Flawed Dogs (3 page)

A little curly wisp of hair atop the head.

For the large woman in the chinchilla coat, it was the holy grail of dachshundom. She spun around and faced an airport man in white overalls behind her. She thrust the dog into the man’s face. “Look! The Duüglitz tuft! THE DUÜGLITZ TUFT!!”

My name is Duüglitz,
thought the dog.

“Oooooohhhh . . .” whispered the great woman in an ecstatic gargle growl of awe. “This one will
finally
win me the
Westminster championship
!”

The man rolled his eyes. “Mrs. Nutbush, as usual you’ll have to wait until his shipping papers are processed. You can pick him up in cargo in a few minutes.”

“Ah, well, there it is,” Mrs. Nutbush said, and with a flourish placed the dog back into his crate. She bent down and put her face to the bars. “Mommy’s little world champion!” She smiled broadly, but the dachshund noticed that she wasn’t looking at his eyes, but rather at his tuft. “BeeYOOtiful,” she purred. “I’ll be back for you, sweet pea!”

She loped off. Bounced, really.

The dog stood in the crate, dazed, her words of doom still ringing in his ears:
“I’ll be back!”

He looked the other way and saw a green ocean of grass in the distance. It rippled like inviting waves. Waves a dog could run through forever.

Then he looked down to the latch on the crate’s bars.

In a crisis, dogs can be simple in their thoughts. In this case he had just one:

He tried to unhook the latch with his teeth. They weren’t reaching. Tongue. Use the tongue! He wrapped it around the strange loop of metal and yanked sideways. Hard! Harder! He muttered:
“Slippery . . . stupid . . . c’mon, ol’ Duüglitz Tuft, get a grip on it . . . out out out . . . OUT!”

As he struggled in panic, his eyes happened to go back up to the window of the plane opposite, where the young human female’s face still peered down at him. He couldn’t hear, of course, but she was mouthing something behind the glass:

“Up,” she was saying. “Pull it
up.
”

A few minutes later Heidy’s bags banged about her knees as she walked down the plane’s stairs. Before entering the terminal, she looked back at the dachshund, still in the dog crate twenty feet away. She stopped, checked to see if anyone was watching and stepped away from the yellow dotted line on the tarmac meant to keep people from doing exactly what she was doing.

She approached the stack of animal shipping boxes and scanned their panting contents. There were every variety and shape and exotic breed. It was like a sidewalk fruit stall of dogs.

She found the dachshund, bent down and looked into the cage. He stopped biting the latch and looked up into her eyes, surprised that the young human being had gotten out of her own crate so easily. Heidy leaned her face in close to the bars.

“Hello, weiner dog.”

He was nervous. But he was polite:

She pointed to the latch. “You’re doing it wrong.”

The dog suddenly forgot about escape and his questions poured out:
“What breed are you? You smell good! How do you keep rain out of those ears? How can you sniff the ground with that little nose? Your eyes are greenish. Do you see everything greenish? Do you have fingers on your other two feet? Do you eat kibble?”

Heidy furrowed her brow. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand dog.”

“Here. Try this,”
he said.

The dachshund then did something that would change the rest of
his
life:

He kissed her.

More precisely, he licked her under the nose.

Not on the mouth, with the common paint-roller application of dog spit. The Big Kahuna, as Labradors call it. No, this was a gently executed upward swipe of the last quarter inch of tongue on the tiny band of flesh between the nostrils: the forbidden promised land of dog affection.

It is a gesture weirdly, wholly unique among an entire planet of animal types. A person may place his or her face before that of a panda bear, parrot, warthog, whale, lizard, elephant, trout, lemur, llama, monkey, rhinoceros, bunny, ferret, hamster, horse, house cat or domesticated dik-dik, but none of those will do what a dog will:

Kiss.

Unless the person’s face is covered with jam. Or in the case of the cat, mouse intestines. Neither counts.

No, only a dog will smooch a human being. And he’ll aim the kiss for the lips but be happy with a nose, chin, ear, neck, toe or buttock. Unlike grandmothers, dogs are not fussy.

In Heidy’s case, it was under the nose.

She stood up straight, as if slapped. The dachshund looked equally shocked.

Neither knew it at the time, but a line had been crossed that could not be uncrossed—a running leap over the chasm of ignorance and misunderstanding between species and worlds . . . and a baby step taken into life’s endless possibilities for wonder and joy and surprise that could no more be reversed than one’s first taste of chocolate.

A dog kiss.

“That was completely gross,” said Heidy.

With a flourish she wiped off the little amount of moisture with a sleeve—really, it was nothing—above her upper lip without looking away from the dachshund, who continued to stare at her. She spun around and walked briskly toward the terminal door.

But not before flipping the crate’s latch upward and off.

“I’m Mrs. Beaglehole,” said an enormous elegant woman, whom Heidy mistook for a trained red cow. She stood stiffly just inside the airline terminal doorway, hands clasped, figured Heidy, about where her udder should be.

Mrs. Beaglehole blinked rapidly and looked down at the girl. “Miss Heidy McCloud, I presume. I now run your uncle’s dog ranch. Welcome to Piddleton.” She held out a long hand. Heidy reached for it carefully with her own while eyeing the woman’s toothy mouth. Cows attack.

“And welcome to your new life,” Mrs. Beaglehole said, folding her hands again. “Your uncle is so very interested in seeing you again. Maybe with your hair brushed. How old were you again when you last visited him here? Thirteen?”

“Six,” said Heidy. The woman snorted and pretended not to hear.

“He has great plans for you, you know.”

“I don’t like dogs,” said Heidy. She thought she should put that out there early. Mrs. Beaglehole looked as if she’d been stuck with a knitting needle.

“Not like dogs! Why?”

Heidy looked back at the woman with equal shock. Did this ridiculous human heifer really not know that it was because of dogs . . .
DOGS!
. . . that her parents had died when she was a little kid? That it was because of DOGS that her criminally negligent uncle had dispatched her to stew with the mutant nuns at St. Egregious for all these torturous years? She didn’t know that it was because of DOGS that Heidy’s life was now shredded like one of her stupid uncle’s giant canvas chewtoys?