Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

“Okay, Punky. We are getting close to my goal. I can use a loyal Page.”

“Page? Some of those are in the big blue carts that do not have good things to eat in them.”

“Not the kind of pages that people recycle. A Page is a youngster who serves a Knight of the Realm…an apprentice.”

“All-righty, Mr. Midnight!” He tries to high five me and misses my mitt entirely with his mini-me version.

“Okay. Here we go. On to Mount Doom.”

“Ooh , this sounds scary.”

The kit is right. Despite the distracting and bright sights and sounds, we are treading into the heart of darkness.

The first sign is the beginning of a distant, low thrum far beneath foot and paw, an inner-earth engine warming up, consuming heat to make motion.

Punky suddenly worms his way under my midsection. None of that mama stuff!

“What is that big monster purring, Mr. Midnight? Is it the Sphinx or Leo the Lion statues coming to life?” He looks around and up into a forest of hairy human legs blending into a ceiling of crowded-together Bermuda shorts hems.

“This way, follow me,” I order.

Soon we have tickled ourselves into the first row of watchers at a roped-off barrier.

“That was hot work, Mr. Midnight.” Punky is breathless, but still with me.

“We are facing the second last, free, spectacular attraction in Lost Vegas, son.”

“Oh, my.” He eyes the dark, humped barrier ahead of us. “Is it that very big fish I hear about in bedtime stories, a whale?”

I have no time to explain that a whale is not a fish, nor a fish story. I nudge him under a baby stroller so no one will step on him.

“Stay here and do not move unless an excited tourist tries to foxtrot over your toes. Watch toward the right, and, no matter what happens, stay where I can see you. That is your trial assignment.”

Punky curls into what might pass at a casual glance for an orange tennis ball.

I look up into the impenetrable black sky above the two wings of the lighted hotel high above us. The Mirage is emblazoned in huge cursive letters on each wing.

“And if I do not come back—”

“Oh, no, Mr. Midnight!”

“Tell them that I competed my quest.”

No worries about being seen haunt me as I slink down the long hairy-legged front line. The whale of a hump Punky spotted is an artificial but fully “live” flame-spewing volcano sitting in a huge lagoon of water. The volcano will erupt in moments, but first the drumbeats introducing the explosive musical score expand into an ominous rumble joined by tribal chants.

The ground trembles beneath feet human and feline. Fireballs on all levels shoot into the air high above the volcano’s cauldron. The rocks in the lagoon pulse with red-hot lava, whisker-scorching close.

I could leap from stone to stone to the volcano top in a twinkle when the heat is off. Now, onlookers are feeling the glow even behind the safety rope line, their rapt faces reddened by the pyrotechnics exploding everywhere, even in the plunging waterfalls pelting the lagoon with lava and ash.

I must reach the cleansing sear of the very lip of the volcano. Moving quickly to keep my pads from burning by a wrong step, I climb the rocky incline of ultra-realistic faux rock, rather like Vegas itself.

I am high enough now to be a black moving silhouette against a fiery red curtain of shooting flames. The lagoon waters below are steaming into a smoky mist.

“Oh!” an onlooker shouts. “Something alive is on the volcano.”

“Something alive. Look!” becomes a chorus.

I have climbed high enough. Now I need to leap twenty feet up to the top while programmed flumes of fire shoot twelve feet into the night air. Here is where I leave the over-heated lava rocks and bound onto the nearest trunk in the cluster of palm trees.

The trunk’s ragged, dense network of stiff fibers rejects the first clutch of my shivs, and I slide down, down before I finally get a good hold.

“It is a cat,” someone shouts. “Call the SPCA.”

Too late now, folks. Computer programming is computer programming. I ratchet my way up so my back is almost level with the volcano sides where the palm tree trunk curves lower.

The graceful fronds sway above me like hula dancers’ skirts. How peaceful. How disturbing. I have hit the moment of truth. I will have to release my bridging palm trunk, twist myself right side up, and manage to land on the only surface that is not erupting with fire and ashes like a hot plate popping corn.

I pause to hear a last onlooker wail, then absolute silence as they realize I may be making Midnight Louie’s last leap.

Well, not by name. Although I am sure I will be identified by the loathsome white bow tie, if we both are not burned to cinders first. In some sense, I face a Viking warrior funeral, ruined by a frivolous bit of outdated twenty-first century wearing apparel. Oh, the horror.

In the silence I hear a piercing kitten shriek.

“You can do it, Mr. Midnight! You can do it!”

I give my spine a half-axel skater’s twist while releasing my shivs.

Falling water and fire blur past my gaze.

My bones thump with a four-point landing on fake volcanic rock.

Do I hear cheers?

Not done yet.

I claw my way to the edge of the cauldron and gaze into real fire. I work a sensitive mitt pad under the breakaway collar. Break-away for my safety, of course, so that is why I am clinging to a place where I can make a suicidal leap into a pet cemetery for one. Me.

I jerk my neck back, simultaneously push my front mitt forward, and the white bow-tie collar snaps like a slingshot. I watch a small white-and-black dot falling into ashen gray and sparking red flame, and then into nothingness. My work is done here.

No wonder men hate to wear ties.

The End.

(for now)

Afterword

Of Collars and Katzenklaviers

“Come gather around, cats and kits from all Las Vegas clowders.”

I stand on an elevated rock to survey an impressive convocation of cats making a black and white, red and orange, and yellow and gray patchwork on the beige desert landscape west of Las Vegas. The sight resembles a giant calico cat reclining.

My audience is scattered, having to avoid settling their posteriors down on a member of the dominant desert species in this location, all varieties of thorny cactus. Still, we share certain spiked defensive attributes of our own, both the animal and the vegetable.

I have lowered my voice an octave and raised my high notes a trifle to reach the crowd of Vegas cat packs or gangs or clowders, to be technical.

“First,” I say, “I must credit my faithful researcher and Internet magician, Miss Temple Barr, for whose nuptials some of you ‘gangsters’ turned into ‘songsters’.”

Shrieks and howls rise from each group as I call out their clowder colors.