The Mostly True Story of Pudding Tat, Adventuring Cat Read online

  At the end of the day, Vincent returned to wash and dress for the evening, bringing with him a newspaper package of treats for the cat. Fat Pudding emerged and climbed into Vincent’s lap. Vincent stroked his beautiful white fur until it crackled with electricity.

  The flea, meanwhile, was booming out “The Bloodless Flea’s Lament.” He’d said nothing about the luxurious Chalfonte Hotel. He didn’t even realize they’d left New York.

  One day, as the maid was stripping the bed above him, Pudding peeked out. Through watering eyes he saw her stuff the sheets into the wicker hamper in the bottom of her trolley.

  The maid didn’t notice a white cat in the basket of white sheets until she reached the hotel basement where they sorted the soiled linen. She tipped the hamper onto the floor. Out of the pile shot something white. It streaked across the room. She screamed, and Pudding dashed out the back of the hotel.

  Under the glaring eye of the sun, he hurried from shadow to shadow. The flea stopped singing when he realized an escape was in progress.

  “What are you doing? Go back! Watch out! That’s the —”

  Pudding heard the honk of an automobile, a screech.

  “Turn! Turn!”

  The flea guided his host to safety under the long boardwalk.

  The sound of thousands of tramping feet and laughing voices fell through the wooden slats with the melted ice cream and spilled beer. After so long indoors, the odors and noise — not to mention the strong light — overwhelmed Pudding. He waited for night to fall.

  Night was quieter, except for the flea, who really had something to complain about now. Pudding hadn’t eaten since the day before. His fatty blood was thinning.

  “I feel sick,” the flea wailed. “Take me back. Oh, my aching head! No sadder flea! My throat is parched! No sadder flea he, than a bloodless … I’m dying!”

  The beaches had emptied and there was no one to see a white cat traveling across the white sand. Pudding disliked the feeling of it between his toes, accustomed as he was now to walking on carpets. With each crash of the waves, he cringed.

  Water! How he hated it!

  “It’s been a long time,” he told the flea. “Maybe we don’t belong out here anymore.”

  He was losing his nerve. When he paused to shake out his paws, he noticed something just ahead watching him.

  He blinked. Not because his eyes hurt, but because he could not believe them.

  A lion?

  The only other lion he’d seen was in Bostock’s Zoological Arena. Pudding had fled at the sight of him, dejected in his prison.

  He drew closer to the creature, circled it one, two, three times.

  It was made of sand.

  He could be a free cat or a captive one, Pudding realized. A real cat or a pretend one.

  “I think I’ll keep going,” he said.

  * * *

  For two days Pudding trudged through a windy expanse of dunes, surviving on fish carcasses and sea grass. By day the sun tormented him. Day and night thirst did. He was already thinner, his beautiful fur clumped by salt spray.

  The flea’s singing grew less raucous. Eventually it petered out like a tuneless music box winding down. Several hours of moaning followed, then a whole day of silence.

  Then out of the blue a sober voice spoke. “Uggh! This is the worst blood I’ve ever tasted.”

  “Hello,” Pudding said. “Are you back?”

  “From where?”

  “Up until now you’ve been hey-ho-ing and telling jokes.”

  “I wasn’t!”

  “How do you find where a flea has bitten you?” Pudding asked. “You start from scratch.”

  The flea had a conniption.

  “I would never!” he shrieked. “I’ve got class! I’m better than them!” His voice turned croaky and hoarse. “You’re lying!”

  In his rage, he leapt right out of Pudding’s ear and landed several feet away, sobbing. A long bout of snuffling followed. Then a quavering question.

  “Was I really singing?”

  Pudding stepped carefully over to where the voice had come from. Even if his eyes had been open it would have been impossible to see the miserable flea crouching among the grains of sand.

  “Are you okay?” Pudding asked.

  “Get lost!”

  Pudding didn’t. The flea might try to jump back on.

  He didn’t want to stray too far so he curled up in a clump of scrubby bushes. He was terribly thirsty. Hungry, too. Though he heard mice scurrying through the dunes, he couldn’t catch them.

  A few hours later, he felt a tickle in his ear. It was the flea crawling back. Without a word, Pudding rose and began to walk.

  Just before dawn, he chanced upon a rabbit carcass, pounced on it and began to pull hungrily at the left-behind shreds of flesh.

  The flea broke his silence. “Who do you think killed that rabbit?”

  Pudding looked around. “Who?”

  “A fox, I’m guessing,” the flea said. “‘Be careful.’ Wasn’t that what your mother said?”

  “I’m a Tat,” Pudding said. “Strong and brave.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” the flea said. “Listen. I know I’m just a speck in your ear. A good-for-nothing Ctenocephalides felis. But if you’ll permit me an opinion, this isn’t the best place to hang around.”

  Pudding couldn’t believe how modest his vain parasite sounded.

  “Are you my flea?” he asked.

  “I’d be honored if you thought of me that way,” the flea said. Then he meekly suggested, “How about we skedaddle?”

  Pudding left the carcass and began to trudge on, his head lowered against the wind and blowing sand.

  After a few minutes the flea spoke again. “Why did you wait?”

  “Pardon?” Pudding said.

  “Back there. You could have kept walking and left me.”

  “There wasn’t any other Felis domesticus around. You wouldn’t have a host.”

  “Felis domesticus?” the flea asked. “That’s you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’re Felis and felis?”

  Though Pudding couldn’t see it, the flea wiped his mouthparts and smiled. Then he said, “Well, if we don’t clear out of these sand hills fast, we two felises will be lunch.”

  Pudding crossed the windy crest. Beyond was a road, which he began to follow. He smelled water.

  “There’s a bridge,” the flea told him. “And a huge tent.”

  Pudding carried on toward it. He was on the verge of perishing of thirst.

  The huge tent was Mr. Wellman’s canvas balloon house, glowing from the inside. The crew was still at work.

  Just then the wireless man, Jack Irwin, set the gramophone needle on the record.

  “Down the road of life we’ll fly,” he sang. “Aeromobubbling you and I!”

  He heard meowing behind him and turned.

  A cat!

  “Why, dah dah di, di! Good evening! Where did you come from, Kiddo?” Jack asked. He scooped up the feline visitor. A stray, obviously, with a matted coat and closed eyes.

  Jack took the cat around, introducing him to the others at work around the airship.

  “Mr. Wellman? Look who dropped in for a visit.”

  Mr. Wellman was hunched behind a typewriter, peering through his spectacles, writing his latest bulletin on the progress of their expedition. He barely glanced up.

  “He’s the man in charge, Kiddo.”

  Jack carried him over to the first engineer, who was tinkering with the motors. “And here we have Mr. Vaniman. Don’t let him touch you with those greasy hands.”

  “I hate cats!” Mr. Vaniman cried, waving Jack away. His hands weren’t only dirty, but enormous. “Get him out of here!”

  “Hey, Vaniman,” said the navigator, Mr. S
imon, who wore his straw boater hat day and night. He was neat and fussy where Mr. Vaniman was burly and rough. “Be nice. A cat on a ship is good luck.”

  “Even a cat on an airship?” Mr. Vaniman scoffed.

  “Why not? A ship is a ship.”

  “Stick around and you’ll see a bit of history, Kiddo,” Jack whispered to the cat. Then he noticed that the creature’s eyes were still closed. “I guess you won’t.”

  Jack fashioned a bed out of some of some spare silk left over from the balloon. He got the cat a bowl of water and opened a tin of sardines. Pudding drank and drank. Once his terrible thirst was slaked, he gobbled the food and licked the tin clean.

  Meanwhile, Jack wound the gramophone again and lowered the needle on another record.

  “Oh! … that beautiful rag! It sets my heart a-reelin’ …”

  Ragtime filling his ears, Pudding curled up in the silk bed and fell into an exhausted sleep.

  Sometime near morning, the flea spoke. “What is that?”

  Pudding woke. He could just make out in the vast space of the balloon house an enormous long shadow above them.

  Curious, he walked all the way around the airship until he found an opening in the cloth-covered passenger car underneath. He clawed his way up the canvas and slipped inside, inspecting the benches, the steering wheel, the navigation equipment.

  Adventure. His tingling whiskers sensed it.

  * * *

  Jack Irwin had come from Australia to train as a sea-going wireless operator with the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America. What a life, traveling back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, clicking out the dis and dahs of Morse Code.

  Then last spring his boss called him to the company office and asked if he wanted to be part of the Wellman expedition.

  “It’ll be the first crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by air. Mr. Wellman needs a wireless for weather reports and to send dispatches to the newspapers. The whole world will be following. Interested?”

  Dah di dah dah, di, di di di, Jack thought before blurting it out. “Yes!”

  It was only after the word left his mouth that he remembered the hydrogen gas. The wireless machine sent its dis and dahs through electric sparks. If a spark from the wireless machine somehow escaped …

  Jack had nightmares about the airship exploding. His nerves only settled when he arrived at the balloon house and was greeted by the little white cat who had mysteriously appeared one night. Just the sight of him eased his fears.

  “Dah dah di, dah dah!” Good morning!

  As the cat rubbed against his legs, Jack couldn’t help but hear a code in the animal’s purring.

  “Take me with you,” he seemed to be saying. “Di dah dah di, di di di, di.” Please.

  When visitors dropped in, everyone wanted to see the little cat who was going to make history with them.

  “No, he’s not,” insisted the youngest of Mr. Wellman’s five daughters, Edith. “Daddy promised I could have Kitty.”

  “I named him Kiddo,” Jack said.

  “He’s mine and I call him Kitty.”

  They were ready to launch by September, but winds delayed them again and again. Finally, in mid-October, a bang came on Jack’s door in the Chalfonte Hotel.

  He’d been, as usual, dreaming in Morse Code. Dreaming of clicking out those terrible letters: CQD.

  Dah di dah di, dah dah di dah, dah di di. All Stations — Distress!

  Then the spark met the hydrogen. BOOM!!!

  “Irwin!” came the shout with the hammering fist. “All clear! We’re leaving!”

  Jack shot out of his bad dream and his bed. He leapt into trousers, which he kept nearby with the tops of his boots already inside the legs. In minutes he was dressed and running down the hotel stairs and out into a cold foggy morning.

  The commotion in the balloon house woke Pudding. He knew it meant departure, for he’d heard it often with Vincent — the bustling and packing, the nervous energy. No one put on the gramophone. Jack forgot his sardines.

  Pudding trailed after him, meowing at his ankles.

  On the beach a massive crowd gathered — journalists, spectators and two hundred police and firemen Mr. Wellman had enlisted to launch the America. When the crew drew back the canvas doors, revealing the airship, everyone gave up a collective gasp.

  “Would you look at the size of it!”

  “Where do they sit?”

  “The long bit underneath. See the windows? They fly the thing from there. The lifeboat hangs below it. That’s where they keep the wireless machine.”

  “I can’t hardly believe my eyes!”

  “Could a bloodsucking nobody suggest that you step aside?” the flea piped up, just as the men came marching in.

  Pudding remembered well his long-ago trampling in the Temple of Music. His left rear foot still throbbed before a storm. He dove to safety under the workbench.

  “Heave-ho!” Mr. Wellman called.

  The men shouldered the ropes and, inch by inch, dragged the airship out.

  “Stay back!” the flea kept warning Pudding.

  But he didn’t want to be left behind. When the canvas fell closed again and the voices began to recede, he crawled out from under the workbench into the dim vacancy of the balloon house.

  “Good luck, Mr. Wellman!” someone called.

  “We’ll be praying for you!”

  “Too bad about the fog. We won’t see it in a minute.”

  Then Pudding heard a needling voice. “Kitty! Here, Kitty, Kitty!”

  “Oh, cripes,” the flea groaned. “We don’t want to get stuck with her.”

  Pudding slipped back under the bench, but Edith saw him and dragged him out by the scruff. Outside, Mr. Wellman was bellowing orders.

  “Edith!” Mrs. Wellman called. “Come and kiss your father goodbye!”

  With the crew aboard, the tugboat was ready to tow them to open water. Mr. Wellman, standing in the lifeboat, had been about to give the signal when he saw his youngest daughter coming toward him with the cat slack in her arms. He leaned out and pecked her cheek.

  Edith screeched, for the limp cat suddenly came to life, leaping right out of her arms and into the lifeboat and under a pile of empty ballast bags.

  At the same moment Mr. Wellman called to the men holding the ropes, “Let go!”

  He climbed up to the car with the rest of the crew, leaving Jack in the lifeboat below with the wireless machine.

  As the America rose into the air, a fluttering started deep inside Pudding.

  The flea felt it, too. “Whoa! Where are we? What’s happening?”

  They were still attached to the tugboat chugging along the inlet, the airship floating behind it like a giant balloon on a string. Fog enveloped them and Pudding crawled out from under the bags. He sniffed the fishy air. In the cottony light he could open his eyes. Above him, the nose of the airship plowed through the white. A raucous convoy of gulls wheeled around them, appearing and disappearing in the fog.

  “Oooh! I feel all funny inside,” the flea warbled.

  Jack was in his place at the wireless, his back to the cat. With shaking hands he put on his headphones. Before long he heard the station on Young’s Pier calling. He shouted up to Mr. Wellman, “Receiving!”

  “Answer,” Mr. Wellman called down.

  Jack’s stomach turned over. Mr. Wellman stuck his head out of the car and, through his spectacles, met eyes with Jack. He was frightened, too, Jack could tell.

  Jack took a breath, flipped the sending switch and positioned his finger above the key. As soon as he touched it there would be a spark.

  And then?

  “Irwin!” Mr. Wellman barked. “What are you waiting for?”

  He couldn’t bring himself to touch that key.

  Something brushed against his leg. Some
thing soft. He glanced down.

  “Kiddo!”

  His heart soared to see the cat. But it wasn’t just his heart, he realized then. All of him was soaring. He, Jack Irwin, just a wireless man, was flying!

  With one hand he lifted the purring cat and buried his face in the white fur. His finger pressed the key.

  Dah!

  Nothing but relief. Then he clicked out the rest of the code. QSL: I acknowledge receipt.

  And for the purring cat, Thanks.

  “Dah, dah di dah, di di di, Kiddo.”

  By the time the tugboat reached open water, Jack was sending and receiving messages fearlessly. The tug cast off their line. Untethered, the America lifted even higher in the fog, causing every stomach on board to lurch. Mr. Vaniman started the engines. The noisy propellers began to spin. The crew gave up a whoop.

  “We’re really flying now!”

  Pudding shrank down in pain. His ears hurt from the engine din. Then, as the America rose even higher, a familiar ache settled in his bones.

  The flea had no bones, just an exoskeleton. He was merely terrified.

  “Woe to the flea!” he cried.

  When Pudding’s left rear foot began to throb, he knew. Storm!

  He yowled out a warning.

  “Is that the cat?” Mr. Vaniman bellowed down. “Throw him out!”

  Mr. Simon stood at the airship’s wheel with his straw boater tied on his head with a bootlace to keep it from blowing off in the wind. “It’s bad luck to put a cat off a ship,” he snapped.

  “Leave him,” Jack called up. “He’ll settle down.”

  But Pudding only grew more frantic as the heavy air closed around him and squeezed. Storm! Storm! Storm! He began to tear around the lifeboat, screeching.

  Finally, Mr. Vaniman had had enough. “Is he going to keep up that racket for the whole crossing? Permission to put him off? We’ll drop him on the tug.”

  Mr. Vaniman jumped into the lifeboat. Before Pudding knew what was happening, a monstrous hand came down on him. Mr. Vaniman stuffed him into one of the canvas bags and tied the mouth with one of the ropes coiled on the floor.

  The drowning sack!

  Pudding screeched even louder.