Flawed Dogs (6 page)

She pulled her hand away.

Hamish drew back the window curtains, flooding the room with dazzling sunlight. Heidy looked out the window and gasped.

The entire population of Piddleton was in the backyard. Cars covered the nearby hills, brightly striped tents sat amidst the verdant gardens and people milled about the sprawling lawn in their finest Sunday clothes. The women were festooned in sparkling bracelets and astonishingly large hats in the shape of inverted serving bowls. Men sported two-toned shoes and pressed cream trousers. Children chased each other and dropped ice cream onto lace-trimmed skirts.

And each gloved hand held a leash, at the end of which was a strutting hound of traffic-stopping beauty . . . of brushed and curled and poofed fur glistening like woven gold . . . and noses and backbones aligned more perfectly than the pyramids of Egypt. The ancient oaks overhead seemed almost to bow at the sight of so much naked dog glamour passing below them.

The pampered paws moved toward a central clearing on the lawn, around which hundreds of white folding chairs awaited the pressed linen bottoms of their proud owners. A woman with a clipboard stood waving in the center.

“It’s a dog show,” said Heidy, staring below, guessing correctly that it wasn’t the Spring Tractor Pull.

“The Piddleton Open,” said her uncle, without zeal. “Held here at McCloud Heavenly Acres every year for the past hundred. Go down there and dip in your toes, Niece. It’s your new pond.”

“Mine?” asked Heidy again, eyes wide, incredulous. She looked down into the rolling ocean of flowered hats and perfumed spaniels as she would lava. “Are you coming with me, Uncle?” She looked up to see that she was alone. “Uncle?” she whispered into the room’s darkness. There was only silence. The firelight flickered on the faces of the dogs in the paintings staring down, now at her.

Out!
There’s that word again, popping into her head for the second time today, pressing on the inside of her skull as she hurried through the front door toward the McCloud Heavenly Acres gate.
Out! OUT!

Now this word too:
AWAY!

Also these:
Go! Now! Quick! Before anyone pulls you back into this cuckoo land of demented dog dips!

She passed Violett carrying a tray of champagne glasses toward the backyard, baby Bruno strapped happily across her back. “Heidy! Where are you going?”

“Fiji!”

She kept moving, then suddenly stopped at the gate, remembering the dachshund bouncing around in her bag. She pulled the dog out and set him on the lawn at the edge of the woods, where he wobbled a bit as he looked up at her.

“That was fun!”
he said.
“What’s next, pardner?”

“Shh! Go! You’re liberated. Join a pack of wolves!”

He looked at her squarely
: “I have to tell you: banana taffy is my new favorite thing.”

Heidy began backing away, but the little dog followed.

“No! Go! GO!!” she yelled. “They don’t allow dogs in Fiji! They pee on the coconuts!” This was a guess. Her tone turned angry: “Go very far away. I’m doing the same.”

The dachshund kept following. Heidy put her face down to his and was about to scream louder when he licked the underside of her nose.

She froze at this unexpected attack.

A familiar shriek from behind made her jump. She turned to see Mrs. Nutbush from the airport—still in her blue fur coat—run in and scoop up the dachshund, holding it above her head. “MY LOST LITTLE DUÜGLITZ TUFT!! Where have you BEEN, naughty boy!”

The dog looked as if it was about to be eaten. Which, in a sense, it was.

Heidy looked down the road to freedom. Then she looked back at Mrs. Nutbush, terrified dog in hand.

“Arrrgghhh . . .” muttered Heidy under her breath as she pulled the little dog from the woman’s grasp, giving him the sternest angry-nun look that she could muster. “Naughty boy is right! Always chasing big . . . blue . . .” She looked at Mrs. Nutbush. “. . . critters.”

“Well, n-n-now, who are you and why do you have my Duüglitz-tufted Austrian red dachshund?” stammered the flustered woman, reaching for the shaking animal. Heidy backed away.

“I’m Heidy McCloud. And this is . . . this is, uh . . .”

She needed a name. Her imagination failed her:

“Sam. My dog Sam.”

“Sam? SAM?” repeated Mrs. Nutbush, suspicious.

“Yes! Good ol’ Sam . . .
the Lion.
” An entirely perfect name, Sam the Lion. Heidy looked down at Sam and gave him a little eyebrow flash, which is more a warning than a wink, meaning: We’re both in it up to our butts now, pal.

Sam looked back at her in panic.
“Do
NOT
hand me back to the blue and hairy woman,”
he said.
“I will throw up taffy and fries on her.”

Mrs. Nutbush narrowed her eyes and leaned in to Heidy. “I think the police might like to know why a discarded snot-nosed orphaned McCloud has a one-of-a-kind $180,000
Duüglitz
dachshund,” she sneered.

Heidy’s eyes popped. $180,000?

She looked down at Sam. “You poop rubies?”

“WHY WOULD YOU HAVE SUCH A DOG?!” demanded Mrs. Nutbush.

Good question.

Heidy opened her mouth. Nothing.

“It was a gift from her uncle,” said a voice from behind. It was Miss Violett, holding a punch bowl containing a humming baby Bruno. “Goodness, no reason to involve the police with an honest misunderstanding, Mrs. Nutbush,” she said as she laid a gentle hand atop Heidy’s strewn hair and stared carefully into the girl’s surprised face. “You’re late, Miss McCloud. The competition is about to start. Take . . . Sam the Lion there and hurry on to register.”

Heidy, too confused to argue, moved back through the gate, past the huge dog-shaped bushes and toward the house. She looked back at Miss Violett, who gave her an eyebrow flash.

Nobody before had given
her
an eyebrow flash.

A smiling Violett turned to a shocked Mrs. Nutbush. Violett daubed her eyes with a corner of her apron. “Heidy and Sam’s first show! A big moment for all of us.”
Sniff.

Mrs. Nutbush snorted a suspicious snort, pushed past Violett and stomped after the girl holding her $180,000 Duüglitz dachshund.

Heidy walked as if in a trance . . . back toward the dreadful place that she had just run from. Sinister cosmic forces beyond her understanding had seized her life, she figured. All she could do was put one foot in front of the other and not fall over.

Carrying Sam and his Duüglitz-tuft-whatever thing, she stumbled toward the jostling crowd and their trash-can-lid hats and their hydraulic bosoms and their powdered, pooferized dogs and the gathering realization that this was going to be the end of her life.

She found herself at the end of a long line of fancy people with fancy dogs at the center of the McCloud Heavenly Acres back lawn. She stood frozen in dazed terror, gripping Sam close to her chest. Upside down.

She was in a dog show. The horror.

The competition was about done. Heidy became dimly aware of people clapping and cheering. She looked up to see a beaming Mrs. Beaglehole getting back in line after showing the dazzling, showstopping Cassius. The people in the surrounding lawn chairs clapped loudly while Mrs. Beaglehole smiled triumphantly and made a little bow to the crowd. The big poodle had won the Piddleton best in show for the past three years. He would grease this one, and Mrs. Beaglehole knew it.

The world championship Westminster show in New York City lay in the future. Cassius would win best in show. The most beautiful dog on the planet. They
both
knew this.

“Wait a minute, ladies and gentlemen,” announced a lady with a microphone and clipboard at the center of the lawn. “A last-minute entry has been added. It’s . . . oh, what a lovely surprise . . . Heidy McCloud, Hamish McCloud’s niece! And her Austrian red dachshund . . . Ham the Lion.”

“Sam,” corrected Heidy in the tiniest whisper.

The crowd went dead silent.

A shocked Mrs. Beaglehole and Cassius spun their heads to stare at her at the end of the line.

Then a frantic, low murmuring raced throughout the crowd: “The little orphan McCloud girl!” “A McCloud hasn’t shown up at their own dog show for ten years!” “She looks like her mother.” “They say at school she set the nuns’ toilets to flush in reverse!”

Heidy heard all of this, which made her mortification complete. She wondered if the others could hear the pounding of her heart.

“Miss McCloud and Sam the Lion!” said the woman in the center, gesturing toward Heidy. “The judges await.”

Heidy stared. The judges awaited what? Here was the dog in her hands. What else did they need?

The clipboard woman gestured to her to do something.

What? What did people do at dog shows? Hundreds of eyes were on her as her panic slipped into action, and she instantly went with her best guess. She put Sam on the ground.

Then she began to dance.

She’d been good at dancing, and her freestyle was legendary among the students at St. Egregious. So she played Elvis’s “Hound Dog” in her head, closed her eyes and let it all fly.

Sam stared up at Heidy’s windmilling arms and legs and wondered if this simply was what all human beings suddenly did around noon every day.

So he began to dance as well. Hopping. Twirling. Bouncing. Heidy smiled. He looked like he was on a hot skillet.

Then Sam noticed Mrs. Nutbush. She was in the crowd and moving closer, dead set, he figured, on eating him. So Sam did what worked before and shot up Heidy’s legs to find high ground. In this case, to the top of her head.

The tittering began. Tittering is polite laughter that never stays polite. Eventually, all three hundred dog lovers were spewing champagne punch through their noses in open hysterics.

Heidy only danced harder, while Sam hung on. He found himself nose to nose with the judge.

Her eyes went to the top of his head.

The judge stopped laughing.