Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

40

Midnight Louie Rings Out the Old…

Alone at last.

As soon as my Miss Temple and her Mr. Matt have made their evening visit to console me on my temporary solo stint at the Circle Ritz and moved on to view the reconstruction above (I am secretly looking forward to stairs and a double balcony), I rush to the zebra-stripe carrier that has been left behind as my presumed sleeping quarters.

I duck my head into the open end, under the hated zippered top, and put my right foot in, my left foot in, and shake it all about in this hokey cat pokey.

As I had hoped, an errand-boy Fontana brother had brought the carrier “home” and done the same usual, tidy job as they would do on a Gangsters limo returning from a jaunt if a customer had left a nail file or a diamond ring behind.

My probing shivs snag something old that makes me blue, leftover from the wedding. I drag it into the concentrated illumination of a nightlight.

I have found a black velvet band.

I pull on the elastic break-away section until I view the white formal bow-tie that has survived two weddings.

Now that my role as Ring Bearer has been exposed to the entire viewing public by a weasel of a man who has been a thorn in my Miss Temple’s side and other assorted places, I need to wash my mitts of the whole miserable, humiliating situation with a ritual of my own.

If I must wear costume bits in the future commercials, at least I will be well paid for it. These two Ring Bearer gigs for Mr. Matt’s mother and now my new united roommates must be the last of their kind. The end.

I pick up the collar with a snarl of repulsion on my lips, crush it under my foot, and use my head to stretch it open enough to don.

Then I begin my long journey under cover of night to dispose of this unwanted souvenir for good.

Of course I am caught at the very outset by a hanger-on from Ma Barker’s cat pack as I trot through the parking lot and into the shelter of the oleander hedge.

“Where are you going, Mr. Midnight?” pipes a small, wee voice.

“None of your business.” I look down at what would be a dust bunny if it was inside. “What are you doing here alone? You are too young to be out without your mommy.”

He takes offence, hisses more like a teapot than a snake, and produces a darling spiky little halo of yellow-orange baby fur. Bast spare me!

“I am four-and-a-half-months and twelve days old.”

“Too young,” I growl. “You need to eat your Free-to-be-Feline and grow up to be big and strong like me.”

“That stuff is rank. I see you drag Free-to-Be-Feline out to the clowder, but I never see you eat it.”

“Because I gobbled so much of it when I was your age.” (And did not know better.)

I try to pass him, but he has those kitten reflexes, and bobs and dodges when I do.

“Look, Kit. I am on important business. Dangerous business. Life-threatening business.”

“Goodie. I want to be your—”

I give him the mild brush-off with a side-bump. “Be my what?”

“Apprentice.”

Now there is a dirty word if I ever heard one.

I nose him back into the light of the parking lot with a few gruff growls. “Look at you. Scrawny as a starving rat. What do they call that coat color?” I survey a mash-up of white paws and yellow and orange stripes and tufts sticking out any which way.

“Ma Barker calls me her little pumpkin.”

“That is not an effective street name if you want to get out and about in the neighborhood and survive the bullies.”

“What would be better?”

“I am not a walking Name-the-Baby book.”

He sits down and hangs his head.

“Okay, fuzz-bottom. I got a better name. Punky. Why did you hang around when Ma put the kittlings to bed back at the police substation?”

His round kitten eyes, too muddy to tell their final color, narrow. “The substation is a low-level crime-fighting operation. I saw all the housebreaker and Fontana brothers action around this place and figured you would soon be beginning a new undercover assignment.”

“Undercover assignment?”

“Under the cover of that sissy zebra-stripe carrier. I see they import you to crime scenes in that.”

I like this kit. “Yeah, well, I had to go along with that low-profile approach to save a lot of people.”

By “crime scene”, I am not sure whether he means my formerly exclusive roommate’s faux wedding-cum-armed robbery or her real-this-time wedding. In either case I witnessed me, myself, and I becoming a third wheel as well as a much put-upon Ring Bearer.

Okay, I did stage manage a masterful musical distraction at the first “wedding”, and got revenge on Crawford Buchanan by exposing the pusillanimous wedding crasher at the second once-in-a-lifetime event.

(And it had better be, because I will not don the Collar of Shame again.)

I shudder to recall the many photos and videos taken of me wearing my formal white tie, and Buchanan’s snarky references in his gossip column to my “cushy midsection, slightly askew whiskers, need of a manicure and a rubdown with a lint-remover”.

While I seethe doing a fast rewind down memory lane, Punky’s sharp little shivs are prodding my shoulder.

“Crime-fighting, that is what I want to learn about, Mr. Midnight. I was best in my litter at fly-catching, bug-biting, and free-style cactus-climbing.”

“Climbing, huh?”

The kit dances around me, feinting with his tiny claws.

“It is going to be a long, confusing walk in the dark,” I warn, “unless I can catch us a ride.”

“Motor Vehicles of Death?” Punky nods. “Usually they catch us, I am told.”

“An urban legend. It goes two ways with MVDs,” I tell him. “Always a hard call for our kind. Black is beautiful, but invisible on dark streets. White is a flag for sadists who, sadly, go for road kill. Your coat color is almost fluorescent, which makes you a target. Life is hard, but death is harder, Punky.”

“I will be all right. You know your way around.”

“That I do. Can you tote this fancy neckpiece while I look for a quick ride?”

“Sure.” He sits upright as I paw the thing off my neck and lower the white bow-tie around his. He takes a deep breath so his upright posture does not sink.

So I now have an unwanted tail. Can Bast make things any harder for me? I am pretty sure she can.

“A C-A-B,” Punky asks, after we roll out of the backseat of one in perfect low-profile harmony with the feet of a somewhat smashed couple from Kankakee and onto the Las Vegas Strip. “What do those initials stand for?”

“Could Annihilate Babies,” I snap.

“Ouch! Mr. Midnight, are you mad at me?”

“Better give me the ball and chain again,” I say. “First, hang on to it real tight.”

Punky braces his tiny feet and squeezes his eyes shut as I pull the elastic part taut and do a powerful head-duck and neck roll to suspend the black velvet collar and its abhorred attachment again around my neck.

“That white bow tie is very George Clooney on you,” Punky says.

I am momentarily flattered. “What do you know about George Clooney and his taste in ties?”

“I saw him getting out of a limo once.”

“You do get around for your age. Look. We are heading into stormy waters, lad. Best you follow and observe.”

I take stock of the journey.

Once upon a time Las Vegas Boulevard was not known as “the Strip”, but it was always wide. Now, with centerline boulevards and hotel-casino properties reaching for or renting space out right to the curbs, it is one big digesting-anaconda of a parking jam.

Everything designed to be seen from a majestic distance, like the Luxor’s pyramid and Sphinx and even Leo the Lion at the MGM-Grand, are now crowded and seem kitschy, gigantic, gift shop gewgaws.

In one sense, that makes it easier for lower, in terms of stature, forms of life to mingle with the foot traffic unseen, and harder. I herd Punky through.

“Tails high and toes never still enough to smash,” I hiss into one of his half-size ears as we head toward a mob of milling feet in tennies and sandals and flip-flops, all hot and sweaty.

We are heading north, passing the Paris hotel with its half-size Eiffel Tower opposite the Bellagio.

“Look, look, Mr. Midnight!” Punky goes up on tiptoes to snag a claw in my collar, “The Paris hotel’s balloon is so pretty, and across from it the famous Bellagio fountains are starting to light up.”

“Yeah, yeah, the fountains are one of the last free sidewalk spectaculars left on the Strip, my boy. You want to stay well back or your toes could be a canapé. Listen, I am on a quest. I do not need interruptions.”

“Oh.”

“Do you know what a quest is? A quest is a place you have to go and a, a—”

“You need a bathroom really bad and there is no sand close by?”

“Not really, no.”

“Yes, yes. Have to go. These fountains are very helpful for tinkling.”

I sigh. I cannot leave the pipsqueak unattended here and I have to go…keep on walking.

“Look, look, Mr. Midnight. There is a man in the fountain.”

“Crazy drunk. They will wade in sometimes.”

“He is a really big man.”

Now that the lights are flashing on and the water is plashing and splashing, one of the programmed songs starts.

“Vi-va Las Ve-ay-e-gas.”

I have already turned to march on, and would have preferred some Souza as walking music.

“Looky, looky!” Punky shrills, about as loud as a cricket, his needle-sharp nails pricking me on the hindquarters.

I turn with a hiss and a snarl. You have to keep these over-caffeinated young ones in their places.

And in the fountain spray I see Punky’s “really big man”.

Elvis in a white jumpsuit, jewels of all the colors of the rainbow sparkling on his belt. And collar. Hey, Elvis wore really big collars. You would think Orion had come down from the sky. Way better than Ophiuchus.

“You see that man?” I ask.

“Oh, yes.”

I nod. I suspect the wizards who program these spectaculars can superimpose any image they want on pulsing water and light. A really great marketing tool to broadcast the singers of the current song likenesses. Still, it is not such a bad thing to see the King when one is on a quest. And the kit may have some ESP to make Karma’s blue eyes green with jealousy.

“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)