TALES FROM THE BACKROOM

      It's been a long standing tradition that after the dance in the Oak grove some of us return to the pub, pop open a bottle of scotch and retire to the backroom.   There we sit around the fireplace and one of us tells a story.   The stories tend to be on the odd side and are usually anywhere from highly improbable to bald faced lies.   But they are entertaining.   I've started recording them so I can share them with you here.   The following tale was told by me on December 21, the night of the Winter Solstice.

       While you sleep, legions of cats are prowling the back alleys and lost byways of the human world.   We see all kinds of events and activities that people miss entirely.   Usually we're just silent witnesses but sometimes we have a role to play.   Last summer a group of us either saved the world or screwed up a chance at utopia.   We're not sure which.

      On a hot June night I was working a dumpster in an alley behind a Chinese restaurant.   You wouldn't believe the perfectly good seafood people throw away.   The trick is catching it quickly enough.   It doesn't take long in a hot dumpster for scallops to turn nasty.   My partner in crime that night was an old black and white tom named Opus.   I think his people named him after some famous cartoon penguin.   Opus could be an ornery cuss but we got along OK.   He knew me from when I got out of the Society back when I was a kitten and he took me under his wing.   His right ear was crumpled and flattened and he loved to tell the story of his life and death fight with a pit bull.   Except one night when he was blasted on nip he told me that it was from a bad ear infection.   But the pit bull made a much better story.

       Opus was trying to figure out how to eat a crawfish when we were interrupted by a skinny white figure bounding down the alley.   "Oh great," I said "it's Smudge!"

       "Quick! Hide!" said Opus.   But it was too late; we'd been spotted.   Look up "pest" in the dictionary and you'll see this guy's picture.   We all have a tendency to be curious and to get into things we shouldn't.   Smudge takes these traits and runs right off the edge of the planet with them.   His people once had to call the fire department to get his head unstuck from a bat house mounted on the second floor.   He's almost my age but he looks like an eight-month-old kitten, startling blue eyes and white fur with a smear of dark gray on his head and neck.   We all like him, but preferably in small doses.

       "Hey guys!   Hey Guys!   I just saw the coolest thing!   Is that a crawfish?"

       "So what'd you see?" asked Opus.

       "Huh?   When?   Oh, yeah." Smudge broke off his inspection of Opus' crawfish.   "There was a big flash of light in the sky and something landed in the park!   Do I smell scallops?"

       "Are you sure it landed in the park?" I asked.

       "What?   Oh, sure!   I was on the roof of the hardware store and it went right overhead!   I saw it crash near the fountain!"

       Knowing Smudge, neither of us thought to ask what he was doing on the roof of the hardware store.   Chances are he just got up there because he could.   It was pretty unlikely that anything had flown over his head and crashed in the park.   It was probably a firefly or just his imagination.   But being who we were we had to check it out.

       It took a while to get even close to the park.   Smudge kept stopping to sniff at random bits of trash or to peer at any odd movement that caught his eye.   We had to keep dragging him back to the business at hand.   How he made it from the hardware store to our dumpster on his own is a mystery.   Because of his inability to resist the urge to investigate anything that caught his attention our party grew to four.   Smudge jumped on what he later claimed he thought was a mouse but turned out to be the end of someone's tail.

       Scooter had been sleeping in an old grocery bag when he was rudely awakened by Smudge's attack.   I'd seen cats levitate before but this was pretty impressive.   Scooter erupted through the bag, flew three feet in the air, performed a half twist and came down slapping the hell out of Smudge.   Luckily he had been de-clawed or we would have been picking pieces of Smudge's face out of the bushes.

       Smudge ran part way up a nearby light pole.   "Hey, back off!   It was an accident!"

       "You accidentally attacked me?"

       "I thought you were a mouse!   Well, your tail anyway."

       We finally coaxed Smudge down off the pole and he and Scooter stood glowering at each other.   To tell the truth I did some glowering of my own.   I get along with just about everyone but something about Scooter just rubbed me the wrong way.   For one thing where most of us came from the Society or the streets he came from a pet store and thought that made him better than everyone else.   Like his litter don't stink.   Plus he's almost the exact same shade of beige as me, that really pisses me off.   We exchanged perfunctory greetings.

       "Jerk!"

       "Asshole!"

       "What are you guys up to?"

       Opus took it on himself to explain.   "Smudge says he saw some thing fly in from the sky and crash in the park.   We're gonna go check it out."

       "Sounds like a fool's errand to me."   Said Scooter "Still, you'll need someone with a clear head along."

       Like we couldn't function without him.   He was curious but wouldn't admit it, what with him being above all that kind of thing.   So like it or not, he joined our group and we continued on to the park.

       We could hear it and smell it long before we got close enough to see it.   There was an odd humming sound overlaid with random crackling noises.   The air smelled scorched and there was an underlying aroma that none of us could place.   We came around a clump of bushes and I'll be damned if Smudge wasn't right.   Between us and the fountain was a blackened pit, the noises and scents were coming from its center.   We crept up to the edge of the pit, bellies to the ground and ears flat.   In the middle of the scorched area was what looked like a spaceship.

       I haven't said anything about the scale of things.   You're probably picturing a pit a hundred feet across and a spaceship the size of a small building.   What we were looking at was a ten-foot pit and a spaceship the same size and shape as a toaster.   It was lying on its side and there was a jagged tear near what looked like the front end.   Every so often jagged bolts of blue energy would spill from the tear and cook another section of grass.   At least we knew where the crackling sound was coming from.

       Without consulting with any of us Smudge went over the edge of the pit and approached the ship.   He had decided to deal with it the way he did most things in life, by backing up and peeing on it.   He was instantly rewarded by a flash of brilliant blue light and we watched him fly over our heads and into the fountain.   The water put out the fire on his butt before it could do any real damage.   The afterimage of his cometary path was burned in our eyes, but we could still see a thoroughly soaked and slightly singed Smudge clamber from the fountain.

       He looks skinny under normal conditions, now he looked like he was made out of pipe cleaners.   "Brilliant plan," said Scooter, "I don't know why I didn't think of that."   Just like him to add insult to injury.   It was lost on Smudge though.   He just stood there looking dazed and absently shaking water from his feet.   There was a small lily pad perched on his head like a dark green peasant's cap.

       "He did manage to get a reaction," said Opus.   We looked at him and he was staring back down into the pit.   We shifted our gaze and saw a door on the top side of the ship sliding open.   There was a pause, and out came three mice.   Well, they weren't precisely mice.   They were wearing clothes for one thing, and they had six legs each.   They walked on the back four and were carrying things with the front two.   Their tails split into three halfway back and their heads were relatively large.   But they looked a lot like mice.   So much so that it was all I could do to keep from running into the pit and start slapping them around.   I could tell Opus and Scooter were having the same problem.   Smudge still hadn't taken notice of them.   This was a good thing since self-restraint is not one of his virtues.

       Almost trembling with the effort to maintain control I walked into the pit.   The little alien mice were setting up equipment and hadn't seen us yet.   I could hear Opus and Scooter right behind me as I got within five feet of the ship.   The mouse-man that was setting up some kind of antennae was the first to see us.   He gave a startled "chirp!" and the other two turned.   They approached together and stood in a line two feet away.   Opus was starting to make chattering noises and I knew he was close to losing it.   The mice-men were chirping at us and each other, alternately pointing at their ship, the antennae and the sky.

       Something had to give and when it did things happened in a flash.   The partially erected antennae started to fall over and one of the mice-men ran to catch it.   This was too much for Opus and he lashed out with a paw and pinned it to the ground.   The other two panicked and ran for the ship.   I could no more stop myself than I could have turned inside out.   I was on them in a heartbeat with Scooter right next to me.

       I won't go into the gory details.   Let's just say the little guys didn't make it.   Smudge had just recovered in time to see the end.   All he could say was "Dudes!   What'd you do?"

      We dragged the ship into the woods and buried it.   If they were here to invade we had just saved the world.   If not we had just screwed up a chance at Utopia.   We didn't know.   Here's the thing, you've heard of karma and what goes around comes around.   I've got a bad feeling that the next group of aliens are going to look like pit bulls.

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