“Those mice have only just left the house and already a new plague is upon us,” she said, frowning darkly, her tail swishing annoyedly through the air. I followed it for a moment with my eyes, until I got slightly dizzy, then focused on Harriet’s clear green eyes again, something I immediately regretted when I was blasted with the full force of her irritation in a look that hit me amidships and rocked me to the core.
I swallowed a little. “What plague?” I managed to ask.
“Oh, Max,” she said, rolling her eyes and freeing me from their hypnotic influence. “Not you, too. I tell everyone who will listen and no one seems to care. I call it a sad state of affairs when the only one who cares about cleanliness and hygiene is yours truly.”
I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about, but I wisely refrained from voicing this thought. Instead, I asked, “Are the mice back? Is that what’s plaguing you?”
Until very recently the house had been infested with a family of no less than two hundred mice. They’d since skedaddled but clearly some new disaster had befallen us.
“Max! Will you please pay attention!” said Harriet.
Out of sheer habit, I sat upright, and would have saluted if I’d been a soldier in Harriet’s army and she the general. Instead, I blinked a couple of times, and wondered how long I’d slept that I’d completely missed this latest tragedy.
“Come,” said Harriet, so I came. “Look,” she said, so I looked.
Only where she was pointing there wasn’t all that much to see. We were in the living room, near the sliding glass door, and try as I might I couldn’t spot the harbinger of doom that apparently had infested our home and hearth. No mice, no black beetles, no cockroaches, not even a teeny tiny spider was in evidence where Harriet was glaring.
“Um… what am I looking at?” I finally asked.
“Dust!” she cried, and gave an innocent little dust bunny a nudge with her paw.
I stared at the dust bunny. The dust bunny stared back at me. Then I glanced up at Harriet, and I must have given her the wrong look, for she rolled her eyes once more.
“It’s a disgrace!” she said. “Once upon a time this house was the epitome of neatness and cleanliness and now it’s turning into a dump!”
“Hardly a dump,” I argued. After all, one dust bunny does not a dump make. Now if dust bunnies had been littering the place it would have been a different matter altogether. But before I could argue my case, Harriet was charging full steam ahead.
“Something needs to be done. This really cannot go on. What if I was allergic? I could have died!” she said, dramatically pointing at the harmless little pile of fluff with her tail.
“A little bit of dust won’t kill you, Harriet,” I said, but quickly shut up when she gave me a look that could, well, kill.
“It’s not just this pile of dust, Max,” she said. “There’s more.”
“More?” I asked, stifling a groan.
“A lot more,” she indicated, and stomped off in the direction of the couch, which is, I must confess, one of my favorite places in the entire house. “Look,” she instructed, and lifted the sheet Odelia likes to place on top of the couch to protect it from my tendency to dig my claws into its softness. And of course the shedding. Let’s not forget about the shedding. However you look at it, cats will shed, there’s simply no denying the fact.
I threw a quick glance underneath the couch in the direction Harriet was pointing, and once again I found myself stumped. “Um…” I said. “I really don’t see…”
“Oh, Max!” Harriet cried, and sighed in an exaggerated fashion, as if she were talking to a three-year-old with mental issues. And to demonstrate what I failed to grasp, she reached into the darkness with her paw and returned… with another dust bunny. “See!” she said, wagging the poor innocent bit of fluff in my face. “This place is falling apart.” She shook off the bunny with an expression of utter distaste, and then proceeded to lay it all out for me. “No cleaning is being done, or at least not in the way that it should be done. Health hazards are allowed to fester and pollute what should be a safe environment. And as a consequence death traps are allowed to spring up left, right and center.” She eyed me expectantly. “So what are you going to do about it, Max?”
I gave her a look of consternation. “Me? What do you want me to do?”
“Odelia is your human, Max. She is your responsibility. You have to tell her that this simply will not do. That her cats are in a situation of clear and present danger and measures must be taken to eradicate the menace to our health and wellbeing.”
“I really don’t think two innocent bits of dust present a danger to our health and safety,” I argued. I don’t mind talking to my human, and pointing out her responsibilities, but this was taking things too far, I felt.
“Do you know how many germs this innocent bit of dust, as you call it, harbors?” Her eyes had narrowed into tiny slits, spelling danger. “And do you know the kinds of diseases that are spread by these germs, not to mention the abundance of fungi?”
I shivered at the mention of the word fungi. I don’t mind the odd germ, but I dislike fungi with a vengeance. Probably because of a horror movie I once saw with Odelia and her boyfriend Chase. It centered around a fungoid growth crash-landing on earth as part of a meteor and proceeding to devour a small town before being stopped by a heroic brace of teenagers and their fearless dog. Why it’s always a fearless dog that accompanies teenage heroes in Hollywood movies and never a fearless cat is beyond me, but there you have it. Typical Hollywood anti-cat bias, I guess.
“Look, I’ll talk to Odelia, if that’s what you want,” I said, “but I don’t think you have to worry about the danger these dust bunnies offer. I’m sure they’re all pretty harmless.”
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong,” said Harriet decidedly. “And if you were a true leader of cats you would know this.”
I frowned. “A true what now?”
“A true leader knows when to take responsibility. He wouldn’t allow things to get as bad as this.”
“I’m not a leader of cats,” I pointed out. “I’m just me. Max. A common house cat.”
“Oh, Max,” said Harriet, shaking her head sadly. “You still don’t see it, do you?”
“Um, no,” I said. “I guess I don’t.” I wondered what she was on about this time.
“You are the cat everyone looks up to, Max, whether you like it or not.”
“No, they don’t,” I said, greatly surprised.
“Dooley looks up to you. And I know for a fact that Brutus does, too.”
I laughed what I hoped was a rollicking laugh. “Brutus, looking up to me? No way.”
“Oh, yes. In fact half the town’s cat population looks to you for leadership, Max, and frankly so do I. And all I can say is that you’ve failed us.” She nodded seriously. “You have failed us and you’ve put us all in mortal danger when you took your eye off the ball.”
I stared at the ball of fluff, and wondered if this was the ball she was referring to.
“You dropped the ball, Max, and I’m very, very disappointed in you.”
First I took my eye off the ball and then I dropped it. Or was it the other way around?
Suddenly the idea of moving into a different home, far away from Harriet and her strange theories and bossy ways sounded a lot more appealing than it had before.
Maybe I should participate in this quiz. But first I needed to find out who can run faster: a hare or a fox. Something told me it was one of those trick questions, though.
Chapter 3
“Max—Max, where are you—Max?!”
Oh, dear Lord in heaven! “What?!” I yelled from my position on the couch. Some days are like that: everyone and their grandmother seems to need to talk to you about something, and feels it incumbent upon them to disturb your peaceful slumber.