Harry Cat's Pet Puppy (2 page)

Now a mouse who lives in the Times Square subway station leads a perilous life at best. But one who rushes out openly—though the rush hour may be past—is taking his four-legged life in his paws. Because in addition to all the commuters, who are only trying to get home, the Times Square subway station is full of transit policemen. Their job is to keep the place as orderly as they can, and they definitely do
not
think of mice as being ornaments of their subway station.

Tucker skittered across the left loafer of a man who was bound for Greenwich, Connecticut, managed to avoid the heel of a lady's shoe, ran right through a transit policeman's legs, and, panting like a sprinter, reached the safety of a corner of the lunch stand.

A middle-aged lady named Louisa was standing at the stove, frying hamburgers and hot dogs. (For the past two years a young man named Mickey, with red curly hair, had tended the lunch stand, but he'd finally saved up enough money and gone off to college this fall. A good thing, too, for the plan Tucker had in mind.)

The mouse caught his breath, and observed Louisa. He'd been observing her for the past two months from the drainpipe opening, and he had decided that she was a nervous type who wouldn't last long in the stress and strife of the Times Square subway station. He intended to make himself a little bit of that stress right now.

Choosing precisely the right moment, when Louisa had just inserted a freshly cooked hamburger between the two halves of a bun, Tucker dashed forward and scratched at her ankle. He was sorry that he ripped her stocking—but first things first. Louisa, startled, looked down and gasped. And then Tucker really did his thing: he jumped up in the air as high as he could, made his grisliest face, wiggled his claws at poor Louisa, and squeaked a little roar that any young lion would have been proud to make.

It worked. Louisa screamed, then shrieked, “A mouse! A rabid mouse!” and began to climb up on the counter beside the stove. And she dropped the hamburger.

Positioning himself like a professional football player, Tucker caught the burger, and holding it in both arms—it was far too big to fit under just one—he began some broken-field running back to the drainpipe.

And got there! Although his tail did get stepped on by a perfectly innocent man from Iowa who just wanted to see what Times Square looked like.

“Look, Harry! Look, Harry! I got—”

“You fool! You could've been killed!”

“Yeah, but
look,
Harry! I got this hamburger. And she's a
big
one, too!” Tucker cuddled his hamburger, half out of hunger—he was hoping there'd be a little morsel left over—but mostly out of pride.

As it happened, there was not one morsel left over. As soon as Tucker set the hamburger down, and lifted off the top half of the bun, and the puppy smelled the steaming meat beneath, that little dog discovered that he was starved. As well he might be, since the last thing he'd had to eat was a sliver of rotten boloney discovered in the gutter of Tenth Avenue.

“Well, that takes care of that,” said Tucker glumly, staring at the space where the hamburger meat had been.

“Come on,” said Harry. “We still have the bun. And it's laced with lovely meat juice.”

Tucker consoled himself with that thought, and was almost through his half of the bun when he noticed that Harry wasn't eating. “
Now
what's wrong?” he demanded through juicy lips.

“He's crying,” said Harry quietly.

Tucker jerked up his mouth. “He's—”

Over in one corner, his head leaning on the wall, eyes hidden behind his scraggly hair, but the tears dropping down nonetheless, the puppy sat, all alone.

“Come on,” coaxed Harry, in a voice soft as his fur. “Come on. Come here. Be part of our party.”

The puppy came up and sat beside Harry.

“That's right,” said Harry. It may seem very strange that a cat should do this, but with his nails withdrawn he reached out and petted and stroked the dog's head. “You're Harry's pet puppy. Harry's puppy. All right?”

“Hh-hhh—”

“He's starting to say something!” burst in Tucker Mouse.

“Shh.
Shh!
” Harry warned.

“Hu-huppy,” stuttered the dog.

“Harry's puppy. Huppy.” Harry glanced toward his friend. “Okay with you? That we call him that?”

Tucker looked at the two of them, his whiskers dripping with now forgotten delicious meat juice. “Okay with me. I guess.”

TWO

The Nuisance

But a few days later Tucker wasn't so sure it was all okay.

“Tuppy,” he grumbled. “It could have been ‘Tuppy.' Tucker's puppy. After all,
I
scrounged up that hamburger!”

A pet puppy, the next few weeks were to prove, could be a nuisance. Especially when its true master was out prowling—which is a cat's duty as well as his pleasure—through the vast mechanical labyrinth of the city of New York.

There was, for instance, the very day after the puppy moved in, the question of—

“Stop that!” shouted Tucker Mouse. “You stop that right now! Come over here!”

In the farthest corner of the drainpipe, and discreetly concealed behind a big chunk of fallen plaster that Harry had pushed into position, was a section of floor that was always covered with several layers of very clean newspaper. Late each night, when the subway was almost empty and safe, either Tucker or Harry—they took turns at the chore—would wrap the newspapers up, secure them with a rubber band, and deposit them in a nearby trash basket. (Tucker always made sure that he'd scrounged up a sufficient supply of rubber bands. The take-out department of the lunch counter was very handy for that.)

“Now
there,
” said Tucker Mouse, with all the parental authority he could muster, as he pointed down at the newspaper, “is where you do—what you have to do.” He marched grandly back into the living area of the drainpipe.

And in a few minutes Huppy slouched back, too.

“Do we have that all straight now?” demanded the mouse.

“Yup,” muttered Huppy. He had a few words now. A very few.

But he didn't understand at all. Anyone who has raised a pet puppy will know what a trial the first few weeks are. They were an especially difficult trial for Tucker Mouse, who prided himself on having the very cleanest—if still chaotic—drainpipe in the Times Square subway station.

“Harry,” he said that night, when the big striped cat got back from his roaming and roving, and Huppy was asleep, “we have to talk about something.”

“I can guess,” said Harry with a sniff. He could see that much of the living area had been rearranged, and that a commuter's handkerchief—a favorite from Tucker's collection of human salvages—had been thrown out.

“It is absolutely
ridiculous
for a mouse to toilet-train a dog.” Tucker drew himself up to his full regal height—about three inches. “I will not appear ridiculous.”

“Well, if that's all that's worrying you, Mousiekins,” said Harry Cat, “you don't need to worry, because you have never failed to be—”

“And don't give me any of your furry lip!”
shouted Tucker as his three inches collapsed.

“Easy now,” soothed Harry. “It'll just take time. You know how puppies are.”

“No, I
don't
know how puppies are!” growled Tucker in a mouse's growl. “Me being perhaps the first mouse in recorded history that had to take care of one!” He kicked a belt buckle he'd salvaged a week before. “And by the way—as far as taking care of goes—”

“I've been busy,” said Harry.

“A cat's excuse,” grumbled Tucker Mouse. “Always the same excuse. ‘Been busy…' Doing
what?
”

Harry Cat didn't answer. He was trying to formulate a plan, but he wasn't ready to discuss it yet.

Instead of replying to Tucker's question, he went over and looked at the sleeping puppy. And tucked a Kleenex—a special Kleenex, because Tucker had managed to salvage it whole—beneath the little dog's left shoulder.

“He keeps kicking it off,” fretted Tucker Mouse. He ran around to the other side and fastidiously edged the torn fringe in. He had meant to use the Kleenex for some grand and glorious nose-blowing. But although it was a blanket now—he'd decided that an hour ago, on a chilly fall evening, when he put Huppy to bed—he demanded that at least it be treated with respect.

*   *   *

Though less undignified than his toilet-training, another of Huppy's habits caused Tucker much more worry.

One Tuesday, between the early rush hour and lunchtime, Tucker looked up from a morning chore—the counting of his life savings, making sure that none had been stolen—to find that the puppy was gone.

“Huppy?” he anxiously asked the empty drainpipe. “Huppy—are you here?”

He was not.

“Huppy?…
Huppy!
” A panicky feeling began to climb up Tucker's chest. He ran to the drainpipe opening. And there, not three feet away, snuffling contentedly at the base of an overflowing trash basket, was a nonchalant dish mop. “Come
back
in here!” The dish mop ambled into the drainpipe. “Don't you
ever
go out there again!” After all, the Times Square subway station was not exactly a tended lawn, with a high protective fence around it. It was a madness of comings and goings, and busy, thoughtless human beings.

“Now I mean it!” Tucker lectured sternly. “
I
will decide when you're old enough to go out in the world.”

“Rrff,” said Huppy begrudgingly.

But Tucker Mouse did
not
decide when Huppy went out in the world again. He went out that same afternoon, having smelled a delectable hunk of frankfurter in the trash basket nearest the subway tracks.

“Huppy!” shouted Tucker, after a frantic search through the drainpipe. “Don't go near the edge!” He darted out—a flash of gray fur—and began to pull the dog by his ears. But, young as he was, Huppy was much too big for the mouse. And much too obstinate. He just sat down and let his floppy ears be pulled.

“Oh, please,” begged Tucker, “come home! Huppy,
please!
” It was almost four-thirty—the time when the tramping feet began. “I'll get that hot dog, I
promise
I will!”

Huppy let his ears be dragged back to safety. And true to his word, Tucker skittered out into the open again and salvaged what turned out to be an almost inedibly old piece of hot dog.

“To think”—Tucker leaned against the drainpipe and panted—“for that lousy little chunk of meat, I risked extinction.”

In the next few days, against his wishes and his express commands, Tucker risked extinction many times. Because Huppy had found a delightful game. It happened that if he ran out into the subway station—and better still, cavorted out there, jumped up and down, and had lots of fun—this hysterical mouse would dash right after him, and plead, and pull ears, which didn't hurt, and push him from the rump, and do just about anything to get him back into that hole in the wall. Which the mouse kept calling “home.”

“I can't stand it!” said Tucker Mouse one night. That afternoon Huppy had not only run all the way to the other side of the station—beyond the end of the shuttle tracks, and his farthest excursion yet—he had also hidden himself behind a trash basket and barked at a transit policeman: great sport!

“This is serious,” said Harry Cat. His forehead puckered up in a frown until his eyebrows touched. “He could have been caught. Or even killed, if he fell on the shuttle tracks.”

“
He
could have been killed!
He
could—! What about—”

“Mousiekins—” Harry pacified his friend, as he usually did, by putting a heavy paw on his back and gently flattening him on the floor.