A Tail of Two Kitties

by Tom Watson

  DEDICATION

  to Mary, of course.

  (SDLMM)

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Remember Our Deal?

  Chapter 2: Stick Cat and Goose

  Chapter 3: Edith

  Chapter 4: Mr. Music

  Chapter 5: One Terrible Musical Note

  Chapter 6: It Was Thunder

  Chapter 7: Catnap

  Chapter 8: “Get Your Tail Over Here”

  Chapter 9: P-H-A-T

  Chapter 10: Edith Sits Down

  Chapter 11: Answering the Call

  Chapter 12: DING!

  Chapter 13: Stick Cat Is Not Talking About Eating Peas

  Chapter 14: “I Don’t Want to Count That High”

  Chapter 15: Encore

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  REMEMBER OUR DEAL?

  Do you remember our deal from the Stick Dog books? You know, how you’re not allowed to hassle me about my drawing skills and stuff? And how I am allowed to go off in other directions now and then?

  I’m glad you remember, because I have a bit of a situation here. I need to go off in a way different direction.

  And it’s Mary’s fault.

  Who’s Mary? Good question.

  Let me just tell you how this all got started.

  Mary Cunningham walked by my desk on the way to the pencil sharpener yesterday.

  She paused for a second at my desk and said, “Hi.”

  It was weird. She had never said hi to me before.

  It was right in the middle of Ms. Griffin’s English class. I was about to get cranking on a new Stick Dog story. It is pretty much my favorite part of every school day.

  Mary sharpened her pencil and returned to her seat. One minute later the super-weird stuff began.

  Mary came back.

  This was her second trip to the pencil sharpener. Only this time she didn’t just pause at my desk—she stopped. I know you probably think I’m making this up, but I’m not. I swear. She actually stopped.

  Mary tapped her pencil on my composition book as she stood there right next to me. Her pencil has a little rubber cat eraser on it. It jiggled with each tap.

  She has cat everything. Her folders and book covers have cats on them. She has cat sweaters and pencils and socks. I’ve noticed her talking a lot about her cats, Francis and Nora.

  Can I tell you something weird? I don’t know how it happened or when it happened, but something occurred last week or last month or whenever, and now girls are a lot less annoying and a lot more, you know, interesting.

  And Mary is more interesting than any other girl in my class.

  She stopped tapping her pencil and looked at me. The little orange-and-white cat eraser wobbled an extra couple of seconds after the pencil stopped moving. Mary stood real close on the left side of my desk.

  It started to get warm in class for some reason.

  I wondered if maybe Ms. Griffin should open a window.

  “Are you working on another Stick Dog story?” Mary asked.

  I nodded.

  “What kind of food will they discover this time?”

  “I’m thinking about candy,” I answered. “A Halloween story maybe.”

  “That’s a fun idea.”

  Okay, this was more than a walking-by-my-desk-on-the-way-to-the-pencil-sharpener comment. This was an official conversation.

  I said, “I think it could be really funny if they follow two kids around the neighborhood on Halloween. And maybe they get all freaked out by the costumes and stuff.”

  That’s when Mary did this really cool thing.

  She laughed.

  “You should do a story about cats,” she suggested. “I have cats.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “I’d like to read it if you do.”

  Then she left.

  I only said one thing after Mary sat down at her desk again.

  “Ms. Griffin,” I called. “Can I open a window? It’s really warm in here.”

  Chapter 2

  STICK CAT AND GOOSE

  Okay, this feline creature is going to need a name. I’ve thought about it for a very, very long time. And I’ve considered my own drawing abilities. I’ve chosen a name.

  This is Stick Cat.

  Stick Cat lives in an apartment on the twenty-third floor of a big building in the city. It’s kind of an old building. Stick Cat has a human roommate named Goose. I know, I know. Goose is a very strange name for a human. But this is the only thing Stick Cat has ever heard his roommate called. So that’s that.

  Between you and me, this guy has a neck that looks a little out of proportion with his head and the rest of his body. And my guess is that somewhere back in grade school—when it’s really important to call people by anything except their real names—someone commented on his long neck, nicknamed him Goose, and now he’s stuck with it.

  That’s just a guess. I don’t know for sure.

  Goose is not embarrassed by his name at all. In fact, he’s embraced it. There are geese all around the apartment. He has goose pillows on the couch. He has a picture of geese flying above a field hung over the mantel in the living room. There is a neon sign in the kitchen that says “Goose Island Root Beer.” It’s really colorful, with lots of orange and green tubular lights. Stick Cat likes it during the day but can’t stand how much it glows at night if Goose forgets to turn it off.

  Goose works in the city. Every morning during the week, Stick Cat watches Goose eat his breakfast and brush his teeth. Then Goose checks his pockets for his wallet, keys, and phone, and walks over to where Stick Cat is resting on the windowsill. This is Stick Cat’s favorite place.

  It’s where he can see another old building across the alley. That building is a lot like Stick Cat’s, but instead of apartments, it has mainly businesses—an old piano factory is on a bunch of the upper floors. At street level, there is a piano store and a bakery. From this sill, he can also see the pigeons. There are dozens of pigeons that live in the alley and fly back and forth and perch on the window ledges of both buildings.

  Anyway, this is where Stick Cat likes to sit the most—and it’s where Goose comes every morning to do three things.

  He opens the window a couple of inches so Stick Cat can feel a little breeze in his favorite spot.

  Goose pats Stick Cat on the head.

  Then he scratches him behind the left ear.

  Stick Cat allows Goose to do all this. It’s how Stick Cat rewards Goose for working all day and buying him food.

  Then Goose says the same thing to Stick Cat that he says every morning when he’s about to leave. He smiles and says, “Remember to relax a little today.” He says this in a sarcastic way, like he knows that Stick Cat is really going to sleep the entire day away. Then Goose gives Stick Cat a final scratch behind the ear—and leaves.

  It’s when Goose leaves that Stick Cat’s day really gets started. And on this day, it all started with a single sound.

  Stick Cat heard a scratching sound coming from the bathroom.

  And Stick Cat knew who it was.

  Chapter 3

  EDITH

  It was Edith.

  Edith is the cat who lives in the apartment behind Stick Cat’s. And Edith and Stick Cat get together every day when their human roommates go to work.

  For months, you see, Edith would paw at her side of the wall, scratch at her side of the wall, and talk to Stick Cat from her side of the wall. And Stick Cat would paw, scratch, and talk back from his side of the wall.

  After all that pawing, scratching, and
talking, they eventually found out where they could hear each other best. It was in the bathroom of each apartment. And the sink in each bathroom was built into the cabinet on opposite sides of that wall.

  When their roommates are not around, it’s through that wall that the two cats get together every day.

  Edith climbs into the bathroom cabinet on her side, scratches at the wall a couple of times, and pushes through a hole that they made together. Upon hearing the scratching signal, Stick Cat goes to the bathroom cabinet on his side and opens the door for her. To be perfectly honest, Edith could open the door herself, but she likes having it opened for her, and Stick Cat doesn’t mind obliging her. It took them several weeks to scratch and claw at the wall inside the bathroom cabinets until they made a hole big enough for Edith to fit through. Although, on this day, Edith wasn’t quite fitting.

  “Stick Cat!” she called. “I’m stuck!”

  Stick Cat dropped down from his windowsill perch. “Again?”

  “Yes, again,” Edith huffed. “Have you been making the hole smaller or something? I seem to get stuck a lot more often lately.”

  Stick Cat hustled across the carpet. He called, “How could I make a hole smaller? That’s impossible.”

  “It’s not impossible,” Edith panted.

  “Explain how,” called Stick Cat. He was now halfway across the living room on his trip to the bathroom.

  Edith huffed. You could tell by her voice that she didn’t really want to have this debate with Stick Cat right now. What she wanted more than anything was to get unstuck. But she heard him padding his way nearer and nearer and figured she might as well try to get him to understand in the meantime.

  “We scratched and dug into this wall for weeks to make this passageway, right?” she asked.

  “Mm-hmm,” Stick Cat answered as he walked into the bathroom.

  “Well, then it makes perfectly good sense that to unmake the passageway, we would just do the opposite thing.”

  “Okaaay,” Stick Cat answered slowly. “I’m not quite following you, I guess. You can’t unscratch something. Or undig something.”

  “Well, something is going on,” Edith grunted in complaint. She was already willing to give up the argument. She was pretty uncomfortable. “I mean, I’m really jammed in here this time.”

  Even though her voice was muffled and she grunted a lot, Stick Cat could still make out what she said from inside the bathroom cabinet on his side of the wall.

  “I’m coming.”

  When Stick Cat slid a claw under the edge of the cabinet door, pulled it open, and saw Edith, it was extremely difficult not to laugh. There she was with only her head and shoulders through the wall right next to the sink pipe inside the bathroom cabinet.

  “How did you . . . ?” he began to ask, but then stopped himself.

  “Let’s not get all bogged down in how or why this happened.” Edith exhaled. “Whether it was you making the hole smaller or something else.”

  “Okay, let’s not,” Stick Cat agreed.

  “Can we just get me out of here?”

  Stick Cat nodded. “By ‘we,’ you mean ‘me,’ right? Because I don’t really see how—in your present position—you’re going to be able to assist with your own rescue.”

  “It’s not quite a rescue, Stick Cat. Let’s not be too dramatic,” Edith said, and pushed her two front legs straight toward him.

  By this time, Stick Cat had climbed halfway into the bathroom cabinet. He brushed aside two spare rolls of toilet paper, a box of lightbulbs, and a plunger to make a clearer path to Edith. He took hold of her paws but did not pull just yet.

  “If it’s not a ‘rescue,’ then what would you call it?” Stick Cat asked.

  “Just pull.” Edith sighed.

  “Seriously, we should have a better name for it, don’t you think?” Stick Cat asked, still holding her paws but not pulling at all.

  “Just pull.”

  “How about if we call it feline dislodging?”

  “Please pull.”

  “Emergency extraction?”

  “Pull.”

  “Unplugging the kitty from the wall?”

  Edith said nothing. Instead, she looked Stick Cat right in the eyes. Her left eye was squinted just slightly—but enough to let Stick Cat know that she had had enough.

  Stick Cat pulled.

  And Edith came tumbling out of her predicament. She rolled over Stick Cat and into the bathroom, scattering a few rolls of toilet paper onto the floor. Stick Cat pushed them back to the cabinet and placed them inside, nudging them over the bottom cabinet trim with his nose.

  “Successfully unplugged,” he said to her.

  “Humph,” Edith said, and gave her body a quick shiver to get her fur properly aligned across her body. With a couple of licks and a quick examination in the long mirror on the bathroom door, she found herself presentable and strutted into the living room.

  Just by entering the living room, Edith’s tension from being stuck in the wall lifted. She hopped up on the couch and did what she always did: she turned the goose pillows upside down and pushed them into the corner of the couch. She really didn’t like those things.

  “Don’t you get sick of all these geese everywhere?”

  Stick Cat had emerged from the bathroom as well.

  “No, not really,” Stick Cat said. “Goose likes them. And I like Goose. So they’re fine with me.”

  “I think it’s weird,” Edith said as she jumped to the windowsill where Stick Cat had been perched just a few minutes before. She surveyed the streets below and the building directly across the alley. She noticed the clothesline outside. It stretched all the way across to the other building. Old Mrs. Maria O’Mahoney, a kindhearted Irish woman, lived in the apartment next door to Stick Cat’s. And she had been drying her laundry this way for fifty-seven years. But only two things were on the line today: a yellow apron and a bag of clothespins. Those two things almost always hung there.

  Stick Cat stretched, arching his back high in the air. It was as if he stretched the night’s sleep out of his body. It was a gesture that meant he was ready to get started with the day. “What do you want to do? We can treasure hunt, listen to music, or play StareDown again.”

  Edith considered these options. “We played StareDown yesterday, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  StareDown was a game they played two or three times a week. It’s sort of like how humans have a staring contest to try to see who blinks first. In the human version, the first one to blink loses. StareDown operates on similar principles. Stick Cat and Edith stare at each other for several minutes—but they are allowed to blink. In StareDown, the first one to fall asleep is the loser.

  “Who won yesterday?” asked Edith.

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “No,” she answered.

  “Why not?”

  “I fell asleep, that’s why,” Edith said simply.

  “Oh,” Stick Cat said, and grinned to himself a bit. Edith didn’t see him because she was still looking at the old building across the alley. “I don’t remember either.”

  Edith moved her head back and forth to survey some of the piano factory’s windows. “He’s not there yet, so no music option,” she commented, turning to Stick Cat. “We might as well go on a treasure hunt. Where do you want to start?”

  “How about here?” asked Stick Cat. He dove beneath the couch before Edith could even answer. In just three seconds, she was under the couch with him.

  They stretched on their backs beneath the couch and began to paw at the black material on the underside. In no time at all, they had scratched a small hole in the material and began taking turns stuffing their paws into the hole.

  On Edith’s third turn, she yelled, “Treasure!” and withdrew a shiny silver dime from the hole.

  “Whoa, that’s a good one,” Stick Cat said. “What is it?”

  Edith patted the dime back and forth with her paws a few times while she consi
dered the question. “I’m pretty sure it’s a lightbulb of some kind. Even under here it has a shine to it.”

  “A lightbulb?”

  “Yes, that’s right. A lightbulb,” Edith confirmed. Now that she had made up her mind about what the object was, she grew more and more confident about it.

  “Don’t lightbulbs only work in lamps?” Stick Cat asked. “Don’t the lamps have to be plugged into the wall where those tiny holes are? You know—the holes that made your hair go all frizzy when you wanted to see what they tasted like?”

  “Don’t remind me,” Edith whispered, and shook her head.

  Sorry. Have to stop here. You know licking electrical outlets is a bad idea, right? I mean, really, really, really bad. Don’t do it. Even if you want to have frizzy hair.

  “A lightbulb, huh?” Stick Cat asked again. “It must have originally been in a lamp then, right?”

  “Oh, I suppose so,” Edith said. “The lamp is probably inside the couch too.”

  “You really think so?” Stick Cat asked. “Wouldn’t Goose have noticed when he sat down that there was a big lamp stuck under the cushions?”

  “Maybe he wouldn’t,” Edith tried to explain. “The whole thing is covered in those creepy goose pillows—maybe he didn’t even notice.”

  Stick Cat just nodded his head, which was not very easy to do considering he was still under the couch. It was pretty easy to tell, however, that he didn’t quite agree with Edith’s lightbulb theory.

  And Edith could tell too.

  She responded, “Oh, very well. Do you want me to find the lamp in the couch?”

  “I would love to watch that, yes.”

  For six minutes, Edith shoved her front paws into the hole in the bottom of the couch. She pushed and stretched as far as she could to the left. She pushed and stretched as far as she could to the right. Once, she reached so far to find a lamp in the bottom of the couch that she pushed her shoulders into the hole. For a moment, Stick Cat was afraid he might have to unplug her from the couch like he had unplugged her from the wall earlier. Edith kept muttering things like “I know it’s in here somewhere” and “If I could just reach a little farther.”