Sam stood, leaning slightly on his three feet, ragged and shorn of his deceit. He blinked . . . as if waking from a rapturous daydream.
But it was not a dream.
High atop the roof, Tusk and Madam stared down through the open skylight at the events unfolding below. “Oh, dear,” said Madam very simply.
Watching from the edge of the red carpet, suddenly Cassius knew. He suddenly saw everything clearly. The big poodle leapt forward, snapping the leash held by Heidy. He reached the backside of the fake Mrs. Nutbush, still teetering close to Sam . . .
. . . and he sunk his teeth into her bottom.
Which was actually Ol’ Blue’s. Which started a predictable chain reaction of dogs tumbling hard down onto the red carpet into a tangled heap of squirming mutt bodies, coats, hats, legs, boots and tails.
Heidy walked toward the tangle of ridiculous dogs and the one battered, very flawed but familiar dachshund at the center. She picked up the fake leg . . . and felt the pieces of fur that had been pasted over his scars. Her head spun.
“No . . .” she said and backed away, confused, trying to make sense of the unbelievable.
Sam watched her move backward. “What’s wrong? Heidy, it’s me. It’s Sam. I’m here! It’s ME!”
“But it’s not you,” said Cassius, again approaching his old enemy. “Look at yourself. You’re not the dog she loved before. You’re broken. You’re ugly. I told you before and it’s still true: she doesn’t want you now.”
Sam looked at Heidy and saw the confusion in her face.
Sam suddenly believed Cassius’s lie.
“Run, stray, run,” said the big poodle.
Sam did. He dashed for the exit at the far end of the arena.
“Sam!” cried Heidy, but he didn’t hear her.
But Cassius did. And in her voice, the one he’d learned to know and love more than any during the last many years, the poodle heard what he dreaded: she still loved the dachshund.
Far more than she’d ever love him.
Cassius dashed after the running Sam. He knew he had to do what he should have done years before to keep Heidy in his life.
He had to kill him.
The vast crowd of onlookers was blocking the exits, and Sam turned around to see Cassius almost on him, a look of fury in his eyes. Sam’s will for vengeance was broken, his spirit collapsed, and he only wanted out, out, out.
Cassius was on him and they both fell against a tangle of folding chairs, sending the crowd screaming. Sam pulled out from the jaws of the big poodle and his old survival instincts took over:
Head for higher ground. Go up.
A steep set of circular steps pointed toward the steel rafters of the ceiling . . . and the giant boxes that hung from them, the ones used as scoreboards during sporting events. Sam shot up the stairs, the lack of a fourth leg slowing him only slightly. Cassius followed, only seconds behind Sam, his teeth bared in furious hatred.
“Sam! Sam the Lion!” screamed Heidy, who reached the stairs just as both dogs ascended above her. She followed them up before the show officials could stop her.
Close behind her, the entire commando squad from the National Last-Ditch Dog Depository scrambled to catch up.
They had no idea why. But they were a team, and it seemed right to follow Sam, if not totally sensible. They stumbled and scrambled up the stairs, snapping at the hands of officials trying to stop them.
As the stunned crowd craned their necks and the TV cameras pointed up at the remarkable events occurring high above the red carpet, only one thing remained clear for them and the millions of people watching around the world:
This was the best Westminster ever.
THIRTY-TWO
NOW
Sam reached the top of the stairs, the arena ceiling blocking further ascent. Cassius was nearly there himself. Sam looked around for escape. A single narrow steel catwalk stretched the length of the ceiling, reaching the huge, angled score boxes hanging from the center of the roof, just below the skylight. Sam dashed across. Cassius reached the girders himself and followed.
Heidy was close behind. She looked down to the distant floor and all the people staring up like ants and she had to fight off dizziness. She sucked in a deep breath and started moving across the spidery walkway toward Sam and Cassius.
Sam reached the score boxes and leapt to the top of the first one of the four, each pointed slightly downward toward the seats in different directions. He lost his footing and nearly slid off, his rear foot at the edge.
The red carpet was directly below, almost two hundred feet.
Cassius landed several yards in front of him, facing him straight on. His voice was calm. Cold. Cruel. And familiar. “It’s time, dear, departed Sam. Three years later . . . and you’re in the same place, aren’t you, old boy? Another broken, lost, unwanted stray. Just take a single step backward and make things simple. It’s so easy. You did it before.”
Cassius was right, thought Sam. There was nothing left. No reason to keep going, really. No purpose remaining. There was that word for a dog again. Purpose.
Do I have one left now? Sam thought.
He looked down to the floor far below. Stepping off would be easy.
“Cassius,” said a voice behind them. They both turned to see Heidy on the box with them, crouched on her hands and knees. Cassius’s heart sank as he saw the look on her face. A look of coldness and contempt. “Cassius . . . it was always you, wasn’t it? You took the baby. You turned us against Sam. It was you.”
Suddenly, the great beautiful show dog knew that his life could never be the same now that Heidi knew. She would hate him. Fear him. Resent him. And finally, he would become that which no dog can ever really endure:
Unwanted.
And in that same instant, Cassius’s heart took the full impact and it did what all dog hearts can do, whether bright or dark, warm or cold, pure or foul:
It broke.
Cassius turned toward Heidy, his lips curled into a new and different rage. His wrath was now upon her. He lowered his perfectly groomed head and moved toward the young woman. Fear swept Heidy’s face and she crawled backward . . . but had nowhere to go.
Cassius bent his long legs low, ready to spring toward Heidy with muscles taut. He opened his jaws.
But Sam leapt first.
With a guttural scream, the small dachshund was suddenly upon him from behind, wrapping his long jaws tightly around the perfectly shaved neck while he wrapped his front legs around the poodle’s frizzy chest. They fell on their side, teeth flashing and jaws snapping, their legs and feet kicking the air and each other in a blurred frenzy of violent movement.
Far below, the crowd screamed, too stunned to move. The announcer on the loudspeakers urged calm until order could be returned.
Order was not close to returning.
The flailing dogs caused Heidy to move backward and slip off the large score box, falling six feet to a smaller box hanging below, holding the clock. Her feet then lost their purchase on the smooth surface and she slid off this, catching herself to keep from falling to her death by a weak grasp on the single brace of aluminum with a single hand.
In the roaring audience Hamish stared up in horror at his niece. Mrs. Beaglehole sat next to him, mouth agape, words stuck in her bovine throat like a chicken leg.
Sam’s commando squad of mutts watched the fighting dogs and the now-dangling Heidy from the catwalk fifty feet away at the edge of the arena ceiling. Ol’ Blue saw a large coil of thin rope, used to pull up crates of replacement bulbs for the scoreboard. He picked it up in his teeth and dropped half of it to the floor far below. Several men ran to it and grasped it, since that’s what humans seem to do when faced with a dangling rope.
Ol’ Blue faced Pooft. “How’s the digestion today, top gun?” Blue asked. Pooft looked down at the floor hundreds of feet below and then back at the blue dog.
“Troublesome,” he said. This was good news.
Blue turned to Jeeves. �
�Good day to fly, pal.”
“Why not?” said the hound.
She turned to the six-ounce Willy. “Willy, secure the goods.”
“Right,” said the tiny terrier.
With that, Pooft hopped onto Jeeves’s back and lay down, much as a jet engine might sit atop a Cessna. Willy took the rope end in his mouth and did what a pair of hands might have: zip around the two dogs, building a hasty but effective harness that strapped them tightly together. Ol’ Blue pointed the two of them at Heidy, still dangling and close to losing her grip. Bug and Fabio steadied the catwalk and made sure the rope was clear.
“Ignition,” said Blue.
The explosive blast suddenly hushed the crowd below. High above their heads, they watched two inelegant mutts rocket off the end of the catwalk on a small but explosive burst of flaming gas from poorly digested kibble. Maintaining altitude with the help of wing-like jowls, they sailed just over the head of the young woman hanging from the clock box and then plunged earthward, their momentum and fuel exhausted.
They dropped only a few feet since the rope grew taut across the clock box framework and was held firm by the men far below. The dogs dangled, as a very heavy kite might from a very high tree.
As targeted, the rope lay within inches of Heidy’s free hand. She grasped the line and held on, her feet wrapping around the rope.
Slowly, the men on the ground fed out their end of the rope and lowered the entire group to the red carpet two hundred feet below.
Heidy pushed away from Uncle Hamish, who’d rushed to help her. She looked back up at the dogs still fighting to the death above their heads.
“SAM! SAM!” she yelled, but the crowd was too loud for her voice to carry.
High overhead, caught in Cassius’s death grip, Sam’s strength was giving out. Blood streamed from tooth punctures, and his flesh was ripped across his back from manicured nails. Cassius held a fold of his neck in his teeth, slowly suffocating the small dog. Sam—on his back—pushed against the big poodle with paws too short. He had only enough breath to croak out a final question in a whispered rasp.
“Someday . . . somewhere . . . you’re going to kill her too, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Cassius, whispering through the teeth clenched on Sam’s neck. “If she won’t love me.”
“She won’t,” said Sam.
Sam moved his eyes up past the reddening face of Cassius and saw Tusk and Madam staring down in horror at him through the roof skylight.
“Now!” called out Sam, despite the jaws that pulled his neck.
Madam stared down. She thought she’d heard him say the word, but couldn’t believe it. It would kill them.
“Now,” said Sam again, mustering up the last shreds of his strength. “NOW!”
On the roof, Madam turned to her huge partner and yelled, “Now, Tusk! Do it now!”
Tusk turned and leapt. His full weight hit the fourth leg of the water tank support, buckling it. The tank groaned as the other steel legs bent and broke and finally gave way to gravity. As Tusk and Madam dove to safety, the round tank landed flat on its side, bursting its roof with a cannon shot explosion, releasing its ten thousand gallons of pudding-like mud onto the skylight. The glass shattered and the liquid burst through like a brown waterfall, hitting the top of the score boxes just below it. Cassius never knew what it was that slammed into them, carrying both dogs over the edge and falling, tumbling, spinning to the never-to-be-clean-again red carpet two hundred feet below.
THIRTY-THREE
RISEN
Women screamed and men yelled as the tens of thousands of spectators erupted in panic and rushed to the exits. The gooey cascade of mud raining down from the heavens had stopped, but many guessed that other biblical plagues might follow and it’d be smart to leave before the locusts came.
Dozens of the world’s most beautiful dogs shook off the bulk of the mud that coated their bodies and staggered away from the arena center in a sort of muddled daze.
All but two.
Two figures lay prone and unmoving at the center of the vast mud-covered floor as people and dogs swirled in chaos about the edge.
Heidy, coated in the brown ooze herself, slowly walked past the unmoving form of Cassius and approached the small dachshund lying next to him. She dropped to her knees next to Sam and gently picked him up with both hands. Sam’s head hung to the side. She cradled the limp dog and looked down at the brown eyes she had thought she’d never see again and her shoulders slumped with a sadness beyond simple grief. A sadness made even more hollow by regret. Regret that she hadn’t believed in him when he’d needed it most, years ago. Regret that she would now never have the chance to tell him how sorry she was for this. Regret for the seasons unspooled, the birthdays celebrated, the happy, small moments of a life passed unshared by the dog that just gave her his.
She wept, but made no sound.
And then neither she nor anyone else in that frantic arena noticed that time seemed to have come to a stop. The lights dimmed, and a darkness dropped over everything. The walls, the sounds and the people faded into the background, as if suddenly out of focus. A blue light, shimmering down, like moonbeams underwater, fell on Heidy— quiet and unmoving, her head bowed—Sam still held tight in her arms.
A figure walked in slowly from the surrounding darkness and sat next to them and looked at Sam with a slight smile. If Sam could have seen, he would have recognized the preposterous terrier-hyena-dust mop mix.
Peaches.
“Poor Sammy. You’ve had a rough go of it, lad.”
Peaches looked up into Heidy’s mud-splattered face, still bowed.
“Aye, she’s a good one, she is. Worth fighting for. Or dying for, eh, Sam?”
The little dog studied Sam’s face, his eyes closed, his great heart stilled.
“You lost it for a bit. The thing that we’re here for. But in the end you found it again, didn’t ya, lad? A shame to waste such a fine thing, it is.”
He paused.
“Sure enough, Sam. Your last day will come. . . .”
Peaches turned, stretched his lumpy frame and yawned. The most unexpected of angels turned and walked away toward the darkness outside the blue light and said without looking back:
“. . . but it’s not this one, laddie.”
Sam opened his eyes.
He saw only a blurry image just beyond his long nose. As his head cleared, he saw that the fuzzy shape was the face of a young woman, smeared with dirt and tears, her eyes closed. An old instinct returned without him thinking about it, as instincts do . . . and he licked just below her nose.
Heidy opened her eyes, startled, and looked down at her dog. She blinked. Sam did the same. She pulled Sam up and tucked his muddy snout tight into her neck as she so often had in the past. She waited for the warmth of his breath and it came and she knew that it wasn’t a dream. She closed her eyes again and whispered into his torn ear:
“Sam. You’ve come home.”
Sam’s dog commandos sat several feet away and looked at each other with something like astonishment. Then they watched the young woman stand up, still holding Sam, and move toward an exit. Uncle Hamish slipped next to her, leaving Mrs. Beaglehole staring and stunned, still seated in the VIP section, where she may still be today.
The crowd of pushing, shoving people suddenly calmed. They moved apart, making a clear path for the young woman and the three-legged dachshund. Before entering the bright light of the afternoon sun, Heidy turned and looked back into the arena. She looked at Sam’s commandos, sitting in the mud watching her along with everyone else. She held out an open hand toward them.
“Aren’t you coming?” she said.
And then before the thousands of hushed people in the audience and the millions of stunned viewers watching across the world on TV . . . the flawed and muddied depositees of the National Last-Ditch Dog Depository followed Heidy and Sam and quietly filed out of the Westminster Dog Show, noses held high, backs straight, mud glistening
.
Wee Willy, sitting on Tusk’s butt with tiny tail waving, turned to look at the passing crowd.
“Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!” he said.
THIRTY-FOUR
LION
Vermont.
Ol’ Blue led the flawed dogs as they discovered what a field of autumn dandelions will do when a pack of mutts tear into it. Streaking across the hills, they and another fifty barking beasts also discovered that while catching dandelion wisps in dramatic balletic leaps could be fun, digesting them was not. Pooft discovered this earlier and the Piddleton fire department had to retrieve him from the singed upper branches of the valley’s tallest maple tree.
As the dogs ran ahead, Uncle Hamish lay on his back sunning himself in a small wagon, his head on Violett’s lap. Bruno, now four, sat in front, holding the reins. Tusk—the only one of the original flawed commandos still unadopted—wore a harness and pulled the lot of them up the hill after the other dogs, his momentum maintained by a giggling Bruno chucking stale baguettes out in front of the happy, huge beast.
Coming in last was Heidy, strolling in the tall grass while Sam stretched atop her head and chewed a dandelion stalk. At the crest of the hill, they could see down to the manor house and kennels, newly renamed the McCloud Heavenly Acres Shelter for Peopleless Dogs.
Heidy and Sam watched several cars pull up, the first of the day. Kids tumbled out and pointed toward the mutts making their way down the hill toward them. Tusk stopped and sat down shyly before a very small, very skinny ten-year-old boy, who stared up at him, arms stiff at his sides.
“There are,” said the boy matter-of-factly, “some kids at my bus stop that grab the Ho Hos from my lunch sack every day.”
Tusk looked at the boy’s father standing behind him, who shrugged.
“Not anymore,” said Tusk.
The boy turned and sat down between the dog’s huge legs and lay back into the furry chest, his head fitting neatly below the long chin. He looked up at his dad with a grin. “This one.”
Flawed Dogs Page 10
