by Tom Watson
“I’m Stick Dog,” he said. He felt the words catch in the back of his throat for a second, but managed to get them out. “Thanks for helping me.”
“I’m Lucy,” she said. “You’re welcome.”
Stick Dog lowered his head and stared at the floor. He didn’t know what to say. He was confused. He had never felt flustered before. He had always been confident. And now he was nervous. A weird nervous. A kind of nervous he hadn’t felt before.
“Where are your friends?” Lucy asked.
“My friends?” Stick Dog asked, lifting his head.
“Yes,” Lucy answered. “I saw them in the woods past the parking lot when we pulled away in the truck. When I was looking for you.”
“You were, umm, looking for me?”
“I guess I was,” Lucy answered slowly. Now it was her turn to look at the floor. She shuffled her front paws a little as she spoke.
“Sort of. Kind of. Umm. Yeah.”
It was quiet then.
Like, awkward quiet.
But just for a moment.
Because right then something smashed into the back door.
CHAPTER 21
WHO ARE YOU?
Thump!
“What was that?” Lucy asked, breaking the silence and snapping her head around to look at the back door.
“Umm, I think I know,” Stick Dog said. He had heard that noise many, many times before. “It’s one of my friends. The poodle.”
“What’s he doing?”
“He’s, umm, banging his head into the door.”
“On purpose?!”
“Yes,” he said, and nodded. After all these years, Poo-Poo bashing his head into things was completely normal to Stick Dog. But he realized that it wouldn’t be normal to someone else. “It’s just something he does. He’s really, umm, good at it.”
“That’s an interesting skill,” Lucy said.
“He’s an interesting dog,” Stick Dog said, and smiled. “Is there a way to open the door? I’d rather he doesn’t keep banging into it. And am I safe back here? From your roommate?”
“You’re safe,” Lucy answered confidently and calmly. “Mike never comes back here while the store is open. He has to be out there for customers. And I can open the door. It’s easy.”
“It is?” Stick Dog answered. He had only seen humans open doors before.
“Sure,” Lucy said, and went to the door. She bit down on the belt that hung from the handle and pulled down on it. Then Lucy backed up with the belt in her mouth and opened the door. “I invented that. Mike, my human, was happy when I showed him. This way I can let myself out whenever I want.”
Stick Dog was impressed.
They stepped outside to the alley behind Mike’s Magnificent Meats. Lucy pushed a brick against the doorframe to keep the door from closing. She had obviously done this a lot of times before. The alley was totally empty except for some garbage cans and the parked meat truck.
Stick Dog’s friends were there too.
Stripes, Mutt, and Karen stared suspiciously at Lucy. Poo-Poo did not. He was there, but his eyes were closed, and he was rubbing his head.
“Poo-Poo, did you bash into the door?” asked Stick Dog.
“Yeah, that was me,” Poo-Poo answered simply, eyes still closed. “We thought you might be in there, so I tried to bash the door open.”
“How’s your head?” Lucy asked Poo-Poo.
“It’s starting to feel really great,” Poo-Poo replied. He kept his eyes shut and continued to rub his head. “It was aching and throbbing for a minute, but now I’m getting that awesome numb-y feeling. I love it when that terrible hurt feeling goes away—it makes the initial pain totally worth it.”
“So, you hurt yourself on purpose, and then you like the way it feels when the pain goes away?” Lucy asked. She obviously thought the whole idea was pretty absurd. “Couldn’t you, you know, just not hurt yourself at all?”
“Where’s the logic in that?” Poo-Poo asked, and then opened his eyes. “Hey, wait a minute. Who are you?”
“I’m Lucy.”
“Lucy just helped me inside the store,” Stick Dog stepped forward and explained. “I was trapped and about to get caught, but she got me out of it.”
When Stripes, Karen, Mutt, and Poo-Poo heard this, they cast away their suspicions and doubt about Lucy. Stick Dog took a minute to introduce everybody and then got back to the main subject.
“We tracked down the store from the information on the side of the truck,” Stick Dog explained to Lucy. “We wanted to get some meat.”
“You’re hungry?” Lucy asked.
“We’re always hungry,” Mutt said.
“Don’t your humans feed you?”
“We’re strays,” Stick Dog explained. “We don’t have any humans.”
This fact seemed to surprise Lucy.
“Hey, Lucy?” Karen asked. It seemed like she had something important to say.
“Yes?”
“Guess what?”
“What?”
“I totally just dug, like, the deepest hole ever!”
“Wow,” Lucy said, and smiled.
“I’m a really good digger!”
“I bet you are.”
Stick Dog listened and liked the way Lucy reacted to Karen. And he watched as she interacted with the other members of his gang.
“Then Karen got stuck,” Stripes said, continuing the story. “At the bottom of the hole. She dug it so deep that she couldn’t get out.”
“I’m an excellent digger,” Karen reiterated.
“You must be.”
“So, we had to figure out a way to get her out of the hole,” Mutt said. You could tell that thinking back on Karen being trapped in the hole made him a little nervous. He shook an old gardening glove out of his fur and began to chew on it.
Lucy noticed.
“Can you store things in your fur? And then shake them out whenever you want?”
Mutt nodded—and chewed.
“That’s fantastic.”
Mutt smiled—and chewed.
“So we had to rescue Karen from that deep hole,” Poo-Poo explained.
Karen said, “I might be, like, the best digger in the whole world.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me at all,” Lucy said to Karen, and then turned back to Poo-Poo. “So how did you rescue her?”
“Well, we had a bunch of good plans,” Poo-Poo said for the group. He was sort of bragging a little bit. “We were going to go to the circus and get some balloons and get her out that way. Then we thought we’d fill the hole with drool and let her float to the top. Then we figured we could go to the opposite side of the Earth and dig upward to get her out.”
“I see,” Lucy said. She glanced sideways at Stick Dog and then back at Poo-Poo, Mutt, Stripes, and Karen. “Such clever ideas.”
“I know, right?” said Stripes.
Lucy asked, “So, how did you finally get Karen, the super-awesome digger, out of the hole?”
“I don’t even remember,” Poo-Poo said, and lifted his head to think. The others didn’t seem to remember either. “It had something to do with Stick Dog, I think.”
“Yeah, I think he played a small role somehow,” Karen added.
“Then guess what happened after we got Karen out?!” Stripes exclaimed, and giggled a little bit.
“What?”
“Stick Dog fell into the exact same hole!” Stripes yelped, and laughed. Mutt, Karen, and Poo-Poo laughed too. “He’s so silly!”
Lucy looked at Stick Dog. He looked back at her and squeezed his lips together. He smiled and nodded. And Lucy seemed to somehow understand exactly what his expression meant.
“Hey, Lucy!”
“Yes, Karen.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know what coffee is?!”
Before Lucy could answer, Stick Dog politely reentered the conversation.
“Karen, could you talk with Lucy about
coffee later?” he asked. “I really want to see if there’s a way for us to get something to eat.”
“Sure, Stick Dog. No problem,” Karen replied. “While you’re doing that, I think I’ll just hop up and down for a while. I’m feeling really energetic!”
“Umm, okay,” he answered slowly. He whispered to Lucy, “She had a lot of coffee earlier.”
Karen asked, “What did you say, Stick Dog?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
Then Karen began to hop up and down.
Lucy watched with amusement as Karen hopped. Lucy turned to Stick Dog and said, “You came here to try to get something to eat? From the store?”
“Yes.”
“I can help you,” Lucy said.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d want to,” Stick Dog said honestly. “I mean, it sort of seems like we’d be taking from you. And that doesn’t feel right.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Lucy answered. “I mean, you saw how much meat was in there, right? There’s plenty. Besides, if you’re hungry, you have to eat. No matter what.”
Stick Dog nodded.
“Let’s go inside,” Lucy said, and pointed toward the back door. “I’ve got an idea.”
Stick Dog nodded again. Then he said to his friends, “You guys stay here. Just hide if anybody comes.”
CHAPTER 22
OBVIOUSLY SMART
When they got to the back room of Mike’s Magnificent Meats, Lucy got her yellow rope and dropped it on the floor.
“I’ll use this,” Lucy said.
“Okay,” Stick Dog replied. “Are you going to play tug-of-war with your human like before?”
“No,” Lucy said. “If I do that, he’ll be standing. That would make it easier for him to see you through the glass case when you reach up to grab something. I’m going to get him to crouch down for a while. That way he can’t see you.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m on it,” Lucy answered, and turned her head toward the doorway to the store to listen.
“Okay,” Stick Dog answered.
It was a strange feeling—a very strange feeling—for Stick Dog. He had always had to devise every plan, manage his friends, and study each detail for every food-snatching adventure.
And now he didn’t.
He felt totally confident in Lucy. She was obviously smart.
“All right,” Lucy said, turning back. “There are no customers. You just peek out the door, and when you see my human stoop down, that’s when you can come out and grab something. You’ll have less than a minute. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“One more thing,” Lucy said. “If you hear me whining or something, don’t worry about it. I’m just acting.”
“Okay,” Stick Dog said again.
“Good luck,” Lucy said. She gave Stick Dog a quick wink and hustled out to the store with the yellow rope.
And Stick Dog’s heart did that weird fluttering thing again.
CHAPTER 23
WORKING TOGETHER
Stick Dog peeked out from the edge of the doorway. He could see Mike the meat man behind the counter. He was cutting something with that big rectangular knife again. Lucy walked right behind him and around the corner of the glass case on the farthest side of the store. Stick Dog couldn’t see her any longer. He could only see her human.
Mike the meat man must have heard Lucy pad behind him.
“How are you doing, Lucy-girl?” he asked without looking.
Lucy barked a friendly bark.
“Glad to hear it,” he said, and chuckled a bit.
Stick Dog waited. He didn’t know what Lucy was going to do. He just knew that when Mike the meat man crouched down, he’d need to move fast. He knew exactly what he was going to try to snatch.
Stick Dog waited.
Mike the meat man slammed that huge knife into something.
Whack!
Stick Dog waited.
Whack!
Stick Dog waited.
Whack!
Stick Dog waited.
And then Lucy started to whimper. It was a soft and pitiful sound. It sounded so sad.
Mike the meat man put that giant knife down and turned around. He wiped his hands on his apron.
“What is it, Lucy-girl?” he called. He walked toward where Lucy was—and turned the corner where Lucy had disappeared behind the glass case.
Stick Dog couldn’t see Lucy, of course. But he could see Mike the meat man.
“What is it?” Mike repeated.
Lucy whined some more.
“Is there something under there, Lucy-girl? Did you lose something?” he asked.
And then he crouched down.
Stick Dog moved—and moved fast. As he listened to what was happening, he hustled to the nearest glass case and propped himself up. He saw what he was after.
Lucy whined.
“How in the world did your rope get under this case?!” Mike the meat man said. “That’s why you’re upset. Your favorite thing is out of reach. Poor thing. I’ll get it for you. It’s really far back there.”
As Mike the meat man grunted, groaned, and stretched to reach the rope that Lucy had deliberately pushed under the case, Stick Dog reached for the foot-long hot dogs with his mouth.
He grabbed as many as he could, ducked his head out of the case, and dropped quietly back to all fours. He padded softly and quickly toward the back room. He tucked himself back into that dark corner, dropping the hot dogs at his paws.
Lucy yelped a happy bark.
“There you go, Lucy-girl!” Mike the meat man said. “Run along now. I need to get back to work.”
Lucy barked again.
“You’re welcome.”
Stick Dog smiled.
He could hear Lucy coming back.
CHAPTER 24
WHY WERE YOU HIDING?
When Lucy returned, she dropped the rope on the floor and came directly toward Stick Dog. She looked down at his front paws.
“You chose the foot-long hot dogs,” she observed. “Good thinking. That’s what I would have grabbed too.”
Stick Dog nodded, appreciating her praise.
“That was a good idea with the rope,” he said to Lucy. “You’re a really good actress.”
Lucy nodded, appreciating his praise.
They took no time getting back outside. Lucy opened the door, Stick Dog picked up the foot-long hot dogs, and they went to find their friends. They knew the other dogs were hungry. After Lucy pushed the brick into place to keep the back door open, they looked around.
But only Karen was there.
“Hi, Karen,” Stick Dog said after dropping the foot-long hot dogs. “Where’s everybody else?”
“I don’t know,” Karen said and shrugged. “They were here a minute ago.”
“Here we are,” Stripes said, coming out from behind a garbage can. Poo-Poo and Mutt came out too.
“Why were you hiding?” Lucy asked.
“Well, Karen ran down the alley a little ways,” Poo-Poo began to explain as they all came closer. He appeared to be speaking for Mutt and Stripes as well.
“I got tired of jumping,” Karen said. “I jumped, like, a million times. And it got boring after a while. But I still felt super-energetic. So I decided to run down the alley and then come back.”
“Right, she got tired of jumping,” Poo-Poo said. “She ran down there—and then she came back.”
“Okay,” Stick Dog said slowly. “But, umm, why were you hiding?”
“Because Karen came back,” Poo-Poo said. “That’s why.”
Lucy was as confused as Stick Dog. She repeated his question, “But why were you hiding?”
“Because Stick Dog said to hide if anybody comes,” Poo-Poo explained further. “Karen came. So we hid.”
“But you know Karen,” Stick Dog stated. “You don’t need to hide from Karen.”
“You said anybody, Stick Dog,” Mutt stated. He wanted to help t
hem understand. “That’s a direct quote.”
“Are you saying Karen’s not anybody?” Stripes asked, trying to prove their point. “I mean, that’s kind of a rude thing to say.”
Lucy looked at Stick Dog. Stick Dog looked at Lucy. They both grinned very slightly at one another. The other dogs did not see this.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Stick Dog said. “I understand why you were hiding now. Thanks for explaining it to us.”
Then Lucy pointed at the foot-long hot dogs and said, “Look what we got.”
And Mutt, Karen, Stripes, and Poo-Poo started to drool.
CHAPTER 25
YIKES
Stick Dog had grabbed as many of the foot-long hot dogs as he could. He hadn’t counted them. There wasn’t enough time, and they were all tangled up anyway. But now that it was time to eat, he realized there were only five meaty treats.
Poo-Poo took one.
Karen took one.
Stripes took one.
And Mutt took one.
There was one foot-long hot dog left.
“You eat it,” Lucy offered. “You’re hungrier than me.”
“No, I’m fine,” Stick Dog said, and shook his head politely. “It was your plan. You should eat it.”
“Share?” Lucy asked.
“Share,” Stick Dog agreed.
Lucy started eating the foot-long hot dog from one end.
Stick Dog started eating the foot-long hot dog from the other end.
Then they met in the middle.
(Yikes.)
CHAPTER 26
ROMANTICAL?
While the other dogs finished eating, Lucy and Stick Dog chatted for a moment. They didn’t have much time to talk—Mutt, Karen, Stripes, and Poo-Poo finished their hot dogs quickly. They gathered around Stick Dog and Lucy after making sure there wasn’t a single nibble left.
