Cat in an Orange Twist

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Actually, you can develop a taste for it,” I say from experience.

  “You can develop a taste for anything,” she jeers. “I have seen the Free-to-be-Feline heaped on your bowl at the Circle Ritz.”

  “Miss Temple is a health food fanatic.”

  “Not for herself, that much I have noticed.”

  “She is only thinking of my better good.”

  “Come on, Pops. Admit that you would love to muscle in on my private chef at the Phoenix.”

  “Oriental cuisine does little for me, except for the koi.”

  At this point during our culinary discourse the truck does a wheelie around the corner that slams Louise and myself against its dented steel side. This adds indignity to personal assault by tilting so far over that the beer puddles around our captive feet.

  Louise leaps atop a swaying carton, shaking her dainty black tootsies and sprinkling a yellow rain on my head.

  The wild turn has shaken the roll-down door loose and I spy daylight. I head for it.

  “Quick! Before we’re locked in here until the yahoo driving it comes back to release it.”

  Louise follows my orders for once and is out the vanishing crack of daylight like a furry eel.

  We stand in the street and watch the beer truck roar into the distance, leaking yellow rain.

  “So this is the mother country,” Louise says, gazing around.

  I turn to take in your usual urban slum. The terrain is filled with small shabby crack houses, weed-choked sandy lots, cars lacking wheels, and windows flaunting iron burglar bars like better domiciles flash white-painted shutters.

  Fast-food wrappers skitter across the rutted streets, rasping like autumn leaves . . . not that Vegas, with all its palm and pine trees, is much for fallen leaves in the autumn or any other season.

  The flap of dry paper has Miss Louise making 180-degree turns with her back up and shivs out.

  There is still nothing to be seen except urban decay.

  I hear the distant rumble of a low-rider, so I shag Miss Louise out of the middle of the street and into the nearest vacant lot, which is not hard to find. This section of town is mostly vacant lots.

  Amid a tall stand of pampas grass, a silver mesh cage crouches. A rank glob of commercial cat food hunkers in one corner like a dead gray rat.

  “Sucker bait,” Louise diagnoses with a disdainful sniff. “How they hope to lure any hep cat with that lump of two-week-old chopped mackerel liver is anybody’s guess.”

  “If you had not eaten in two weeks, I guess you would be lured,” I point out.

  “So this is a feral internment camp,” she says, looking around. “I always kept to myself on the street. Better company.”

  I notice that her ears are at half-mast. “You know about the Program, then?” I ask. She has never said much about her roaming days, other than that I was the cad to blame.

  “What is new?” she asks with a careless swagger. “The helpful humans trap the Wildspats and their ilk, and whisk them away for a low-rent neutering, then they return them to their turf, expecting attrition to eliminate the colony members without them having to resort to so-called euthanasia, or what I call knockin’ ’em off wholesale. It is one way to reduce dependent populations without resorting to open warfare. Or welfare.”

  “Not such a bad solution,” I say. “These ferals are never going to cozy up to a domestic situation, and this way they do not litter the streets.”

  She shrugs, unconvinced. “Not all of us can rehabilitate. Still, it is not our fault that we have been abandoned by humans and forced to fend for ourselves. I cannot understand why we allowed ourselves to be domesticated in the dim, distant past in the first place.”

  “I do. We were taken in by the nice ones before we met the mean ones. It is still the same old story, optimists end up pessimists in the face of the real world.”

  “So what are we doing here in this pathetic part of town? What can we learn except who hates whom and how much more misery there is in the world than we thought?”

  I look around. The long weeds are stirring. I did not expect that we would be allowed to gawk unmolested for long.

  The only question is which gang has happened upon us. I am hoping the proximity of the Spade Ladies Cat-tail Gardening Club’s portable pied-à-terres means that our own species rules the immediate roost around here.

  On the other mitt, my hopes may be misplaced.

  I spring into position back-to-back with Louise and spit out a . . . suggestion.

  “Suffering Succotash, Louise! We are on alert until we find out who is rattling the sagebrush around here.”

  I hear her shivs clawing sand. Her fluffy rear member is twitching up a sandstorm of irritated feline fury. Mine makes like a metronome itself, pounding possession into our square foot of turf.

  “Mr. Midnight!” cries a juvenile voice.

  I see Gimpy galloping toward me. On three legs, with which he now makes better time than he did on the three and one distorted broken limb that had healed without veterinary care.

  The little yearling nearly knocks me off my feet, which is saying something for a twenty-pound dude like myself.

  Gimpy licks the sand out of my face that his own exuberant entrance has kicked up.

  When I blink away the grit, I see we are surrounded by the same old gang.

  What a relief.

  Behind me, Louise is a whirling dervish of sand and fur and snarling female fury. There is something to be said for that combination.

  “Hello, Big Boy.” My next welcome mew comes from Snow Off-white, the rangy female I encountered on my last, and first, expedition into feral cat territory.

  Her greeting rubs the dust off my dapper sides, causing Miss Louise to hiss and spit out a warning.

  “Do not get your ruff in a wad, honey.” Snow Off-white eyes Louise and pauses to wet a whisker with a soiled paw. “This old boy and I go way back.”

  Well, only a couple of weeks, but I can see that Miss Louise is impressed with the wide range of my acquaintanceship on the wild side. Maybe not favorably, but she is impressed, and that is a start.

  “What happened to you?” I ask Gimpy, who is still prancing around me on his three legs. The fourth has gone missing entirely, and I see a bald spot where it used to be.

  Granted it was a twisted mess, but . . .

  “The alien abductors,” he says importantly. “They swooped me up in one of their silver ships. Then all I remember is this long needle coming toward me, and when I woke up I was back here, but three of my vital members were missing.”

  The gathered gang members emit sighs of resigned horror. They do not like the alien abductions. They do not like the genital gentrification going on in their neighborhood. However, they cannot argue that Gimpy is not better off now.

  I process this tale with my superior worldview. Gimpy has been kidnapped for his own good, rendered sterile (which requires losing his two, um, hairballs), and surgically freed from the burden of his mutilated limb. I see how these people think: better three legs that work than a fourth that puts the whole system out of joint.

  “You look good, kit,” I tell him with a manly box on the ears. Homo sapiens is always big on boxing. In the ring. We just do our boxing in the litter. “You will be winning the Special Olympics in no time.”

  I notice one major piece missing from this reunion.

  “Ma Barker around?” I ask.

  There is a silence I do not like to hear. Or not hear.

  “What is it?” Louise asks, her fur now damp and flattened into an imitation of a civil coat.

  She sure is quick on the uptake.

  The big marmalade bruiser known as Tom swaggers forward.

  “She took a hit.”

  I manage to keep my voice level and calm. “Car or canine?”

  “Neither.”

  I lift the few, airy vibrissae (whiskers to you) over my eyes.

  “Those are generally the usual suspects.”

  “R
acoon,” Snow Off-white says, putting me out of my misery.

  There is a silence filled only the by the snare-drum rhythm of McDonald’s wrappers blowing past like tumbleweeds.

  Racoons are a tough tangle. They come fully shived and toothed, and are canny and fierce opponents.

  “I heard you guys got coyotes around here.”

  “And racoons. With all the suburban development, the wildlife is being herded into the badder neighborhoods, where no one cares enough to eradicate them.”

  “Is that why your gang was hanging out down by the new May-lords store going up?”

  “Yeah. Ma Barker was insisting we needed to relocate into a nicer neighborhood. That was one of the last empty lots left in town. She figured we would at least get a better grade of fast-food throw-aways there.”

  “And,” pipes up Gimpy, “she was big-time annoyed about my leg and all the alien abduction visits. Called it ‘uncon-scent-you-all’ surgery. Said free food was not worth sacrificing your freedom.”

  Louise drops a murmur in my ear. “This is your mama they are talking about?”

  “She might be something of a socialist,” I admit. “So, uh, where is she?”

  “Holing up in the MASH unit.”

  “You guys make illegal hooch?”

  “Nah. MASH stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. What is the matter? They do not have cable TV at the fancy place you hang out? I will show you.”

  “At least,” Louise hisses in my ear, “it sounds like she is still alive.”

  “Yeah. And I bet meeting you will make her sit up and howl too.”

  Louise ignores me and turns tail, trotting ahead to accompany Tom. Traitor!

  “So how did she end up called Ma Barker?” Louise asks, batting her twenty-four-carat golds at him.

  “Held off four rogue Hydrophobias a while back,” Tom snarls. “A long while back. When she was done with them, there was not a one who could do anything more than whimper. They had been after her latest six-pack of kits for dog meat. She stole the bark from the whole darn gang for several days, until their wounds scabbed over. That was before the alien abductors saw to it that she had no more kits.”

  “High time,” I hear Miss Louise mutter.

  “I guess she was past her prime,” Snow Off-white admits. “Gimpy is our last young ‘un. His littermates were caught and probably ended up domesticated, but he wiggled away.”

  “Straight into the metal mangler of a car,” Louise notes.

  No one can say anything to that, so we trudge around broken glass and discarded sharp-tipped needles that are poisoned on top of being sharp, and those strange deflated balloons that humans do unthinkable acts with, and keep mum.

  This territory is occupied by homeless humans as well, and they are nicer to our kind than many of the housed ones are. But some of the humans who come here are scum preying on the bad luck and ill health of their own kind.

  I cannot imagine in what shape Ma Barker is if she is being kept in a MASH unit. Until now I thought a MASH was a speeding car.

  Not long ago I had to pull Louise back from the brink of a near-death experience. I do not relish trying the same trick with a tough but pretty elderly broad.

  A racoon. Not your usual urban evildoer. Nobody is ready to go up against a rogue racoon. It might even have a form of “distemper” the humans call “rabies” to come this close to civilization. If that is the case and the beast has bitten Ma Barker, she is roadkill.

  I rue the day I ever told Miss Louise about her maybe-grandmother. Dames always take relationships way too seriously. It is a built-in flaw in the species. On the other mitt, without dames, we would have no species, flawed or otherwise.

  Orange Bowl Special

  Temple awoke to the insistent chirping of her cell phone. It was worse than sparrows in the chimney, which was not a current problem because the Circle Ritz didn’t have chimneys.

  Her left calf was numb from Louie lying on it.

  She shook a leg, quite literally, and leaped out of bed, limping across the parquet floor to her tote bag. It leaned drunkenly against a wall, which reminded Temple of her 90-proof bedtime toddy with Matt the night before last, which reminded her of . . . well, never mind.

  “Yes?” Temple answered the phone. Max! At last! She needed to see him, touch him, but hearing him would do for now.

  “It’s Pritchard Merriweather.”

  “Oh. Yes?”

  “How fast can you move?”

  Temple eyed her left leg twitching with tingles as she leaned against the wall. “Not fast at the moment. My leg’s gone asleep.”

  “I meant on publicity.”

  “Like canned lightning.”

  “Good. Ms. Wong is doing an orange-peel blessing at Maylords at noon today. Since Sunday’s a slow news day, it should be worth some coverage on the nightly news, maybe even national. Can you swing the locals?”

  “Can you fax me the particulars on an orange-peel blessing in ten minutes?”

  “Two.”

  “Done.”

  “See you there.”

  Temple’s ear was slightly warmed from the brain-killing press of her cell phone. Louie had deigned to rise and had come over to rub against her numb leg.

  Maybe he was apologizing . . . or, on the other hand, being a cat, just rubbing it in.

  Temple sighed heavily, feeling her spine flatten against the wall. Her regular phone rang, and it was time to hobble to the office on the other side of the living room and peel the fax sheets off her machine.

  Maybe that was the “peel” in an orange-peel blessing, but Temple doubted that she would ever be so lucky.

  Forty minutes later she had a snappy press release ready to fax to the local TV stations. She decided to hit the radio stations too. This was a very funky event, according to the gospel straight from Wong Inc.

  She checked her watch and saw it was almost 9:00 A.M. Okay to phone one floor above.

  She pressed a quick-dial button on her phone and sat down, tapping her fully circulating left foot.

  “Sorry, did I wake you?” she asked when the ringing stopped.

  “Just barely,” came Matt’s voice. Matt’s bedroom voice, come to think of it. Only in her dreams. Just what had she dreamed last night anyway? Max had the bedroom voice, and the personal history to back it up.

  “Listen. There’s a very trendy spiritual event happening at May-lords this noon. I thought you might want to be there.”

  “Spiritual? At Maylords?”

  “It’s an orange-peel blessing with Amelia Wong presiding. I was rounding up some media and thought, hey, Matt is media. Maybe there will be some fodder for a future Midnight Hour discussion.”

  “Uh, orange-peel blessing?”

  “I know. It sounds blasphemous to a mainstream religion guy, but I’m told it will ‘cleanse and bless’ Maylords and its inhabitants in the wake of the other night’s ‘evil assault,’ the Friday from hell. It will erase a multitude of negative influences and will correct and compensate for known and unknown feng shui problems, providing a fresh start after even the most unfortunate circumstances. It is also appropriate to bless a home or office upon moving in, and can ensure an auspicious grand opening for a new business.”

  “Sounds like ‘Reverend’ Wong should have performed this rite before the gala opening night.”

  “Better late than never,” Temple said.

  “You were reading that off a press release, I hope.”

  “My personal press release. PR is magic: transforming disaster into advantage.”

  “So that’s what you and Kinsella have in common.”

  “Ah, do you mean magic . . . or disaster?”

  “I’ll let you answer that one. So, okay. If you want me there, I’ll come.”

  Ooooh. Temple bit her tongue to avoid an inciting answer to that innocent double entendre. Ow. “I have to run. Actually, I have to run off at the mouth and follow up my faxes with personal calls. I’ll have a cauliflower ear by noon
. The ceremony’s at four P.M.”

  “See you there,” Matt signed off.

  Temple listened to the dial tone drone for a while to help her heart rate slow down.

  A bit after three, Temple eased her Miata into a parking space all by its lonesome near the street, so no one would park in adjacent slots and chip her paint.

  She surveyed the array of media vans pulled up in front of Maylords with satisfaction. They represented every major local station, as well as the networks.

  The facade of Maylords was pretty jam-packed too. Workmen moved between the room settings and the great outdoors, replacing huge sheets of glass.

  Temple hustled inside on her white patent leather clogs, a patriotic symphony in a red-and-blue knit suit. The floor, she was relieved to see, was pristine, and all of Friday night’s shattered glass had melted like icicles in the Las Vegas heat. If it weren’t for the workmen rein-stalling the plate glass windows, one would never know. . . .

  A wandering TV reporter with videographer in tow started to intercept Temple, but was diverted by the sight of a Day-glo orange Gangsters limo as long as Shamoo trick-or-treating as a pumpkin. It was pulling up to the entrance.

  In the manner of a clown car the back door opened to unleash the entire Amelia Wong contingent.

  Temple nodded like a hostess with a spring in her neck as they passed her on the way in. Then she sidled up to the chauffeur clad in an orange zoot suit.

  “What model is this?” she asked.

  “The O.J. It comes with Bruno Magli footrests and a lemonade concession.”

  “Isn’t that a bit tasteless, even for Gangsters?”

  “Hey, taste is in the mouth of the beholder.”

  Another voice intervened from behind her. “Speaking of tasteless, your wardrobe isn’t in tune with the big blessing ceremony.”

  Before she could turn to confront that oily and unfortunately familiar baritone, he added her initials as a coda to his comment. “Is it, T.B.?”

  Temple finished turning. “If it isn’t C.B., as I live and regret it.”

  There he stood, all five-foot-five of him, Crawford Buchanan, the sleaziest flack in Vegas, resplendent in an orange terry jogging suit. It went well with his gelled black hair that erupted in a foam of curls at his nape. All in all a pre-Halloween look.