Flawed Dogs (2 page)

It was blood. It was life.

But here, spilled and dried in this terrible place, it was death.

And here, finally, he knew it was the end of a long, unexpected road. He would go no further.
Here I stop.

Slowly, he dropped his head and laid his long bony back down along the curved wall, three stubby brown legs out straight as if stretched on a porch on a hot day.

One of the men in the mob yelled out: “He’s a-gonna take a snooze!”

The crowd hushed into stunned silence as they stared.

Then they exploded into twice the frenzy, waving their smelly money harder. The raging dog across the pit twisted against his restraints. The Rough-Handed Man leaned over the wall, waving at him: “Up! Get up! UP! YA CAN’T LIE DOWN, LITTLE BUDDY!”

He dropped the side of his head flat against the dirt and looked sideways at the end of his world. He looked for something—anything—to fix his eyes on rather than the drooling, corrupted fighting machine soon to be upon him with its broken fury. His gaze went up to a single arc bulb overhead flooding the pit with light. Blue, cold and blinding; yes, this would do.

He stared at it and then closed his eyes. A new light took its place: the sun on a cobalt sky above the rolling green hills of another time and another world long ago. It was dazzling.
It’s warm,
he thought, and closed his eyes tighter. He traveled back and felt wild grass below his paws and breathed other, less cruel scents on the wind while he ran in a blur through a forest of exploding dandelions. And he heard her voice calling his name. “Sam! Sam the Lion!”

Her
voice!

Heidy

Above in the roiling crowd, the Rough-Handed Man looked down in the fighting pit at the three-legged dachshund lying still on its side, eyes clenched shut, and saw something out of place. He squinted and leaned closer and looked.

No. Can’t be. Not here and not on a dog:

A smile.

Three years before . . .

In another time and another place . . .

Late August.

 

 

Heidy McCloud sat in the last row of the airplane as it taxied toward the small terminal and looked out the lefthand side window, changing her life forever.

Years later she suggested to other people whose lives were on a crummy, hopeless dead-end path that a good thing to do is to look in the direction exactly opposite of which you were
going
to look. Catch life by surprise.

If she’d been seated on the right side of the plane, she would have seen only fat green hills dotted with fat cows. She would have wondered if cows attacked. She would have seen the elegant sign over the terminal door greeting visitors:

“Oh, brother. I don’t belong
here,
” she would have said with a grimace of remembrance. A single word would have occurred to her:

And she would have dropped her bags the moment she’d left the plane and made a dash in the direction of Fiji, where she’d read somewhere that fourteen-year-olds were considered fully grown and could legally lie around the beach their entire lives eating Fruit Roll-Ups.

But Heidy didn’t look out the right side window because back in St. Paul, Minnesota, the nuns of the St. Egregious Home for Troubly Girls had strapped her in row 40—on the left. They had assumed correctly that it was the farthest point from the cabin door on the right and she’d have trouble getting to it when it occurred to her somewhere over Indiana that a pleated school skirt might make a decent parachute.

So it was the left window that she pressed her face on and looked down.

A dozen dog crates were stacked on the tarmac. Each had a shipping label.
Like boxes of tomatoes,
thought Heidy.

They had just been off-loaded from the cargo compartment of a large plane, waiting to be picked up by their new Piddleton owners. Each held a different kind of dog—the world’s most beautiful dogs—all of whom were sleeping or looking stupidly at the air molecules go by.

Except one.

The dachshund looked up through the chrome bars at the young human female.
“Ah. They’ve got you too,”
he said aloud. The girl’s face pressed against the glass of the airplane above him. He sighed and added:
“Your crate is better.”

The dachshund knew almost nothing about people. He knew the rubber boots of the one that used to clean his kennel and bring him his kibble, but he’d never spoken to the man. The last three hours in the plane only added to his life experience a plastic shipping crate, the smell of jet exhaust and the sounds of turbine engines.

And now a new young human face was looking down at him. He stared back. As he stared at her and she stared at him, fifty feet and millions of years of evolution separated them. The sight of the human girl inspired the first murmurings of a primordial dog instinct rumbling deep inside his dog skull, and a single thought slowly rose to pop into his dog brain:

“I want,”
he said,
“one of those.”

Suddenly a much different face filled the cage’s opening, peering through the bars one inch away from his nose. It was much older and rounder and smelled of perfume, hair spray and broccoli and bacon quiche. It squealed, “My handsome boy! My HANDSOME boy!”

A large squarish woman in a hairy blue chinchilla fur coat and hat unlatched the cage door and pulled the young dachshund out, holding him up high for a first inspection. She rolled up her coat sleeves and stretched his torso, arching his back, while one hand clasped his muzzle, holding him high. She examined backbone, neck, shoulders, forehead, rump, teeth, eyes—did they align perfectly? She cocked her head, closed one purple eyelid and sighted down his nose. “Gooooooorgeous! Just what I ordered! Straight and true!” she purred. She squeezed the dog’s thighs.

Heidy watched from inside the plane above. She’d seen holiday shoppers inspect something else in the very same manner. What was it . . . ?

A Christmas ham.

On an instinctual level, the same thought occurred to the dachshund:

“NO, NO! Don’t eat me, furry human!”
he cried out, but the vice-like fingers held his mouth shut. A whimper emerged. His eyes could move, though, and he could see that the large woman must have fallen down stairs recently.

Her lips, nails, nose, cheeks and eyes were discolored into horrifying shades of purple. He shuddered at what monstrous hues might glisten on her other, unseen parts.

Suddenly the woman froze, her eyes locked to the top of his head.

“Good Lord ’n’ holy butter! The cranial Duüglitz tuft!” she said. A shaking finger reached out and touched a wisp of fur curling up from a point at the top of the dachshund’s skull. Pierre Duüglitz was an eighteenth-century Austrian breeder who died without fulfilling his life’s dream of producing a lime-green-colored dachshund. Instead he left behind a highly prized genetic abnormality that forever carries both his name and his eternal shame: