The Cat Who Had 14 Tales

Gus lived upstairs, and he let her sleep on his pillow nights. “The li’l dinger curls round my head like a coonskin cap,” he says in a boastin’ way, “and if she wants to go out, she bites my nose.”

Tipsy went out, all right. She started gettin’ fat and lazy, and we all knowed it was kittens. Ding-swizzled if Gus didn’t start buyin’ her hamburger and providin’ a sandbox so she wouldn’t have to go out in the dirty alley.

Did business fall off when Tipsy stopped putting on her act?

Not on your life! Everybody was bettin’ how many kittens she’d have and what color. She got big as a barrel, and when she tried to walk you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Gus was gettin’ nervous. He had a box ready for the kittens to be born in, and he wouldn’t allow no jokes about how Tipsy looked.

Then one day who should walk into the bar but the health inspector. He sees Tipsy and does a double take. Then he makes his speech about the ten-dollar fine.

After he left I says to Gus: “What’ll you do?”

“Hell, I’ll just pay the fine,” he says. “The li’l dinger is worth it.”

Ten smackers! That was more’n a week’s wages if you was lucky enough to land a job.

Next night, a rowdy bunch of sailors come into the bar from a cement carrier docked on Front Street. They was makin’ dirty remarks about Tipsy, and Gus was gettin’ mad. Finally one of them idiots tried to give her a snort of whiskey in an ashtray.

Gus jumped over the bar like a wild man and grabbed the sailor. “You hell-pup!” he yells. “Get outa here before I knock you galley-west!”

The other sailors started swingin’ and the reg’lar customers piled in. It was some shindy! Fists flyin’, heads crackin’, tables knocked over! Somebody musta swung a chair because fifty feet of stovepipe come tumblin’ down. Smoke and soot all over the place!

Where was Tipsy during the fight?

That’s what I’m gettin’ to. The bar cleared out in a hurry, and Gus and me stayed up all night, moppin’ up. When we finished, it was daylight, and Tipsy was gone!

Gus was fit to be tied. We hunted in the cellar, the iceboxes, the garbage cans, most every place. I tramped around to all the stores, and Gus prowled around the waterfront. Couldn’t find hide or hair.

“She’s gone,” Gus says, and he blows his nose hard. “The cement boat sailed last night. Them sailors musta stole her. Maybe drowned her.” You never seen a man so broke up.

Things was pretty gloomy in the bar that night. The bets, they was all called off, and the place emptied out by ten o’clock. Next night, same thing. Customers bought one beer, maybe, and then vamoosed. Gus had no heart for anythin’.

We was there alone in the bar, just him and me, not even talkin’, when we heard a little noise. Golly if it wasn’t a meow. Gus jumps up and yells: “It’s Tipsy! Where is she? She’s trapped someplace!”

We listened hard. Yep, another meow. It come from the black hole in the wall where the stove pipe used to go, and you could see a kind of shadow movin’ in the hole. Then a black cat come out with a mouthful of somethin’ black, size of a mouse.

“That ain’t Tipsy,” I says, but when she jumped down and staggered across the floor, it was Tipsy, all right.

How did Gus react?

He went crazy, boy. Yellin’ and jiggin’ and carryin’ on! Word got round the waterfront, and that night the cash register was ringin’ like nobody’s business.

Tipsy got the kittens all cleaned up—two tigers and four black-and-white—and the whole family was squirmin’ around in a box on the bar when . . . guess who walks in!

The health inspector.

Nobody but! Gus took the violation ticket and grinned, sort of. He says: “What’ll this cost me, Inspector? Ten plunks?”

“Seventy dollars,” the man says. “Ten for each animal on the premises. Payable at City Hall. You can expect a follow-up inspection within a few weeks.”

“Seventy holy smackers!” I says to Gus, after. “Y’better drown ’em.”

“Nothin’ doin’,” says Gus. “We’ll raffle ’em off and pick up enough plunks to pay the fine.”

Well, the raffle tickets sold like hotcakes, but Gus wouldn’t let the kittens leave their mother yet. Too young. So the whole caboodle was crawlin’ in and out of spittoons when that doggone inspector showed up again.

He counted tails and wrote up another seventy-dollar ticket.

“Whaddaya drink, Inspector?” Gus says, with a wink at me. “I’ll buy one.”

“Sorry. Regulations,” the inspector says. He kept shakin’ his foot. One of the tigers was tryin’ to crawl up his leg.

Well, the little ones got to be seven weeks old—time to pull the winners out of a hat. It was Saturday night, and the place was crowded. Gus was kinda quiet. Looked like he was sorry to see Tipsy lose her brood.

After the raffle he drops a bombshell. He says: “Drinks on the house, folks, till the booze runs out. The city’s gonna padlock the joint at midnight.”

The customers, they raised a holy row. Nobody believed it.