Flawed Dogs Read online

  She found the dachshund, bent down and looked into the cage. He stopped biting the latch and looked up into her eyes, surprised that the young human being had gotten out of her own crate so easily. Heidy leaned her face in close to the bars.

  “Hello, weiner dog.”

  He was nervous. But he was polite:

  “Hello, hairless lips.”

  She pointed to the latch. “You’re doing it wrong.”

  The dog suddenly forgot about escape and his questions poured out: “What breed are you? You smell good! How do you keep rain out of those ears? How can you sniff the ground with that little nose? Your eyes are greenish. Do you see everything greenish? Do you have fingers on your other two feet? Do you eat kibble?”

  Heidy furrowed her brow. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand dog.”

  “Here. Try this,” he said.

  The dachshund then did something that would change the rest of his life:

  He kissed her.

  More precisely, he licked her under the nose.

  Not on the mouth, with the common paint-roller application of dog spit. The Big Kahuna, as Labradors call it. No, this was a gently executed upward swipe of the last quarter inch of tongue on the tiny band of flesh between the nostrils: the forbidden promised land of dog affection.

  It is a gesture weirdly, wholly unique among an entire planet of animal types. A person may place his or her face before that of a panda bear, parrot, warthog, whale, lizard, elephant, trout, lemur, llama, monkey, rhinoceros, bunny, ferret, hamster, horse, house cat or domesticated dik-dik, but none of those will do what a dog will:

  Kiss.

  Unless the person’s face is covered with jam. Or in the case of the cat, mouse intestines. Neither counts.

  No, only a dog will smooch a human being. And he’ll aim the kiss for the lips but be happy with a nose, chin, ear, neck, toe or buttock. Unlike grandmothers, dogs are not fussy.

  In Heidy’s case, it was under the nose.

  She stood up straight, as if slapped. The dachshund looked equally shocked.

  Neither knew it at the time, but a line had been crossed that could not be uncrossed—a running leap over the chasm of ignorance and misunderstanding between species and worlds . . . and a baby step taken into life’s endless possibilities for wonder and joy and surprise that could no more be reversed than one’s first taste of chocolate.

  A dog kiss.

  “That was completely gross,” said Heidy.

  With a flourish she wiped off the little amount of moisture with a sleeve—really, it was nothing—above her upper lip without looking away from the dachshund, who continued to stare at her. She spun around and walked briskly toward the terminal door.

  But not before flipping the crate’s latch upward and off.

  FOUR

  MOO

  “I’m Mrs. Beaglehole,” said an enormous elegant woman, whom Heidy mistook for a trained red cow. She stood stiffly just inside the airline terminal doorway, hands clasped, figured Heidy, about where her udder should be.

  Mrs. Beaglehole blinked rapidly and looked down at the girl. “Miss Heidy McCloud, I presume. I now run your uncle’s dog ranch. Welcome to Piddleton.” She held out a long hand. Heidy reached for it carefully with her own while eyeing the woman’s toothy mouth. Cows attack.

  “And welcome to your new life,” Mrs. Beaglehole said, folding her hands again. “Your uncle is so very interested in seeing you again. Maybe with your hair brushed. How old were you again when you last visited him here? Thirteen?”

  “Six,” said Heidy. The woman snorted and pretended not to hear.

  “He has great plans for you, you know.”

  “I don’t like dogs,” said Heidy. She thought she should put that out there early. Mrs. Beaglehole looked as if she’d been stuck with a knitting needle.

  “Not like dogs! Why?”

  Heidy looked back at the woman with equal shock. Did this ridiculous human heifer really not know that it was because of dogs . . . DOGS! . . . that her parents had died when she was a little kid? That it was because of DOGS that her criminally negligent uncle had dispatched her to stew with the mutant nuns at St. Egregious for all these torturous years? She didn’t know that it was because of DOGS that Heidy’s life was now shredded like one of her stupid uncle’s giant canvas chewtoys?

  Apparently not, concluded Heidy.

  “I don’t like dogs,” she finally said. “Because they always need a bath.”

  Mrs. Beaglehole’s smile tightened with annoyance and spread so wide that Heidy worried the ends of her mouth might stretch all the way around her neck and meet, allowing the mighty head to spring off and hit the ceiling.

  “Dogs don’t need baths here,” said Mrs. Beaglehole. “Unlike children. How you must be so looking forward to yours.”

  Heidy stopped listening because she’d noticed something peculiar about Mrs. Beaglehole as she talked: with her head cocked ever so slightly to the left, the woman had one eye closed and the other focused on the center of the girl’s face. She was sighting Heidy’s nose for straightness. Exactly like the blue-furred woman had looked at the dachshund.

  Heidy sighed and rolled her eyes. She looked past Mrs. Beaglehole and through the huge terminal windows, looking hard for the mountains of Fiji.

  But she didn’t see Fiji outside. She saw the dachshund out of his crate, crouched at the base of a pile of luggage on the tarmac outside, waiting to lunge for freedom.

  A lion in the bush! thought Heidy, smiling.

  Her first smile that day.

  She watched the dog make a dash for the tarmac fence, but several workers cut him off, sending him into another group having lunch. His forward momentum took him straight up the leg of the first man, past his chest and up his face, which had several french fries sticking out of it. Dogs are creatures of survival, so he instinctively grabbed them all with his teeth as he climbed. Hooking a rear paw into the man’s open mouth, he pushed himself onto the top of the man’s head. The man flailed, as if being attacked by a fruit bat.

  The other man grabbed for the dog, but then the escapee leapt to his head. Other workers ran up and the dog kept leaping from headto head

  to head

  to head

  to head and so forth.

  You might think these acrobatics enough to fully occupy a dog’s attention, but no, they are multitaskers at their core, and he finished chewing the stolen french fries. His first french fries ever, as it happens. The dog licked his lips and made a mental note that his favorite thing in the world was no longer kibble.

  Inside the terminal, Mrs. Nutbush shrieked in horror at the sight of her Duüglitz dachshund escaping across the scalps of Piddleton’s sweatiest luggage handlers. Heidy watched as the furred woman surged forward and body-slammed through the glass security doors. Airport alarms erupted, as did Mrs. Nutbush: “GET HIM! GET HIM! DON’T TOUCH THE TUFT!!” she yelled, arms out, hands waving, fur coat flapping. She got twenty feet before the first of a dozen security people tackled her, looking, Heidy thought, like the Notre Dame backfield piling atop a two-hundred-pound blue rodent.

  Heidy gave a long, low whistle of awed admiration. “Some dog,” she said aloud.

  “A stray, no doubt. Mongrel!” snorted Mrs. Beaglehole. “Grubby, undisciplined mutts need a leash.” As she mumbled this, she reached into her large purse and removed a dog leash. Heidy’s eyes went large as the woman bent down toward Heidy’s neck. She stopped, catching herself. “Old habit,” she said, smiling that tight, lipless smile again. Mrs. Beaglehole picked up Heidy’s bags and nudged Heidy out the front doors to a town car idling in front of the terminal, waiting to take her to the rest of her life.

  FIVE

  737

  Heidy settled nervously into the backseat as the car pulled away onto the airport road. She never saw the renegade dachshund behind her on the tarmac leap into the cab of an electric airport cart and accidentally hit the accelerator with his bottom.

  The little vehicle l
urched forward and bounced below the belly of a parked airplane and on toward the runway. A dozen airport people chased the cart—a huge sign attached to its bumper read: FOLLOW ME. The dog wasn’t actually steering, of course, but to his surprise, he found himself moving quickly away from Mrs. Nutbush, who was still flattened under the men on the tarmac. He kept his bottom pressed against the accelerator pedal and presumed, like a dog caught shredding and eating a designer sofa, that everything was going fine.

  The FOLLOW ME vehicle entered the main runway from the side and directly across the path of a taxiing 737 airliner that had just landed from Dubuque. The little truck continued east across the grass toward the highway. The plane turned in the same direction and obediently followed close behind.

  Meanwhile, Heidy sat unhappily in the back of the huge car moving down the airport perimeter road while Mrs. Beaglehole drove.

  “Dear, sweet Heidy,” the woman said. “We should probably discuss something before you see your uncle. The wonderful ladies of St. Egregious mentioned some . . . problems there that you had been involved with.”

  Heidy said nothing. Word must have gotten out about the flush reversals she’d arranged for the nuns’ bathrooms. She stared at the back of the car seats. Little golden retrievers were carved into the leather.

  “Your uncle Hamish’s spirit isn’t terribly well, dear. We’d hate for any . . . unnecessary stress to enter his life right now.” Heidy looked out the windows as the car moved away from the airport. She saw people on the sidewalk pointing back down the road behind them.

  Heidy twisted around in her seat and looked out the rear window. The little electric airport cart swerved close behind their bumper, the dachshund’s face peeking out over the hood. Close behind the FOLLOW ME cart rolled a 737 airliner and its obedient pilots moving down the country road.

  Mrs. Beaglehole stared straight ahead in the front seat and continued: “Heidy, I’ll just ask you straight out: Can we expect any problems ahead?”

  Heidy stared behind her as the airliner’s wings knocked down the power poles lining the road twenty yards back, sending sparks flying and exploding a small transformer box.

  “No,” she said.

  On the weaving, bouncing electric cart, the dog spotted the girl peering at him through the car’s rear window ahead of him. Amidst a troublesome day where nothing made sense, the girl’s face was a lifeboat of familiarity. He leapt from the electric cart’s accelerator pedal, stopping it cold. The airliner behind it slammed on its brakes in front of a Piggly Wiggly grocery store, which the passengers decided was the Piddleton Airport baggage claim.

  The dachshund streaked up alongside Heidy’s car, leapt onto the running board and scrambled up the rear door, through the open window, and into Heidy’s open travel bag tucked next to her leg.

  Panting hard, he looked up at the startled girl and said simply: “I love french fries.”

  He honestly couldn’t think of anything less stupid to say. But he thought something honest was called for. It was a pity that girls don’t speak dog.

  Heidy looked down in mute amazement.

  Then with a single finger, Heidy gently, silently pushed the dachshund’s muzzle into the bag and zipped it up.

  SIX

  SNORT

  “I remember this place like a dream,” said Heidy, allowing a smile. She leaned over Mrs. Beaglehole’s shoulder and peered out the town car’s front window at the extraordinary sight ahead of her. The car had turned off a country road and into a tunnel made of a dark canopy of great oak trees. As they emerged back into the sunlight, two twenty-foot-high Great Danes made of shrubbery stood sentinel on either side of the final entrance to McCloud Heavenly Acres. The driveway pointed to the top of the highest hill for miles around, atop which stood the McCloud mansion, one of Heidy’s faded memories from eight years before. She let out a low whistle, which made the renegade dachshund hiding in her bag stir. (Whistles are to dogs what a pricked thumb is to a vampire.) Heidy pushed her last taffy candy bar into the bag to quiet her stowaway.

  “Something’s different,” said Heidy, still staring out the window. She saw rows and rows of empty kennels in the near distance. “The dogs are gone.”

  “Your uncle seemed to lose interest in dogs after your parents were . . . were . . .” Mrs. Beaglehole trailed off.

  “You can just come out and say it,” said Heidy. “Eaten by schnauzers.”

  Mrs. Beaglehole spun around and gave the smirking girl the evil cow eye. The woman was shocked at her coolness toward her parents. Why not coolness? Heidy had never known her family, really. Her memories of her parents were like dim figures peeking out from a thick fog. All she’d known for the last eight years was a girls’ school in the freezing hills of Minnesota and platoons of behemoth penguins pretending to be nuns.

  Mrs. Beaglehole continued: “Your uncle sold off all the beautiful dogs. All! So beautiful. Like tossing out Louis Vuitton handbags! Snort!” This was the first of many snorts of displeasure. Heidy read somewhere that water buffalo snort before they ram people. “Your uncle Hamish now mostly spends his time alone. Doesn’t seem interested in much of anything. I arrived a few years ago to take care of things while he . . .” She snorted. “He’s not well. Which is why he sent for you.”

  This time Heidy snorted.

  She was going to demand the truth about her parents’ deaths . . . and why her uncle had sent her away years ago . . . but changed her mind. She looked at the rows of empty kennels passing by. “There aren’t any dogs left here AT ALL?”

  Mrs. Beaglehole brightened visibly. “Why, yes, dear. Mine. That makes one!”

  Heidy felt her bag move as the dachshund chewed his first banana taffy. Two, thought Heidy.

  The car pulled up to the grand house’s grand entrance, where Heidy’s door was opened by a younger woman in a neat housekeeper’s apron who didn’t make Heidy think of cows at all. A quiet baby was slung tightly across her back in a sling. “Heidy McCloud! I’m Miss Violett. I look after your uncle’s house. And the cooking. And my Bruno here, of course.” She held up the baby’s socked foot.

  Mrs. Beaglehole snorted. “He looks like an Indian papoose, Violett.”

  Miss Violett took Heidy’s hand and looked at her with a softness that she wasn’t used to. “Your mother and I were good friends when we were girls. I used to play with her in this very house. And isn’t it funny . . . now I’m back looking after her brother.”

  “Actually, Miss Violett, that is my job,” injected Mrs. Beaglehole with an edge to her voice. “You see to lunch.”

  Mrs. Beaglehole climbed onto a step leading to the front door, so that she was slightly higher than either of them. “Come along, your uncle is waiting to see you. You’re off a button with your sweater, dear.”

  Heidy followed Mrs. Beaglehole into the entry. She gasped. Dark-paneled walls soared to a ceiling three stories above her. Straight ahead, a grand staircase curved upward into darkness. In fact, the entire house was dark. But that’s not what made the girl stop and stare.

  The dogs. Ghosts of McCloud family purebreds. The walls were covered with them. In huge paintings eight feet tall, they sat rigid and regal, as if stunned into bewildered awe by the glory of their own fabulousness.

  A Bolivian flat-nosed spittin’ spaniel. An orange-crested Dutch baby dusenstruegal. A Chinese kissin’ tellin’ terrier. Many more, far more exotic. Heidy let out another long, low whistle.

  Which again made the dachshund hiding inside the bag across her shoulder stop chewing the taffy and reflexively blurt out: “What! Hello! I’m here! My tongue ith thtuck to the woof of my mowth.”

  He said this in dog, of course, and it emerged as a garbled yip. Heidy heard it and tried to cover it up by shuffling a large chair next to her. Mrs. Beaglehole glanced about. “Moles,” she sniffed.

  There was another set of ears nearby, however, far less easily fooled. A large poodle with a red bow came tearing in from the kitchen, barking maniacally. “I HEARD THAT! WHO WAS TH
AT!?” he yelled.

  Mrs. Beaglehole spun around and threw her arms wide. “There’s my darling champion to be! Heidy, THIS is Cassius.”

  Heidy stared at the pathetic creature. Beachball-size explosions of fuzzy hair erupted like creeping blobs of attacking white broccoli across the entirety of the starved beast’s shaved skeleton. “Is he going to die?” asked Heidy.

  “On the contrary. He’s going to win Westminster one day,” said Mrs. Beaglehole, reaching down through miles of poodle fur and fluffing it up to an even more terrifying extent.

  Cassius turned to Mrs. Beaglehole with a lick to her nose. She thrust out a hand to stop him. “Tut! No lickies, Cassius! You know only on my feet and before bath time!”

  “I shall count the minutes until paradise, madam,” mumbled the poodle, rolling his eyes. He looked around the room. He’d heard a yip. He knew a yip when he heard one, and it wasn’t a stupid yard mole. He ate them all the time and they never yipped.

  Unless, he thought, you started at the tail and went veeeery slow.

  SEVEN

  POOFED

  “Heidy! Come to me, Niece!” a man’s voice said from the darkness above the stairs. The girl froze. Then she moved to the source of the voice as commanded, climbing the stairs slowly. She peered into a vast, dark room.

  “You got my letters?” asked the voice of Uncle Hamish somewhere in the black depths of a huge chair. Cassius stood nearby, eyes glowing like embers.

  “Yep. Got ’em,” said Heidy, standing in the doorway, unsmiling.

  “You look like your mother, Heidy,” said Hamish.

  “Well, that’s a relief, Uncle. People start looking like their dogs after enough time.” She stared at her uncle. “It’s been eight years. I figured I might start looking like the nuns.”