Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Chapter 14

Gossip Guys: Doing One’s Nails

Well, trim my toe hairs with a hedge shears!

Or just step on a crack and break my mother’s back, why not? She will make you pay, believe it. One does not mess with Ma Barker, and you do not tug on Superman’s cloak or Midnight Louie’s tail.

Here I have been trekked to Chitown in a designer carrier that gets me taken for a purse pooch and kidnapped, but I am still about to perish of boredom. Then I keep my ears perked and a nice, plump juicy family scandal plus a deranged stalker case gets tossed into my furry lap like a grenade.

Some would scramble to dodge falling family standards and potential bodies. Not Midnight Louie. I will be on the lookout for any malfeasance, not to mention bad actors.

Speaking of bad actors, my Miss Temple and Mr. Matt and Miss Matt Mama all do a lousy job of concealing the verbal bombshell Miss Mira has just let loose regarding her late demented hubby.

Cliff Effinger was the worst lowlife to hit Vegas and did not do a decent thing in his life, except draw Mr. Matt to my hometown to track him down.

I know the whole sordid story. It is as common in my world as in soap operas. In other words, it actually happens in real life but sounds too bad to be true. Seems Mr. Matt is the “product of sin.” Yeah, we hip cats on the street do not get those ugly labels. We are all just called superfluous.

He was actually the product of this sloppy Romeo and Juliet scenario humans like to sniffle over when they are not busy casting stones. My kind has often been the object of such schizo reactions too. As I understand it, She Who Is to Become Matt’s Naïve Young Mother is visiting St. Stanislaus Catholic Church near Christmastime to light a candle to the Virgin Mary. Watch out for that Virgin Mary! She is just a statue and may sometimes be asleep at the switch, as the Great Goddess Bast has been known to do for a century or two through her many millennia of worship.

Anyway, this young soldier going off to whatever war is the flavor of the moment is there to light a candle for his safe return, and zowie, powie. Human hormones strike, aka love at first sight. Believe me, I sympathize with the biological imperative. I have been blindsided by its pull a few dozen times myself.

It is the same old story as in my world. He is off about his business protecting territory for the feline race and she is left with a six-pack of kits … or just one if the leavee happens to be human.

You can imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the church choirs come the ensuing months. Jeez, you would think they could leave a lone cub in peace to be born, but Mr. Matt comes into this world everything a human kit should not be. Father unknown, mother shamed, and a family secret forever.

Follows the dumb, desperate marriage to whatever lowlife will take a fallen woman to wife. Enter the lazy, worthless, haranguing Cliff Effinger. At least Miss Matt Mama gives poor Mr. Matt a false surname, her one act of defiance, changing that into something new, not the old Polish “maiden” name, not Effinger’s, but something unique and Devine. Mr. Matt grows up with such lousy father figures except for the parish priest that he becomes one. Maybe his interior kit thinks he can redeem his mother’s “mistake.”

Me, I find life tough enough as a former homeless street dude. I cannot see adding on all this additional angst, but humans have over the centuries invented whole systems designed to make most things miserable.

Mr. Matt is a good priest; he has to be a perfect “father,” after all, but he finally wakes up and smells the candles and realizes he cannot make up for anyone else’s past. So he gets himself cashiered out as a civilian, but tells no one he wants to track down the Evil Effinger, who has long since left his mother for the dubious attractions of the criminal life in Las Vegas.

It could be Mr. Matt is primed to leave a lot of Mr. Cliff Effinger’s skin on the asphalt. Whatever, he has an epiphany and puts the brakes on his revenge, but some other dudes take out the miserable cur. Murder, they wrote. The rest is a long slow dance to reconnect with his mother and encourage her to bury the past and grow strong in the new soil that has accrued over it during all these years.

Which is working great until Mr. Matt once again uses his tracking skills to find out his real father is not dead on foreign soil, as his mother was told by the guy’s family lawyers long ago, but alive and well and rich and unhappily married in his old hometown, Chicago.

I guess this is a “what if Romeo and Juliet had lived” story, and it looks like acts four and five are still coming. With my Miss Temple in the midst of all this, I cannot let her do it alone, but perhaps I must let her do a teeny tiny bit of it solo.

Although the family dinner tomorrow is sure to be a slaughter of more than the main course—I am violently against any but vegetarian fare for humans, given they have the unfair double advantage of opposable thumbs and automatic weapons—I decide that while our current crew is out for Sunday dinner I will find reason to hang out at Mr. Matt Mother’s homestead and see if I can catch whoever is spiking the place with billets-doux of a threatening nature.