Sam snapped the movie on again. The boy was running toward the English horizon with Lassie at his heels, her shiny coat of fur flowing like threaded gold in a stream.
There then arose a sound new to the dark and terrible walls of the National Last-Ditch Dog Depository: a howling of a fresh and terrifying pitch . . . a cry not for food but of pride and vengeance.
Sam pointed to the Westminster poster. “In three days, they’re coming to their grand palace of perfection. They and their human beings who don’t want you. Who don’t need you . . .”
Sam moved closer to the dogs.
“. . . but I do.”
Peaches looked at the dogs’ faces. They were lit, glowing, alive. Sam’s voice rose higher.
“Help me! Help me go to their great house of self-worship in New York City . . . and before the whole world watching on their TVs, do to them what they’ve done to you . . .”
The dogs sat rigid, waiting.
“. . . WRECK ’EM! WRECK WESTMINSTER!”
“WRECK WESTMINSTER!” they all chorused, leaping and bouncing. Even Madam showed explosive emotion, which for a cat means the subtle flaring of nostrils while looking bored.
Pooft backed up to the Westminster poster and shot a burst of flame from his afterburner, reducing it to glowing embers. He rocketed across the room in the opposite direction and hit a pail of dog food, exploding it like brown confetti.
From atop the desk, Sam and Peaches watched this gaggle of unwanted outcasts celebrate their new mission in life . . . pointing their noses high and howling to a moon they hadn’t seen in years . . . but soon would.
TWENTY-SIX
FLYER
If Mr. Flemmie Croup, the sole administrator, caretaker and poop scooper of the National Dog Depository for the past forty-six years, had been just five minutes earlier in waking up the next morning . . . if he had been just one mile per hour faster in walking to work . . . if he had been only slightly less patient with feeding the squirrels in the freight yard that morning and had chucked the whole stale baguette at them instead of breaking it up into pieces . . . then he might have actually stumbled into the dog escapees dashing out the front door ten minutes before dawn and he would have stopped the grand enterprise cold right there, leaving this book without an ending.
But he was not.
And he did not.
And it has one.
Mr. Croup arrived as always at three minutes after dawn and found the front door wide open and the dreadful building wholly absent of its seven permanent occupants. After wandering around tidying up, he then did what he’d never done in those forty-six years: He took the day off. And he went home for a bubble bath, in which he pondered in bubbly relish the thought that whatever sort of day his former depositees were about to experience . . . whatever trouble, mischief or harrowing mayhem they were to wander into . . . it would, without doubt, be the best day of their miserable lonely lives.
He was right.
The dawn broke in a sky clearing of the previous night’s storm clouds. The Manhattan Flyer sped southward toward New York City with nine freeloading passengers atop its streamlined engine. They’d dropped from a trestle stretching over the rails back in Vermont after the engineer had slowed on spying what appeared to be a cowboy wearing a tutu sitting on the tracks reading a newspaper. On inspection, the trainman found it to be an old smashed store mannequin propped up with sticks, dressed in folds of pink wall insulation and a discarded straw hat. He continued southward, but now with a commando squad of unwanted mutts sitting directly above his head.
Soon, the steel pinnacles of New York City appeared on the brightening horizon. Most of the dogs were rehearsing the elaborate plan that Sam had explained to them the night before. But they also stole excited glances at a world speeding by them that they’d simply never really known existed.
Freshly woken, Sam lay on his back next to the roaring diesel exhaust, absorbing the warmth, looking at the clearing sky, thinking about what he had to do.
Peaches stared down at him.
“Sammy. I heard ya sneezin’ durin’ your nappy. But it weren’t sneezes you was blurtin’ out but a name: Cassius. Cassius. Cassius.”
Sam shrugged.
“This Cassius chap . . . ’Ee’s up ahead somewhere, ain’t he? ’Ee’s what this ’ole thing is about, I’m thinkin’.”
Sam didn’t say anything.
“It won’t be a kiss you’ll be givin’ yer Cassius, will it?”
Silence.
“Oh, lad, it’s a bad thing ya got in mind. I wouldn’t be sayin’ this if we wasn’t such lifelong mates. I think yer using those poor blokes.” Peaches looked at the other dogs farther back on the engine, pointing out the sights speeding by.
“They had nothing. Now they have a purpose,” said Sam, stretching.
“Aye. Purpose ’n’ pooches,” sighed the odd dog. “Not much to that. They’re not designed to catch a mouse. They’re not meant to bring down a gallopin’ wildebleedin’ beast. Don’t round up cows or sheep or pick up a log with their nose.” He spat. “There is only one thing we silly slobbering furbags are put on this earth to do.”
Peaches moved in close to Sam and pointed to the lights of Manhattan ahead. “This ain’t it, lad.”
Sam looked at him and said nothing. He turned and moved to the front edge of the roaring engine and raised himself on his rear legs—both bone and steel, his body upright like a sail, leaning forward, ears flowing backward into the morning’s rising sun. The dachshund closed his eyes, his front paws pushed wide with the rushing wind, as if to embrace the sparkling city that sped closer . . . and a destiny darker than the other dogs suspected.
“Storm’s over,” Sam said.
“Not yet,” said the little mutt quietly.
TWENTY-SEVEN
QUACK
Midnight.
New York City.
Two days before the big dog show.
Eldon P. Liddle, night watchman for Madison Square Garden, was dozing on the arena’s roof in a lawn chair, as he always did on balmy summer New York nights. But it was quite breezy, and the sound of the wind through the decorative palm trees lining the roof’s round edge woke Eldon just in time for him to see Jeeves come into view.
Eldon noted that Jeeves wasn’t a particularly beautiful dog. Not like the ones that came every year and were due the next morning to prance around the arena far below him. This dog’s jowls, for instance, were extraordinarily enormous and inflated like a flapping beach towel in the wind, floating the animal twelve feet from Eldon’s stupefied face and 200 feet above the ground. A string wrapped around Jeeves’s chest disappeared down toward the street, presumably, thought Eldon, to a gang of dog-flying terrorists in the parking lot.
Startled into petrified inaction, Eldon watched Jeeves drift on the breeze like a slobbering kite, scanning the items on the roof with the help of sharp eyes and a full moon. Jeeves noted three things as he floated: A huge water tank on stilts, several palm trees in large wooden dirt planters, and a very large roof skylight over the center of the arena below.
Jeeves motioned to be pulled back down. As the hound dog descended, Jeeves happened to look over at security guard Eldon P. Liddle and—giddy with the excitement of a newly purposeful life—did something that would cause the poor man to quit at the end of his shift:
He flapped his wings and quacked.
TWENTY-EIGHT
BORROWING
Noon.
One day before the big show.
Mrs. Corinthian Nutbush—last seen three years before, strapped to a Vermont ambulance gurney without most of her clothes—walked out the front doors having freshly registered her new long-haired dachshund, Mr. Toodles, for the Westminster competition. As usual, Mrs. Nutbush was wrapped from head to foot in the fur of many of the world’s rarest animals. On this day, it was leopard, chinchilla, baby seal, and the rare Peruvian long-haired blue vole, the latter species having only a dozen known individuals left on the planet before
Mrs. Nutbush’s hat was made from ten of them.
Her Mr. Toodles led the way on a jeweled leash.
After tucking her priceless Westminster credentials inside her purse, Mrs. Nutbush moved into Central Park and paused to sit on a bench in front of the east fountain, as the stress of preparing for the world’s most important dog show was wearing on a giant gopher-like woman her age.
She dozed off while Mr. Toodles licked up the pigeon droppings, whose taste he found similar to Junior Mints.
Mr. Toodles looked up from his brunch to see what at first he thought was a spotted mouse with the end of a long string in its mouth emerge from the hedge, run up Mrs. Nutbush’s seal boot and disappear below her coat. Mr. Toodles sat down and continued tracking the creature by the small movements he could see it make as it traversed the towering peaks and valleys amidst the generous acreage below Mrs. Nutbush’s clothes. The dachshund watched, fascinated, as the rodent scampered through the coat, the handbag, both her gloves, the loops on the back of the boots, and then finally up to her scarf around the mighty Nutbush neck.
It wasn’t until Mr. Toodles saw the little creature actually drop the string temporarily, creep up the snoring woman’s face and poke its head deep into the vastness of her right nostril that he finally realized that the creature wasn’t a mouse at all but a three-ounce dog. He knew this because when the tiny mutt pulled his head out from the Nutbush honker, he turned around, looked down at the staring dachshund and said, “If you yodel, there’s an echo!”
This is also when Mrs. Nutbush awoke to find what she believed to be a baby rat on her upper lip. She screamed and leapt to her feet as though stuck by an electric cattle prod while Wee Willy grabbed the string again and made a swan dive into the bottomless mine shaft of her cleavage. This sent the president of the Vermont Dachshund Club into a windmilling frenzy of self body-slapping and high kicks. As Wee Willy’s movements below the clothing grew even more athletic, Mrs. Nutbush began to tear her clothes completely off.
This was the plan.
Mr. Toodles sat motionless on the sidewalk, chewing his snacks and watching with keen interest as his female human—now stripped down once again to her natural birthday suit—ran off shrieking for a pest exterminator. As she did so, the quite naked Mrs. Nutbush flapped her limbs and jogged toward the lake looking, thought Mr. Toodles, like a thawed Christmas turkey trying to fly.
The little dachshund turned back and saw that the tiny spotted mutt had run into the hedge with the end of the string, now looped through every item that was formerly on Mrs. Nutbush. The indigo blue and purple head of a much larger pit bull-crayon mix dog emerged from the plants to take the string in its green teeth and pull the tangle of clothes and accessories into the bushes.
Mr. Toodles then watched as a three-legged dachshund and another smaller, curly-haired black mutt approached him through the plants. Sam pointed to the collar and leash around Mr. Toodles’s neck. “I’ll take that, pal.”
Mr. Toodles was too stunned to move.
Sam sighed and nudged Pooft. He spat a flame from his afterburner, charring a tulip six feet behind them.
Mr. Toodles quickly slipped out of the jeweled collar. “Don’t kill me,” he said, shaking.
Sam and Pooft grabbed the leash in their mouths, turned and ran off down the path along the lake, headed uptown. They were joined by the other depository escapees, Mrs. Nutbush’s belongings tumbling behind them on the string like the day’s catch of fresh trout.
Then the freshly robbed long-haired little dachshund called out the three most welcome words ever heard during the scrambling raiders’ lost, forgotten lives:
“Are you pirates?”
TWENTY-NINE
D -DAY
Dog Day.
Throngs of people, reporters, TV trucks and police milled about outside of the Madison Square Garden arena, deep in the concrete recesses of Manhattan.
The secretary of the Westminster Kennel Club stood stiffly at the rear entrance, holding a clipboard and staring in horror at a woman in fur walking toward him.
Walking actually isn’t a technically accurate term in this case.
Nor woman.
If he could have seen below the Peruvian blue vole hat, the leopard fur coat, scarf, glasses, gloves and baby seal boots, he would have seen most of the nervous renegades from the National Last-Ditch Dog Depository clinging to each other like rats on a piece of floating cork.
All were piled atop Fabio, whose spindly legs drove the teetering assembly toward the terrified man.
Bug’s face poked up from the fur collar but was largely, gratefully hidden behind the scarf, hat and glasses.
Tied to the woman’s empty glove and sleeve was a leash leading down to Sam, trotting nervously in front of her.
But this wasn’t the old Sam. Madam had done her makeover magic.
Gone was any evidence of the last three terrible years. The scars and nicks and rips were covered up with the help of bits of fur, glue and the other assorted wonders found in Mrs. Nutbush’s makeup kit. Sam’s reddish brown coat shone and glistened from the aerosol canola oil found in the trash behind a Waffle House.
And most astounding of all: Sam had four legs again. The steel soup ladle was gone, replaced by a leg made of leather, plastic foam, fur, and the leg bone from a discarded bag of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Sam was again the stunning show dog from his former life.
He had to be. He was the key to getting into this fortress of dog fabulousness.
“I’d wish ya luck, lad . . .” said a familiar Scottish voice. Sam turned to see Peaches in the shadows behind a stall selling Westminster T-shirts. “I’d wish ya luck if what you was doin’ was what a dog should be doin’. But it’s not. So I won’t.”
Sam pulled his stumbling “human” toward Peaches.
“I’m setting things right,” said Sam.
Peaches sighed. “Sam the Lion they called ya before. But yer not. Yer a dog. A dog’s got twice the heart of a worthless smelly snorin’ lion. Yer heart, Sammy. Set that thing right.”
Peaches turned and walked farther into the shadows. Sam was going to call after him, but it was almost noon. Showtime.
Sam held his head high and led the pile of dogs disguised as Mrs. Corinthian Nutbush toward the club secretary at a table covered in white linen, atop which were the badges and numbers that the registered competitors would wear. They stood before the table, the crowd suddenly growing silent around them. Below the coat, the dogs froze, trying not to breathe, burp, whine, itch an ear or break wind.
Which didn’t stop Pooft from losing his grip on Ol’ Blue’s chest and sliding earthward. As the small curly-haired dog tried to regain traction, he slid around toward the rear, giving the full appearance to the observing crowd that below the coat, Mrs. Nutbush’s left bosom had gone rogue and begun a migration to better shores.
The club secretary watched this without expression beyond a single perfectly arched eyebrow.
“Madam,” he said. “Your bits are restless.”
Sam stood up on his rear legs, placed his front paws on the table and offered the Westminster official an ID card, gripped in his teeth. In this case, one from the Vermont Dachshund Club. The man looked at it.
“Mrs. Corinthian Nutbush,” he read out loud.
“YES?!” responded another voice from behind the dogs.
Sam, to his horror, turned to see the real Mrs. Nutbush standing several people back in the line. She stomped forward, giving the impression of an irritated refrigerator. “I’M MRS. CORINTHIAN NUTBUSH. WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?”
The real Mrs. Nutbush suddenly recognized her clothes standing next to her. She yelped. “M-m-my coat! My blue vole hat! These are my clothes! I was robbed yesterday! This thief is an imposter! She’s got my boots on backward.”
The official turned to the disguised dogs. “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, dear lady . . . but is there any truth to this person’s claims?”
Sam froze. The dogs under the clothes bega
n shaking. Sam worried that Pooft would spontaneously erupt with a nervous blast and they would explode like a fireworks display.
“Madam. Are you ill?” the official asked the fake Nutbush. “Can you take your glasses off, please?”
The suspicious man began to reach for the huge sunglasses sitting atop Bug’s snout. Behind them, the mutt’s huge eyeballs were actually growing even larger and threatened to pop out entirely.
The man glanced down and suddenly froze.
“The Duüglitz tuft!” he whispered. The official reached a shaking hand down and touched the wisp of hair curling up from where Madam had glued it atop Sam’s perfect dachshund head.
The official cupped his mouth with a hand and grew pale. He seemed to wilt at the sight of dog greatness, as a church deacon might before the robe of Jesus.
“TH . . . TH-TH-THAT’S MY DUÜGLITZ TUFT!” screamed Mrs. Nutbush.
“Yours?”
“YES!! THAT’S MINE!”
The man sighed with disbelief. “Yes. I’m sure. And so is the Taj Mahal.” He snapped his fingers toward some burly men. “Security,” he said. The men took Mrs. Nutbush by her arms and began dragging her toward the street. She continued to scream, “MY DUÜGLITZ!” even as she was loaded into the back of a police cruiser and driven away for what Sam desperately hoped was the final time. It occurred to Sam that this could only be guaranteed if she were to be shot into space.
“Madam,” said the man, turning back to the artificial Mrs. Nutbush and slipping a number 46 around her sleeve, “welcome to the Westminster Dog Show. And may I personally offer you my best wishes for your success.”
He bowed.
Fabio—at the bottom of the dog pile and ever the proper one—reflexively did the same.
Flawed Dogs Page 8
