They were a scrawny, scruffy bunch, the kind of cats that couldn’t get along in civilized society and now, with the new Dumpsters, didn’t have to anymore. Some were runaways who’d been kicked around once too often by their owners. Others had been transported to strange towns and abandoned or left behind when their families moved to the city. That was fine with them. They didn’t need families anymore. They’d grown used to living outside on their own. The idea of coming home every night to an overheated kitchen and a bowl of store-bought cat pellets wasn’t high on their list of priorities.
Shredder looked tough, but he was an old cat now with an old cat’s sadder and deeper thoughts. Compared to Murray the Claw and the rest of the highway bunch, he wasn’t much of a ruffian anymore. The foul language that came out of the mouths of these cats was shocking and unprintable. The battles they fought against each other were savage. The rotten stuff they ate and the way they ate it was revolting beyond words, and since they’d long ago stopped washing up like proper cats, they were malodorous, which means they stank. For the most part, they were avoided by humans and animals alike, left to occupy their patch of forest in lowlife peace.
Until they broke the peace, that is. Then there was Animal Control. From time to time AnCon officers were called in to sweep across the parking lot and stop fights. They arrested stragglers, bagged escapees, broke up the biggest brawls with fire hoses and attempted to stamp down the bushes and undergrowth where many cats made their homes. Those who were caught were sent straight to The Shelter, never to return as far as anyone knew.
“What happens there?” a young stray dared to ask one time.
“Curtains is what happens,” Murray the Claw had growled. “The lights go out.”
“You mean…?”
“Thad’s right. And no applause neither.”
This was the frightening, grown-up world the kits were about to enter, if they ever smartened up enough to figure out where the Dumpsters were. Now they seemed too exhausted to be hungry. After old Shredder had gone, they curled up together in a soft mound on the side of the highway and went to sleep. When they woke up, it was morning and Khalia Koo was there watching them, along with her sidekick, Jolly Roger. This did not bode well for the kits at all.
Khalia Koo was a once-beautiful Siamese cat who’d been thrown into a fire by a mean-tempered owner and set ablaze. Afterward, though she survived, her face was ruined and she’d turned bitter toward the world. She’d gone into hiding in the little woods and taken to wearing various plastic containers over her head to conceal the horror of her scars. At the moment when the kits woke up, she was wearing a twelve-ounce strawberry yogurt container with the eyeholes gnawed out.
“Well, well, what is this-ss we have here?” she asked Jolly Roger, her blue eyes glittering through the gnaw holes. Inside the container, her s’s echoed with an unnerving hiss.
Jolly Roger was used to that. He was a brutish yellow cat with a mouthful of rotten teeth, known for paralyzing his enemies just by smiling.
“Kittens, my dear,” he answered, grinning horribly, “but so small you’d hardly know it. Good for nothing, I’d say.”
“Not so fas-sst.” Khalia Koo paused over the kits. To make a living, she ran a rat farm back in the woods, and finding good help was hard. The highway cats were undependable workers. They’d gobble up a rat on the sly before it was anywhere near fat enough for market, which cut into the profits. Khalia Koo sold rat meat to a pet food company in the city. It was a new item, Canned Rodent, on the supermarket shelves and still making a name for itself. Khalia Koo had high hopes for her business, though.
“We might put the kits to work as trainees-ss,” she hissed. “Mold their minds the right way and they’ll be ours for life. We wouldn’t have to pay them either. They’re underage.”
Jolly Roger smiled. “They’d probably just die on you. They’re runty little things—look at their legs.”
“Well, how about selling them as overgrown rats-ss? Looks like they’ve got meat on them.” Khalia Koo stuck out a claw and jabbed one of the girl kits in the haunch.
“Ow!” shrieked the kit.
“Hmmm. Not as much there as I thought,” Khalia Koo said. “Fuzz mostly. We could use them for pillow stuffing.”
“Dead or alive?” Jolly Roger asked.
“Well, dead they wouldn’t need feeding. But alive they’d give out heat. It’s been a cold spring. How’d you like a pre-warmed pillow to get into bed with at night?”
Jolly Roger smiled and smiled at this. In short order, the kits were captured and dragged back to Khalia Koo’s rat farm, a horrid place where the meat rats were kept in wire cages built several feet above the ground, out of reach of passing carnivores, including their own guards.
The kits were thrown into a tiny pen at the back. They cowered together, nibbling bits of skunk cabbage and stale bread that were tossed in after them. Anyone could see they weren’t going to last long under these conditions. To make matters worse, that night Khalia Koo and Jolly Roger stuffed them into pillowcases and went to sleep on them.
Shredder heard about it. The next day, he went by the kits’ pen and shook his head.
“It’s a shame, a shame. After these kits were miraculously saved on the highway and all, now you’re going to finish them off like common field rats?” He gazed accusingly at Khalia Koo.
“Mind your own business-ss!” she hissed through the lime sherbet container she was wearing that day. “They get the same treatment as every other cat around here.”
“Well, they’re too young to stand it,” Shredder said. “They’ll shrivel up and die. Then you’ll have a miracle on your conscience. You’ll have gone and snuffed out a miracle.”
“A miracle? Rat-wash!” Khalia Koo laughed. She’d heard the story of the kits’ amazing crossing but didn’t give it much credit. “These kits had blind luck, that’s all. They’re no more ss-special than anyone els-sse.”
Shredder twitched his grizzled tail. “Maybe they are and maybe they aren’t. All I’m saying is, what happened out there wasn’t usual. They were goners, and then in one blink they were safe. Ask Murray the Claw—he saw the whole thing.”
Perhaps she did consult Murray because, later, the sharp eyes of a cottage cheese container could be seen examining the kits from behind a tree. That night, Khalia Koo was careful not to roll too hard on them in her pillow. Next morning, she gave them a sweet-and-sour shrimp that Jolly Roger had unearthed in one of the Dumpsters. It was old and smelly, but the kits gobbled it up.
When Shredder went by again at the end of the week, the kittens had put on weight. They didn’t look too bad, he noticed; a little sad, maybe, from being tossed out so suddenly on their own. They weren’t complainers, though, like some. Shredder admired that. He wasn’t a complainer either.
“Where are you guys from?” he asked, leaning over their pen in a friendly way that wasn’t his usual style. It had been a long time since he’d been near any kittens.
They couldn’t answer, of course. They were still too young. They recognized him from the highway, though, and gazed at him with such eager, trusting eyes that he glanced away in embarrassment.
“Don’t look at me like that. There’s nothing more I can do,” he growled, and went off into the woods determined to put them out of his mind.
That evening, though, crouched at the highway’s windy edge, Shredder found his thoughts circling back to the kittens with a strange feeling of…was it warmth? That would never do! He flicked his tail fiercely and turned back to the wind and the roar of traffic.
KHALIA KOO’S RAT FARM was the only cat-owned business for miles around. Most highway cats found it necessary to work for her from time to time, when pickings at the Dumpsters froze up or the highway was rained out. The kits hadn’t been at the farm very long before their arrival was noticed and began to stir up talk. After all, every cat in those woods had personal dealings with Interstate 95. Like a powerful river, it flowed down the center of their lives, som
etimes giving, sometimes taking away, delivering food and comfort one day, sudden death the next. Among the highway cats, close calls were proof of courage and something to boast about.
“I survived an oil truck going seventy-five miles an hour.”
“Well, I outran a horse van and only lost three whiskers.”
“A forty-foot camper went right over me in the center lane! I jumped up on its tailpipe and took a ride!”
“That’s impossible! Campers don’t have tailpipes.”
“Well, this one did!”
“Liar!”
“Bonehead!”
“Fur ball!”
“Toad!”
Here the conversation would usually disintegrate into an exchange of claws and teeth.
The kits’ crossing sent a ripple of excitement through the cat community. Never had an entire litter of kittens, tiny infants, no less, been so fortunate as to come across together, without injury, when all hope was dashed and rescue seemed impossible. Who were the little survivors? Everyone wanted to know. How did they get so lucky?
Shredder had an answer to that. “It wasn’t luck. It was a miracle!” he declared to anyone who would listen. “If you’d been there, you’d have seen. These kittens are something special. There’s no other way to explain it.”
Of course, there was another way. Murray the Claw, still angry about losing his bet, was against all miracles. Holding to his theory of things being fixed and fishy, he talked against the kits whenever possible, making them out to be weaklings of low intelligence, hardly worth the fur they came wrapped in. That didn’t stop the buzz, though. As word of the little ones spread, even cats who had never worked at the rat farm, those too ornery or too independent to sign on to a day job, came by to look at them in their pen. When Khalia came out to feed the kits at night, she’d had to wade through a crowd.
“Go on. Get out of here!” she’d snap. “What’s a bunch of hard-nosed, flea-bitten characters like you want with kittens? Stand back. Give them some air!”
Grumbling and snarling, the cats would back off. A minute later, they’d close in again. Miracles were things they hadn’t seen much of in their lives.
The kits seemed completely unaware of the stir they were causing. They went determinedly about the business of being kittens. They ran. They pounced. They rolled and bit. They were far too young, apparently, to know who or what had rescued them, or to wonder why they were here in this godforsaken place and what would happen next. They were so tiny and so obviously incapable of escape that after a while, Khalia Koo didn’t bother to keep them penned up anymore. She allowed them to wander the farm freely during the day.
They went just about everywhere. With their big, curious eyes they examined the cages where the rats were housed together. They visited the feeding machines and the weighing scales and surveyed, with the most innocent expressions, a pile of leftover tails.
“Scram!” “Bug off!” “Whatcha staring at, Twinkie face?” the cat workers snarled, embarrassed to be seen in such a nasty line of work. From the corners of their eyes, they examined them, though. The kits’ fur was patchy and their claws had no length. They couldn’t hiss or growl, leap or attack. They had none of the skills necessary for a serious highway cat to survive in the world, and yet here they were, cheerfully carrying on. What was it about this that fascinated the cats?
Whatever it was, the workers soon found themselves cleaning up their language around the kits. They cut back on spitting and fighting. A few cats even went so far as to tidy their coats and brush up their whiskers, as if they were hoping to impress the little nitwits.
The other cats sneered loudly when these dandies first showed up among them. No highway cat had ever bothered with appearances before. Dirt was a badge of honor, ticks and fleas the price of freedom. Not long after, however, a wave of grooming swept the farm. Ruffians who had never been associated with “style” suddenly reported for work with sleek legs and bouffant tails. Soon the whole rat farm was looking cleaner, acting better and running more efficiently. Rat-gobbling on the sly (always a messy affair) largely disappeared. Production was picking up!
Being a sharp businesswoman, Kahlia Koo noticed. One day, when no one was looking, she moved the kits out of their tiny pen into the main house with her.
“Who’d ever guess-ss you little ninnies would be s-ssuch a hit?” she hissed at them through the margarine tub she was wearing that day. That night, she excused them from pillow duty.
“Going soft in your old age?” Jolly Roger teased her, baring a yellow fang through his whiskers.
“Clam up,” said Khalia. “They’re a good invessstment, that’s all, fit for better than to lie under your muddy jowls.”
“Who says I have muddy jowls?” Jolly Roger took a swipe at the nearest kit.
“I say!” Khalia replied, giving him a whack on the head.
That night when Shredder stopped by, he noticed that the kits had been served fresh grilled tuna for dinner, while Jolly Roger, smiling murderously, was gnawing on the ancient, meatless spine of a boiled catfish.
CHAPTER THREE
Shredder began to stop in more often at the rat farm.
“You again, Grandpop?” Jolly Roger snickered. “You got a sweetheart somewhere here?”
“Bottle it, maggot face.”
“A little touchy, aren’t we?”
“We are not!”
As far as anyone knew, Shredder wasn’t the sort of cat who cared to attach himself to anyone or anything. He’d certainly never had a sweetheart. The way he told it, he’d been a traveler for most of his life. Abandoned as a newborn on the streets of New Orleans, he’d taken to the road earlier than most, heard the call of the wild and never looked back.
“I’m a one-cat band and plan to stay that way,” he liked to boast.
“How’d you get all the way up here?” Khalia Koo asked him once.
“Came up the Mississippi on boats and barges,” he answered. “Took me a couple of years just to make it to St. Louis. I stowed away on a steamer in Cairo, Illinois, and went up the Ohio. A cold-blooded river cat I was, outside the law and ruthless as they come. Nobody could lay a hand on me.”
He glanced at Khalia to be sure she was appreciating this violent description of his character.
“And then?”
Shredder looked away. “Let’s say I caught a bus and came here.”
“Caught a bus? How’d you do that?”
“It caught me, actually,” Shredder had to admit. “I got locked in the baggage compartment. Big mistake. Four days in the heat of summer without water. I nearly bought it that time.”
“No wonder you’re so tough.”
“You better believe it!”
Khalia Koo smiled under the orange juice container that was her disguise that day. She knew a thing or two about hiding old wounds and had guessed that Shredder might be keeping a secret.
“What’s this I hear about you being someone’s respectable family pet once, with a roof over your head and a blanket in the corner?”
Shredder squinted sharply. “It’s a lie,” he snarled.
“I thought so.” Khalia shrugged. “I didn’t think anybody as tough as you could stand living with that nonsense.”
“That’s right—they couldn’t.”
Inside her container, Khalia Koo smiled her knowing smile again.
TRY AS HE MIGHT TO KEEP to the highway rules of turning a cold eye, Shredder found he couldn’t stay away from the kittens.
He began inventing reasons for going by the farm. He was picking something up, he’d say, or leaving something off. Once he got there, he’d look around for the kits. There was nothing in it, he told himself. They were his winning bet, that’s all. He was interested to see if they could keep on beating the odds.
The kits watched out for Shredder too. When they saw him coming, their eyes lit up and they’d run over each other trying to get to him. It gave the old cat a good feeling to see that. He’d glance around to be
sure no one was watching and tickle them under their chins. A minute later, he’d be playing tag or rolling on the grass, as full of high spirits as a youngster himself. He’d take them into the woods, show them a skunk or how to tell north and south from the slant of the sun. Kits should know things like that, shouldn’t they? Who else was going to teach them?
Small and scraggly as the little forest was, it was a pretty place to scamper around in. The trees were old and tall, sheltering the nests of many songbirds and climbing animals. Spicy-smelling pine needles lay thick on the ground, warmed by sunshine that shafted through a latticework of branches above.
That spring, tiny flowers appeared along what might once have been woodland paths if anyone had been there to walk them. No one was anymore. The shopping center was where people walked now, while what remained of the forest’s wild creatures followed ancient routes of their own.
The highway cats, more recently arrived, walked apart and alone. Their paths were random, winding through brambles and thickets, around stumps and fallen trees, past bogs and anthills, across a pebbly brook that rattled from a freshwater spring at the heart of the wood. Nearby, on a small hill long lost to outside eyes, a mossy stone wall enclosed an abandoned graveyard. Potter, its crumbling headstones read, hieroglyphics to the cats. They scampered past without a glance.
A grove of tall pines grew off to one side. Shredder began to take the kittens there for climbing lessons.
“Climb in a circle—don’t go straight up,” he advised them. “With a regular tree, you can jump branch to branch. With a pine, it’s dense. You’ve got to work your way up.”
The kits tried to follow directions.
“Not bad. Practice in your spare time,” he encouraged them. Privately, he worried: they seemed strangely slow. They couldn’t keep control of their feet and tended to lose their balance in a most uncat-like way. There was a second problem too. They always wanted to stick together.
Highway Cats Page 2