The Dogs Are Guilty

 

I am not a very pleasant fellow before the first cup of coffee in the morning. I do not wake up well.

I do not like to have my hands cold-nosed, licked, or snuffled in the dark at four o’clock in the morning. Spike The Wonder Dog, the “house lab” and official duck retriever, will do that to me every time on my way to the coffee maker in the kitchen. He will, that is, if I forget to growl at him in the dark before he gets to me.

I can growl pretty good. If I growled at you in the dark, you would stop what you were doing, and so does Spike, but sometimes I forget to do it and get cold-nosed, licked, and snuffled before I can get the kitchen light turned on. When it happens, I come about three feet straight up off the floor. I am wide awake and ready, say, for the duck hunt following, but I am not in a good mood about it.

I curse about as well as anyone you know before daylight, and hand out lengthy lectures along with the blue language. The expression “hangdog look” was invented to describe Spike’s facial expression in the middle of one of these lectures. He has about him the look of a dog that is about to be hanged, if you were going to hang a dog I suppose. I’ve come close to it a couple of times. The times I’m thinking of, I wouldn’t have awaited until official sunrise.

One time he and Heidi The …. oh, yeah, Heidi’s the German shepherd that lives in the kitchen with Spike. Her official job, the reason I spent as much money for her as you would a decent used car, is to scare people. That hasn’t happened yet. In fact, just the opposite happens all the time, but she sure is nice to look at, and, boy, does she eat.

Anyway, getting them out of the kitchen on their morning walk a couple days back, they began to rough house and play. They play hard, at full running speed while looking back over their shoulders at pursuers. They have no idea where they’re going when they play like this, and do not care. They run into trees and bounce off of them like huge, furred rubber balls, all the time without a whimper. There must be bruises all over their hided carcasses, but they show no pain.

I was looking in the wrong direction the morning of which I speak, while they ran looking over their shoulders as they always do. None of us should’ve been surprised when they caught me at about thirty-five miles an hour square in the back of my knees, what we used to call in football a “crackback block,” but we were. You “shake” those off when you’re eighteen. At sixty-four?

I distinctly remember looking up and seeing a frame of blue sky around my feet. There was an audible silence as my body drifted in space for what had to have been the smallest fraction of time, but seemed like a year. Then I began to curse.

Flat on my back, my head resting on gravel, the dogs assembled quietly at my side and assumed their hangdog looks as I spoke a language they were used to hearing in the dark. Spike looked sorry about it. Heidi The …. well, she looked like she was going to maybe break out into a small smile until she thought better of it, remembering, perhaps, what happened New Year’s Eve in the kitchen.

Pam’s mother, Katie, started way back in the Fifties the tradition (which Pam now maintains) of New Year’s Day homemade spaghetti and meatballs cooked all night long slow, slow, slow. Multiple pounds of ground round and aromatic sauce are lovingly spiced via secret recipe, and hundreds of meatballs carefully formed from it and cooked in a giant roaster and fed to multitudes of bowl game watchers all day long. It takes a lot of work (time equals quality), and a lot of meatballs. Katie was in our kitchen barely a month gone, talking to her daughter.

“Do you think I should make some more?” Katie asked. “We’ve got the meat.”

“Yeah, go ahead and make a couple dozen more,” Pam said from her station by the sink. “Somebody’ll eat ‘em.”

Which, Katie made twenty-five more meatballs, count ‘em, like she did, right there on the kitchen table, then turned around to wipe her hands on a dishrag. When she turned back around, Heidi was looking at her from next to the table with sweetest smile on her face. I heard the scream all the way out in the yard.

That, and what followed with a big stick and a surprisingly agile little woman are what kept Hedi from laughing out loud at me there on the ground, I think. She knew she and her buddy were in trouble, even if it wasn’t perfectly clear to her why. This time. The meatball deal she understood perfectly well.

It took a minute, but eventually my head cleared, and my senses came back to me. The moment passed, and I gave up the thought of picking up a big stick of my own.

“Dang, Spike. You lughead. You like to of killed me. Watch what you’re doin’.”

Which Spike understood to mean it was now alright to place his broad head squarely in the middle of my right palm and get his ears scratched, which he did. Which Heidi understood to mean it was alright to lick my left hand with a tongue the size of a small shovel, attached to a mouth big enough to lap up twenty-five meatballs at a time.

I don’t like having my hand licked. I growled. Everything was coming back to normal out on Baker’s Branch.

© 2009 Conrad M. Vollertsen