Punky curls into what might pass at a casual glance for an orange tennis ball.
I look up into the impenetrable black sky above the two wings of the lighted hotel high above us. The Mirage is emblazoned in huge cursive letters on each wing.
“And if I do not come back—”
“Oh, no, Mr. Midnight!”
“Tell them that I competed my quest.”
No worries about being seen haunt me as I slink down the long hairy-legged front line. The whale of a hump Punky spotted is an artificial but fully “live” flame-spewing volcano sitting in a huge lagoon of water. The volcano will erupt in moments, but first the drumbeats introducing the explosive musical score expand into an ominous rumble joined by tribal chants.
The ground trembles beneath feet human and feline. Fireballs on all levels shoot into the air high above the volcano’s cauldron. The rocks in the lagoon pulse with red-hot lava, whisker-scorching close.
I could leap from stone to stone to the volcano top in a twinkle when the heat is off. Now, onlookers are feeling the glow even behind the safety rope line, their rapt faces reddened by the pyrotechnics exploding everywhere, even in the plunging waterfalls pelting the lagoon with lava and ash.
I must reach the cleansing sear of the very lip of the volcano. Moving quickly to keep my pads from burning by a wrong step, I climb the rocky incline of ultra-realistic faux rock, rather like Vegas itself.
I am high enough now to be a black moving silhouette against a fiery red curtain of shooting flames. The lagoon waters below are steaming into a smoky mist.
“Oh!” an onlooker shouts. “Something alive is on the volcano.”
“Something alive. Look!” becomes a chorus.
I have climbed high enough. Now I need to leap twenty feet up to the top while programmed flumes of fire shoot twelve feet into the night air. Here is where I leave the over-heated lava rocks and bound onto the nearest trunk in the cluster of palm trees.
The trunk’s ragged, dense network of stiff fibers rejects the first clutch of my shivs, and I slide down, down before I finally get a good hold.
“It is a cat,” someone shouts. “Call the SPCA.”
Too late now, folks. Computer programming is computer programming. I ratchet my way up so my back is almost level with the volcano sides where the palm tree trunk curves lower.
The graceful fronds sway above me like hula dancers’ skirts. How peaceful. How disturbing. I have hit the moment of truth. I will have to release my bridging palm trunk, twist myself right side up, and manage to land on the only surface that is not erupting with fire and ashes like a hot plate popping corn.
I pause to hear a last onlooker wail, then absolute silence as they realize I may be making Midnight Louie’s last leap.
Well, not by name. Although I am sure I will be identified by the loathsome white bow tie, if we both are not burned to cinders first. In some sense, I face a Viking warrior funeral, ruined by a frivolous bit of outdated twenty-first century wearing apparel. Oh, the horror.
In the silence I hear a piercing kitten shriek.
“You can do it, Mr. Midnight! You can do it!”
I give my spine a half-axel skater’s twist while releasing my shivs.
Falling water and fire blur past my gaze.
My bones thump with a four-point landing on fake volcanic rock.
Do I hear cheers?
Not done yet.
I claw my way to the edge of the cauldron and gaze into real fire. I work a sensitive mitt pad under the breakaway collar. Break-away for my safety, of course, so that is why I am clinging to a place where I can make a suicidal leap into a pet cemetery for one. Me.
I jerk my neck back, simultaneously push my front mitt forward, and the white bow-tie collar snaps like a slingshot. I watch a small white-and-black dot falling into ashen gray and sparking red flame, and then into nothingness. My work is done here.
No wonder men hate to wear ties.
The End.
(for now)
Afterword
Of Collars and Katzenklaviers
“Come gather around, cats and kits from all Las Vegas clowders.”
I stand on an elevated rock to survey an impressive convocation of cats making a black and white, red and orange, and yellow and gray patchwork on the beige desert landscape west of Las Vegas. The sight resembles a giant calico cat reclining.
My audience is scattered, having to avoid settling their posteriors down on a member of the dominant desert species in this location, all varieties of thorny cactus. Still, we share certain spiked defensive attributes of our own, both the animal and the vegetable.
I have lowered my voice an octave and raised my high notes a trifle to reach the crowd of Vegas cat packs or gangs or clowders, to be technical.
“First,” I say, “I must credit my faithful researcher and Internet magician, Miss Temple Barr, for whose nuptials some of you ‘gangsters’ turned into ‘songsters’.”
Shrieks and howls rise from each group as I call out their clowder colors.
“From the West side, the Jet-Blacks.
“From the East, the Koi-fighters.
“From the North, the White Blizzard.
“From the South, the Kudzu Nation.”
“We came together, my friends, to plot a daring foray and provide a discordant distraction to foil armed robbers at a wedding. We were successful, but we must also think back to a horrible time in our breeds’ past.
“A cat may look at a queen, people say.
“They were speaking of human queens, like Queen Elizabeth of England, queens who sit upright on a throne and wear heavy glittering headdresses and remind me of Bast the cat goddess from ancient Egypt in her temple statue. Both human Queen Elizabeths have lived long and prospered in separate centuries.
“And then there is the fact that cat fancy breeders today call Mama cats “queens”. How right they are.”
Shaken paws and encouraging yowls.
“And that the veterinarians’ device to keep a cat or dog from licking wounds and stitches is called an ‘Elizabethan collar’ from the stiff lace collars in Queen Elizabeth the First’s sixteenth-century court.
“And there is the collar I wore to play the part of a human Ring Bearer at the ceremony where so many of you performed.”
Now the growls and mewls are discontented. No cat likes a collar of any kind.
“Thankfully, it is employed more often with dogs (who would lick a cactus if they could), rather than our superior breed.”
A huge vibrating purr shakes the sands under me.
I gauge my audience’s mood and move on quickly. (Full disclosure: I have, on occasion, for commercial and publicity purposes, donned some odd bits of human attire.) “Now that we have had a history and wearing apparel lessons,” I tell my eager audience, “I will proceed to a less glorious, but no less cruel fashion long gone (thank Bast!). All of you know and have heard at your fathers’ and great-aunts’ whiskers, of that fiendish invention…The Katzenklavier.”