Invisible Cat!
by tallsunshine12
"Newkirk!" cried Carter, panicking from top to bottom of his skinny, underfed frame. "Your cat is chasing my Felix! You gotta come quick."
He was shouting down into the tunnel, where Hogan, LeBeau and Newkirk—the owner of the cat—were discussing a map for an upcoming mission.
"Wha's that, Carter?" Newkirk called up. "Is my furry moppet throwing a wobbly!"
"Huh?" said Carter, a language savant who knew Sioux, English, German, and even some British, but was baffled by the Cockney expression, 'throwing a wobbly.'
Newkirk left the map table with permission from Hogan and headed up the ladder to the main floor above the tunnels.
"Cor blimey! Carter, are you bonkers? What's the idea, shouting 'Get up 'ere!' Every bloke outside'll hear you and barge in 'ere."
"Clover chased Felix under this bunk," said Carter, leading Newkirk over. The man lying on top of it was laughing at Carter's antics and sharing winks with a couple of others in the barracks. How could Carter have seen an invisible cat, even if it was chasing a very visible soft-gray mouse named Felix?
"Get off, mate," Newkirk told the man in the bunk, who sighed, slapped his book together with a rap!, and climbed down to help move the bunk out. There, cowering on the floorboards was the small mouse, Felix. But what of the invisible cat?
They looked all around, futilely. The door was closed, so it couldn't have gotten out that way. Colonel Hogan's office door was shut, since he was downstairs with the map.
"Here, Kitty!"
The other men in the barracks hopped to their feet calling for the cat, some of them doing so with tongue in cheek, but all of them wanting to be agreeable to Newkirk and Carter in their feline delusion.
Two years ago, Newkirk had arrived with a batch of POWs and had been assigned to Barracks 2. He dropped his 'g's' and his 'r's', so he didn't warm up at first to the other inmates of the barracks, and was usually on his own.
As a new POW, he felt as if he had no purpose in life. He owned nothing but a razor, a bar of soap and a towel. So that's when Clover had come along. With her, he could feel the world turning more gentle-like in the heavens. Of course that was before Colonel Hogan had showed up to start an Underground operation right under the snozzles of the Germans, and given him that purpose he had been lacking.
Well-settled in now, he had not 'seen' the cat—Clover—for a while, but every so often a jittery Carter felt the need to 'see' the cat. At dusk, the slow time of the night, after dinner, but before cards, he often got to feeling a mite lonely. Now he was smiling. Ten men, some believers, some not, were scrounging around on all fours, here-kitty-kittying for Newkirk's unseeable friend.
"Schultz's coming!" called the man at the door, keeping the usual watch when any 'monkey business' was afoot in the barracks.
Schultz, a gentle giant of a man who'd made toys before the Wehrmacht converted his toy factory into a munitions plant, wedged his way in and with rounded eyes regarded the mayhem before him. Bunks had been overturned, the prisoners were on hands and knees, and Carter was looking petrified.
"Is it the invisible cat again, Corporal Newkirk?"
Schultz was well aware of Clover's existence, or lack thereof. He had met 'her' before any other soul, save Newkirk, in the camp. When Newkirk first came to Stalag 13, Schultz had seen him sitting on a crate behind the delousing station, petting the air above his lap. He was talking softly—cooing—down at his hand.
Schultz almost put a bullet in his rifle in case whatever it was in Newkirk's lap got violent, but he refrained. After all, he might shoot Newkirk by accident. Or himself.
"What's got there?"
"'aven't named 'er yet, mate. But it's a cat. She wandered in under the wire, latched onto me somehow, and so now I'm 'er keeper, it seems."
"It's almost roll call," said Schultz, not unsympathetically. "You must put her down now and come in."
"Can't I take 'er with me?" Cpl. Peter Newkirk had been shot down recently in a Lancaster bomber as one of the gunners, and his world was still upside-down. "She doesn't take up much room."
Schultz laughed. "I can see that, Newkirk." He seemed to reconsider. "Real cats and dogs are verboten, but I don't see why an invisible cat should pose a problem. Just don't let the Commandant see it, or it'll have to go."
"Go where?" Newkirk gestured at the deep woods all around with the hand he had been petting the cat with. "Trees, Gestapo patrols, and nightly bombing raids on Hammelburg, so where could she go?"
Schultz looked at Newkirk, whose hand had gone back to stroking it. He almost thought he could see the animal, too. "I get your point. She'd not stand a chance out there." He made an 'executive' decision, one that he hoped wouldn't bite him in the hinterteil. "Okay, bring her in. But no noise, hear? Tell her not to meow."
Newkirk smiled for the first time since he'd come to Stalag 13. He cradled Clover in his arms and followed the beefy sergeant of the guard back to Barracks 2, his home until the prisoners' escape committee determined it was time for him to escape.
Clover's first night in the barracks, one of the men set out a plate of milk for her, the bottle copped from the mess the day before. In the morning, the marveling men found the plate of milk empty, all drunk up. Newkirk didn't marvel, though. He knew he had a thirsty cat on his hands.
When he came to roust up the men for roll call, Schultz's parting words were, "Just don't let her have kittens."
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