Read Dewey for Free Online Page B

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