Cat In An Alien X-Ray

Once I smear my kisser with soap and some water from the leaky faucet (there is always a leaky faucet or two in these dives), I will chew up a good lather.

Then, apparently foaming at the mouth, I will return to the teeming, screaming crowd, jump up on the bar, and start knocking over bottles of beer like a champion bowler on a tear.

My next trick is to elude the would-be heroes in the crowd by climbing anything I can. Then when the Animal Control folks come, I pretend to be cornered and go quietly. Lulled into the usual complacency, the hunters will become the losers.

I will escape when out in the open again and streak for the abandoned lot next door. There I will evade tranquilizer darts as the posse closes in until they, stumbling over the dead body, finally have more important matters than little me on their minds.

Just planning the sequence reminds me that there are many junctures where I might be stopped, stomped, and clamped behind bars.

I sit and contemplate the lonely, dangerous life of the undercover operative. If I am caught and am regarded as rabid, that might be my last trip to the shelter with no witnesses of even an animal nature. It could be bye-bye Free-to-Be-Feline for Midnight Louie … and for what?

An old dead guy who would probably have kicked off without help sometime soon anyway.

This is not a case any of my nearest and dearest are at all involved in. I have no stake in this death other than that Ma Barker thinks it our civic duty to alert the authorities. Fine for her to think. She has delegated the job to me! She may have faced off mad dogs and rabid raccoons as the leader of her pack, but she has no idea of the level of danger to be encountered integrating with humans, which are the most dangerous breed of all.

So. This is it. Midnight Louie plays the sap for no one, not even his own mother. Maybe especially not even his own mother. Am I a grown male or a mouse?

At that moment an intoxicated and intoxicating feminine giggle does an arpeggio up and down the scale of the human voice.

I look back to the Cabana Club. A solitary couple has exited, and turned my way. I cannot tell if he is holding up she, or vice versa, but they are entwined in a very friendly way and ambling, albeit shakily, right toward me.