BY CRAIG INANEN
Copyright is held by the author.
DURING MY time enforcing the law in Coal County, Oklahoma I’ve done my best to protect the citizens and keep them safe. I figure I’ve done a pretty good job, too. The best I could, anyway.
As a Sheriff’s Deputy I’ve faced down bad men, tracked down stolen horses and cattle, been in gunfights, arrested all sorts of criminals ranging from 10 year old boys stealing penny candy to the murderers I followed on horseback down into Texas. That one took me three weeks and it was a sore spot between me and Sheriff Brown. He claimed that I didn’t stay in touch with him, didn’t report what I was doing, disobeyed direct orders and was operating way too far out of my jurisdiction. He’s right about all those things, too. But I got my fugitives.
So now I’m assigned to 90 days of desk duty and I’ll tell you I’m not a man to sit behind a desk. He hinted pretty strongly he’d a lot rather have had me throw in my time, too, and finally retire. Coming up on 65 years of age I can see that on the horizon but it’s not here yet. There’s not too much quit in me.
Besides, I’ve got 31 years seniority over him. I was tracking down rustlers and horse thieves before he was born. I fought renegade Indians who were off the reservation when he was on his mama’s tit.
So I sat behind the wooden desk and hunted and pecked away at the shiny new Underwood No. Five typewriter we had to use for reports now. That was one of Sheriff Brown’s innovations, using the typewriter. A man’s got to keep pace with the times or he gets left behind. It was 1929, after all.
When the telephone rang I answered it, “Coal County Sheriff’s office, Deputy Seth Brunner,” just the way we were supposed to. Not everyone did, shortening that down to, “Sheriff’s office.”
“Hello? I’m not sure if I should call you or not,” the voice on the other end of the line began. “You see I think there’s a cat stuck up in a tree.”
“Yes, Ma’am, can you see the cat?”
“Well no, I went out there and looked but I couldn’t see it. It’s been up there for hours, though, just a-wailin’ away, like it can’t get down.”
“I understand, Ma’am. Let’s start with your name and address. We’ll take care of it,” I reassured her.
“What you got there?” Sheriff Brown asked me after I had taken down all of the information.
“A Mrs. Sheehan over on Oak Street reports a cat stuck up in a tree. Says it’s been there for several hours. She sounded pretty concerned.”
Sheriff Brown digested that information. “I can hold down the phone here. Why don’t you drive over and see what’s what? Do you think you can handle this one without making an interstate case out of it? ”
“That’s only five blocks. I’d just as soon walk.” I can drive. I learned over 10 years ago and the Sheriff Department has got some Model T’s for just that thing.
“Suit yourself,” he told me. He didn’t say anything about the fact I was wearing my boots rather than my uniform shoes. Actually I’d rather ride but my good horse Pateador was at home. Pateador is Spanish for “kicker” and that was an appropriate name for my horse. Fourteen years old now, he was a real handful when I got him. His days of law enforcement were fast coming to an end. We about drive everywhere now.
I’m a big old boy, nearly six feet and pretty close to 250 pounds. I feel it in my knees, at my age, but I can walk five blocks. I rapped on the door of the Sheehan residence. It was a stately place, well kept up and nicely painted, two stories with that, what-do-you call-it, bric-a-brac on the porch to make it look fancy. There’s a trick to that. When I knock on the door it sounds like the law has arrived. Mrs. Sheehan came to the door promptly.
“Oh, I’m glad to see you. I wasn’t sure if I should have called or not.” She stepped out onto the porch and pointed across the street at a big old cottonwood tree. It must have been 100 feet tall. “I think it’s up there. I’ve heard it for a couple of hours now. First of all it was really wailing. It’s quieted down some now.”
I thanked her and walked across Center Street, looking up at the big tree. It was in the front yard of an attorney’s home and office. Nice place, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was their cat. The only thing was I didn’t hear anything, no wailing, no meows, nothing at all. So I called to it, of course. “Here, kitty! Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!” No answer. I’ve talked to animals all my life. I doubt they understand everything I say but I think the tone of voice might tell them something. I talk to the Widow Muñoz’s cats all the time. Mostly they don’t listen. “Get down from there, kitty,” and so on. There was no way I was going to climb that tree even if I was in my tree-climbing prime, which I’m not. The bottom limbs were much too far up there to grab a-hold of.
Then I heard it. Sure enough it sounded like a cat wailing but it was off in the distance, not up the tree. Looking off to the southwest, where the sound had come from, there was another ornate house, this one painted a light blue colour with cream-coloured trim. Wouldn’t hurt to walk over there and see. That’s what I did. In fact I walked all the way around the house. It had one of those gazebos in the back yard, which butted up against a field grown up with big bluestem and switchgrass, a couple of native grasses. It was grown up to about five feet tall and was in bloom. It looked kind of pretty. On the other side of the field were the Fort Smith and Western railroad tracks. I poked around the back yard and the gazebo a little bit. I didn’t see any cats or hear anything. There was a woman watching me from the house. She might have been a maid. I waved to her. She didn’t wave back; she just stood there and stared.
Now I’ve known some mother cats to get real vocal when they’re whelping a litter of kittens, particularly if it’s their first one. Mama cat will generally find a place that’s hidden and safe, too before she starts in. Maybe that’s what I was running onto here. It was a theory, anyway. I reported back to Mrs. Sheehan that there definitely wasn’t a cat stuck up in the cottonwood tree that the noise had come from further to the southwest, that it might have been behind the blue and cream coloured house but I didn’t hear anything when I was back there.
“Thank you for coming out,” she told me. “I just kept picturing a scared cat up a tree when I heard that noise.” I thought she might actually be a little bit embarrassed for having called now.
“Quite all right, Ma’am. That’s what we’re there for. Protectin’ and servin’ Coal County. That includes cats.” Before I left I took a sighting on two landmarks. If you used the Coalville First Union Bank over on Locust Street as the eastern point and the tipple for the Three Brothers’ Gun Barrel mine it had seemed that the noise had originated at about the 11:00 position. I thought about that as I walked back to the Sheriff’s office.
“Well, what did you find?” Sheriff Brown asked me.
“Nothing,” I told him. “There was something there, a-wailin’ away but I didn’t find it. Then it stopped. It for sure wasn’t a cat up a tree. Maybe it was a mother cat giving birth to some kittens.” Maybe, it was a mystery I might never know the answer to.
“OK,” he told me. “Close it out and write it up.”
I did that. That’s what I was told to do. Sheriff Brown doesn’t like having open cases in the unsolved file. I did battle with the Underwood the rest of the day. I swear if I didn’t know better I’d say those keys moved around to various places on the keyboard when I wasn’t looking. But after we did the shift change I walked five blocks down Locust Street to the railroad tracks and then headed west. That whole episode gnawed at me, it preyed on my mind and I was in no particular hurry to get home that evening.
When I had walked along the tracks about two blocks I heard it again. It was a lot weaker now but it was distinct. I walked back and forth on the rail bed until I figured I was about in line with the source. I traced the line mentally between the mine tipple and the bank, figured the 11:00 position and walked into the tall grass.
Forty-five years ago I had found a longhorn steer using geometry. I didn’t know that’s what it was called, then. Sighting on the intersecting point of two straight lines I had tracked down that old longhorn by the direction his bellowing had come from in similar tall prairie. He’d gotten his head and horns stuck on the other side of two saplings. They were too close together for him to push through. How he’d managed to tilt his head far enough to slip his horns between them, I do not know. It was simple enough to get him out; I just dogged him down and slipped his head out. I only got kicked three or four times. That was one pretty scared steer. No telling how long he’d been trapped like that.
I walked through the big bluestem and switchgrass which was better than shoulder high on me. There was no sign that anyone had been there before me, when you walk on that it bends the stems over and lays some of them down. I stopped at the point I’d calculated and just listened, then.
I heard a weak little noise right close by. Walking about ten feet I came upon a little baby girl. She was naked and red, her little fists clenched and her eyes shut tight and she was mewling, now and then, like a kitten. Somebody must have thrown this little baby off the train. What a helluva a thing to do to a newborn child. I bent down and picked her up, cradling her against my chest. Her little legs kicked and she waved her arms.
Sheriff Brown was going to love this one.
***
Craig Inanen lives in the Midwest U.S. His work has been most recently published in Cetera Magazine. It will also be featured in the March 2026 issue of Close to the Bone, the June 2026 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine and broadcast January 2026 on YouTube by Antimatter Dreams. He is a contributor to The Yard: Crime Blog and the British The Short Humour Site.