Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

I have hit a nerve, for several sets of green and gold eyes narrow to angry slivers.

“It is the rugrats like Gimpy,” says Snow Off-white, with a shrug of her razor-sharp shoulder blades, “who get creamed.”

I glance at the kit with the right-angle leg, and conceal a shudder. Poor sod would be better off with that seriously bum limb amputated.

“It is not so bad,” the dingy yearling pipes up. “The winos and bums feel sorry for me because I cannot forage and see that I get McDonald’s leavings.”

Jeez, this lot is so low that the homeless humans show them charity. Chalk one up on the pearly gates for the homeless humans. I have always found that the have-nots are better at sharing than the have-it-alls who got plenty to share.

“What about this day-old fish market behind the grille here?” I say.

“We stay away,” says Tiger, with a growl. “We think it is a trap. People come and take away the dumb ones that venture inside and cannot get out.”

“And you never see them again?”

“We do,” Snow Off-white says, eager to explain. I can always get through to the babes, which may be why Tiger and Tom are breathing down my epiglottis. “But…they are different.”

“They are…drones,” Tom snarls. “All the fight is out of them. They come back with their ears…and everythng notched and have zero interest in dames and just want to lay around and wait for free food and get fat like you.”

“I am not fat. I am well built. If your lot was not half-starved, you would see that you are all way too skinny.”

“That is better than the alternative,” Gimpy bursts out in his high adolescent voice.

“And what is the alternative?” I ask.

“Death or domestication.”

I digest this for a few seconds. It is no use to preach the joys of the domestic lifestyle to those to whom just living for the next day is a real achievement. They regard every human with fear and suspicion, and in almost all cases around here, rightly so.

Except, that is, for those beneficent bums and bumettes, and the feline birth control brigade responsible for the satellite clinics that litter this junkyard, one of them right at my back.

I realize, of course, that if this gang gets too rough I can always leap through the open door, grab the glop, and trigger the automatic closing mechanism. I will be caught like a rat in a trap, but I will also be safe from the Wild Bunch.

Ole Tiger seems to be reading my mind, because his yellow teeth show a Cheshire cheese grin. “Guess you would not mind a ride in a cage, being the domestic sort to start with. You would come back minus your cojones , though.”

“You do not understand. I have already been rendered free of unpopular potential, such as progeny.”

Gimpy has been slinking around the side. “He has still got them, boss. He is lying. He is still armed and dangerous to dames.”

I sigh. “It is too difficult to explain to street types. I have had a fancy operation by a plastic surgeon called a vasectomy, and —”

“We are not interested in your medical history, you pampered sellout!” Tom spits. “Whatever you have had, what you will not have when you come back from the twenty-four-hour abduction is your hairballs.”

I gulp. This mission is more dangerous than I thought. If I happen to fall into the hands of these do-gooders, they will have me sliced and diced for real in no time, because a vasectomy is invisible. I will be summarily cut off from my former self just as if I were a homeless, irresponsible, kitty-littering street dude.

“So,” says Tom with an evil grin, digging his shivs into my shoulder like staples. “Why is a domestic dude like you risking life, limb, and liberty to come hassle us on our territory?”

“I am an investigator,” I begin.

“Narc!” screams Snow Off-white, arching her bony back. “We hardly ever get any nip, just that awful weed that people are always selling on corners around here. We better take care of the narc personally.”

They crowd closer, ugly mugs full of fangs and uglier expressions. I can handle myself in a brawl, but they have me pinned and my only escape is into the clutches of the North Las Vegas Neutering Society.

Shivs as edged as sharks’ teeth are pricking my undercoat in warning. With this crew, one puncture wound, one whiff of blood, and they will go into a fighting frenzy.

I let them push me closer to the open door to eunuchhood. I’d rather take my chances hornswaggling a bunch of humanitarians than beating off a gang of wildcats any day. Where is that twerp Midnight Louise when you need her?

“Wait a minute,” yowls a rough female voice.

A cat who is black like me shoulders through the mob to thrust her jaw in my face like a knuckle sandwich. Midnight Louise this is not.

This is a big-boned, rangy lady with a hacksaw voice. The white scar tracks crisscrossing her mug are not tokens of the plastic surgeon.

“I have been taken away by the aliens with the silver ships,” she says, “and it is not so bad. I was tired of trying to eat for five or six every few months anyway. So if I were you, dude, I’d take the escape hatch. This gang is out for blood. Just being brave enough, and stupid enough, to come here will not save you.”

I stare into her hard and weary green eyes. She stares into my hard and wary green eyes. Suddenly, I feel an embarrassing purr bubbling in my throat. I growl to conceal it, but it is too late.

She lunges at my throat, then twists her head and takes the nape of my neck in her teeth and shakes me until my fangs chatter. A big black mitt boxes my cheek.

“Is that you, Grasshopper?”

“Yeah,” I admit sheepishly. I cannot stand being publicly mauled by overenthusiastic females who are not babes. “Ma. But they call me Louie now. Midnight Louie.”

Well, there is only one thing that cuts it with a gang as down and out as this one: family. They are all so related to each other that if they were people they would be put in jail. In fact, I think a lot of them are a few whiskers shy of a full muzzle, but nobody cares about the family trees of our kind. Our mating tendencies go back to our godlike Egyptian origins. The Egyptians were not too nice to resort to marital alliances with brothers and sisters to keep the royal line going. I believe the term is inbred.

Anyway, by virtue of my long-lost mama being among them and being something of a top cat at that, my bacon is not chopped liver. In fact, they are all my kissing cousins now.

She has taken me aside for a family reunion.

“How did you remember me?” I ask as we settle down on a Naugahyde ottoman that has lost its stuffing until it is shaped like an inner tube. Actually, it is quite comfy. “It is not like you did not have dozens just like me.”

“Oh, Grasshopper, there were none just like you. Naughty from the moment you lost your milk teeth. You were after those poor grasshoppers before your eyes were open. So. You are in business. Did I hear you bragging about a co-op apartment? Not smart with this gang.” She boxes my ear again, as if dislodging mites.

“Actually, it is a ‘cooperative’ living arrangement I have with this babe who flacks for the Crystal Phoenix.”

“It is a mixed marriage?”

I blink.

“She is human?”

“Um, pretty much so, but she has long red nails. I really love the way they sink into my…ah, we are just roommates, Ma. Purely platonic. My real ladylove is this shaded silver Persian —”

“A foreigner? And what is this ‘shaded silver’ stuff? You mean the chit is gray.”

I roll my eyes. I am not about to explain the sublime and subtle mix of black, white, and gray hairs on the aristocratic form of the Divine Yvette.