Dewey (5 page)

“Hi, Dewey,” he said, checking him over.

“Do you think this is absolutely necessary, Doctor?”

“Cats need to be neutered.”

I looked down at Dewey’s tiny paws, which had finally healed. There were tuffs of fur sticking out from between his toes. “Do you think he’s part Persian?”

Dr. Esterley looked at Dewey. His regal bearing. The glorious ruff of long orange fur around his neck. He was a lion in alley cat clothing.

“No. He’s just a good-looking alley cat.”

I didn’t believe it for a second.

“Dewey is a product of survival of the fittest,” Dr. Esterly continued. “His ancestors have probably lived in that alley for generations.”

“So he’s one of us.”

Dr. Esterly smiled. “I suppose so.” He picked Dewey up and held him under his arm. Dewey was relaxed and purring. The last thing Dr. Esterly said before they disappeared around the corner was, “Dewey is one fine cat.”

He sure was. And I missed him already.

When I picked Dewey up the next morning, my heart almost broke in two. He had a faraway look in his eyes, and a little shaved belly. I took him in my arms. He pushed his head against my arm and started purring. He was so happy to see his old pal Vicki.

Back at the library, the staff dropped everything. “Poor baby. Poor baby.” I gave him over to their care—he was our mutual friend, after all—and went back to work. One more set of hands and he might be crushed. Besides, the trip to the vet’s office had put me behind, and I had a mountain of work. I needed two of me to do this job right, but the city would never have paid for it, so I was stuck with myself.

But I wasn’t alone. An hour later, as I was hanging up the phone, I looked up to see Dewey hobbling through my office door. I knew he’d been getting love and attention from the rest of the staff, but I could tell from his determined wobbling that he needed something more.

Sure, cats can be fun, but my relationship with Dewey was already far more complex and intimate. He was so intelligent. He was so playful. He treated people so well. I didn’t yet have a deep bond with him, but even now, near the beginning, I loved him.

And he loved me back. Not like he loved everyone else, but in a special and deeper way. The look he gave me that first morning meant something. It really did. Never was that more clear than now, as he pushed toward me with such determination. I could almost hear him saying,
Where have you been? I missed you.

I reached down, scooped him up, and cradled him against my chest. I don’t know if I said it out loud or to myself, but it didn’t matter. Dewey could already read my moods, if not my mind. “I’m your momma, aren’t I?”

Dewey put his head on my shoulder, right up against my neck, and purred.

Chapter 5

Catnip and Rubber Bands

D
on’t
get me wrong, everything wasn’t perfect with the Dew. Yes, he was a sweet and beautiful cat, and
yes, he was extraordinarily trusting and generous, but he was still a kitten. He’d streak
maniacally through the staff room. He’d knock your work to the floor out of pure playfulness. He
was too immature to know who really needed him, and he sometimes wouldn’t take no for an answer
when a patron wanted to be left alone. At Story Hour, his presence made the children so
rambunctious and unpredictable that Mary Walk, our children’s librarian, banned him from the
room. Then there was Mark, a large puppet of a child with muscular dystrophy. We used Mark to
teach schoolchildren about disabilities. There was so much cat hair on Mark’s legs that we
finally had to put him in a closet. Dewey worked all night until he figured out how to open that
closet and went right back to sleeping on Mark’s lap. We bought a lock for the closet the next
day.

But nothing compared to his behavior around catnip. Doris Armstrong was always bringing
Dewey presents, such as little balls or toy mice. Doris had cats of her own, and like the
consummate mother hen she always thought of Dewey when she went to the pet store for their litter
and food. One day near the end of Dewey’s first summer, she quite innocently brought in a bag of
fresh catnip. Dewey was so excited by the smell I thought he was going to climb her leg. For the
first time in his life, the cat actually begged.

When Doris finally crumbled a few leaves
on the floor, Dewey went crazy. He started smelling them so hard I thought he was going to inhale
the floor. After a few sniffs, he started sneezing, but he didn’t slow down. Instead, he started
chewing the leaves, then alternating back and forth: chewing, sniffing, chewing, sniffing. His
muscles started to ripple, a slow cascade of tension flowing out of his bones and down his back.
When he finally shook that tension out the end of his tail, he flopped over on the ground and
rolled back and forth in the catnip. He rolled until he lost every bone in his body. Unable to
walk, he slithered on the floor, undulating as he rubbed his chin along the carpet like a snowplow
blade. I mean, the cat oozed. Then, gradually, his spine bent backward, in slow motion, until his
head was resting on his behind. He formed figure eights, zigzags, pretzels. I swear the front half
of his body wasn’t even connected to the back half. When he finally, and accidentally, ended up
flat on his tummy, he rippled his way back to the catnip and started rolling in it again. Most of
the leaves were by now stuck in his fur, but he kept sniffing and chewing. Finally he stretched
out on his back and started kicking his chin with his back legs. This lasted until, with a few
flailing kicks hanging feebly in the air, Dewey passed out right on top of the last of the catnip.
Doris and I looked at each other in amazement, then burst out laughing. My goodness, it was funny.

Dewey never tired of catnip. He would often sniff halfheartedly at old, worn-out leaves,
but if there were fresh leaves in the library, Dewey knew it. And every time he got hold of
catnip, it was the same thing: the undulating back, the rolling, the slithering, the bending, the
kicking, and finally one very tired, very comatose cat. We called it the Dewey
Mambo.

Dewey’s other interest—besides puppets, drawers, boxes, copiers, typewriters, and
catnip—was rubber bands. Dewey was absolutely fanatical about rubber bands. He didn’t even
need to see them; he could smell them across the library. As soon as you put a box of rubber bands
on your desk, he was there.

“Here you go, Dewey,” I would say as I opened a new bag.
“One for you and one for me.” He would take his rubber band in his mouth and happily skip
away.

I would find it the next morning . . . in his litter box. It looked like a worm poking
its head out of a chunk of dirt. I thought, “That can’t be good.”

Dewey always
attended staff meetings, but fortunately he wasn’t yet able to understand what we were talking
about. A few years down the road that cat and I were able to have long philosophical
conversations, but for right now it was easy to wrap up the meeting with a simple reminder.
“Don’t give Dewey any more rubber bands. I don’t care how much he begs. He’s been eating
them, and I have a feeling rubber isn’t the healthiest food for a growing kitten.”

The
next day, there were more rubber band worms in Dewey’s litter. And the next. And the next. At
the next staff meeting, I was more direct. “Is anyone giving Dewey rubber bands?”

No.
No. No. No. No.

“Then he must be stealing them. From now on, don’t leave rubber bands
lying out on your desk.”

Easier said than done. Much, much easier said than done. You
would be amazed how many rubber bands there are in a library. We all put our rubber band holders
away, but that didn’t even dent the problem. Rubber bands apparently are sneaky critters. They
slide under computer keyboards and crawl into your pencil holder. They fall under your desk and
hide in the wires. One evening I caught Dewey rummaging through a stack of work on someone’s
desk. There was a rubber band lurking every time he pushed a piece of paper aside.

“Even
the hidden ones need to go,” I said at the next staff meeting. “Let’s clean up those desks
and put them away. Remember, Dewey can smell rubber.” In a few days, the staff area looked
neater than it had in years.

So Dewey started raiding the rubber bands left out on the
circulation desk for patrons. We stashed them in a drawer. He found the rubber bands by the
copier, too. The patrons were just going to have to ask for rubber bands. A small price to pay, I
thought, in exchange for a cat who spent most of his day trying to make them happy.

Soon,
our counteroperation was showing signs of success. There were still worms in the litter box but
not nearly as many. And Dewey was being forced into brazenness. Every time I pulled out a rubber
band, he was watching me.

“Getting desperate, are we?”

No, no, just seeing
what’s going on.

As soon as I put the rubber band down, Dewey pounced. I pushed him
away, and he sat on the desk waiting for his chance. “Not this time, Dewey,” I said with a
grin. I admit it, this game was fun.

Dewey became more subtle. He waited for you to turn
your back, then pounced on the rubber band left innocently lying on your desk. It had been there
five minutes. Humans forget. Not cats. Dewey remembered every drawer left open a crack, then came
back that night to wiggle his way inside. He never messed up the contents of the drawer. The next
morning, the rubber bands were simply gone.

One afternoon I was walking past our big
floor-to-ceiling supply cabinet. I was focused on something else, probably budget numbers, and
only noticed the open door out of the corner of my eye. “Did I just see . . .”

I turned
around and walked back to the cabinet. Sure enough, there was Dewey, sitting on a shelf at eye
level, a huge rubber band hanging out of his mouth.

You can’t stop the Dew! I’m
going to be feasting for a week.

I had to laugh. In general, Dewey was the best-
behaved kitten I had ever seen. He never knocked books or displays off shelves. If I told him not
to do something, he usually stopped. He was unfailingly kind to stranger and staffer alike. For a
kitten, he was downright mellow. But he was absolutely incorrigible when it came to rubber bands.
The cat would go anywhere and do anything to sink his teeth into a rubber band.

“Hold on,
Dewey,” I told him, putting down my pile of work. “I’m going to get a picture of this.” By
the time I got back with the camera, the cat and his rubber band were gone.

“Make sure all
the cabinets and drawers are completely closed,” I reminded the staff. Dewey was already
notorious. He had a habit of getting closed inside cabinets and drawers and then leaping out at
the next person to open them. We weren’t sure if it was a game or an accident, but Dewey clearly
enjoyed it.

A few mornings later I found file cards sitting suspiciously unbound on the
front desk. Dewey had never gone for tight rubber bands before; now, he was biting them off every
night. As always, he was delicate even in defiance. He left perfectly neat stacks, not a card out
of place. The cards went into the drawers; the drawers were shut tight.

By the fall of 1988,
you could spend an entire day in the Spencer Public Library without seeing a rubber band. Oh, they
were still there, but they were squirreled away where only those with an opposable thumb could get
to them. It was the ultimate cleaning operation. The library looked beautiful, and we were proud
of our accomplishment. Except for one problem: Dewey was still chewing rubber bands.

I put
together a crack investigative team to follow all leads. It took us two days to find Dewey’s
last good source: the coffee mug on Mary Walk’s desk.

“Mary,” I said, flipping a
notebook like the police detective in a bad television drama, “we have reason to believe the
rubber bands are coming from your mug.”

“That’s impossible. I’ve never seen Dewey
around my desk.”

“Evidence suggests the suspect is intentionally avoiding your desk to
throw us off the trail. We believe he only approaches the mug at night.”

“What
evidence?”

I pointed to several small pieces of chewed rubber band on the floor. “He
chews them up and spits them out. He eats them for breakfast. I think you know all the usual
clichés.”

Mary shuddered at the thought of the garbage on the floor having passed into
and out of the stomach of a cat. Still, it seemed so improbable. . . .

“The mug is six
inches deep. It’s full of paper clips, staples, pen, pencils. How could he possibly pluck out
rubber bands without knocking everything over?”

“Where there’s a will, there’s a
way. And this suspect has proven, in his eight months at the library, that he has the
will.”

“But there are hardly any rubber bands in there! Surely this isn’t his only
source!”

“How about an experiment? You put the mug in the cabinet, we’ll see if he
pukes rubber bands near your desk.”

“But this mug has my children’s pictures on
it!”