Purrfect Peril

Chapter 10

Vena’s was bustling like never before. In fact I don’t think I’d ever seen so many cats squeezed into the tiny waiting room before. All of them were glancing around morosely, and all of them were in a plaintive mood, the topic of fleas dominating every conversation. Even Shanille was there, the leader of cat choir and Father Reilly’s cat. Father Reilly himself was looking glum, possibly not used to taking time out of his busy schedule to take his cat to the vet.

Since it was standing-room only, Odelia leaned against the wall, the four of us nicely bundled at her feet.

“Your cats are so well-behaved!” a woman remarked, referring to the way we were the only cats not cooped up in those plastic cage contraptions. “How do you manage?”

Odelia shrugged. “I tan their hides if they step out of line. Nice crack of the whip.”

The woman pressed her lips together and shook her head. No sense of humor.

Odelia didn’t need to ‘tan our hides’ to make us behave. We were so terrified to visit Vena’s that we didn’t stir an inch from the spot where Odelia had plunked us down. And so were the other cats. You may think that cats love going to the vet. Think again. We hate the vet. We hate to be prodded and pricked and having our gums checked and our tummies measured. It’s degrading. It’s humiliating. It’s very anti-cat. Sure, it’s supposed to be good for us. I don’t care. I still hate it. Now, though, with the notion that Vena would rid us of our flea infection, I was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Not the other cats, though. They were all plaintively meowing up a storm.

Dooley, meanwhile, seemed to have other interests. He’d been brooding a lot on the drive over, and now it became clear about what. “So you said that the fact that Chase has moved in has something to do with babies, right?” he asked Harriet.

“Oh, Dooley,” she said, exasperated. “Are you still going on about that?”

“What did you mean when you said that?” he insisted stubbornly.

“Isn’t it obvious? When a human male and a human female move in together it’s because they want to make human babies.”

Dooley uttered a shocked gasp. “Odelia is having babies?”

“Of course she is. She’s a human female and human females need to have babies before a certain age. Something really old, though. Probably like twenty or something.”

Dooley turned to me. “How old is Odelia now?”

“No idea. Ten? Fifteen maybe?”

“That sounds about right,” Brutus agreed. “Chase is probably the same age as Odelia and I’m six and I know Chase is a lot older than me so he’s probably ten years old by now. Fifteen at the outside,” he allowed.

“That means Odelia still has oodles of time to have human babies,” said Dooley. “Years and years and years. So why have them now?!”

“It’s an urge,” Harriet knew. “Humans get this inexplicable urge to make babies. I think it’s very strange but there you are. Urges. They get them and Odelia is no exception.”

Odelia would have commented but the other humans in the room would have looked at her strangely if suddenly she broke out into meows. So she kept her mouth shut. It was hard for her, though, judging from the scarlet blush that had crept up her cheeks. Her lips were trembling, too, and if I hadn’t known any better I would have thought she was trying to keep from bursting out laughing. Which was impossible, of course, as we were having this very serious, very adult conversation right under her nose.

“She needs to control this urge,” Dooley said. “She needs to know that we’re her babies and she doesn’t need human babies so she needs to control this urge and she needs to control this urge now, before Chase does…” He turned to Harriet again, whom he seemed to consider the expert on all things human all of a sudden. “What part does Chase play in this whole baby making thing?”

Harriet frowned. “Well, he’s the one who needs to put the baby in her, obviously, so at some point he’ll probably…” She flicked her eyes to Dooley and then to me. “Has Dooley ever had The Talk?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I never gave him The Talk.”

“What talk?” asked Dooley.

“The Talk,” Harriet clarified.

“I don’t get it,” said Dooley.

Harriet sighed exaggeratedly. “Brutus. Please give Dooley The Talk.”

“Why do I have to give him The Talk? Why can’t you give him The Talk?”

“Because you’re a male and Dooley is a male and only males should give other males The Talk. It’s a rule.”

“It’s not a rule.”

“It’s a rule. I didn’t invent it.”

“There’s no rule about that. There’s no rule that says only males can give other males The Talk,” Brutus protested. “In fact I think it’s much better coming from you.”

“Guys!” Dooley cried. “What is The Talk?!”

“Look,” I said, deciding to get this over with. Like a band-aid, you just had to rip it off. “You know how a male cat and a female cat get together and a couple of months later lots of kittens come out?”

“Uh-huh.”

“With humans it’s the exact same thing. The male of the species and the female of the species, um, lie together, as they do, and then a couple of months later babies pop out.”

“How many babies?” he asked, darting curious glances at Odelia, as if expecting a litter of babies to suddenly emerge from our human.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said vaguely. “A few, probably.”

“One,” said Brutus. “Usually humans have the one baby.”

“That’s it?” I asked, frowning. “That can’t be true.”

“It’s true. Humans are stingy. They just have the one baby.”

“Sometimes they have two,” Harriet said. “Or three or four. But it’s rare. So rare that when humans have, like, eight babies in a single litter, they get their own TV show. It’s true.”

“Humans are weird,” Brutus agreed.

“So… how long before these babies arrive?” asked Dooley, still staring at Odelia, who was still having trouble keeping a straight face.

“Oh, maybe like three months?” I said. “Two?”

“You guys!” Dooley said. “Odelia and Chase have been lying together for weeks now, so these babies might pop out any moment now!” He buried his face in his hands. “Oh, no.”

“Relax, Dooley,” I said. “Humans don’t always have babies when they lie together. They have to… do stuff.”

“Yeah, and then sometimes they take a pill and then they don’t have the babies,” Harriet explained. She seemed to know an awful lot about this stuff. Then again, at her house they watched the Discovery Channel all the time, which was probably where she got her information.

“They take a pill?” asked Dooley, looking up. “What pill?”

“Yeah, what pill?” I asked. This was news to me, too.

Harriet shrugged, studying her fingernails. “I dunno. Some pill.”

Dooley turned to me, and I could see the question in his eyes before he formulated it. “Does Odelia have this magic anti-baby pill, Max?”

Ugh. “How should I know?”

His face took on a determined look. “We need to find out. This is life or death, Max.”

I was afraid to ask. “Why is this life or death, Dooley?”

“Because the moment Odelia has her babies she’ll get rid of us!”

And there it was. The crux of the matter. I had to admit I’d given the matter some thought myself. Our mailwoman Bambi Wiggins recently had a baby, and her cat Ellen had told us that there are three rules for cats when in the presence of a human baby: don’t scratch the baby. Don’t sit on the baby. Don’t bite the baby. But I could tell Ellen wasn’t entirely sanguine about her position in the Wiggins household herself now that this baby was born. She tried to put on a brave face, but there’s a long-held rumor amongst cats that the moment humans have babies those same humans’ cats get offered a one-way ride to the pound. And if there’s one place us cats fear even more than the vet, it’s the pound.

“We have to stop her,” Dooley whispered, loud enough for the entire waiting room to hear. “Odelia can never have babies, Max. We need to stall her until she’s too old! Which is only…” He made a few quick calculations in his head. “Two more years!”

“Ten,” Harriet corrected him. “She’s ten now, which makes her twenty in ten.”

“Fifteen at the outside,” Brutus repeated. “Which gives you a window of five years.”

He cut me an urgent look. I knew what that look meant: have you thought of some remedy or cure for my very delicate issue, Max? I gave him a look back that said: no, Brutus. I haven’t. But I was adamant to bring it up with Vena when I had the chance, whether he liked it or not.

What? I’m not an expert on tomcat anatomy. Vena is. Which is why she gets paid the big bucks.