Bobby D. Lux - Dog Duty

by Bobby D. Lux

  No one moved. Any tails that had been wagging, even slightly, had stopped.

  “Come on, Nipper, what’s the big deal?” someone chirped from the crowd, a sentiment echoed by others.

  “I brought you all here for one reason-” Nipper said.

  “Are you trying to sell us some junk?”

  “You better not be trying to do any preaching to us.”

  “Listen,” Nipper said. “The sooner you stop interrupting me, the sooner I can get this over with… Like I was saying, some of you may or may not know that I’ve long fancied myself as a dog with a sense of high culture and have always been a bit of song and dance dog-”

  “Not once.”

  “Nope. Never heard that one.”

  “Well, it’s true,” Nipper said. “I’ve been working on something and I want to share.”

  Nipper lowered his head and turned back at Ernie and me. I nodded. Ernie couldn’t look at him out of, what I assumed, pity. Maybe Ernie just wanted to be able to look Nipper in the eye in the future. Nipper circled in place for a few orbits and exhaled a deep breath.

  “The tension is killing us, Nipper. Let’s go.”

  Nipper snapped his head up to the sky with a showman’s flair and bounced up and down on two feet. His tail whipped side to side like a snakebite.

  “I’ve thrown away my toys, even my drum and train,” Nipper sung, no louder than a muffled hum. “I wanna make some noise, with real live aeroplanes.”

  The other dogs made various versions of the stupid head crooked sideways, ears half-pointing out, tongue frozen look that humans like to edit to music on the Internet. Stereotypes exist for a reason. The dogs watching Nipper did not get it. This was going to be a monumental failure.

  “He’s dying out there,” Ernie said.

  “Let him finish the verse,” I said, while stretching my leg again to make sure it was loose enough to get me through.

  “Someday I’m going to fly. I’ll be a pilot too,” Nipper sung, having mined some vocal confidence from an unknown source. “And when I do, how would you like to be my crew-ew-ew-ew.”

  For the critics among us, Nipper may have held that last note too long, but he looked to be enjoying the added vibrato on the “ew” sound as his throat dribbled. He puffed out his chest and pointed his mouth to the sky like a lonely wolf seeking comfort in the night air. The other dogs snapped out of their stupor and saw Nipper for what I wanted him to truly be at that moment: a blithering fool.

  “On the good ship lollipop!” Nipper belted. And cue the explosion. Howls of laughter engulfed Nipper as he really got into the show, prancing like a flea between the rolling canines. “It’s a sweet trip to a candy shop, where bon-bons play, on the sunny beach of Peppermint Bay. Lemonade stands everywhere. Crackerjack bands fill the air. And there you are, happy landing on a chocolate bar.”

  “He did it,” Ernie said, more embarrassed than impressed while Nipper crooned, dashing and sashaying circles around the convulsing dogs.

  “I’m clear,” I said. “Wait until I’m over and then you take off.”

  “What about Nip-” I was gone, trying to keep as much weight off my leg as possible. I sprinted forward towards the mound. Nipper’s song became a blur and the only thing in focus was the quickly approaching launch pad. I smelled the other side of the fence. It was a sharper, sweeter, more dense and far more powerful scent than the fertilized dog park. Nipper was still going strong. The other dogs piled up on each other as they convulsed in laughter. A quick glance at the humans proved that no one was watching yet. I turned to Ernie, who was lowered down like a compressed spring. Then his eyes shot open wide in surprise. My head snapped back forward. The plan was suddenly in immediate danger. Scarlet was steps ahead of me sitting in front of the mound.

  I veered out of the way and tumbled over on my side, with most of the impact landing on my good side, but it still felt like a knife was shoved through my hip socket.

  “What are you doing?” I yelled at her. “Are you stupid? You want to get us both hurt.”

  “Oh now,” Scarlet said. “You wouldn’t dare hurt me. I knew you’d move.”

  “Get out of the way. Do it now.”

  “No.”

  “Scarlet, I’m warning you. Get out of my way.”

  “Or what? You gonna bite me?”

  “Scarlet-”

  “I want to apologize to you.”

  “Fine. Apology accepted. Now get out of here.”

  “Don’t you even want to know what for?”

  “Not really because I don’t care.” I snarled and tried to push her away. If I retraced a few paces, I could still make the jump. She snapped and showed me her teeth with enough of a flash of what I took as pure insanity in her eyes that I stopped.

  “Do that again and I’ll scream,” she said.

  “Fine. What do you want? This is a really bad time.”

  “A bad time?” she said, looking around and seeing the mound. “Oh, I see what’s going on here.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “You’re trying to avoid me?”

  “You could put it that way.”

  “No one avoids me when I don’t want them to.”

  “Are you done?” I said. Ernie started to walk over towards us. “Stay in your position, Ernie. That’s an order.”

  “Don’t lose focus, sugar. You keep your eyes and nose on me, hot stuff.” At that moment, she was the ugliest dog I’d ever seen in my life. Her curves were blocky; her lips razors; her legs tree stumps; her voice barbed wire; her fur steel wool. “Don’t you be thinking too hard now. It’s not a flattering look on you.”

  “What?”

  “You ever hear of poetry, hmm? Just so you know, I like to have poetry recited in my ear by a warm, soothing, masculine voice. And it so happens, you have one of those voi-”

  “Shut up!” I screamed in her face. And then the park was too quiet. Nipper had stopped singing. He sat in the center of a pack of dogs, some on the verge of collapsing while others just tried to catch their breath. He gave me the coldest stare I’d ever seen from a non-criminal. “Show’s over. Leave me alone.”

  I walked away from her to nowhere as Nipper absorbed the realization that he was forever stationed as the fool of this canine world.

  “What happened?” Ernie said, catching up with me.

  “What does it look like? We didn’t make it.”

  “We can still do it. Let’s go.”

  “We can’t. We needed a distraction so that none of the other dogs would notice we were leaving because if they noticed, then the humans would, and that would’ve been it for our escape. Does that not make it crystal clear for you?”

  “Hey, don’t take it out on me.”

  “Didn’t you see her coming? You could have warned me.”

  “I was watching Nipper. He was getting good.”

  “It wasn’t your job to watch Nipper!” I said. We stopped at the fence I should’ve been on the other side of. “Your job was to be ready to move.”

  “I don’t need this. See you at home, Fritz.”

  I stared through this thinnest of borders that separated me from the rest of my life. A rusted chain linked fence with too many marks from too many other dogs. This is what kept me in that world. Woven strings of metal no thicker than my teeth and there was nothing I could do about it. I looked up at the birds who could come and go as they pleased, the squirrels perched in the trees free to roam, and Ernie says he’ll see me at home? He’ll see me at his home.

  I didn’t have a home. I had a place where I could eat, sleep, and have some semblance of company, but I didn’t con myself into believing that was my home. I didn’t know if one was out there, or if I ever had one. What I did know was that the only way to find out was to get over that fence and not have to worry about being chased by a manic human in a car.

  “Looks like your little plan went exactly as you wanted,” Nipper said, having appeared next to me at the fence. He too stared at th
e other side of the fence. He sounded reserved and resigned like a hostage who knew they weren’t going to be rescued. “It makes sense actually. Smart move on your part to be honest. Get me to cement my status as public spectacle while you simultaneously woo the one dog I’ve ever loved.”

  “You love Scarlet?” I said.

  “Yeah- I guess- I guess… I don’t know. Who cares?”

  “My plan was for me to be on the other side of this fence.”

  “Sure it was.”

  “It is. Or it was. I want to be gone. I have something I need to do.”

  “Just you, huh?” Nipper said.

  “Us.” Then neither of us said anything. Maybe he expected an apology. Whether Nipper would have believed it or not, I felt as miserable and as hopeless as he did.

  A bug shimmied up the chain link in front of me. He paused every few steps to wiggle the feelers on the side of his head while he hung upside down by doing nothing more than standing on his feet. Further proof that life isn’t fair. I say he, but it very well could have been a she. Who can tell the difference with these things? They all look the same. It’s not like with another dog where you look at one and say oh, that’s clearly a female.

  It stopped what it was doing and perched up on two of its eight back legs and looked me up and down like it had any right to pass judgment on me. There he was right in my face with his wiggling tentacles and beady eyes that looked like soccer balls and a set of wings that looked more for decoration than anything else. It opened its mouth and showed me a set of teeth that looked like they couldn’t get the better of a single strand of my fur. I stuck my nose up to it and the little jerk leaned its head towards me. I shot a double blast of exhaust from my nose and blew it away.

  “They should just make it a wall, you know?” Nipper said, continuing to look forward. “That way no one can see you over there.”

  “That’s not a bad idea.”

  “Yeah…”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not interested in her,” I said, “for the record.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Yeah, I do. You know how mad I am at you?”

  “I have a pretty good idea,” I said.

  “I’m probably not going to forgive you for this. But hey, it’s not like there’s anything I can do about it, you know?”

  “I wanted it to work too,” I said. And wouldn’t you know, that little bug returned and scurried right in front of my face. He ran by on the exact same stretch of link I blew him off of. This time he didn’t stop to gawk at me. He kept his head down and quickly passed. But of all the many paths up those links that he could’ve avoided me with, he chose the same one. I laughed to myself and let him pass. I had to.

  “Get a load of this,” Nipper said.

  “I know. Bug’s got guts if nothing else. Or is it just stupid?”

  “Bug? Huh? Turn around. Looks like someone’s trying to break in.”

  Over on the other side of the park near the front gate, Missy was in the midst of plowing through a hole she’d dug under the fence, a hole that could rival any of Ernie’s best work, speaking in terms of pound-for-pound, obviously. Her fur was dulled with mud. I suspected she tried to look that way on purpose; a welcomed addition to the dog park congregation.

  “C’mon Missy, almost there,” I shouted at her, wanting something to go right for at least one dog today. She was halfway into the dog park. Her tail looked like hummingbird wings while she dug. A couple of the other dogs saw what she was doing and started to encourage her too. Ernie, who was now chasing Saucy around, was the most obnoxious of the group. “Keep digging! Get under that fence! Come on, Nipper. Let her hear it.”

  Nipper looked like he was trying very hard to stay quiet for fear of shortchanging his righteous anger with me.

  Like a seedling sprouting up from the soil, Missy’s nose pushed its way through the dirt on the other side of the fence. The rest of her miniscule body wasn’t far behind. She emerged on our side to an eruption of cheers and barks from the other dogs at the park. In that moment, Nipper’s performance debacle was forgotten. Missy grabbed the first stick she could fit into her mouth and was off and running. She was out of control. Missy’s legs flew through the air like a bronco as she flung the dried twig like she’d been zapped by a taser.

  “Missssssy!” Mrs. Hart said, exploding up from the humans’ bench. “Get back here!” If my years in the field taught me anything, it was that shouting a demand to stop-and-return at a recently escaped individual is the most ineffective choice one can make in a crisis situation. It never works.

  Mrs. Hart got her legs momentarily caught as she tried to stand up from the table. She bobbled up and down like a broken “s.” Her friends made minimal attempts to help her, or at the very least, get out of her way. Instead, they looked bothered by the sudden outburst. Mrs. Hart frantically circled halfway in each direction before placing her glass on the table and tried to slip her feet into her sandals. Her right foot slid in without an issue, but it took four attempts with some help from her hands to get the left one on. She took a slight jog towards the dog park as Missy ran with the speed and direction of a balloon with a hole in it.

  Mrs. Hart abandoned her sandals as she approached the mud and dirt adjoining the fence to the dog park. She flung the door open and went after Missy. The door quickly snapped back, but had been thrown open so hard that it didn’t secure back into place. A nosy Pomeranian, a redundancy if ever there was one, stuck his head between the gate and fence.

  “It looks like fate is on our side today, my friends,” he announced. He, along with a following St. Bernard, were the first two to push their way out of the park. They also were the first ones to send the remaining humans into a sudden pursuit of their escaping dogs.

  “The gate,” raspy screamed. “Close it!”

  “They’re getting out!” high-pitched said.

  I stood back with Nipper as the chaos of humans and dogs splashed in and out of the park.

  “Now there’s a distraction,” Nipper said. “Can’t plan that.”

  “Yea-” I started to say. “Let’s go. Right now, Nipper.”

  “Huh?”

  “Looks like we have a second chance.”

  “I don’t know about-”

  “If you haven’t noticed, everyone is occupied at the moment and everyone is focusing on the front of the park. We have an open window here but we have to go right now.”

  “Where’s Ernie?”

  “I don’t know. Get to the spot and wait for me. I’ll get Ernie.”

  “What if you can’t find him?”

  “Then it’ll be just you and me. Go.” Nipper took off towards our starting point. I found Ernie and Saucy scratching themselves on some freshly trimmed bushes away from the other dogs.

  “Hey Fritz,” Ernie said. “You always get a better itch after they cut the branches.”

  “Ernie, we’re leaving.”

  “Aw, we just got here,” Saucy said.

  “Right now,” I said.

  “I don’t want to go… You’re not talking about home, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “You see all that commotion at the front of the park. We’ve got thirty seconds to do what we came here to do and we have to do it now.”

  “I don’t know,” Ernie said. “I’m hanging out with Saucy now.”

  “Fine. Me and Nipper are gone.”

  “Where are you going?” Saucy said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  “Hey,” Ernie said, “don’t talk to her like that. It’s top secret, Saucy.”

  “You need to decide right now if you’re coming, Ernie. We’re going with or without you.”

  Ernie hesitated. I rejoined Nipper at the launching site. Dogs were still running around the parking lot. The St. Bernard who led the charge jumped into the back of a pickup truck that didn’t belong to him and marked it for himself.

&
nbsp; “Where’s Ernie?” Nipper said.

  “He’s not coming.”

  “What? We have to-”

  “He’s not coming. On three, it’s you and me. Ready?” Nipper nodded. “One… Two… Three.” We took off. Nipper got out several steps in front of me. I had blocked out the pain on my previous escape attempt, but I felt it on that one with every stride as my leg jammed into the hard earth. “When you hit the mound, push off with your hind legs. Once you get clear, take cover behind the bathrooms eastbound and wait for me.”

  “Which way is east?”

  “You see those bathrooms?”

  “Yeah,” Nipper said.

  “That’s east. I’ll be right behind you. Don’t look back and don’t stop. We’re approaching-” Up ahead at the dirt mound, a trio of pugs were taking turns sliding down the mound and didn’t see us coming. Giggling little goofballs grunting and snorting as they bowled themselves down the mound to get themselves dizzy.

  “Pugs!” Nipper said, shouting back.

  “I see them. Keep going.”

  “What if they won’t?”

  “Keep going. They’ll move.”

  Nipper yelled at the dogs to scram, but they remained in place, happily oblivious to the impending collision as they danced in a tribal circle atop the mound.

  The pugs didn’t see Nipper until he was a step away from the mound. Even then, their reaction was a muddled “huh, wha?” while Nipper took his jump a step early and flew over their heads. The pugs watched with a stunned and oddly harmonic “whoa” as Nipper took flight inches from their heads. Nipper landed clear of the fence on the other side to a chorus of “awesome” in triplicate from the pugs. It wasn’t until they saw me following behind that they snapped back into living amongst the residents of this planet.

  They all screamed versions of “Run!” and ran into each other like only cartoon characters would.

  “Move!” I said. I knew that if I stopped I wasn’t getting another chance at this. Nipper cleared the jump with plenty of room to spare and took cover around the corner by the restroom. One pug managed to tumble off the mound as I stutter-stepped on my approach. The sudden adjustment made my leg feel like it was whipped. I lost all strength in it. I pushed off as close as I could to the top of the mound with my one good leg. I wasn’t going to have the distance Nipper had. A little bit of luck would need to go a long way. I was mid-flight at five-and-a-half feet over the bushes that outlined the fence and was already making my descent. I turned towards the fence to create some extra momentum as my arms and head cleared the top of the fence. I tucked my head towards my chest and rolled through the air as my torso and legs finally cleared the fence. The top of the chain link snagged the end of my tail. That stung. A graceful landing was not had as the wind was bludgeoned out of me upon impact with the ground. I saw threads of my fur still in the clutches of the top prongs of the fence where it snagged me.