Flawed Dogs (22 page)

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.

Peaches looked up into Heidy’s mud-splattered face, still bowed.

The little dog studied Sam’s face, his eyes closed, his great heart stilled.

He paused.

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.

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.”

Sam watched his commandos meet their human visitors—just as varied and imperfect and splendidly flawed as the dogs were—and he knew that here, love would have a better chance to find its way, as it usually does with dogs.

Sam noticed something else. A pickup truck had stopped and a young man had gotten out. The truck was new . . . and the nice clothes were not familiar . . . but the man was.

Sam dropped to Heidy’s shoulders, then to the ground. He loped down the hill on his three legs until he got close enough to the visitor to know that the man’s hands were probably a bit less rough now. He approached, and the man knelt down low to do what Sam had never allowed him to do before: gently stroke the top of his head.

“So, little buddy. It’s Sam the Lion now, is it?” the man said.

“Always was,”
said Sam, and he closed his eyes.