by Tom Watson
The nervousness in Stripes’s voice had clearly affected the other dogs. They immediately nodded along with her idea.
“I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation,” said Stick Dog calmly. As he said this, the music blared quite loudly. The volume of it, however, was now not changing at all. It was as if something had come closer and closer and closer and then stopped—and stopped nearby. Stick Dog asked, “Who wants to go check it out?”
Mutt said, “These strings in between my teeth will, unfortunately, prohibit me from investigating the music source.” He quickly sat down and scrunched and unscrunched his mouth in an obvious and valiant attempt to dislodge the offending strings.
Poo-Poo answered next. “I’m a smeller, not a hearer,” he said with great dignity and pride.
Stripes provided her excuse next. “I think the water-attacking machine may have temporarily damaged my hearing capabilities,” she said. She then leaned her head over to the right side while tapping the left side to demonstrate that there was, indeed, water in her ear.
“No problem, Stripes,” said Stick Dog.
“What?” she asked. She straightened up and held a paw to her ear.
“I said, ‘No problem,’” Stick Dog repeated.
“Huh?”
“I said—” Stick Dog answered, and stopped himself. Then he said, “The water machine gave your coat a nice rinse. Your spots look great.”
“Oh, thank you,” Stripes answered quickly, and glanced down at herself. “Thank you very much.”
Stick Dog smiled and turned to Karen. She would provide the last excuse, he knew, not to investigate that annoying music.
“Stick Dog?” she asked.
“Yes?”
“I really just don’t want to go.”
Stick Dog nodded his head in understanding. “I’ll go,” he said.
With that, he immediately wriggled through the lilac bushes to discover what was making that annoying sound.
He didn’t have to go far.
Chapter 7
WHAT’S WEIRD ABOUT IT?
Stick Dog didn’t even need to leave the safety of the lilac bushes. As soon as he stuck his head out, he discovered the source of that annoying music.
It was parked right on the street.
It was one of the strangest trucks Stick Dog had ever seen. And Stick Dog had seen quite a few trucks in his day. His pipe was below Highway 16, after all. And he would often sit outside it and watch the traffic—including many trucks—go by on the big highway above.
But he’d never seen one like this before.
It was more square in shape than usual—most trucks were long rectangles. It had many strange features. Stick Dog read two words—“ICE CREAM”—on the side of the truck.
He ducked back into the bushes to tell the others what he saw.
“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” Stick Dog began. He wanted to put everybody at ease right away. “It’s just a weird truck parked out on the street.”
“What’s weird about it?” Mutt asked.
Stick Dog answered, “Just about everything. It’s kind of a strange shape, it has a screened window, and it’s decorated with colorful pictures. It also has a shelf that runs along its side. And the music is coming from a strange contraption on the top that looks like a big, metal mouth.”
“I have to see this,” said Mutt as he began to push his head through the lilac bushes. Stripes, Karen, and Poo-Poo wanted to see too.
They stared out at the truck for nearly a minute and then shimmied backward into the hiding spot.
“You’re right, Stick Dog,” Mutt said. “That really is a strange truck.”
Everyone agreed.
Stripes asked, “What’s ‘ice cream’?”
Now, we need to pause here for a minute. Just for a little reminder. You remember that the dogs can all read, right? Remember how they read “Peter’s Frankfurters” on the side of the cart in the second book? And how they read the address on the pizza box in the third book?
And who says dogs can’t read anyway? It’s possible. Maybe they just can’t read out loud to us in human language. When we all go off to school during the day, maybe our dogs all reach out to the bookshelf and pick out a favorite novel or something. Then when they hear us come back, they shove the book back into its place and lie down real fast and pretend to be asleep. When we walk in the doorway, they stretch and yawn as if they’ve been asleep the whole time—when really they’ve been enjoying a mystery or a dictionary or a comic book.
Think about it. It’s possible.
You know what would be really funny? What if you had a dog and that dog could read? And what if when nobody is looking, your dog picks up this book and opens it to this page and reads all this?
And then the dog is like, “Oh, man! We are SO busted! The humans have figured out that we can all read. It says so right here in this book!”
Now, if you ARE a dog who is reading this right now, I just want to tell you this: Don’t worry about it. We won’t let the secret out. Please go on reading whenever you want.
It’s okay. Go grab a lemon cupcake off the kitchen counter and enjoy the rest of the book.
Anyway, the dogs in this book can definitely read.
“I have no idea what ‘ice cream’ is,” Stick Dog answered, after giving Stripes’s question a moment of thought. “But I do know what ice is—it’s real cold, and it turns into delicious water when it melts. It forms on the creek in the wintertime. On a day like this, ice sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?”
They all nodded their heads in the blazing-hot sun.
“Let’s watch this truck for a few minutes,” Stick Dog suggested. “Maybe it will lead us to this ‘ice cream’ in some way.”
Before they could even poke their heads back out of the lilac bushes to investigate further, however, the music stopped abruptly.
And that annoying music was replaced by a sound that brought fear to their hearts.
Chapter 8
RAINBOW PUDDLES
Suddenly, they heard running footsteps everywhere around them.
The footsteps charged from the left and the right, from the back and the front. It was as if a dozen or more humans had suddenly started running right at them.
Now, the sound of human footsteps is not very scary to you and me.
But that’s only to you and me.
To five stray dogs who live on their own, don’t trust humans, and are afraid of being caught by them, the sound of many human footsteps converging on their location was about as scary as it gets.
Immediately, Poo-Poo said low and hard, “Somebody has spotted us! We have to get out of here!”
“Where can we go?!” Mutt whispered urgently. “It sounds like they’re everywhere!”
Karen couldn’t say anything, but she did spin around and smash her shoulder into Mutt’s knee. He barely noticed in all the commotion.
“Hold still, everybody. Stay where you are,” Stick Dog whispered. He leaned his head sideways a bit and listened. The footsteps seemed to be going around them and past them—some close by and some farther away. Stick Dog was pretty sure they weren’t coming right at them. “I think we’re safe here.”
“We aren’t spotted, after all,” sighed Poo-Poo, utter relief in his voice.
“Speak for yourself,” Stripes said, pointed at herself, and smiled.
Mutt, Poo-Poo, and Karen groaned.
Stick Dog smiled, but his attention was still focused on the footsteps. They seemed to converge and then halt in a common place some short distance away.
“I think it’s safe to look now,” he said.
The others, trusting Stick Dog completely, joined him in pushing their heads out through the lilac leaves to have a look.
While they did, Stripes repeated the previous conversation to herself. She smiled with great glee as she recited it again.
“Poo-Poo said: ‘We aren’t spotted.’ Then I said: ‘Speak for yourself.’” She giggled and shook her
head, taking great pride in her outstanding sense of humor. “Stripes, old gal, that was a classic.”
“Shh,” Stick Dog whispered. “I want to see what’s going on.”
What was going on was some of the strangest behavior by a bunch of humans the dogs had ever seen. A group of about ten humans had gathered around that strange screen window on the side of the truck. They were mostly small humans, but there were a couple of bigger ones too. The music had stopped. The driver had parked the truck and climbed into the back of it, and a few seconds later appeared in the screen window.
That’s when the really odd things started. The humans stood in a line at the window and spoke one at a time to the driver. Then the driver completely disappeared for a half minute or so. When he came back, he held a pointed brown cylinder with circles on top of it.
The entire process repeated itself for about five minutes until each human had a pointed cylinder with circles on top of it. Some hung around near the truck, leaning their elbows against the shelf. Others wandered off in different directions.
“What are those things they’re holding?” Mutt asked after several minutes of observation.
“That must be ‘ice cream,’” answered Stick Dog.
“It’s a drink of some kind,” said Poo-Poo, joining the conversation.
“A drink?” Stripes asked. “I don’t think so. It looks more solid than liquid.”
“No, no,” Poo-Poo insisted. “It’s a liquid; it has to be. See? They’re lapping at it with their tongues. You only lap at things that are liquid.”
Now Karen expressed her opinion. “Those circle things are liquid, all right. They’re dripping every now and then. Liquids drip; solids don’t. I agree with Poo-Poo.”
“But just look at those circles,” Mutt said. “They look solid. If they weren’t solid, wouldn’t they just run off the sides of those cone-shaped things? They couldn’t hold their shape like that if they were liquid. I think Stripes is right. They’re solid.”
With two of them thinking solid and two of them thinking liquid, it was clearly going to be up to Stick Dog to break the tie. They all turned to him. He had a puzzled look on his face. To the other dogs, this was quite an unusual event. It was not very often that Stick Dog was confused about something. That was especially true when the subject was food.
“You all make perfectly good points,” he said. It was difficult to tell, frankly, whether Stick Dog was puzzled by the whole solid-liquid thing—or by the fact that his four friends had all made very valid points.
“So which is it?” Karen asked. “Solid or liquid?”
“Let’s go find out,” Stick Dog answered simply.
“Are you insane!?” Poo-Poo screamed instantly. Mutt, Karen, and Stripes all backed away from Stick Dog inside that circle of lilac bushes. “There must be a dozen humans out there! And a big truck! And really, really annoying music!”
Stick Dog smiled. “The music has started playing again,” he said. “And if you listen carefully, I think it’s getting softer and softer. And if it’s getting softer, then the truck is moving away. That probably means the humans have moved away too.”
This made sense to them. They pushed their heads back through the lilac leaves to survey their surroundings again.
Do you know what they saw?
Nothing.
No humans and no truck. Everything was quiet—except for the slowly fading music.
“Let’s go,” said Stick Dog. He pulled himself forward through the limbs and leaves of the lilac bushes. He ran to the spot where the truck had been parked, and Poo-Poo, Mutt, Stripes, and Karen followed close behind.
The dogs looked all around for clues about what the truck and the humans had been doing.
“There’s nothing here,” said Karen. She sniffed at the pavement. “The only unusual things I see are these small rainbow puddles.”
“Rainbow puddles?” asked Stick Dog. He immediately came next to Karen to examine what she had found.
“Yeah, rainbow puddles,” she said casually. “It’s like the rain cloud that crashed into the earth earlier and was raining upside down. You know, back in that yard? Probably the same thing happened here, except a rainbow crashed into the earth and left these puddles. That’s why they’re all different colors and stuff.”
“Well, that’s certainly one explanation,” said Stick Dog slowly. “But didn’t we discover that the spraying water in that backyard was really from a machine?”
“A water-attacking machine,” added Stripes, who, with the others, had now wandered over to investigate the colored puddles as well.
“Oh, right. A water-attacking machine. I remember now.” Karen nodded and considered these puddles and their origin a little more. “So these, obviously, came from a rainbow-attacking machine then.”
Stick Dog stood very still. He didn’t say anything for several seconds. Ultimately, he said, “I can see why you would think that.”
“Do you think it’s safe to taste them?” asked Mutt.
“I think the drips from the humans’ ice cream made these puddles. They were lapping at the ice cream, so we probably can too,” said Stick Dog.
That was all the encouragement they needed. Immediately, Poo-Poo, Stripes, Mutt, and Karen lowered their necks and began to probe the small puddles with the tips of their tongues.
Do you remember the first time you tasted something sweet? Probably not. You were probably too young. Maybe it was a nibble of a cupcake on your first birthday. Or maybe it was a piece of candy on Halloween. Whatever it was, I guarantee the smile that came to your face as your taste buds first awakened to something sweet was exactly the same kind of smile that came to all the dogs’ faces.
Immediately, they wanted to share these wonderful, sweet flavors with their friends. “Try this brown puddle,” yelled Mutt. “It’s the best, the absolute best! And guess what?! While I was taking a taste, the strings from that old gray sock came loose. They just came right out while I was tasting this amazing brown flavor! The strings are gone, and I’ve never tasted anything so good. I mean, this is like a miracle puddle or something! A miracle, I tell you.”
“Try this yellow one,” Stripes panted, before turning quickly to the brown puddle.
“Okay,” Mutt said. “We’ll switch. But be prepared. If you have something that’s bothering you, the miracle puddle is going to make it all better!”
Karen couldn’t leave her puddle, despite her friends’ urgings. She was lapping at a delicious white puddle.
Poo-Poo was over a blue puddle.
He tasted it ever so carefully—the bright blue was not a typical food color, after all. He dipped the tip of his tongue in. And then he pulled it back quickly. He paused for a moment and closed his eyes to allow that little drop of blue flavor to spread in his mouth. He smiled.
Stick Dog watched all this. He had already tasted a dark-brown puddle of his own and he, like the others, had found a flavor that was utterly scrumptious. But he had noticed Poo-Poo and that strange blue puddle he was tasting. When Poo-Poo, still smiling, opened his eyes, Stick Dog asked him, “What is it? Is it good?”
“Really, really good,” Poo-Poo whispered. “And really, really familiar.”
“Familiar?”
Poo-Poo nodded and raised his head, staring off into the distance. Lost in thought, he swayed his head a little. “I can see circles, small circles,” he said. “They’re flavorful and of many different colors. They’re hollow in the middle. Yellow, purple, orange, blue. Just circles. They’re coated in something—something powdery.”
Mutt, Stripes, and Karen had overheard all this. They knew Poo-Poo’s descriptions were not to be missed. They left their puddles and came closer to listen.
“I can see a garbage can. It’s tipped over,” Poo-Poo continued. “A human had thrown out a cereal box. And a lot of those circles had spilled out. And I found them, Stick Dog; I found them. There must have been thirty or forty of those multicolored circles. And I ate them all. They were
so sweet. A flavor I’d never tasted before. That’s what this small blue puddle tastes like. I’m trying to remember the name. It was something dramatic, elegant, and beautiful. A name for the ages. A name I’d always remember.”
“What is it?” asked Mutt, Stripes, and Karen all at once. “What’s the name?”
Poo-Poo’s eyes flashed open. “Froot Loops!” cried Poo-Poo. “That’s what that blue puddle tastes like! Froot Loops! Froot Loops!! Froot Loops!!!”
“Well, I’m glad you remembered,” said Stick Dog.
“Me too,” Poo-Poo said as a sense of calm came over him. “That would have driven me nuts.”
Stick Dog looked both ways down the street. There were no cars or humans visible, but he knew they had to hurry.
“I’d like to take our time here and explore and enjoy all these flavors,” Stick Dog said quickly. “But we’re way out here in the open. We’d better finish off these little puddles and fast.”
There were not that many puddles; they were pretty small, and there were five dogs. So it was only a matter of twenty or thirty seconds before all the different-colored puddles were gone.
“Now what?” Mutt asked. Poo-Poo, Stripes, and Karen all turned toward Stick Dog as well.
“That’s easy,” he answered. “We follow the truck.”
“Follow the truck!?” Stripes exclaimed. “That’s impossible. It must be miles away by now! We’ll never catch up to it. We’re not nearly fast enough!”
Stick Dog calmly held up his front right paw—and Stripes stopped speaking.
Stick Dog pointed down the street. Perhaps only a quarter of a mile away was the strange truck with “ICE CREAM” written on its side. It was stopped like before, and there was a small crowd of humans gathered around it.
