Highway Cats (3 page)

Whatever it was, the workers soon found themselves cleaning up their language around the kits. They cut back on spitting and fighting. A few cats even went so far as to tidy their coats and brush up their whiskers, as if they were hoping to impress the little nitwits.

The other cats sneered loudly when these dandies first showed up among them. No highway cat had ever bothered with appearances before. Dirt was a badge of honor, ticks and fleas the price of freedom. Not long after, however, a wave of grooming swept the farm. Ruffians who had never been associated with “style” suddenly reported for work with sleek legs and bouffant tails. Soon the whole rat farm was looking cleaner, acting better and running more efficiently. Rat-gobbling on the sly (always a messy affair) largely disappeared. Production was picking up!

Being a sharp businesswoman, Kahlia Koo noticed. One day, when no one was looking, she moved the kits out of their tiny pen into the main house with her.

“Who'd ever guess-ss you little ninnies would be s-ssuch a hit?” she hissed at them through the margarine tub she was wearing that day. That night, she excused them from pillow duty.

“Going soft in your old age?” Jolly Roger teased her, baring a yellow fang through his whiskers.

“Clam up,” said Khalia. “They're a good invessstment, that's all, fit for better than to lie under your muddy jowls.”

“Who says I have muddy jowls?” Jolly Roger took a swipe at the nearest kit.

“I say!” Khalia replied, giving him a whack on the head.

That night when Shredder stopped by, he noticed that the kits had been served fresh grilled tuna for dinner, while Jolly Roger, smiling murderously, was gnawing on the ancient, meatless spine of a boiled catfish.

S
hredder began to stop in more often at the rat farm.

“You again, Grandpop?” Jolly Roger snickered. “You got a sweetheart somewhere here?”

“Bottle it, maggot face.”

“A little touchy, aren't we?”

“We are not!”

As far as anyone knew, Shredder wasn't the sort of cat who cared to attach himself to anyone or anything. He'd certainly never had a sweetheart. The way he told it, he'd been a traveler for most of his life. Abandoned as a newborn on the streets of New Orleans, he'd taken to the road earlier than most, heard the call of the wild and never looked back.

“I'm a one-cat band and plan to stay that way,” he liked to boast.

“How'd you get all the way up here?” Khalia Koo asked him once.

“Came up the Mississippi on boats and barges,” he answered. “Took me a couple of years just to make it to St. Louis. I stowed away on a steamer in Cairo, Illinois, and went up the Ohio. A cold-blooded river cat I was, outside the law and ruthless as they come. Nobody could lay a hand on me.”

He glanced at Khalia to be sure she was appreciating this violent description of his character.

“And then?”

Shredder looked away. “Let's say I caught a bus and came here.”

“Caught a bus? How'd you do that?”

“It caught me, actually,” Shredder had to admit. “I got locked in the baggage compartment. Big mistake. Four days in the heat of summer without water. I nearly bought it that time.”

“No wonder you're so tough.”

“You better believe it!”

Khalia Koo smiled under the orange juice container that was her disguise that day. She knew a thing or two about hiding old wounds and had guessed that Shredder might be keeping a secret.

“What's this I hear about you being someone's respectable family pet once, with a roof over your head and a blanket in the corner?”

Shredder squinted sharply. “It's a lie,” he snarled.

“I thought so.” Khalia shrugged. “I didn't think anybody as tough as you could stand living with that nonsense.”

“That's right—they couldn't.”

Inside her container, Khalia Koo smiled her knowing smile again.

 

T
RY AS HE MIGHT TO KEEP
to the highway rules of turning a cold eye, Shredder found he couldn't stay away from the kittens.

He began inventing reasons for going by the farm. He was picking something up, he'd say, or leaving something off. Once he got there, he'd look around for the kits. There was nothing in it, he told himself. They were his winning bet, that's all. He was interested to see if they could keep on beating the odds.

The kits watched out for Shredder too. When they saw him coming, their eyes lit up and they'd run over each other trying to get to him. It gave the old cat a good feeling to see that. He'd glance around to be sure no one was watching and tickle them under their chins. A minute later, he'd be playing tag or rolling on the grass, as full of high spirits as a youngster himself. He'd take them into the woods, show them a skunk or how to tell north and south from the slant of the sun. Kits should know things like that, shouldn't they? Who else was going to teach them?

Small and scraggly as the little forest was, it was a pretty place to scamper around in. The trees were old and tall, sheltering the nests of many songbirds and climbing animals. Spicy-smelling pine needles lay thick on the ground, warmed by sunshine that shafted through a latticework of branches above.

That spring, tiny flowers appeared along what might once have been woodland paths if anyone had been there to walk them. No one was anymore. The shopping center was where people walked now, while what remained of the forest's wild creatures followed ancient routes of their own.

The highway cats, more recently arrived, walked apart and alone. Their paths were random, winding through brambles and thickets, around stumps and fallen trees, past bogs and anthills, across a pebbly brook that rattled from a freshwater spring at the heart of the wood. Nearby, on a small hill long lost to outside eyes, a mossy stone wall enclosed an abandoned graveyard. Potter, its crumbling headstones read, hieroglyphics to the cats. They scampered past without a glance.

A grove of tall pines grew off to one side. Shredder began to take the kittens there for climbing lessons.

“Climb in a circle—don't go straight up,” he advised them. “With a regular tree, you can jump branch to branch. With a pine, it's dense. You've got to work your way up.”

The kits tried to follow directions.

“Not bad. Practice in your spare time,” he encouraged them. Privately, he worried: they seemed strangely slow. They couldn't keep control of their feet and tended to lose their balance in a most uncat-like way. There was a second problem too. They always wanted to stick together.

Shredder mentioned it to Khalia Koo one day.

“It's puzzling. One never makes a move without the others.”

“They're probably still in their litter mentality,” Khalia said. “Sometimes it takes a while to come out on your own.”

“But it's time. Past time,” Shredder said. “I never saw kits that stuck to each other like this. And they don't talk. Not a word.”

Khalia had to admit this was odd. Most kits by their age couldn't keep their mouths shut.

“They've got trauma,” she decided. “From the highway, when they came across.”

“Maybe,” Shredder said. “But we've all got that. I've noticed something else.”

“What?”

“They have a glow.”

“A
what
?”

“A shine. Real faint. You see it best at night.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don't know. I never saw anything like it before.”

That night, Khalia Koo spied on the kits in the dark of her kitchen as they slept in their usual mound. She saw that Shredder was right. A faint silvery blue sparkle surrounded them, drifting up off their coats like early-morning mist over a pond.

Beneath the designer tissue box she was wearing that evening, her Siamese eyes narrowed in alarm. She was on the verge of calling for Jolly Roger to throw the whole bunch from her house—a job he would have relished!—when one of the girl kits woke up. As Khalia watched, she opened her tiny mouth in a wide, pink yawn, gave a sigh of contentment and fell back asleep against her brother and sister.

Khalia's call died on her lips. She tiptoed out of the room and crept away to bed with a softness in her heart she hadn't felt in years.

It didn't last. How could it? Such memories were useless in a place like this. The sun was barely up before the businesslike shape of a manila envelope (with two eyeholes gnawed out) could be seen through her windows, bent over piles of account books and sales sheets.

“It's a good thing those kits improve my rat production. Anyone else with sparkle would be out my door in twenty-five seconds,” she snapped at Shredder when he came by. “I can't afford to fool around with mystical stuff.”

“Sure,” Shredder agreed. “You've got orders to fill.”

“And a company to run.”

“You have to look out for yourself.”

“Exactly. I can't be wasting time chasing after a bunch of kittens! I've half a mind to throw them out the door tonight.”

“Tonight,” Shredder cried. “But they've nowhere else to go!”

“Maybe it's-ss time they did!” Khalia said, with such an alarming hiss that Shredder knew he must take immediate action. For better or worse, the moment had come to introduce his tiny friends to the dump.

“You guys need to learn how to feed yourselves,” he explained to them that afternoon as they poked around the old cemetery.

The kits were acting especially kittenish that day, hiding under vines and leaping out to chase butterflies between the graves. They'd discovered the remains of a house foundation jutting out of the ground and not far away a pile of giant timbers that might once have belonged to a barn. They practiced jumps from the timbers, making no improvement that Shredder could see.

“Stop that and listen!” he ordered. “You've had an amazing run up to now: crossing the highway, getting moved indoors, eating high off the hog. It can't go on. Nothing like that ever lasts.”

The kits rubbed playfully against him, as if to protest this harsh view of the world, but for once Shredder pushed them away.

“You've got to grow up! I won't always be here to look after you.”

That night, he took the kits out of Khalia's house (while she pretended to look the other way) and marched them sternly through the woods to the shopping center to begin their instruction.

 

T
HEY ARRIVED ABOUT MIDNIGHT
, just as the restaurants were closing. Several loads of unusually fine garbage had been dumped during the day, and a fair number of highway cats were there rooting around inside the Dumpsters, seizing greasy morsels and dragging them up onto the high metal sides to devour them. Competition was fierce. Bad-tempered snarls and hisses came from all corners.

The kits hung back from this threatening scene. Shredder prodded them forward.

“Come on! You've got to show some grit if you want to eat around here.”

He demonstrated how to climb up to the Dumpster's metal rim and spy out for juicy tidbits inside. The kits followed him shakily. They were just beginning to get their balance and look around when an ugly head reared up from a carcass below.

“So, id's Shredder with his nursery school phonies,” Murray the Claw called out in his tough-guy twang. “Welcome, toddlers!” He lifted his one vicious paw in a sarcastic salute.

“Ciao, Murray. What's going down?” Shredder replied coldly. He'd picked up some foreign words during his travels across the country. Murray was not impressed.

“Chow
is
what's going down, dimwid. Beijing duck, to be precise. You dwerps planning any miracles tonight?” he sneered at the kits, who retreated unsteadily behind Shredder.

The cats around them snickered.

“Leave them alone,” Shredder warned. “They don't know anything.”

“Maybe,” purred Murray. “Or maybe not. I've been hearing about these freeloaders, how they're in the house with Khalia Koo, eating her food. Now thad really is a miracle.”

The highway cats snickered again. Several moved up closer. They smelled a fight brewing.

“Lay off,” Shredder warned, but Murray went right on.

“So, let's get to the boddom of this,” he said. He leapt up on the Dumpster's high edge and began walking around it, Egyptian style, to confront Shredder. “We're all a liddle confused. We want to see what these miracle phonies are made of. Can they dance, for instance?”

Murray's sharp claw paw zipped out and smacked the kits behind Shredder so hard they hopped up in the air just as if they were dancing.

The highway cats howled with laughter.

“Hey!” yelled Shredder. “Quit that!” But Murray wouldn't.

“Can they sing?” he asked, reaching out and pricking their little ears.

“Eee, eee, eee,” wailed the kits in unison.

The highway cats laughed louder.

“Stop it!” shouted Shredder. He tried to punch Murray, but the old bristle hair scooted out of reach.

“And most of all, what I want to know is: CAN THEY FLY?” roared Murray, darting toward them again. He caught the kits with the tips of his claws and launched them, one after another, off the Dumpster's metal edge and high into the air, where they surprised everyone by plummeting like stones, headfirst, toward the ground. Not only was there no miracle flight, they showed none of the airborne grace of even the most ordinary alley cat.

At this, Shredder lunged at Murray and began to fight him. The other highway cats, who'd been spoiling for a brawl anyway, leapt on Shredder (“Fakes, fakes!” they howled) and then on each other. Soon the shopping center Dumpsters were boiling inside and out with furious clawing, biting cats and wild screeches, and bloodcurdling yowls went out in all directions.