Harry Kitten and Tucker Mouse

by George Selden

  “I don’t know,” said Harry. “They all look alike.”

  “Precisely!” said Tucker. “That means we are—”

  “Don’t say it!”

  “—lost!”

  Neither said a word …

  Then Tucker remembered. “You know—Tenth Avenue wasn’t dull. It was very lively, in fact.”

  “Especially when the sanitation workers were trying to bash you with shovels,” said Harry.

  “We’ve got to get out of here!” shouted Tucker. “I’m going out of my mind!”

  “I agree,” said Harry, sighing. “The Empire State Building—beautiful as it is—is not the place for us.”

  “But we’re lost,” shrieked Tucker. “And there’s no ladder here. Even if we could find an elevator.”

  There is no more pitiful sight than a young mouse wringing his paws.

  “Now, just you wait,” said Harry Kitten. And for a kitten, he had learned to speak with a bit of authority. “I have seen something you have not!”

  “You’ve seen?” Tucker Mouse talked loudest. But Harry only purred the truth. “What? What?”

  “I have seen a chalk mark on the wall.” Harry, with one paw, pointed to a slender line of chalk that ran along one wall. “We are not the only souls who’ve been alone down here. One human being also was afraid to get lost. And he’ll show us the way out.”

  “He will?” Tucker couldn’t believe his ears.

  “He was scared, too. But he had a piece of chalk. And if we follow the line he made—to find his way out—”

  “Let’s go,” yelled Tucker. “Whoever you are—you human being—please save us, too, who are only animals!”

  And the chalk line, scribbled on the wall, led Tucker and Harry, as it had that man, to the street.

  (The man’s name was Matthew. He lived in Queens—which is part of New York—and he had four sons. And the night he drew the chalk line—so he’d know where he had been already—that night was Halloween. And he was on duty—a lucky accident, two years later, for a kitten and a mouse.)

  “The street!” said Tucker Mouse and sighed. “Oh, the street.”

  He was just about to feel relieved when “Watch out!” warned Harry. “Here comes a garbage truck.”

  “We’ve got to run—”

  “Follow me!” shouted Tucker.

  “Follow you?”

  “I’ve got brains, too! Maybe little ones—but when I was on Tenth Avenue, just trying to stay alive, I heard some kids say they were going down to the docks to get a suntan.”

  “The docks?” puffed Harry. He had to run to keep up with his friend. “With all those ocean liners?”

  “Not those docks,” said Tucker. “Down in the lower part of New York there are old, abandoned piers, where people get suntans. If they take their shirt off.”

  “Old, abandoned piers—”

  “Yes. Very run-down. So, safe for us.”

  “Mmm!” Harry Kitten choked as he ran. “I don’t quite like the sound of that.”

  Furtively, in the late afternoon, the kitten and the mouse made their way to the docks.

  And if Harry Kitten didn’t like those words—“old, abandoned piers”—he liked the old, abandoned piers themselves much less.

  Yet it was sunset, and even in their dangerous ruins the docks, the decaying piers of New York, seemed almost beautiful. Red and orange light illumined the fallen roofs, the leaning walls. And the everlasting sun—in the west—seemed to bless the place. Behind the two friends, as they sat on the pier, the lights of New York were flickering on. They, too, as they danced on the great flowing river, seemed like a blessing.

  But nothing blessed the inhabitants of those piers.

  “There are rats here,” whispered Tucker.

  “Well, you’re a—”

  “I am a rodent, I guess. Not a rat! Not me!” He sleeked down his fur. And gave Harry an appealing smile. “We mice have style.” Then he growled ferociously. “And rats have none. No style. No niceness. No nothing. The bums!”

  Tucker looked around. “There are human beings here, too. Look at that guy lying over there, asleep.”

  “Poor soul,” murmured Harry. “I hate to see a human being so down on his luck. They have to find a place of their own, too.”

  “I agree.” Tucker nodded sympathetically. “I also hate to think of a certain kitten I know—and also a mouse—who are so far down on their luck that they have to live here. Yeck!”

  The “yeck” burst out because a frantic cockroach—heaven knows where he was going—had just dashed across Tucker’s left paw.

  “We’ll stay here tonight, and then—watch out!”

  A crunching, tearing sound came from the ceiling of the pier where they were. Harry yanked Tucker Mouse aside—and a huge chunk of plaster fell just where they’d been sitting.

  “If we live through the night,” said Tucker, wiping plaster dust off his fur.

  “Over here,” said Harry. A huge girder had fallen from the roof. There was an open space beneath it. “Get under here. Then, even if more of the roof comes down, we’ll be safe.”

  The two animals crawled beneath the beams.

  “Safe,” said Tucker. “I’ve about given up on being safe. Even those kids, with their nice suntans, will probably throw rocks at us tomorrow.”

  “Well, don’t give up on being safe. Rocks and falling beams or not,” said Harry. He curled up, and in a few minutes a whizzing, purring, zizzing sound told Tucker that he was asleep.

  And after fifteen minutes, so was the mouse. His first dream was all about cheeseburgers.

  Next morning, at the very same moment, the two woke up—as if the clocks inside their heads were exactly the same. They were that close.

  Dawn gloried over the east. The sight made the great buildings of Manhattan look as if they were dreams. Such great dreams!

  “I’m hungry.” Tucker yawned.

  “We’ve got no food.”

  “Oh,” Tucker admitted. “Then, what now—”

  “I don’t know.”

  And for the first time Tucker heard, not a whimper, but a fearful tone in Harry’s voice.

  “Come on, Harry,” said Tucker Mouse. “If we have to go on looking—we go!”

  All that day and night—what with hurrying, scurrying, worrying—the mouse and the kitten made their way uptown. It meant hiding behind fireplugs, in alleys, under cars. And so like the old lonely life it was!

  The next morning, just at first light—gold streamed from the east—Harry said, “I see green! Look!”

  Ahead of them were trees, shrubs, clipped hedges, aglow in the dawn.

  “We have to rest here,” said Harry.

  Heaving sighs of relief and weariness, Harry Kitten and Tucker Mouse crept under an iron fence, through a hedge, and fell asleep.

  They woke up together, and on the dot, as usual.

  “Just look at these lovely bushes—those trees,” said Harry. “Why, it’s a protected little park!”

  “Protected from what?” asked Tucker, who had noticed that, as well as the barred fence around the park, there was a gate. And it was locked. Only the people who lived nearby had a key to get in.

  “Oh, you ask so many questions,” said Harry.

  “I repeat—if this part of New York is so nice—protected from what?”

  “Oh—from hoodlums and beggars and troublemakers. And also, I would guess, from horrible dogs who aren’t on leashes!”

  “And from homeless kittens and mice, too, maybe? A park this well kept could make even me feel like a hoodlum.”

  “I am trying to find us a place to live—”

  “All right. Okay. So we’ll give it a try. At least it beats the docks.”

  So, for a while, one kitten and one mouse lived quietly in Gramercy Park. For that’s what it was called. Very quietly! Because this park in the heart of New York City seemed to have a discreet sort of upper-class hush about it. Not that there weren’t children, or older people, jus
t sitting in the sun, but everyone was—

  “They’re so polite!” said Tucker.

  “You’d rather have rats?” asked Harry, who was munching slowly, to make it last, on half a roast-beef sandwich. The meat was perfectly cooked, too: not too rare, but not too well done. It must have come from a very expensive delicatessen. Harry could not imagine how half a roast-beef sandwich could have been dropped and forgotten in Gramercy Park.

  “No, I don’t want rats,” said Tucker Mouse. “But I wouldn’t mind a little action! Now, give me a chomp on that roast beef.” He gobbled furiously.

  “Your manners—my word!” Harry murmured disapprovingly.

  Tucker almost choked. “Will you listen to King Kitten here! You improve your manners a little bit more—and lick your fur three times a day—with a little luck, you could get adopted by one of those old women who come here and knit all afternoon. Would you like that, kittykins?”

  Harry didn’t reply.

  Yet Gramercy Park was a beautiful place. Tucker couldn’t deny it. There were well-tended trees; there were flowers of all different colors: it was as if an overripe rainbow had burst and scattered its seeds over Gramercy Park. The lawn was clipped as neat and nice as a new haircut. Clean benches were set here and there. And also, all around the square, there were lovely old buildings, town houses. But there also was that high iron fence. (Of course, animals could get in through the bars—but even the animals, and especially the squirrels, had exquisite manners.)

  So Tucker and Harry, whose manners were not that exquisite or refined, had just slipped through the bars and found themselves in a very well mannered paradise.

  What little creatures were living there—a few well-bred insects, especially—were all of a very high class. One praying mantis even nodded to Tucker—and that had never happened before. Indeed, it was the very first time in New York—and perhaps anywhere—that a praying mantis had nodded cordially to a mouse.

  “This is heaven,” said Tucker. “I got smiled at by a bug!”

  But heaven—and would anyone believe this?—even heaven itself, for a mouse, has its disadvantages. A mouse gets nervous. Especially when he almost gets run over by a baby carriage.

  One afternoon, a wee bit bored by nothing but leisure, and the idle beauty of Gramercy Park, Tucker Mouse ventured out on the sidewalk, just for a change, and he almost got squashed by a lovely yellow baby carriage which was being wheeled by a nurse in a starched white uniform. The nurse herself looked quite starched, too.

  “Harry,” said Tucker, when he had returned to the rhododendron bush they were living under, “which would you prefer: to be mashed by a nurse in a stiff uniform or by a bum on the docks?”

  “What?” asked Harry.

  “Or how would you like a life in the fantastic and fabulous corridors—lowest level—of the Empire State Building?”

  “Have you gone crazy?” asked Harry.

  “Very nearly,” said Tucker.

  Harry sighed. “And I thought I’d found you happiness.”

  “Happiness is fine,” said Tucker. “But I’ve got to have some action, too. I mean—apart from baby carriages and flowers that never cease to bloom.”

  Harry lay down, and didn’t purr—he sort of moaned. “Docks, skyscrapers—what do you want?”

  “I want life, excitement!” shouted Tucker.

  “Oh, excitement, life,” mused Harry Kitten. “Where is it?”

  And then his eyes changed. A glitter, an almost challenging glitter, came into them.

  “Harry, stop that,” said Tucker. “You don’t need to go goofy—”

  “Mmm,” Harry purred. “Yes, life. And I know where it is.”

  “Where?” squeaked Tucker, who was sounding more like a kitten himself now.

  “Times Square!” shouted Harry, although his voice cracked. “The crossroads of the whole city!”

  “I’m not sure I’m up to that,” whimpered Tucker.

  “You’d better be,” commanded this little furry kitten, Harry Kitten, who sounded now more like Harry Cat.

  “Is it dangerous?” asked Tucker Mouse, wringing his paws again.

  “You bet,” said Harry Cat.

  “Tell me about it,” pleaded Tucker Mouse.

  “In the very center of the very greatest city, in the very greatest country there is—there is—Times Square! The Heart of the World!”

  “Harry, you are frightening me.”

  “There are subways—trains that run underground—there are candy stores, and hamburger joints—and most of all, there are hurrying, rushing human beings.”

  “I’m not so keen on them,” said Tucker.

  “Don’t worry—they won’t even notice you.”

  “Well, a little bit of notice,” said Tucker, “would not be too offensive.”

  “And there are—I know this, because when I prowled Times Square, I saw pipes and I saw niches, and I saw places to hide.”

  “But the people, Harry—the human beings—you don’t think they’d hound us out?”

  Harry shook his head. “They’re too much concerned with themselves. If we just keep out of the way of all the life that goes on there.”

  “Keeping out of the way of life,” said Tucker. “Is that a way of life?”

  Harry started to laugh. But quickly he stopped. For he saw that some moisture was dribbling down Tucker’s furry cheeks.

  “We have no place to live,” moaned Tucker in a choked voice. “And nobody wants us.”

  “Now, just a minute!” Harry laid a paw on his small friend’s back. “In the first place, we want each other—so that takes care of that. And in the second, you will like Times Square.”

  “Well, Harry, if you do—I might like it, too.” Tucker’s whiskers—very small—were absolutely dripping now.

  A curious thing then took place: a kitten wiped a mouse’s eyes. Neither one said a word. And the brush of those paws across those wet cheeks was the strangest touch, the most wonderful in all the world.

  “Shall we give it a try?” asked Harry quietly.

  “I guess so.” Tucker sniffed a little. “If you say so, Harry.”

  And again there began the scuttle and struggle through the streets of New York. It was raining now, too. The kind of dull drizzle that everyone hates. Gray light hushed all the harsh silhouettes of the dangerous city.

  But that was fortunate, on this special day. For a gray mouse and a kitten whose fur hadn’t quite decided its color could pass almost unseen through the equally gray streets of the city.

  The people in Times Square—when Tucker and Harry reached it, safe—were far too busy avoiding the drizzle to notice two shivering little creatures.

  “We’re in luck,” whispered Harry.

  “So this is luck,” mused Tucker Mouse, as a man with a blaring radio passed by. “That penny must be a bust.”

  Although he could remember Tenth Avenue, Tucker had always avoided Times Square. That is, when he could: when the sanitation workers hadn’t chased him in that direction. There was too much hustling and bustling there, too much pushing and shoving—and no niceness at all.

  There were people dashing everywhere, and bumping each other, and not caring a bit. They all were trying desperately to escape the drizzle, which had now turned to rain.

  “I know there’s a grille in the street here—that leads down to the subway—” said Harry.

  “The subway—” wailed Tucker.

  “You’d rather get soaked in the rain? And maybe bonked by a portable radio?”

  “The subway,” said Tucker, utterly defeated. “And how, might I ask, do you know about the subway?”

  “When I was a kitten—”

  “Mmm! A lion already!”

  “—I did some prowling late at night—and I’m sure that there’s a grate near here.” Harry’s eyes flashed left, right—everywhere.

  “And what is so safe”—Tucker Mouse was shivering—“about the subway?”

  “It’s dry, and it’s wa
rm. Now will you hush up?”

  “Two very good reasons.” Tucker wiggled his growing whiskers.

  “There it is!” shouted Harry. “Over there! Across the street. That grille in the sidewalk.”

  “What eyes you have!”

  “Come on. But wait for the light—”

  In the very small time it takes for a traffic light to change, a mouse and a cat had dashed across Forty-second Street and vanished through a grille in the concrete. They were just small enough to fit. And then they were gone …

  Gone underground—to the strange, but lively, warren of the Times Square subway station.

  “Isn’t it wonderful!” said Harry, awe-struck. He gazed at the stores—for some of the subway stations in New York have stores in them—and at the lunch counters and newspaper stands. But “Oh, those neon lights!”—red, green, blue, a rainbow of colors—they were what fascinated him most.

  “I’m scared,” said Tucker, who wasn’t quite so fascinated. “I’ve never been in a place like this before.”

  “It’s marvelous!”

  “Sure, marvelous. So where do we live?”

  “That remains to be seen. Discovered, I mean. I know the way in, but—”

  “But?”

  “—I don’t know the layout. Let’s explore.”

  “I’ve heard that before!” said Tucker Mouse.

  But exploring they went, late at night, after hiding behind a trash can which most of the humans didn’t bother to use—and when most of the commuters had pushed and crammed their way into the subway cars, to get home.

  The station was more quiet then: they could do a little prowling in safety.

  Harry was still bewitched by the place, and Tucker had begun to be a little bit bewitched himself—especially by the smells that came from the lunch counters. They made his mouth water.

  “I might be happy here, Harry, after all,” the mouse admitted breezily.

  “So might we both,” said Harry. “But we’ve got to find a place of our own. A private place.”

  “Like a home, you mean?”