Critters of Mossy Creek

by Deborah Smith

  “We’re looking after them for the weekend.”

  “I’m going to a motel.”

  “Louise, be serious. They won’t be a bit of trouble. They can go and come through the dog door. They’re housebroken, and they’ve got the whole backyard to play in. I’ve got their beds, their dishes, their food and their toys in the car. We can take them with us on our morning walk and add an evening walk, which we’ve been saying we were going to start. Do us both good.”

  “Charles, you have bursitis in your shoulder. Can you imagine how you’ll feel with those two giants yanking you all over the neighborhood?”

  “They won’t yank, will you, boy?” Charlie rubbed Benjamin’s small, gray, floppy ears that looked as though they belonged on a Jack Russell rather than on this beast. “I told you, they’re both champions. They’re show dogs. They know how to walk on a leash.”

  “As I recall, show dogs actually trot when they’re being shown. Their handlers sprint to keep up with them while stuffing raw liver down their gullets. I refuse to carry raw liver.”

  “Now you’re just being obstinate. Look at Mirabel, there. She already adores you.”

  Mirabel, obviously the quieter of the two, sat at my feet and stared up at me. Her eyes did look adoring, but whether I was looking at love or at meal assessment, I had no way of knowing. She ooched closer, so that she was actually sitting on my feet. I managed to yank them out from under her. She whimpered.

  “Charles, dear, please explain this—this—invasion.” I was trying to sound rational, but it wasn’t easy.

  “It’s Millie at the office. Her mother had a stroke last night. She lives in Athens, and she’s in intensive care. There wasn’t any room at Millie’s usual kennel for Benjamin and Mirabel over the weekend, so I said we’d take them. She’ll pick them up either Sunday afternoon or Monday morning. I knew you’d want to help out.”

  What do you say to that? Take your two monsters into intensive care to climb onto your mother’s hospital bed? Obviously not. “I didn’t know Millie had a mother,” I said lamely. “Or dogs.” As though I could solve the problem by denying knowledge of it. “Lord help us, Charlie, Millie can’t weigh more than ninety pounds! How does she handle them?”

  Charlie still sat on the den floor. Both Benjamin and Mirabel collapsed in front of him with their heads in his lap. “She seems to manage, but she did say they can be a little hyper. Shoot, Louise, Benjamin is only a puppy. He’s barely eighteen months old.”

  “He’s not full grown? He’s already the size of a pony.”

  “He won’t get much taller, Millie says, but he’ll probably put on another ten pounds or so.” He chuckled again and scratched both sets of tiny ears. “What good dogs,” he simpered. “Yes, you are. Come on, Louise, help me get their toys and bedding in. Once we show them the dog door, they won’t bother us.” Famous last words that must rank right up there with the cowboy’s epitaph, “That ole horse won’t do nothin’.”

  “They are your responsibility,” I said. “I am not cleaning up dog doo.”

  Trying to fix dinner with those two roaming the kitchen was like trying to create a soufflé in the elephant pen at the zoo. Ben could reach the kitchen counter without lifting his feet off the ground. We no longer eat a big dinner, but even after I moved the soup to the back burner of the stove, Ben put his paws up and almost grasped the handle of the Dutch oven to pull the whole boiling pot over on his paws.

  Then I discovered that Bel could open the refrigerator. Obviously Ben was the brawn of the operation, while Bel was the brains. Charlie kept himself out of the way until I screamed so loud he was afraid I’d either killed or been killed.

  “Problem, Louise?” he asked. He was holding the morning newspaper, which he never reads until he comes home from the office.

  “Get them out of here. Put them outside and lock the dog door if you want any dinner.” I thought I sounded reasonable.

  “About that. I just tried the dog door. Ben doesn’t fit through unless he scrunches down. I don’t think he’s figured out how to manage that yet.” He held up his hands. “I’m sure I can teach him after dinner.” He tried a smile. It didn’t work. “Millie sent along one of those child gates. She said she didn’t think we’d need it, but it’s in the car. We could put it across the door to the back hall. They’d be able to see us, but not get into the kitchen.”

  “And you did not think of this until now?”

  “I thought they’d settle down.”

  I pointed my ladle at him like a weapon, which, under the circumstances, it was destined to become if he didn’t get that precious pair out of my kitchen.

  Of course they didn’t want to go. It took Charlie on the front pulling and me on the back shoving to get first one dog, then the other, in the hall, then snap the gate into place before they could get out.

  They voiced their displeasure at once in a series of hair-raising ululations that would have done Lawrence of Arabia proud. I hardened my heart and served the scrappy supper on the breakfast bar under the doleful eyes of the grief-stricken canines.

  I had taken two whole bites of my sandwich when Ben vaulted the gate, followed at once by Bel. She didn’t quite make it and fell splat onto the kitchen floor.

  Before I had time to put my sandwich down, Ben had snatched it out of my hand. I grabbed my glass of tea and the other half of my sandwich, stood up and said, “I’m going to lock myself in the bedroom and not come out until Monday. Have fun.”

  I have no idea when Charlie came to bed, although I heard male cusswords and dog toenails for quite a while. I stayed in the bedroom. The dogs apparently had not figured out how to turn a round doorknob yet.

  Although we don’t sleep late on Saturday and Sunday, we do sleep later than on weekdays, so when the alarm in the kitchen went off at 5 a.m. we both sat bolt upright.

  Charlie had locked the dogs in the kitchen and back hall before he came to bed after first securing the refrigerator door with a heavy-duty bungee cord and crawling back and forth through the dog door. Finally, he had hauled Ben in and out until he figured out how to crawl through on his belly. According to Charlie, Bel regarded her brother as a mental defective and ignored his impassioned pleas from outside until he mustered the courage to come in on his own.

  “For Pete’s sake,” Charlie grumbled, when the alarm went off. It’s in the kitchen. If we leave it in the bedroom, one or the other of us turns it off and goes back to sleep without waking the other. Charlie went to shut it off.

  I put a pillow over my head and waited for it to stop. It didn’t.

  Five minutes later, Charlie stormed into the bedroom, climbed back into bed and put a pillow over his head.

  “Why is that thing still ringing?” I asked.

  “You just had to have that darned state-of-the-art sound system,” he grumbled. “’Look, honey,’” he imitated me. Badly. “’No knobs at all on the tuner. Just this simple little clicker.’” He raised up on his elbows. “That simple little clicker is in nano-pieces on the kitchen floor. Until I get another FEDEX-ed from the manufacturer, I cannot cut off that alarm. I unplugged it, but I have no idea how long the batteries last. Are you happy, now?” He rolled over and stuffed the pillow over his ears.

  I considered holding mine over his face until either his breathing or the alarm stopped, whichever came first.

  The alarm gave up and turned itself off in thirty minutes, by which time the dogs had decided it was past time we got up, fed them and took them for a walk. I knew dogs barked and whined. The song these dogs sang sounded like an alien language. Loud, expressive and totally incomprehensible for those of us from planet earth.

  “We’re supposed to walk them before we feed them,” Charlie said. “You can handle Bel. I’ll take Ben. Just say ‘heel.’”

  Having watched those dog training shows on TV, I know that a tired dog is theoretically a calm dog. I also know that at least one of those trainers is an expert on in-line skates. I haven’t skated since I was twe
lve when skates had four small wheels, so that was out. I didn’t dare try to handle a leash while riding my bicycle. One good sideways yank and I’d be lying in the road with a broken hip or under the wheels of a semi.

  Without Charlie straining on his end of the leash, I think Ben could have outrun the Batmobile. At the end of twenty minutes, I was wondering how fast the EMTs could get to us with their defibrillators.

  We did have a few moments of peace while they gobbled their breakfasts. I, for one, spent them in the recliner in the den fanning with a magazine.

  “Just one more day,” Charlie gasped from the sofa. “They go back to Millie on Monday morning, thank God.”

  Only of course they didn’t, although Charlie went back to work and left me with both of them.

  Sunday night Millie called. Charlie talked to her a long time, and I heard words like ‘really sweet’ and ‘no trouble.’

  Liar. They were really sweet, I had to admit. When Bel climbed onto the sofa on Sunday afternoon, laid her head on my thigh and looked up at me with those shoe-button eyes, I must admit I melted and spent the rest of the afternoon half paralyzed from the weight of her while I scratched her ears and read my book.

  Charlie eventually stretched out on the floor cushions in front of the football game and went to sleep with Ben tucked close beside him.

  Very sweet.

  But no trouble? As if.

  “Well? How’s Millie’s mother?” I asked after Charlie hung up the phone.

  “Still in a coma. She’s showing some signs of coming out of it, but Millie can’t possibly leave her. She’s an only child. There’s no one else.”

  “So you’re taking the dogs to the kennel tomorrow morning, right?”

  “Actually, I said we’d keep them. Just a few more days. She’ll have to come back to work sooner or later.”

  Charlie escaped to his consulting job—he’s semi-retired now—after our race on Monday morning and left me alone with the terrible two. He was supposed to come home with a taller, stronger gate that Ben couldn’t jump and every book available on Bouviers from the bookstore or the library.

  In the meantime, I tried to ignore them, while I got at least a modicum of house tidying done. I quickly realized that they were like toddlers. If they were quiet, they were doing something bad.

  I found both of them asleep on our unmade bed, wrapped in the duvet, gray ears peaking out from under the covers. I would haul one of them onto the floor, then when I started pulling the other, the first would crawl back under the covers. I am not generally a screamer, but I’m afraid I gave vent to some alien language of my own before I got them locked out of the bedroom long enough to make the bed and pick up Charlie’s socks. Make that one sock. The other had disappeared. I still haven’t found it.

  I expected them to be sitting outside the bedroom door waiting to pounce, but they weren’t in evidence. The house was quiet. At that point I hadn’t realized that quiet equaled disaster. I walked into the den and sank onto the modern recliner. Designed to ease back problems, it is the world’s ugliest but most comfortable chair. It flipped directly from upright all the way to nearly flat when you pulled on the lever.

  I sat and promptly went over backwards. I lay teetering back and forth and completely unable to control the mechanism that sat me upright.

  Past my knees I saw Benjamin happily tearing a hunk of dark green leather that should have been tacked onto the bottom of the chair. The mechanism that tilted it lay in pieces around his feet.

  Then the doorbell rang. The dogs dropped what they were doing and raced to the front hall barking like foghorns.

  It was my daughter, who already thinks Charlie and I are one step from senility and should be earnestly searching for The Home in which to spend our declining years.

  I shoved the pair out of the way, opened the door a crack, grabbed her arm, yanked her inside and shut the door behind her. She cowered against the door, both hands protecting her crotch. “Good Lord, Mother, what on earth have you done now?”

  You can certainly see why I immediately rose to their defense. It was fine for me to criticize them, but they were my guests, after all.

  I told her about Millie and their short-term visit.

  “Huh,” she said. “Get rid of them as fast as you can. They’ll knock you over and break your hip, then where will you be?”

  “In bed with a broken hip, I assume. Are you here for any specific reason, or merely to see whether or not I am still alive?” I had a right to be grumpy, didn’t I?

  “I came to invite you for lunch. Can you leave them?”

  “Of course. They are perfectly well-behaved,” said I as I steered Margaret to the kitchen so she wouldn’t see the recliner. They padded cheerfully behind me. Benjamin, having been baulked of sniffing her crotch, shoved her in the ass instead. Her midriff connected with the edge of the breakfast bar with an audible thud.

  I agreed to lunch and got her out of the way before she could spot the disaster in the den.

  I had time to take the clean dishes out of the dishwasher and put them away before I had to fix myself up and drive downtown for lunch. Since this is an old house, the new cabinets go high. I keep wine glasses and little-used casseroles and such on the top shelves and out of the way. Since Charlie and I had hosted a small dinner party Thursday night before the Monsters showed up on Friday, I had set the dishwasher to run during last night when it was full.

  I set all the glasses on the counter, brought over the step stool, took off my shoes and climbed onto the counter in my stocking feet so I could reach the top shelves.

  Benjamin decided I had invented a new dog game. He barked once, nearly scaring me off my perch, put his front feet on the counter beside me and cheerfully rolled six wineglasses onto the quarry tile floor where they exploded.

  He jumped straight up, yelped once, knocked my step stool halfway across the kitchen and decamped, leaving a snail trail of blood drops behind him.

  Oh, Lord, I’d wounded Millie’s dog. I had to get the mess cleaned up before Bel decided to investigate and cut herself as well.

  She hesitated at the kitchen door. I screamed at her. She disappeared into the den. I could no longer reach the overturned step stool. I sat on the edge of the counter and carefully slipped over the edge to stand in the midst of the disaster, preferably avoiding the broken glass.

  I felt at least one shard pierce my sock and the big toe of my left foot. I checked my shoes for stray bits of glass, shoved my bleeding left foot into my shoe, put the other on my apparently intact right foot, took a flying leap across to the broom closet, then swept up the broken glass and dumped it into the compactor.

  My left foot hurt like hell. I could feel the stickiness of blood when I took a step.

  But Benjamin was hurt as well. He took priority. Thank God he left a trail of droplets, because he lay flat on his belly under the recliner and regarded me balefully.

  “Come on, sweetie,” I crooned. “You dear little nitwitted, idiotic, ridiculous throwback to a tyrannosaurus rex. Yes, sweetie, come to Mommy so I can cut your benighted throat and make the world a better place for all mankind.”

  His ears drooped while his nearly invisible stub of a tail wagged gently.

  He scooted out on his belly and laid his head on my lap. I expected to be bitten or at least snarled at when I inspected his paw, but he let me look at it. The blood had already stopped. It was a tiny puncture with no shards embedded in his flesh so far as I could tell. My foot, on the other hand, had obviously been impaled and was pumping my life’s blood into my shoe.

  I heel-walked to the master bath with both dogs padding after me. They were very subdued. I sat on the edge of the tub and disinfected Ben’s foot. He bore the pain manfully. Or dogfully.

  When I took off my sock, I discovered a good-sized shard of wine stem in my big toe. The sock was scarlet, but the blood had already clotted. The dogs eddied around me sympathetically. I could almost believe they were concerned about me. I tweezed
the shard out, cleaned, disinfected and bound up my toe, sponged the blood out of my shoe, put on a clean sock and eased my foot back inside. It hurt.

  I had to walk normally at lunch or my daughter would know something was wrong. I also had to find someplace to put the dogs where they wouldn’t destroy the house while I was gone. If I left them outdoors, they would howl or bark, and Amos would show up at my front door with a citation about noise pollution.

  The safest place for them was the upstairs guest bath. It was small; they could lie on the bathmat in comfort, play with their toys and wait until I came home.

  I managed to get through lunch without my daughter’s catching on, but by the time I got home, I was gray with pain.

  The house was blissfully quiet. No doubt the dogs were asleep upstairs in the bathroom. “Good doggies,” I called. “Mommy’s home. Time to go out.”

  I heard toenails click on the tiles and panting as I twisted the knob to open the door.

  It refused to turn. I continued to try as they began whimpering and scratching inside. “Dammit, I can’t get the door open.”

  They refused to understand.

  Since I have boys for grandchildren, Charlie and I put in real locks on the bathroom doors, not those stick-a-hairpin-in locks. Somehow Benjamin and Bel had managed to lock the door from the inside. Where they were.

  I worked, sweated, cussed and screamed at them to shut up for a good hour. I knew I’d have dog doo to clean up when and if I got inside. No dog could hold it that long.

  Finally, I called Charlie.

  “Louise, what do you expect me to do about it? Call a locksmith, for Pete’s sake.”

  Triple A lock arrived an hour later to find me sitting on the floor in front of the upstairs bathroom door. The dogs were quiet, either because they trusted I would get them out, or in despair.

  He spent five minutes getting the door unlocked, presented me with a bill for eighty dollars and his business card and left, asserting that he didn’t want to meet a pair of gigantic dogs that had been locked up in a small space for hours.