Kat rented a room in a brown-and-white house that tumbled down a steep hillside overlooking the sound. Across the water: Seattle. She could hear seagulls and smell the oily ocean water. During the day, she crouched in the dark corners of her room and stayed hidden. She tried to walk the straight line Jimmy James told her about. But she had trouble. She started out with a simple, dead-end job and cleaned up for a while. But her hands shook with anxiety. Her mind thought crazy thoughts. She couldn’t quit hooking. There was no explaining and no one who listened. She had no friends. She couldn’t stay clean. But she swore there would be no more crazy stuff. No more meth or crack. She became a closet junkie. Like suburban jocks. A bedroom addict hiding pills instead of needles. It was easier. She drank more than she would have had there been friends around. She drank and drank—became more bitter and lucid as her lonely intoxication grew. She planned to come back to David after a long, long time.
She would show him.
Thoughts of the Man from Angel Road boiled her blood. Made everything in front of her indistinguishable—tinted red from her terrible, frenzied fury. The navy boys thought of her as a dumb, shy, country girl. They felt sorry for her. Gave her cigarettes and wine and cocaine. They told her things they wouldn’t have told anybody else. They thought she didn’t understand most of it. They dumped all their garbage out—made insidious confessions of things they had done.
Kat walked home the same way every morning. Ate a TV dinner. The dinners were always the same kind: One piece of gray meat. A soggy vegetable. Runny, mashed potatoes. She took her pills—one and a half. Sometimes she smoked them. Sometimes she swallowed them.
She slept quietly, dreamed silently. But she had only one dream in which:
Her pituitary is pumping out strong messages. It is dark and he is asleep. She crawls through his window into his bedroom. She is lithe and sneaky. She rubs her cheek against his skin and claims him. She is sinewy. Dark. Graceful. She moves gently against him—breathes in his scent. She noses at his armpits, his groin—where the hair holds the strongest odor. Inhales long and deep. Hindquarters in the air, entire body attune.
He stirs and wakens.
He watches with the light off as she crouches in the corner. Her tail twitches. She paces back and forth. She makes low, growling, whoofing noises. Throws her voice. Screams like a woman. He turns his back confusedly to look around—see who else is there. His bedsheets fall from him. His strong lats flex. It is her one chance. She launches herself. Feels the hard plate of her chest hit his back between his shoulder blades. She uses all her strength—her weight. His arms fly out. The wind is knocked out of him.
Her claws dig into his eye sockets, her tail twitches in ecstasy, the muscles ripple underneath her fur, her canines sever his spine.
The taste of blood, the silent struggling, his body slowly collapsing underneath her . . .
Kat moaned in confusion from her dreamworld in her twin bed in her friendless rented room. Nobody heard her. An ambulance rumbled the walls. Its siren sounded long and red into the bustling morning. She stirred only slightly.
She woke trembling from her dream every evening. She cleaned herself in the small, communal shower. Soap that didn’t smell good. Cheap, single-blade razors. Her rented room had no windows, so she walked the docks to pass the long, lonely afternoons. The daylight seemed foreign. At Charleston Beach Road she got on the railroad tracks and walked along the water.
She sensed the giant gray ships looming and blinked at the bright lights. She saw all the highway signs with the name of her hometown written on them in reflective white on green. But she did not go home. She waited in the wicked seaport and listened to the sounds of the naval shipyard on the breeze. She watched the steel ships for a sign that crowds of men with shaved heads had commandeered the vessels, made right what had been done wrong, and finally come to save her.