It seemed beautiful to me. And even the ugly parts, that line of stacked cars or the piles of busted junk, seemed like something exciting, dangerous, a little mysterious. I hadn’t figured out yet that I was supposed to be ashamed—of the trailer or the heaps behind it, of our cheap furniture, of the way Pop would pluck toys or books out of the boxes of crap people left at the junkyard, clean them up, and present them to me at Christmas or birthdays all wrapped up with a bow on top. I didn’t know they were trash.
I didn’t know we were trash.
I have Pop to thank for that. For that, if nothing else. I was able to imagine for a long time that we were the blessed guardians of a strange and magical place, and I realize now that it was because of him, that he took it upon himself to keep the world’s meanness at bay so that it wouldn’t interrupt my dreams. Even when things were tough, when the winter had lasted a month longer than usual, and the car broke down, and he had to spend our grocery money for a new transmission, he never let on that we were desperate. I still remember how he would walk into the woods at dawn and come back with three fat squirrels strung over his shoulder, the way he’d grin when he said, “I know a lucky gal who’s getting my nana’s special limb-chicken stew tonight.” He was so convincing with his “special” and “lucky” that I clapped my hands with joy. One day, I would realize that we weren’t lucky but broke, and that our choices were squirrel meat or no meat at all. But in those early days, neatly clipping the feet off my dinner with a pair of bloodstained tin snips, undressing them out of their skins the way Pop had taught me and his daddy taught him, it all felt like an adventure. He shielded me from the truth about who we were for as long as he could.
But he couldn’t do it forever.
I was alone a lot that summer, just me and the heaps and the junkyard cats. We’d always had a few skulking around, raggedy feral things that I rarely saw except out of the corner of my eye, a lightning-quick flash of gray slinking low from between the heaps and into the woods. But there had been a litter of kittens that winter; I could hear them mewing from somewhere near the trailer, and one day I saw a lean tabby cat disappear down a passageway into the trash with a freshly killed mouse dangling from her jaws. By June, the tabby had left for parts unknown, but the kittens were still there, grown into three curious, leggy adolescents who would sit on the heaps and watch me every time I walked through the yard. Pop gave me a long look the day I told him I wanted cat food from the grocery store.
“Them cats can hunt for themselves,” he said. “That’s why we don’t chase ’em away, ’cause they keep the yard clear of vermin.”
“But I want them to like me,” I said, and I must have looked truly pathetic, because I saw him suck in his cheeks to keep from laughing—and the next time he went to the market, he came back with a bag of cheap kibble and a warning: no cats in the trailer. If I wanted a pet, he said, he’d get me a dog.
I didn’t want a dog. Not that I didn’t like them, understand. I always liked animals, liked them better than people for the most part. But dogs, they were just so much. The slobber, the noise, the desperate desire to please. The loyalty of a dog is overrated; you get it for nothing. You could kick a dog every day and it would still come back, begging, wanting to be loved. Cats, though—they’re different. You have to work for it. Even the new kittens at the junkyard, the ones who hadn’t learned yet to be wary of people, wouldn’t take food from my hand right away. It took days before they didn’t run from me, more than a week for me to earn their trust. Even when they would take scraps from my fingers, only one of them ever let his guard down enough to crawl into my lap and purr. He was the smallest of the bunch, with a white face and gray markings that covered his head and ears like a cap, and a funny pair of front legs that bent inward like a pair of human elbows—what some people call a “twisty cat.” The first time he crawled out of the heaps, I laughed out loud at the sight of him, hopping forward and sitting up on his hind legs like a kangaroo, appraising the situation. He didn’t seem to know that he was broken, or if he did, he didn’t care. I loved him fiercely and immediately. I named him Rags.
My father didn’t understand, nor share my warm feelings for broken things. The first time he saw Rags come creeping out of the heaps, his face darkened.
“Oh, hell, girl. He can’t hunt with those cockeyed forelegs,” he said. “He won’t survive the winter. The kind thing to do would be to put him down, before he starves.”