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 commericial 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-�-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 ih 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.”
“Racoon,” 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 I scented your gang hanging out down by the new Maylords 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 throwaways there.”
“And,” pipes up Gimpy, “she was big-time annoyed aboutmy leg and all the alien abduction visits. Called it ‘unconscentyou-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 seeing 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 twentyfour-carat golds at him.
“Held off four rogue Hydrophobias a while back,” Tom snarls. “A long while back. When she was done with them, not a one 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.”