Cat In A White Tie And Tails

However, I have allies—or shills, if you will—everywhere, especially in down-and-dirty presumably empty places and locales.

I climb a shaky tower of empty crates until a bit of daylight shows through the broken chicken-wire backed glass. Once elevated, I hiss softly through the bars an irresistible code word.

Sssausssage. Fresssh Polissssh ssssausssage, kielbasa alive, alive-o.

How sweet it is to have a native secret language. I do not wait for my troops to arrive, but scamper back down to the concrete floor, the crates now crashing and scattering from my uncontrolled weight and pace.

The clatter brings Shifty and Lefty awake. They blink and look up, perhaps searching for Santa. I rocket right toward and under Shifty’s propped-up legs, slashing as I go.

“Arghhh!” As he falls over sideways he reaches for a stabilizing crate, but they are all shaky. I see the comet of a falling lit cigar. “My eye!” he shouts. “It is burning. I am blinded.”

Lefty swipes an arc of cheap beer at his pal’s face, leaving Shifty’s head dripping, one eye closed and the other blinking out beer.

Meanwhile I jump onto a crate and get a sausage round down and rolling toward the entry point just as a flood of cats comes bounding through.

“Rats!” Shifty cries, turning around to see with his one eye. “We are being attacked by rats.”

Shifty has pulled the pocketknife from his pants.

“That is all you have for a shiv?” Lefty demands. “It is not big enough to chop off a rat’s tail and now they are all coming for us.”

I turn and make for the piled crates rimming the space, racing up them in plain sight. If you have both eyes.

“That cursed cat,” Lefty yells. “Get him!”

“Why bother?” Shifty yells back, quite rationally. Now that they have phoned in their threat, my well-being is moot.

“He has stolen our sausages.”

Enraged, Lefty charges toward the decrepit crating even as I dig in my taloned hind claws to dislodge a particularly large one with a great white shark’s jaw-worth of exposed four-inch sixteen-penny nails, all rusted and corroded and sharp as a giant serpent’s business fang.

I kick it right into the oncoming would-be chopper.

He trips on a shattered piece of crating, lifts his arms to protect himself from the handy cat’s version of a spiked Iron Maiden torture device closing on him, screams and flails into embracing the inevitable, and falls over forward right on it.