by Bill Wallace
• • •
Again, I woke with a start. Blinking, I looked around to see where I was. The Rotten Willy was wrapped about me like a blanket. I was curled against his tummy—warm and cozy as could be.
I had no idea how long I had slept, but the ground was covered with a blanket of white. I could see it through the crack between his neck and paws. More snow fell. I could hear the soft, feathery sound as the flakes landed on the roof.
“Why are you being so nice to me?” I whispered, not sure if he was awake or not. An enormous brown eye peeked at me, but he didn’t answer.
I leaned forward and stared at the eye. “Dogs chase cats. Dogs eat cats. That’s the natural way of things. But you don’t. Why?”
He snorted and plopped his head back on his paws. I leaned closer to the eye.
“Is it because of Tuffy?”
The eye glared at me. Then it closed tight. I crawled over his huge legs and stood, staring down at the closed eye.
“You told me that Tuffy was your friend. Did she make you be nice to cats?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He raised his head and turned it toward the doorway. I climbed up and put my paws on his cheek. I stood, staring down at his other closed eye.
“Why?”
The eye opened, but it didn’t look at me. It stared off into the darkness of the doghouse.
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“It makes me sad to talk about Tuffy. It hurts to even think about her.” He closed his eye again.
I stood, watching him for a moment. I remembered the way Tom and I felt about Louie. How we missed him, and how we tried not to think about him.
“Did Tuffy get smushed?”
His massive head gave a tiny wobble.
“No. She just got old.”
“I had a friend named Louie. He got smushed. I sure do miss him. I remember, one time when he fell out of the tree and landed in Rocky’s yard. We thought he was a goner, but . . .”
• • •
It worked. I told him about Rocky and Louie, and I told him about how Louie was going to swat the Pomeranian on the nose—only he couldn’t tell which end was which. And I told him that—sometimes—it helped to talk. And that talking made the hurt not be so bad.
He sighed and rolled back over so he could look at me.
“I was only a baby when the people-animals took me and my brothers and sisters away from our mama,” he began. “They put us in a pet store. It was really cold and smelly and lonely. But my David found me and brought me home. I loved him and we played a lot, only at night I couldn’t sleep with him. I had to sleep outside. That’s where Tuffy lived. Tuffy was an old cat. I think she was a Si-mon-ese.”
“Siamese,” I corrected.
“Siamese?” he asked. “Mostly white with black ears and a black tail?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “That’s a Siamese.”
“Anyway,” he shrugged his ears, “she was old and cranky, but I loved her a lot. Tuffy was kind of like a mother. She washed my face with her tongue. She scolded me if I had an accident on the floor. Tuffy played with me. One time, I got too rough and wouldn’t mind her. She pounced on my head and bit me on the ear. It was nice to have someone warm to sleep with. This one time, after I got pretty big, I smarted off to her. Man, she jumped right on my back and . . .”
• • •
The rest of the night, I listened to him talk about Tuffy. I could feel the love from him. I could sense how much the old cat had meant to him as he thought of her.
Early the next morning, I squeezed through the crack in the big double gate and went home. The Mama was happy to see me. She fed me and told me over and over again how she was afraid something bad had happened to me. She even let me sleep inside when she left for work.
The next day, when she let me out, I went to see my friend. Rotten Willy and I talked about my Katie and his boy David. We talked about the college place. We took a catnap—I guess you’d have to call it a dog-and-catnap—inside his house. And that afternoon we played chase in the snow.
I heard my Mama call, but I stayed with Willy. He missed his David as much as I missed my Katie. It was nice to have someone to talk to.
• • •
In the middle of the night I woke up and glanced beside me. The beast was enormous! He was huge! With little tufts of brown around his mouth and over his eyes, the rest of him was black as death itself. On top of all that, his breath smelled bad and he was . . . a dog!
Dogs are loud and rude and noisy. They’d just as soon fight with each other as us cats. Dogs and cats just can’t be friends!
My tail flipped—first one way, then the other. Okay, so think of him as a Rotten Willy—not a dog. Nothing says you can’t be friends with a Rotten Willy. The thought made me smile. Gently, I reached out a paw and touched his gigantic nose. A humongous eye peeked up at me.
“You ever eat spaghetti and meatballs?”
Willy raised his head and frowned.
“What’s that?”
“You mean, you’ve never had spaghetti and meatballs.”
“No.”
“You’re gonna love it. I got this people-friend named Luigi. He makes the best spaghetti and meatballs you ever sank your teeth into.”
About the Author
BILL WALLACE has had pets for as long as he can remember. He grew up with all sorts of animals around the house.
“Our dogs and cats always got along,” Bill said. “Fact was, I just knew they could communicate and tell what the other was thinking.”
But a friend of Bill’s had a dog who didn’t like cats. When he rode over on his bicycle to play, the dog almost got Mike, a Siamese that Bill really liked.
He used that dog for Butch in the book Snot Stew. Butch was really a “bad guy.” Then a fan wrote and wanted to know why Bill made dogs the villains and told him how his dogs and cats always got along. It was that letter—and the six dogs and one cat that live on the Wallaces’ farm in Oklahoma, combined with Bill and Carol’s “granddogs”—that gave him the idea for this story.
Aladdin
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by Bill Wallace
Illustrations copyright © 1998 by David Slonim
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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ISBN 978-0-6710-1769-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-6710-1415-5 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4814-3143-9 (eBook)