I do my business by pushing the bowl of A La Cat toward the reclining Yvette. She reaches out a dainty paw to pat the bowl, then leans her little face into the mess and begins nibbling away.
I sigh in a way that is not detectable on camera, then insinuate my face into the bowl, so our whiskers interweave as we sup.
At the director's call of "Cut!" this particular segment is history.
"Look at how Louie stops eating the minute the director calls cut," Miss Temple points out with fond maternal glee. "It is like he knows he is off camera."
"Maybe he just does not like A La Cat," Miss Savannah Ashleigh says as she sashays over to wrest Yvette from my tender custody.
'Then he fakes it pretty well," Miss Temple crows, also drawing me out of the vehicle.
I try not to interfere with her magic moment, but I am a lot more pussycat to lift straight up than the Cotton-Puff Queen, the Divine Yvette. Miss Temple's dramatic reclamation of myself is less than graceful, and there is nothing I can to do prevent her further embarrassment.
"I think Louie's getting enough A La Cat to gain weight!" she announces to one and sundry.
And in this little moment of owner hubris, she loses her grip on me. I slide back to the car seat like a sack of potatoes.
"I will get him," the director suggests gallantly.
But, before he can move, the car I am stalled in does.
"Clete! Hit the brakes!"
"Where are they on this antique?" Clete yells back as he and I roll toward a very long, low, expensive-looking convertible covered in chrome.
A good question. I hop over the high front seat with my usual agility and find myself staring into the dark cavern of the floorboard, which bristles with gear sticks and other strange equipment. It resembles no car of my acquaintance, and I have motored extensively. Maybe my old man would have a tip or two on how to stop this rolling death trap, but he is not here.
"Oh, Aunt Kit's kaboodle!" Miss Temple exclaims, the only one with the sense or guts to run alongside the moving car. "Clete, can you hit anything on the floor to the left of center? The brake must be there."
"I cannot feel nothing but the gas pedal, lady, and you sure as hell do not want me flooring that by accident." Clete, wrestling with the giant steering wheel, overturns it in a panic that has us weaving right and left like a shuttle-bug.
I jump into the dark at his feet, hoping to avoid a crushing. The pedals look confusing even to me, just faint shapes in the dark I am used to seeing in. I identify the gas pedal, though, and hurl my full weight on the pedal left of it. Nothing happens, except that I am jostled to the floor.
I leap upon the next pedal and feel a slight hesitation in our progress. Bingo! Now to get some human muscle on the job.
I insinuate my forelimbs up the guy's right pant leg. He begins giggling, partly in panic, partly because my light touch tickles him. Then I snick out the shivs and claw down hard. He screams and tries to stomp me as if I were a bug. Maybe a foot-long centipede. I wait until the peril of the last moment, then leap aside onto the center hump. His combat boot stomps the brake so hard that both our noses hit solid surfaces. His head impacts the center of the steering wheel, which sets off a terrible sustained honking note; I bump into the center hump, sorely abrading my second-best sensory organ on the console.
Despite my cosmetically tragic injury, I clamber up and over into the rear seat, glad the Divine One had been removed before the rough stuff started. I also begin licking my nose, imagining how delightful it would be were the Divine Yvette loose and able to tongue my wounds.
Everyone outside the car is agog, helping the driver exit, asking if he's all right and how he stopped the car. The injustice of the moment stings worse than my skinned nose.
A museum attendant runs up to study the car that has stopped ... oh, maybe six inches from the sleek little vintage convertible's side.
"I cannot believe this happened. The emergency brakes are set on all these cars every day we open, but this one has its emergency braked pulled up and out. It was useless!"
"How much strength would it take to disengage the emergency brake?" my mistress's curious voice pipes up from somewhere very near.
"Not much. A two-year-old could do it."
I plant my mitts on the open windowsill and glare back into the once-adjacent vehicle our slo-mo rush to oblivion has left behind. Maurice is in a mirroring position to mine, except that he is grinning whisker to whisker. I am beginning to bet that a well-trained eight- or nine-year-old could do it too, and did.
"I got the footage," the cameraman is yelling. "Louie going over the seat into the front compartment, Clete yowling and hitting his head."
"Yeah, Clete," the director asks. "Why did you scream like that?"
"I do not know." Clete rises from his dazed seat on the running board. He inches up his right pant leg. "Felt like a dozen scorpions stinging me, and I stomped down on it so hard I hit the brake. Sure couldn't see it."
"Well, look at that," the director says.
They look, even Miss Savannah Ashleigh, who has minced over to eavesdrop on everything.
"Cat scratches," the director says in an awed tone. "The cat scratched you so you'd stop the car."
"I do not think so," the dazed Clete says. "I think the cat was just trying to hide under my legs."
"It does not matter," the director replies, stepping back to view the car and me in it. "We will shoot some new stuff to intercut with what the cameraman got now. Louie finding the brake and doing his scratching-to-save routine. We will put some catnip on your leg, that ought to do the trick. Then Louie leaping into the backseat again-- we have got that--and perhaps getting cozy with Yvette. Or she could push the A La Cat bowl to him this time. I love it."
"What about Maurice?" the trainer asks in a grating tone.
"Huh? Oh, him. I guess we could close with a shot of the Louie-mobile taking off and shooting a cloud of dust into the back of his car, all over his inferior brand of cat food."
"Great work, Louie." The director reaches into the backseat to pull me out.
He even scratches my ears, but I do not admonish him for this liberty. I like the way he thinks. I also watch the animal trainer quietly collect the disgraced Maurice.
Missed again, buddy. Too bad the cat is not out of the bag--and the commercial--entirely.
Chapter 21
An Inspector Calls
Matt felt as serene as the blue rectangle of cool water in the pool three stories below. He had just been beside it in the warm November sunshine, doing his tai-chi routine and then a more conventional Western meditation on the blue mats.
His panicked feelings about the ConTact caller had receded like a high tide. His head and emotions were clear; he felt exonerated, forgiven. Having just gotten up an hour before, he was hacking together a cold breakfast: cereal, milk and half a cantaloupe, when the doorbell rang.
Who could that be? he wondered, discounting Temple. She was off turning Midnight Louie into a TV star, and landlady Electra had lots of weddings scheduled for her attached wedding chapel, the Lovers' Knot.
So he opened the door, cantaloupe cleaver still in hand. Lieutenant C. R. Molina stood there, looking like an enlisted woman in navy blue.
"C--" he began to greet her.
She held up a hand he was surprised to see was not white -gloved.
"None of that Carmen stuff, Devine. I'm here on official business."
Her officer act was second to no one else's. Crisp, authoritarian, humorless, she could have been an archbishop. He gave way as she entered, glancing sardonically at the large kitchen knife.