Flawed Dogs Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  ONE - SCENT

  TWO - UP

  THREE - GROSS

  FOUR - MOO

  FIVE - 737

  SIX - SNORT

  SEVEN - POOFED

  EIGHT - $180,000

  NINE - GOPHER

  TEN - MURDER

  ELEVEN - BEAST

  TWELVE - SCREAMS

  THIRTEEN - FIRED

  FOURTEEN - DESCENT

  FIFTEEN - MEN

  SIXTEEN - LASSIE

  SEVENTEEN - BETRAYED

  EIGHTEEN - ABYSS

  NINETEEN - 12:03:28 A.M.

  TWENTY - ANGEL

  TWENTY-ONE - LIFTED

  TWENTY-TWO - JAM

  TWENTY-THREE - LEAVE

  TWENTY-FOUR - CURTAINS

  TWENTY-FIVE - RETURN

  TWENTY-SIX - FLYER

  TWENTY-SEVEN - QUACK

  TWENTY-EIGHT - BORROWING

  TWENTY-NINE - D -DAY

  THIRTY - GO

  THIRTY-ONE - DANCE

  THIRTY-TWO - NOW

  THIRTY-THREE - RISEN

  THIRTY-FOUR - LION

  Thanks to my pal Jean-Leon Gerome for letting me improve

  on his “Pollice Verso” of 1872.—B.B.

  The illustrations on pages iii and facing page 184 are re-envisioned from the author’s picture book:

  Flawed Dogs: The Year-End Leftovers at the Piddleton Last Chance Dog Pound

  (Little, Brown), © 2003 Berkeley Breathed.

  PHILOMEL BOOKS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group.

  Published by The Penguin Group.

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  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd).

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd).

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

  Copyright © 2009 by Rosebud Productions Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Breathed, Berkeley.

  Flawed dogs : the shocking raid on Westminster /

  Berkeley Breathed. p. cm.

  Summary: After being framed by a jealous poodle,

  a dachshund is left for dead, but comes back with a group of mutts from

  the National Last Ditch Dog Depository to disrupt the prestigious

  Westminster Kennel Club dog show and exact revenge on Cassius the poodle.

  [1. Dogs—Fiction. 2. Dog shows—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.B7393Fl 2009

  [Fic]—dc22 2009002638

  eISBN : 978-1-101-14028-4

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  All animals dream.

  But only dogs dream of us.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The recently released Congressional Report on the Westminster Dog Show Riot is rubbish.

  The source of that day’s injuries and property destruction is not so easily written off to the violent reaction to “a panicked poodle peeing in the punch,” as President Obama famously said when trying to calm the anxious nation.

  This country has prided itself in facing its most traumatic events with the courage that comes from the unblinking truth, no matter how shocking.

  After months of careful, courageous research into the lives of those responsible for this disaster, I am happy to deliver the true story to you now.

  BERKELEY BREATHED

  ONE

  SCENT

  The Rough-Handed Man carried him through crowded rooms empty of heat and kindness. The hands were shaking, but not from the cold. He became aware that the man was whispering to him: “It’s our turn, little buddy, little tough guy. I know you can do it. I need you to do it. You’re not so big, but you got a big stubborn heart bigger’n all of . . . of . . .”

  The voice paused.

  “Well, it’s bigger’n mine.”

  He was small for a dachshund and was being held upright like a fat salami on end. His bony spine lay against the man’s chest, his front feet bobbing before him. His broken rib required that he be carried this way. His fourth leg was not a leg at all but a steel soup ladle taped to his stump.

  He curled his tongue up to lick his nose, dry and cracked from the cold. He was aware of being carried past more men—all mutts and mongrels, no purebreds—bustling and shoving about him with arms tattooed, grimy, wet.

  Human-being smells enveloped him like a foul blanket: Smoke. Sweat. Chewing tobacco. Alcohol. Roasting meat.

  And money.

  The human beings’ money smells of all those other things. Among all the stuff they love so—cars, kids, wood floors, driveways, socks, hair, teeth, feet, plums—only their money they don’t wash, he thought.

  They should.

  And this time, it smelled of something else.

  Something new.

  He couldn’t identify it, this scent so unfamiliar. Long ago in a different life he could put a nose to the June breeze and tell you that the marigolds in the North Meadow had bloomed and new paint was on a fence somewhere and the furry-shoed Fat-Fingered Lady three miles down the road had just pulled a blackberry pie from the oven, sprinkled it with nutmeg and then farted.

  But here, now, he didn’t know this new scent. He knew he didn’t like it. He also didn’t care. He was past caring about anything.

  The man bore him through the jostling crowd, down some stairs, into more darkness, before entering a large space with a soaring ceiling filled with more men in shadow that he could not see but he could smell. And hear.

  They shouted and argued and spoke harshly and waved paper in their hands. There it is again. Money.

  He was lowered over a plywood wall formed in a circle, down farther until he felt dirt below his three paws. Dirt. At the bottom of a room in a building at the edge of a concrete city, how strange to feel dirt.

  He would have thought about this more if he hadn’t raised his eyes to see fifty pounds of bull terrier opposite him, five body lengths away, both front feet lifted off the ground. A reddening human hand held the collar and much of the huge beast’s weight as it strained forward, the muscles of his neck bulging and looking to explode. Pulses of hot mist shot into the frigid air from a gaping pink throat: a slobbering murderous locomotive building up steam. The eyes were unblinking and wild and fixed forward on a single point opposite the terrible mouth.

  “You want to kill me,” the dachshund said aloud.

  “I do,” said the other dog.

  “Isn’t there anything you’d rather do instead?”

  The big bull terrier stared at him, thinking hard. He’d never considered that question.

  But the dachshund understood now why he was here, in this dirt, in this pit.

  He looked up and found the face of the Rough-Handed Man staring down at him, looking crazy scared. “Ya gotta fight, little buddy!”

  Fight.

  The man might have just as well said, “Float.” Or, “F
ry up a haddock.” Better would be, “Faint.”

  He backed up until the wood planks found his tail, which folded below his rump as he pushed back, back.

  At that moment he also knew what that new smell was. He looked down and saw it, a dark crimson ribbon woven amidst the filthy dirt and food wrappers.

  It was blood. It was life.

  But here, spilled and dried in this terrible place, it was death.

  And here, finally, he knew it was the end of a long, unexpected road. He would go no further. Here I stop.

  And here I die.

  Slowly, he dropped his head and laid his long bony back down along the curved wall, three stubby brown legs out straight as if stretched on a porch on a hot day.

  One of the men in the mob yelled out: “He’s a-gonna take a snooze!”

  The crowd hushed into stunned silence as they stared.

  Then they exploded into twice the frenzy, waving their smelly money harder. The raging dog across the pit twisted against his restraints. The Rough-Handed Man leaned over the wall, waving at him: “Up! Get up! UP! YA CAN’T LIE DOWN, LITTLE BUDDY!”

  Watch me.

  He dropped the side of his head flat against the dirt and looked sideways at the end of his world. He looked for something—anything—to fix his eyes on rather than the drooling, corrupted fighting machine soon to be upon him with its broken fury. His gaze went up to a single arc bulb overhead flooding the pit with light. Blue, cold and blinding; yes, this would do.

  He stared at it and then closed his eyes. A new light took its place: the sun on a cobalt sky above the rolling green hills of another time and another world long ago. It was dazzling. It’s warm, he thought, and closed his eyes tighter. He traveled back and felt wild grass below his paws and breathed other, less cruel scents on the wind while he ran in a blur through a forest of exploding dandelions. And he heard her voice calling his name. “Sam! Sam the Lion!”

  Her voice!

  Heidy

  Above in the roiling crowd, the Rough-Handed Man looked down in the fighting pit at the three-legged dachshund lying still on its side, eyes clenched shut, and saw something out of place. He squinted and leaned closer and looked.

  No. Can’t be. Not here and not on a dog:

  A smile.

  TWO

  UP

  Three years before . . .

  In another time and another place . . .

  Late August.

  Heidy McCloud sat in the last row of the airplane as it taxied toward the small terminal and looked out the lefthand side window, changing her life forever.

  Years later she suggested to other people whose lives were on a crummy, hopeless dead-end path that a good thing to do is to look in the direction exactly opposite of which you were going to look. Catch life by surprise.

  If she’d been seated on the right side of the plane, she would have seen only fat green hills dotted with fat cows. She would have wondered if cows attacked. She would have seen the elegant sign over the terminal door greeting visitors:Piddleton, Vermont—Home of

  The World’s Most Beautiful Dogs.

  “Oh, brother. I don’t belong here,” she would have said with a grimace of remembrance. A single word would have occurred to her:

  RUN!

  And she would have dropped her bags the moment she’d left the plane and made a dash in the direction of Fiji, where she’d read somewhere that fourteen-year-olds were considered fully grown and could legally lie around the beach their entire lives eating Fruit Roll-Ups.

  But Heidy didn’t look out the right side window because back in St. Paul, Minnesota, the nuns of the St. Egregious Home for Troubly Girls had strapped her in row 40—on the left. They had assumed correctly that it was the farthest point from the cabin door on the right and she’d have trouble getting to it when it occurred to her somewhere over Indiana that a pleated school skirt might make a decent parachute.

  So it was the left window that she pressed her face on and looked down.

  A dozen dog crates were stacked on the tarmac. Each had a shipping label. Like boxes of tomatoes, thought Heidy.

  They had just been off-loaded from the cargo compartment of a large plane, waiting to be picked up by their new Piddleton owners. Each held a different kind of dog—the world’s most beautiful dogs—all of whom were sleeping or looking stupidly at the air molecules go by.

  Except one.

  The dachshund looked up through the chrome bars at the young human female. “Ah. They’ve got you too,” he said aloud. The girl’s face pressed against the glass of the airplane above him. He sighed and added: “Your crate is better.”

  The dachshund knew almost nothing about people. He knew the rubber boots of the one that used to clean his kennel and bring him his kibble, but he’d never spoken to the man. The last three hours in the plane only added to his life experience a plastic shipping crate, the smell of jet exhaust and the sounds of turbine engines.

  And now a new young human face was looking down at him. He stared back. As he stared at her and she stared at him, fifty feet and millions of years of evolution separated them. The sight of the human girl inspired the first murmurings of a primordial dog instinct rumbling deep inside his dog skull, and a single thought slowly rose to pop into his dog brain:

  “I want,” he said, “one of those.”

  Suddenly a much different face filled the cage’s opening, peering through the bars one inch away from his nose. It was much older and rounder and smelled of perfume, hair spray and broccoli and bacon quiche. It squealed, “My handsome boy! My HANDSOME boy!”

  A large squarish woman in a hairy blue chinchilla fur coat and hat unlatched the cage door and pulled the young dachshund out, holding him up high for a first inspection. She rolled up her coat sleeves and stretched his torso, arching his back, while one hand clasped his muzzle, holding him high. She examined backbone, neck, shoulders, forehead, rump, teeth, eyes—did they align perfectly? She cocked her head, closed one purple eyelid and sighted down his nose. “Gooooooorgeous! Just what I ordered! Straight and true!” she purred. She squeezed the dog’s thighs.

  Heidy watched from inside the plane above. She’d seen holiday shoppers inspect something else in the very same manner. What was it . . . ?

  A Christmas ham.

  On an instinctual level, the same thought occurred to the dachshund:

  “NO, NO! Don’t eat me, furry human!” he cried out, but the vice-like fingers held his mouth shut. A whimper emerged. His eyes could move, though, and he could see that the large woman must have fallen down stairs recently.

  Her lips, nails, nose, cheeks and eyes were discolored into horrifying shades of purple. He shuddered at what monstrous hues might glisten on her other, unseen parts.

  Suddenly the woman froze, her eyes locked to the top of his head.

  “Good Lord ’n’ holy butter! The cranial Duüglitz tuft!” she said. A shaking finger reached out and touched a wisp of fur curling up from a point at the top of the dachshund’s skull. Pierre Duüglitz was an eighteenth-century Austrian breeder who died without fulfilling his life’s dream of producing a lime-green-colored dachshund. Instead he left behind a highly prized genetic abnormality that forever carries both his name and his eternal shame:

  A little curly wisp of hair atop the head.

  For the large woman in the chinchilla coat, it was the holy grail of dachshundom. She spun around and faced an airport man in white overalls behind her. She thrust the dog into the man’s face. “Look! The Duüglitz tuft! THE DUÜGLITZ TUFT!!”

  My name is Duüglitz, thought the dog.

  “Oooooohhhh . . .” whispered the great woman in an ecstatic gargle growl of awe. “This one will finally win me the Westminster championship!”

  The man rolled his eyes. “Mrs. Nutbush, as usual you’ll have to wait until his shipping papers are processed. You can pick him up in cargo in a few minutes.”

  “Ah, well, there it is,” Mrs. Nutbush said, and with a flourish placed the do
g back into his crate. She bent down and put her face to the bars. “Mommy’s little world champion!” She smiled broadly, but the dachshund noticed that she wasn’t looking at his eyes, but rather at his tuft. “BeeYOOtiful,” she purred. “I’ll be back for you, sweet pea!”

  She loped off. Bounced, really.

  The dog stood in the crate, dazed, her words of doom still ringing in his ears: “I’ll be back!”

  He looked the other way and saw a green ocean of grass in the distance. It rippled like inviting waves. Waves a dog could run through forever.

  Then he looked down to the latch on the crate’s bars.

  In a crisis, dogs can be simple in their thoughts. In this case he had just one:

  OUT!

  He tried to unhook the latch with his teeth. They weren’t reaching. Tongue. Use the tongue! He wrapped it around the strange loop of metal and yanked sideways. Hard! Harder! He muttered: “Slippery . . . stupid . . . c’mon, ol’ Duüglitz Tuft, get a grip on it . . . out out out . . . OUT!”

  As he struggled in panic, his eyes happened to go back up to the window of the plane opposite, where the young human female’s face still peered down at him. He couldn’t hear, of course, but she was mouthing something behind the glass:

  “Up,” she was saying. “Pull it up.”

  THREE

  GROSS

  A few minutes later Heidy’s bags banged about her knees as she walked down the plane’s stairs. Before entering the terminal, she looked back at the dachshund, still in the dog crate twenty feet away. She stopped, checked to see if anyone was watching and stepped away from the yellow dotted line on the tarmac meant to keep people from doing exactly what she was doing.

  She approached the stack of animal shipping boxes and scanned their panting contents. There were every variety and shape and exotic breed. It was like a sidewalk fruit stall of dogs.