Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Topaz Tango

“Take a deep breath,” he said, “and don’t breathe after that.”

They sank down together to Atlantis, kissing until she saw its gleaming turquoise towers behind her eyelids. Her hair swirled like seaweed. They were no place on earth. It felt heavenly.

No Good Dude Goes Unpunished

“. . . and the food is vershtunken. ”

I am sitting in the parking lot of the Circle Ritz apartments and condominiums, an elegant five-story fifties’ doughnut of a building wrapped in black marble, listening to my jet-black dam unleash a flood of invective about my home, sweet home.

I mean the word dam not as a water barrier or a swear word—cat heaven forbid!—but as the word that indicates the alma mater of myself, Miss Ma Barker.

I hasten to ease her aggravation. “Free-to-Be-Feline is highly regarded as an earth-sensitive, digestatory product, literally green, which you must admit is all the politically correct rage these days,” I say, not believing a word of it.

I am known to loathe the stuff by one and all, save my devoted roommate, Miss Temple Barr. Clever as she is, she has never tumbled to the fact that her favorite feline health food is—not to put too fine a point on it—“ vershtunken. ”

Meanwhile, Ma Barker, a pretty testy old dame who commands a feral colony, rants on.

“I led my loyal entourage all the way down from north Las Vegas to this so-called Promised Land to hand them bowlfuls of dried, army-green rabbit turds? Served in sterile plastic? Not so much as a fresh, grease-soaked fast-food wrapper for a napkin? Even the do-gooder brigade of homeless cat-trappers and ball-snappers did better by us than you, son.”

“They mean well!” I cry. That was ever the best, though weak, defense for ignorant humanity. “I, ah, find Free-to-Be-Feline in my own personal food bowls daily.”

I nimbly dodge admitting to actually eating it.

“You have gone over to the Dark Side, son. I understand. Mere security is a powerful lure.”

“Hey! I provide security, I do not crave it.”

“Whatever, I have been scouting the neighborhood and have found a more amenable location.”

“The Circle Ritz is a very good address!”

“That may be, but I have never been an uptown girl, except geographically. Look at us, son. We are marked by the Tipped Ear. We have been trapped, ’napped, and lopped off at the ear and in other, more personal, external and internal places. The world knows us for a neutered colony, but we are not about to give up our rep as a mad, bad street gang.”

“I know that, Ma. Getting free vittles is not a sign of defeat.”

“I do not object to the free vittles, just the quality at your pad here. I have found a better free lunch.”

“Yeah?” If I am dubious, it is because I am well aware how little the feral elements of our breed are welcomed anywhere.

“Yeah. I am talking juicy, greasy burgers. I am talking long, lank, salty fries. I am talking the dregs of thick, creamy milkshakes. I am talking doughnuts.”

“Doughnuts! That is the worst of empty calorie foods. No carnivore worth its fangs would sink them into a glazed doughnut.”

“That is where you are so wrong, son. Follow me.”

She pushes up onto her venerable limbs and stalks off, her knife-sharp shoulder blades parting the steamy Vegas daylight like shark fins.

I have busted my derriere getting Ma and her gang to a safe house. How annoying that she spurns it. Those of our breed are masters of spurning, however, and food is the prime example of what we can achieve in that direction.

Speaking of directions, Ma Barker is heading northeast of the Circle Ritz, cross-country. She is a cagey mitt-to-mitt fighter and even vanquished a raccoon, a feat for one of her advanced years. Still, I do not trust her alone in new territory.

We finally halt in some weeds near a low, undistinguished-looking brick building. The spunky, funky Circle Ritz it is not.

Call it one-story bland.

However, my nose sniffs old, cold oil that has dripped from cars and . . . fast food. The place has a manly aura, and I am ever in favor of that.

I spot a lot of cars at rest, otherwise known as parked. They are also marked.

“This is it?” I ask. “The site you have chosen over my own premises?”

“Right.” Ma Barker’s still-skinned nose lifts to inhale stale oil and dead fish and overcooked cow.

“Are you crazy, Ma? This is the southeast substation of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. They have a no-tolerance policy toward gangs. They will sweep up your posse and cart them off to stir and the so-called ‘shelter’ death chambers faster than you can hiss Free-to-Be Feline.”

“You think so, sonny? Look, my lead agent has made first contact.”

I look, and I have to admit my old lady is a pretty canny strategist.

None other than Gimpy, the gangly adolescent three-legged victim of a car accident, is hopping around the station’s back door, mewing piteously. I hate to see our kind stoop to begging for what we should be given, but the cruel breaks of life on the street have made Gimpy into an orphan out of a Charles the Dickins tome.

A bicycle officer in summer Bermuda shorts uniform is leaning down to share some double cheeseburger with little Gimpy.

“She is female and an easy touch,” I hiss to Ma Barker. “No way will the male cops let your gang set up shop here.”

Another officer steps out the door, the burly sort just the right size to kick an inconvenient cat out of the way.

“Poor little bastard,” he says. “Ear is nicked, so he has had his balls cut off too. I got some take-out Chinese shrimp he might go for.” He ducks back in and soon returns with Gimpy’s fish course.

“Somebody underwrote getting that leg surgically removed,” Miss Bicycle Officer, heretofore IDed as Miss BO, says. Hey, it is hot in this town!

“He must have been in horrid shape to need it removed,” she goes on, staring into the surrounding brush. “There must be a colony around here. The trap, neuter, and release programs say it is better to keep them on the streets until all the clodder members die out.”

“Clodder?” the guy asks, “like in cluttered?”

“Naw, it is the official name for a community of stray cats.”

“Huh.” The guy squats carefully beside Greedy Gut, aka Gimpy. He chuckles. “Look at the little fellah eat. He must still be putting on muscle.”

In his dreams!

Meanwhile, Ma Barker is massaging me with her mitt, shivs out. “That clodder talk was our cue, Louie. Time to take a bow. We can hang back like we are bashful, and you lower one ear so they do not see you have two whole ones.”

I gaze at Ma’s face with the rakish ear at half-mast. I thought a raccoon or another cat had taken a chunk out of it, but now I see that the missing piece has been nipped off in a nice straight line.

Nobody nips the ear off Midnight Louie!

I growl and would retreat, except that Ma has her claws in me right where it could do some damage to my perfectly functional male member and satellites.

I too am politically correct in the failure-to-reproduce department, but my neutering was accomplished internally, with a human procedure called a vasectomy. That is my license to thrill in this town. I cannot strew unwanted litters anywhere, although I can distribute my personal favors hither and yon as I please.

Trouble is, my lack of littering capability does not show, and I could be whisked away and stripped of my will to love, by mistake. What a tragedy!

So when Ma Barker wants me to step forward into a lineup of two, I am hesitant.

“Move it, lad!” She whacks me in the rear, all four shivs at full extension.