The Cat Who Smelled a Rat_txt

There was confusion about who would ride with whom. Maggie refused to ride in the same limousine with Jess Povey. Leslie wanted to ride with the dog. Amanda shouted above the hubbub, “I don’t care if I ride on the hood! Let’s get this show on the road!”

It was decided that Qwilleran’s passengers would be Maggie, Leslie, and the ninety-eight-year-old historian Homer Tibbitt, with his wife.

Leslie’s mother straightened his tie and combed his hair, saying, “You’ll have your picture taken, and it’ll be in the newspaper! Grandma will be so proud of you! I’ll be here to pick you up when it’s over. You’ll be riding with that nice man with the big moustache, and he’ll take good care of you.”

Qwilleran looked askance at the youngster squirming in his little long-pant suit, white shirt, and bow tie. Huffing into his moustache, he said to Maggie, “No one told me I’d have to baby-sit.”

She and Leslie took the seat behind the driver, leaving the roomier backseat for the Tibbitts: Homer and his attentive wife, Rhoda. She had brought pillows to make a nest for his bony frame. Leslie, who had never seen anyone so old, knelt on the seat and rode backwards, staring at the furrowed, fretful face.

After a while he pointed a finger at the old gentleman, pulled an imaginary trigger and said, “Ping.’”

Maggie said, “Turn around and sit down, Leslie, and fasten your seatbelt. We’re going to start moving.”

The signal was given, and the motorcade pulled away from the courthouse and proceeded up Main Street, where shoppers stood on the curbs and cheered. This was an important event for Moose County. For the next four hours the vehicles zigzagged through the countryside, past the ten minesites on back roads and lightly traveled highways.

The first destination was the Big B Mine that had been owned and operated by Maggie’s great-grandmother. When the motorcade stopped, all the car doors opened simultaneously, and the passengers piled out, gathering around the bronze marker. Like all the mines, it was now only an expanse of barren ground, fenced and posted with warnings, the only relic being a weathered wood tower about forty feet high. There was something mysterious, even scary, about the silent, lonely shafthouses.

Maggie and the chief commissioner were posed with the bronze plaque, and a young woman from the florist’s van came running with a large wreath tied with purple ribbon, to hang on the post supporting the marker. Photographers jockeyed for angles that would include the shafthouse in the background.

Then the commissioner made his speech about Moose County’s proud mining heritage… . The thousands of miners and their families who had lived and died here … the disasters they endured: cave-ins, explosions, riots … their primitive villages of huts, a one-room schoolhouse, a chapel, and a company store. Now there was nothing left but the shafthouse! He talked a little too long, and the celebrators were glad to return to their cars.

Qwilleran thought, One down and only nine to go!

At the next mine, associated with the Harding family, there were more photographs, another wreath, and another speech by another politician, who said, “Other parts of the country have Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, or the Statue of Liberty. We have ten shafthouses!”

A photographer told a direct descendant to take his thumb out of his mouth and try to smile, but Leslie only cocked his finger at the man and said, “Ping!”

The rest of the afternoon was reported by Qwilleran himself in his personal journal:

After the first five stops, all the direct descendants had been photographed and had lost interest in the proceedings, but they were trapped. So were the other dignitaries. Photographers from the Bixby Bugle and Lockmaster Ledger had all the stuff they could use, and they left. The TV crew drove back to the airport after shooting what they considered most newsworthy: Amanda with her built-in scowl and scarecrow style of dressing, and Burgess with his kilt and Alexander.

The speeches were getting shorter-and the listeners fewer. Homer Tibbitt refused to leave the limousine anymore, and Leslie continued to torment him, cocking his finger and saying, “Ping!”

“Kid, if you do that one more time,” Homer screeched in his high-pitched voice, “I’ll bash you with my crutch!”

His wife said, “Leslie, dear, he doesn’t have a crutch. Why don’t you sit up front with the driver, and you can shoot sheep and cows through the windshield.”

“Thank you, Rhoda,” I said sotto voce. “You’re a sweetheart!”

So Leslie rode with me in the front seat, and I guess I unnerved him by saying, “What kind of ammunition do you use? Do you have a license to carry a handgun? How long have you belonged to the NRA?”