Flawed Dogs (4 page)

Apparently not, concluded Heidy.

“I don’t like dogs,” she finally said. “Because they always need a bath.”

Mrs. Beaglehole’s smile tightened with annoyance and spread so wide that Heidy worried the ends of her mouth might stretch all the way around her neck and meet, allowing the mighty head to spring off and hit the ceiling.

“Dogs don’t need baths
here,
” said Mrs. Beaglehole. “Unlike children. How you must be so looking forward to
yours.
”

Heidy stopped listening because she’d noticed something peculiar about Mrs. Beaglehole as she talked: with her head cocked ever so slightly to the left, the woman had one eye closed and the other focused on the center of the girl’s face. She was sighting Heidy’s nose for straightness. Exactly like the blue-furred woman had looked at the dachshund.

Heidy sighed and rolled her eyes. She looked past Mrs. Beaglehole and through the huge terminal windows, looking hard for the mountains of Fiji.

But she didn’t see Fiji outside. She saw the dachshund out of his crate, crouched at the base of a pile of luggage on the tarmac outside, waiting to lunge for freedom.

A lion in the bush!
thought Heidy, smiling.

Her first smile that day.

She watched the dog make a dash for the tarmac fence, but several workers cut him off, sending him into another group having lunch. His forward momentum took him straight up the leg of the first man, past his chest and up his face, which had several french fries sticking out of it. Dogs are creatures of survival, so he instinctively grabbed them all with his teeth as he climbed. Hooking a rear paw into the man’s open mouth, he pushed himself onto the top of the man’s head. The man flailed, as if being attacked by a fruit bat.

The other man grabbed for the dog, but then the escapee leapt to
his
head. Other workers ran up and the dog kept leaping from head

You might think these acrobatics enough to fully occupy a dog’s attention, but no, they are multitaskers at their core, and he finished chewing the stolen french fries. His first french fries ever, as it happens. The dog licked his lips and made a mental note that his favorite thing in the world was no longer kibble.

Inside the terminal, Mrs. Nutbush shrieked in horror at the sight of her Duüglitz dachshund escaping across the scalps of Piddleton’s sweatiest luggage handlers. Heidy watched as the furred woman surged forward and body-slammed through the glass security doors. Airport alarms erupted, as did Mrs. Nutbush: “GET HIM! GET HIM! DON’T TOUCH THE TUFT!!” she yelled, arms out, hands waving, fur coat flapping. She got twenty feet before the first of a dozen security people tackled her, looking, Heidy thought, like the Notre Dame backfield piling atop a two-hundred-pound blue rodent.

Heidy gave a long, low whistle of awed admiration. “Some dog,” she said aloud.

“A stray, no doubt. Mongrel!” snorted Mrs. Beaglehole. “Grubby, undisciplined mutts need a leash.” As she mumbled this, she reached into her large purse and removed a dog leash. Heidy’s eyes went large as the woman bent down toward Heidy’s neck. She stopped, catching herself. “Old habit,” she said, smiling that tight, lipless smile again. Mrs. Beaglehole picked up Heidy’s bags and nudged Heidy out the front doors to a town car idling in front of the terminal, waiting to take her to the rest of her life.

Heidy settled nervously into the backseat as the car pulled away onto the airport road. She never saw the renegade dachshund behind her on the tarmac leap into the cab of an electric airport cart and accidentally hit the accelerator with his bottom.

The little vehicle lurched forward and bounced below the belly of a parked airplane and on toward the runway. A dozen airport people chased the cart—a huge sign attached to its bumper read:
FOLLOW ME
. The dog wasn’t actually steering, of course, but to his surprise, he found himself moving quickly away from Mrs. Nutbush, who was still flattened under the men on the tarmac. He kept his bottom pressed against the accelerator pedal and presumed, like a dog caught shredding and eating a designer sofa, that everything was going fine.

The
FOLLOW ME
vehicle entered the main runway from the side and directly across the path of a taxiing 737 airliner that had just landed from Dubuque. The little truck continued east across the grass toward the highway. The plane turned in the same direction and obediently followed close behind.

Meanwhile, Heidy sat unhappily in the back of the huge car moving down the airport perimeter road while Mrs. Beaglehole drove.

“Dear, sweet Heidy,” the woman said. “We should probably discuss something before you see your uncle. The wonderful ladies of St. Egregious mentioned some . . . problems there that you had been involved with.”

Heidy said nothing. Word must have gotten out about the flush reversals she’d arranged for the nuns’ bathrooms. She stared at the back of the car seats. Little golden retrievers were carved into the leather.

“Your uncle Hamish’s spirit isn’t terribly well, dear. We’d hate for any . . . unnecessary stress to enter his life right now.” Heidy looked out the windows as the car moved away from the airport. She saw people on the sidewalk pointing back down the road behind them.

Heidy twisted around in her seat and looked out the rear window. The little electric airport cart swerved close behind their bumper, the dachshund’s face peeking out over the hood. Close behind the
FOLLOW ME
cart rolled a 737 airliner and its obedient pilots moving down the country road.

Mrs. Beaglehole stared straight ahead in the front seat and continued: “Heidy, I’ll just ask you straight out: Can we expect any problems ahead?”

Heidy stared behind her as the airliner’s wings knocked down the power poles lining the road twenty yards back, sending sparks flying and exploding a small transformer box.

“No,” she said.

On the weaving, bouncing electric cart, the dog spotted the girl peering at him through the car’s rear window ahead of him. Amidst a troublesome day where nothing made sense, the girl’s face was a lifeboat of familiarity. He leapt from the electric cart’s accelerator pedal, stopping it cold. The airliner behind it slammed on its brakes in front of a Piggly Wiggly grocery store, which the passengers decided was the Piddleton Airport baggage claim.

The dachshund streaked up alongside Heidy’s car, leapt onto the running board and scrambled up the rear door, through the open window, and into Heidy’s open travel bag tucked next to her leg.

Panting hard, he looked up at the startled girl and said simply:
“I love french fries.”

He honestly couldn’t think of anything less stupid to say. But he thought something honest was called for. It was a pity that girls don’t speak dog.

Heidy looked down in mute amazement.

Then with a single finger, Heidy gently, silently pushed the dachshund’s muzzle into the bag and zipped it up.

“I remember this place like a dream,” said Heidy, allowing a smile. She leaned over Mrs. Beaglehole’s shoulder and peered out the town car’s front window at the extraordinary sight ahead of her. The car had turned off a country road and into a tunnel made of a dark canopy of great oak trees. As they emerged back into the sunlight, two twenty-foot-high Great Danes made of shrubbery stood sentinel on either side of the final entrance to McCloud Heavenly Acres. The driveway pointed to the top of the highest hill for miles around, atop which stood the McCloud mansion, one of Heidy’s faded memories from eight years before. She let out a low whistle, which made the renegade dachshund hiding in her bag stir. (Whistles are to dogs what a pricked thumb is to a vampire.) Heidy pushed her last taffy candy bar into the bag to quiet her stowaway.

“Something’s different,” said Heidy, still staring out the window. She saw rows and rows of empty kennels in the near distance. “The dogs are gone.”