up to inspect the cats beneath.

“Hmm,” he mused, releasing the cover. He turned to read an official state park sign near the entrance that listed the site’s rules and regulations.

“No doggies allowed,” he read slowly, before pursing his thick lips contemplatively. “But . . . no men-
shon
of the feline species . . . so . . . ” He clapped his hands together. “ . . . you are in the clear.” He leaned forward to look down once more into the stroller. “I
can-nut
say that anyone has ever tried to bring cats in here before,” he said goodnaturedly.

Isabella’s nose twitched as she stared up at him. The orange tip of her tail thumped warily against the floor of the carriage. Yawning himself awake, Rupert blinked sleepily up at the General, his blue eyes crossing as they caught sight of his distinctive side-whiskers.

Rolling the stroller over the concrete floor, I followed obediently after our guide, who stepped further into the breezeway, past a roped-off display of a small canon with spindly wooden wheels. He paused briefly to allow me to peek into the first interior room, located across from the canon.

Glancing through the open doorway, I saw that the space had been furnished to simulate the barracks during its earlier operational years, when soldiers populated the living quarters. Wooden-framed beds lined the walls on either side of the room. A chest lay neatly at the foot of each one, and samples of each sleeper’s clothing hung on designated pegs behind the headboards. Stiff wool blankets were mounded on top of each bed frame, exposing enough of the space beneath to reveal a mattress-less netting of corded wires.