Lily, Unleashed

by Douglas Cobb

  "That's what the whistle is for, to contact The Scarlet One, or Frankie, a scarlet Macaw, who is a top agent of SNURFLES. You were in brief contact with him yesterday, until you had an unfortunate--er--accident, and got a temporary case of amnesia. I am helping you recover your memory, so that you can continue working for PAWS at least until the exhibit is ready at the zoo and Clare takes you there."

  "Hmm...." General Yao Xing said. "That is very kind of you, I must say! Now let me see...I seem to have felt something kind of lumpy while I was sleeping that disturbed my dreams...ah, I believe this whistle was likely the cause!" He held up a red whistle which he'd hidden somewhere in his thick, fluffy fur.

  "Yes, that's the same whistle I saw you use yesterday!" I shouted excitedly. "That is what you used to signal to Frankie! All you have to do, Yao, my main man--er, red panda--pardon me--is to once again climb up the oak tree you were in yesterday, and make like Pinocchio--that is, give a little whistle--and The Scarlet One is sure to come to your call! And then, you just tell him...." I went on to relate to Yao what he should tell Frankie, and then told him I'd be hiding behind some shrubbery listening to what was going on.

  Soon, General Yao Xing had done what I'd asked, and he was once again perched in the oak tree. He grabbed his whistle, blew into it, and bing, bam, boom--Frankie made his second appearance in as many days. He joined the general up in the tree and the had a lively conversation and resulted in....

  "Bwa-ack!" Frankie squawked. "What happened yesterday? How did you get free from the clutches of Bwa-ack, PAWS?"

  "If you'd stayed around a little while longer, my fine feathered friend," General Yao Xing said, just as I had asked him to do, "you would have seen just how well an expert in Chinese martial arts can fight when pressed. I could have defeated twice as many ignorant Westerners with one paw tied behind my back, but you didn't stay to see the fun!

  "After the fight, or should I say, after I kicked their butts up between their shoulder blades, I decided I'd better stay close by, but in hiding, and try to contact you in the morning--which is, as you can see, exactly what I did!" General Yao Xing concluded.

  "I don't know, Bwa-ack!" Frankie said, sounding doubtful. "When I flew away yesterday, and looked back over my shoulder, it sure looked liked you were knocked out on the ground!"

  "I was playing--how you say--possum, that's what I was doing!" the general answered. "I was just luring those boobs closer to me, then I sprang up and went all Jet Li on them! Just tell me again the address of the SNURFLES headquarters--I seem to have misplaced the piece of paper I'd written it on--"

  "Bwa-ack!" Frankie angrily squawked. "You wrote it on a piece of paper and then forgot where you put it? If anyone from PAWS discovers it, then we're all done for!"

  "Don't worry, silly bird!" General Yao Xing said. "I wrote it in Mandarin Chinese, and none of the Quinces knows how to read Mandarin Chinese! Fuzzy Wally MacGee believes he knows Chinese, but he tried to speak to me in Spanish, and it was very fractured Spanish, at best!"

  An alarm bell went off in my head. How could General Yao Xing know about Fuzzy Wally MacGee's being "Chinese challenged," unless his memory had come back? Yow-zah! His memory obviously had returned! I didn't even have my friend, Fuzzy, this time to help me! But, fortunately, I had a little sum-thin', sum-thin' with me, as a backup plan, just in case of such an eventuality occurring.

  I, like all of the other members of PAWS, had extensive weapons training, and one of the weapons I was deadly with was the blowgun. There's not often hordes of headhunters stalking the citizens of Centralia, Arkansas, so usually there was no real need for my expertise with this weapon, but I still liked to keep in practice. Besides my blowgun, I had with me a box of Clare Quince's Sleepinol Darts, whose slogan, "Remember, It's a Jungle Out There!" made them the Number One selling animal tranquilizer darts amongst Big Game hunters and the home hobbyists and wannabes.

  "Roar!" I roared, jumping out from behind the shrubbery. "So, General Yao Xing, you remembered what you forgot when you got memory loss due to amnesia, which caused temporary memory loss!" I glibly shouted. I always did have a "silver tongue," I must say. That's yet one more awesome quality to add to my ever-growing list (not that I'm actually keeping a list) of my amazing qualities. I'll put it right after being incredibly humble when I get around to it (and I will, as I'm not known as being a procrastinator).

  I grabbed my blowgun, inserted a dart, and let it fly! It struck General Yao Xing in his shoulder blade, and he toppled end over end from the tree branch he'd been clutching tightly.

  "Bwa-ack!" The Scarlet One squawked, surprised, flustered, and angry, a combination which seemed to be his natural state. Maybe he didn't get enough attention from his mom when he was a hatchling.

  "Dead meat! Dead meat! I'll be bwa-ack, back, sucka, you can count on that!" Frankie continued, before flying off, his typical way of handling potentially violent situations when the odds weren't in his favor.

  I quickly took off, flying directly under the hapless falling red panda, preventing him from slamming into the ground headfirst. I'm such a humanitarian, even when it comes to animals, and even when it comes to ones who are ruthless, bloodthirsty spies. Then, it was simply a matter of getting him back in his cage again, which I did with Triple Q's inadvertent help.

  An hour went by when I went to check on him. I'd removed the dart, of course, not wanting to leave any evidence for anyone to find. He staggered about the cage, shouting "Happy New Year!" and "What a night!" and "Dios Mio, my head aches! Ay, chihuahua!, Now I'm speaking Spanish, just like that crazy Chinese Crested Rhino-dog, or whatever he is!"

  Another hour passed, and I started to get an uncomfortable feeling. You know the kind, when maybe you did something a tiny bit rash, during the spur of the moment, the heat of the battle. You do know what I'm talkin' about, right?

  For one thing, I hadn't really looked at the box of Clare Quince's Sleepinol Darts I snatched that closely. Looking at the box again, more carefully, I saw that I had picked up the type that's supposed to be used on larger animals, like tigers, not wee small animals, like koalas, spider monkeys, and, well, red pandas.

  Besides my concern about this (I wanted him alive--it's rather difficult to question someone who's dead, though Prince Alphonse Saed has had some success in this in the past by using a Ouji board), I was also thinking that, in my efforts to be thorough, I had told the red panda about Fuzzy Wally MacGee's use of Spanish instead of Chinese. That would mean that maybe General Yao Xing's memory hadn't really come back, but that he was merely telling The Scarlet One information I'd told him. In other words, he was possibly just parroting the information to a parrot, information he'd learned from me, rather than which he'd remembered.

  I went to check up on him again, to see if he was still alive, and if so, maybe I could help straighten out any potential misconceptions he may have regarding the "friendly fire" that brought about the darting incident. I'd explain it was in everyone's best interests to move on, and get past it, and let bygones be bygones. I was sure he'd understand--he struck me as an understanding sort of red panda, at least as criminal masterminds go.

  The cage door was open, and General Yao Xing was gone! Though red pandas don't have actual thumbs, I remembered that one fact Clare had told us about them was that they, like Giant Pandas, have a "false thumb." Their wrist bone juts out at an angle, making it appear as if they have a thumb. Perhaps General Yao Xing was able to use this false thumb to manipulate the lock mechanism and hold a lock picking tool, like Lucy does sometimes, to free himself. Or, possibly the lock hadn't been actually closed securely.

  Immediately, I got out an APB (All PAWS Bulletin) to all of the members of PAWS both by e-mail and through roaring when Triple Q let me go into the backyard again. I told them to be on the look out for a medium to large-sized red panda, possibly in an inebriated condition and singing Broadway tunes or Frankie's favorite, "I Did It My Way."

  I, myself, took wing and did surveillance of the neig
hborhood. I didn't see General Yao Xing, but I saw an orange orangutan swinging from tree to tree: Lucy Marmoset Higgins! She was obscured for a few seconds by the heavy foliage, and when she reappeared, I saw that she carried in the crook of one arm the red panda! He must have gotten hungry, and went off to get some, er, fast food, and--and now he was puking up his "fast food," all over Lucy's shaggy fur. She did not look like a happy orangutan at all....I signaled to Lucy with a shrill "Screech!" and, looking up, she saw me, and followed me back to my house.

  "I found your 'foreign dignitary,'" she said, "acting in a very un-dignified manner! It'll take me forever to wash this vomit out of my fur and get rid of the smell!"

  "I'll get you a bottle of Clare Quince's Banana-Scented Red Panda Puke-Begone Shampoo ("You've Tried the Rest, Now Try the Best!") while I'm inside! Better yet, you come with me and help me put the general back in his cage, and you can get the shampoo then!"

  And so, that is what we did, this time making sure that the cage door was securely locked. I wished Lucy luck with restoring her fur's luxurious luster, and she headed home to shampoo her fur and put up curlers in it. Another day gone, another disaster successfully averted, thanks to my leadership and the well-oiled teamwork of the other members of PAWS under my expert guidance!

  Chapter Nine

  A Very Scruffy Thanksgiving

  The odors wafting from the kitchen to my sensitive nose, or should I say, bill, were almost more than I could bear. There was the smell of the cooking turkey, with all the trimmings; there was the odor of green beans simmering with bits of ham; and, there was the spicy, delectable aroma of the cooling pumpkin pies. These would be our contributions to the Thanksgiving feast this year, which would be at Celeste's grandparents' house on Clare's side of the family, in Paris, Arkansas.

  Their names were Daisy and Lonnie Clooney, and they were two of the nicest people you'd ever have the pleasure of meeting. They were both in their sixties, but they still led what you would call active lifestyles. Lonnie was a Methodist minister, and Daisy was involved in a lot of charitable activities and church groups. They liked to wind surf, hang glide, and go cliff diving and spelunking and renovate old houses and then sell them for a tidy profit, among other hobbies. Of course, as you can well imagine, what they most liked to do was spend time with their kids and grandkids, and yours truly.

  When we pulled into their driveway, I heard a distinct trumpeting noise that reverberated seemingly for miles. Chained up in the yard was the source of the trumpeting, their new elephant (they thought of him as being a different sort of terrier than I was--he was different, all right!). While the adults brought in the food, I introduced myself to the Brooks' elephant, who was still trumpeting and repeatedly baring his tusks and molars at me, in an unusual sort of repeated smile. He turned around in circles, shaking the ground with each massive stomp he made. I decided to try my hardest not to act like a mouse, as I didn't want to startle him.

  "Hello, my name is Li-ly, though many people for some reason call me Victoria!" I said. "I don't believe we've been introduced, but I've heard that your name is--"

  "Scruf-ruf, rufy!" Scruffy replied, hiking his leg on a nearby pecan tree and peeing. He went to every other tree he could reach, doing the same; then, he did it on Celeste's left foot. "No more fires, the danger's past, no fires here!" he trumpeted.

  "That stupid dog!" Celeste shouted, shaking her foot. "Why'd he have to do that?"

  "He apparently thinks he's a fireman--er, fire elephant, and he keeps believing that fires are breaking out spontaneously everywhere, and he's trying to put them out!" I theorized. "Well, either that, or he's just having what he thinks is a hilarious joke at your expense...."

  "Well, I don't think it's very funny at all!" Celeste sounded mad.

  "Maybe he thought he was saving your life, though, from a raging forest fire!" I said. "It wouldn't be true, but perhaps he's just suffering under a misconception. Everyone is not as level-headed as I am, you know. Into each life, a little--"

  "You'd better not be comparing Scruffy's pee to rain!" Celeste said. "That's just not right!"

  "Your face isn't, either, but do I say it isn't?" I asked. I always kidded around with Celeste like this--she knew I wasn't serious..

  "You just now did," Celeste said, starting to cry. Perhaps she didn't always know I wasn't being serious, after all....

  "Your face is fine, Celeste--I didn't really mean to hurt your feelings," I said.

  "It's not that, Lily," Celeste said. "It's just that Scruffy has not added to my enjoyment of this day, and you know how much I look forward to visiting with Gran and Granddaddy, and...things just aren't going like I'd like them to go!" She ran into the house (with me following closely behind) and headed for the bathroom to wash her shoe off as best as she could and to tell her grandparents with had happened.

  When she told them, her granddaddy Lonnie said, laughing: "Into each life, a little rain must fall!"

  I roared to Celeste: "Why didn't you tell him what you told me?"

  "Shhh!" Celeste whispered. "Because he's my granddaddy!" she added under her breath.

  I gave her a look that was supposed to say: "What am I, then, chopped liver?" but she just rolled her eyes at me and tried to ignore me.

  "Come here, come here, and give me a hug!" Celeste's gran said, and she did, and then she hugged her granddaddy, who asked for one next. I jumped up onto Lonnie's lap and licked his face, and Daisy went into the kitchen and dining room area to both check up on how the pies, mashed potatoes, ham, and rolls were coming along, and to show Triple Q and Celeste where to put the food we'd brought.

  The house was already starting to fill up with people. Both of Celeste's brothers were already there. William Faulkner Clooney, a journalist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the older of the two, was there with his wife, Lamonica, and their son, TayShawn Bonaparte Clooney, and daughter, Juaniqua Marakesh Clooney, who had also brought her baby, Riley. William's and Celeste's younger brother, Jeff "Slam Dunk," Clooney, played professional basketball for the Centralia Dragons, the newest NBA team. He was divorced and there with his teenage children, Zack and Lauren, who both also there and went to the same school as Celeste did.

  Dexter and Nicole arrived about fifteen minutes later, hands full of even more delicious-smelling food, and of course, some of their to-die-for-pastries and other dessert items. Scruffy and I ran to greet them, he trumpeting and I, roaring, and Scruffy once again peeing, but Dexter moved his leg out of the way just in time, narrowly avoiding Scruffy's aim. I could already tell that I'd be leaving Paris a few pounds heavier; but, as they say, you only live once!

  "Rats!" Scruffy trumpeted loudly. He then added: "Only you can prevent forest fires!"

  "You can lead a Blue Tick Coon Dog to a fire, but you can't make him pee on it, um," I said, doing my Dr. Phil impression again. "If you want him to do that, or want him to stop doing that, we have pills for it, um. They're the little, yellow, pee-colored ones, that's right, um."

  "What are you trying to say?" Scruffy asked. "I was born to be a firehouse elephant! It's in my blood, and I--"

  "Water's not what you're trying to put out fires with, though," I butted in. "Take my advice, and get some counseling, son, if not from me, than someone else, who might actually be a real doctor, um."

  "Well, Doc, I never thought of it like that," Scruffy said. "What you're telling me is really opening up my eyes!"

  "So what you're saying is that you'll try to make the needed changes in your life, son?" I asked my elephantine patient.

  "Whatever gave you that crazy idea?" Scruffy answered, with another question. "Forest rangers and firefighters must always be vigilant!" he continued.

  "Vigilant, huh?" I said. "Scruffy, I may just have an opening for you in PAWS as one of my agents! You can be as vigilant as you want, just for slightly different reasons. And, your special...er, power, can be put to other uses! What say you? Are you in?"

  "Scru-ruf-rufy!" Scruffy replied. "You b
etter believe it! To be able to use my special talent to make the world a better place--has always been a dream of mine!"

  "You could be like Don Quixote, the Man of La Mancha, dreaming the impossible dream--of course, he was slightly crazy--"

  "But, he was a man of vison, right? And, this Don Quixote fellow--he was also a firefighter, yes?" Scruffy asked, his hopes hanging on my reply.

  "Why, er--sure, I'll go with that!" I said. "He fought windmills, he fought injustice, he fought the law, so I'd say there were a lot of fires he had to put out! I don't think he used the exact way that you use, though--society at the time frowned on that sort of firefighting method for some odd reason."

  The Thanksgiving feast was a wonder to behold, and to smell and eat, too! Scruffy and I got the choicest cuts of the turkey, like the heart and gizzard and neck, so we were too full to have any dessert later. Well, I ate some grass outside, and, um, was able to make (if you know what I mean) a little room for one slice of pumpkin pie (with whip cream), but other than that, neither of us had dessert.

  Then, while everyone else was digesting their meals and watching football on television, I continued my conversation with Scruffy in the yard. I had him on my line, he'd swallowed the bait, now all I had to do was to reel him in, and make him an agent of PAWS.

  "Scruffy, old pachyderm, you have the stuff in you to be a leader of animals, to make a difference in this world, and to make it a better place for us all to live in! How would you like to be the leader of the Paris, Arkansas chapter of PAWS?"

  "Hmm...I don't know...something smells kind of fishy...." Scruffy sniffed the air, and then his pits, and said: "Oh, never mind--that was me! I'd be my own boss, huh? But, there's a slight problem with that, Sir--er, Ma'am...."

  "Oh? And what is that?"

  "Who, exactly, would I lead?" Scruffy asked in puzzlement. "And, what I would I do as the leader of the Paris branch of PAWS?"