Mark, There's a Beagle in My Bedroom!

by Michael Ciardi

A shower didn’t help Kip wash away his anxiety of rooming with a loquacious beagle. Adding to his angst, Mark neglected to pick up his cellphone for the tenth consecutive call. Without a foolproof plan to corroborate Bruce’s story, Kip left his house as if he had been targeted as the brunt of a well-crafted joke. If he didn’t know any better, he would’ve scanned the neighborhood searching for a Candid Camera crew. After all, it was easier to believe that Allen Funt rose from his grave to orchestrate this gag than to accept the situation as it presented itself.

  After Kip drove his car into Bed Mania’s parking lot, he remembered why he dreaded this day even before the beagle opened his muzzle. Today was Ben Baylock’s chance to reaffirm to all potential customers that he had completely lost his sanity, and any sense of dignity along with it. The store’s annual “Swashbuckling Saturday” had arrived, and Baylock most likely wasted the entire evening adorning the showroom’s furniture and bedding with Jolly Rogers, parrots, daggers, treasure chests, and any other pirate paraphernalia he harvested from novelty sites on the Internet. Keeping with the spirit of this occasion, it was also the only day Baylock expected each “matey” to masquerade as a band of marauding buccaneers. Upon entering the store, Kip realized that had forgotten his flock coat and breeches back at home.

  “Shiver me timbers!” Baylock bellowed. “Where yer garb be at, landlubber?”

  “I’m sorry, Ben. I really just forgot what day it was.”

  Baylock, of course, had bastardized the pirate motif to a degree where Black Beard himself would’ve felt underdressed. His one good eye twitched as if spattered by cobra venom.

  “Ye’ll meet the ropes end for this, me addlepate.”

  “Talk normal, Ben.”

  Baylock’s mouth crinkled at each corner as he lowered his plastic cutlass. He looked like a chubby kid at the circus who just dropped his ice cream in a mound of elephant dung. “Geez, how could you forget your costume, Kip? It’s Swashbuckling Saturday! Blimey! We set sail in ten minutes. Arrr! What will me customers think?”

  Kip wanted to say ‘they’ll think that someone is actually professional enough to buy a mattress in this sinking ship of a job!’ But he settled for something a bit more impartial. “You want me to go home and change?”

  A dull glint ignited Baylock’s one good eye like a 20-watt bulb. “Me hearties won’t hornswoggle me on this outing,” Baylock said. “Ye be in luck, me bucko! I’ve got me some extra slops in the stockroom.”

  If this was a morsel of fortune, Kip wondered what the pits of hell must’ve tasted like. Nevertheless, appeasing his manager’s quirky obsession for a few hours on a Saturday seemed like the least of his worries at the moment.

  “Thanks. I’ll go put the costume on, Ben.”

  “That’s Cap’n Baylock to ye, me scurvy dog.”

  “Yo-ho-ho, me Cap’n,” Kip said in his best pirate voice.

  “Hey, that was pretty good,” Baylock, said, breaking character. “Do you think you can talk like that all day?”

  “Not even if my pathetic life depended on it.”

  If reeking of mothballs wasn’t nauseating enough, Kip endured the likelihood that Baylock’s spare apparel hadn’t visited the inside of a washing machine since last year’s sale. For authenticity, it made sense. After all, any pirate worth his sea legs was required to plunder booty as well as stink like it. Kip didn’t favor the blousy shirt and snug petticoat, but the hat and buckled boots weren’t as asinine. Had it been Halloween, he could’ve doubled as a weathered seadog. What any of this had to do with peddling mattresses, however, remained a mystery that Baylock refused to decode with any regularity.

  As the day progressed at the pace of a raided frigate, Kip was unsurprised that the merchandise in his station remained unsold. He couldn’t even blame his sales funk on his funkier outfit; apparently the other crewmembers were better at coping with their humility. Of course, he currently had more urgent matters to ponder than his co-workers, unless they too had encountered a talking dog spewing forth conspiracy theories. Kip needed to make sure this wasn’t the case.

  During a coffee break, Kip seized the moment. He approached Hutch McCloyer by a vending machine in the stockroom. Despite working together for over three years, these men conversed less often than two mimes with laryngitis. Kip perpetuated most of this coerced silence. He was a nitpicker at times, and he therefore found it humorous that Hutch failed to recognize the irony of his name and the fact that he sold furniture for a living. A while ago, for some unstated reason, Hutch started referring to him by the moniker of ‘Lil’ Kippy’, which Kip loathed almost as much as the portly man’s relentless body odor. Not surprisingly, Hutch had spent most of this A.M. sweating profusely, which seemed as chronic to his physiology as breathing was to others.

  “Hutch, do you gotta minute?”

  Hutch’s was buoyant; it was a rare occasion when he outsold Kip on the showroom floor, and he didn’t want such a milestone to go unrecognized. “Did you see me out there this morning?” he gloated. “I moved three kings and a queen set in fifty minutes flat. Catch me if you can, Lil’ Kippy.”

  Dare to dream, Kip thought. “I know. You’re really kicking ass today. The pirate costume must be doing the trick, huh?”

  “Nah, I think I just finally got the hang of things around this place.”

  “Yeah, maybe that’s it. I mean, you’ve only been here a little over three years.” Kip didn’t intend to sound glib, but Hutch’s ego was in dire need of a body check anyway. “Hey, I remember overhearing you say that you’ve got a couple dogs at your house, right?”

  Hutch’s face lit up, which caused his clammy cheeks to glisten. He often bragged about his pets in the same irritating way parents praised their kids’ meager attributes. “Roe and Mini,” he gushed. He reached into a pocket to retrieve his cellphone. “You wanna see some photos of them at the Easter egg roll last month?”

  “Thanks, but not right now.” Kip then resorted to a fib. “I was thinking about adopting a dog, so I was just wondering how they usually behave on a day-to-day basis.”

  “I’d say that depends on the dog. What breed are you looking at?”

  “A beagle.”

  “Oh, they’re awesome pets. A bit full of the dickens for my liking though.”

  “I’m used to being with someone whose full of the dickens; I was married to a slut,” Kip said.

  Baylock didn’t smile when he replied, “Well, they’re smart dogs and good with kids.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’ve been told. I’ve known a few people who’ve said that pets change over the years, though. Did you notice anything different about your dogs lately?”

  Hutch looked at Kip as if he just asked him to solve a problem in quantum physics. His eyes brows knotted together like two wooly caterpillars in mating season. “Now that you mention it, I’ve seen one very peculiar change.”

  “You have? What is it?”

  “Well, Roe—my miniature schnauzer—always does her business by the gazebo; he’s done that since she was a lil’ pup. But Mini, my schnoodle, who usually goes by the fence, has staked a claim on Roe’s favorite potty spot in the yard.”

  “What the hell is a schnoodle?”

  “It’s a poodle and schnauzer mix, of course. Anyway, Mini will only poop next to the gazebo now. Don’t you think that the weirdest thing?”

  “Someone call Rod Serling,” Kip said flippantly. He surmised that Hutch probably had no cultural frame of reference to draw upon, so there was no point in mentioning The Twilight Zone to him. “Listen, have your dogs done anything else strange lately?”

  “Nothing comes to mind, except for a ceremonial sacrifice they attend after dark here and there.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  Hutch smiled impishly and said, “I’m kidding. God, where’s your sense of humor? They’re dogs. They like routine things.”

  As do most people. Kip couldn’t think of a subtle way to navigate toward his next question, so he simply blurted
it out. “Did you ever think of having a microchip implanted in your pets, you know, in case they got lost?”

  “Funny you should ask. I just learned about those things. The vet tried to talk me into getting them at the office last week. I’m still thinking about it.”

  Kip gulped the last ounces of coffee from his Styrofoam cup and tossed it in a wastepaper basket near the vending machine. “Think more than twice about it, Hutch.” Kip started to walk back toward the showroom, but not before Hutch fired off his parting shot.

  “Hey, Lil’ Kippy, just so you know, nobody will be calling Rod Serling, because he’s already crossed over to another dimension. He died of a heart attack in 1975.”

  Kip seemed awestruck. “Touché,” he said. “Just don’t step in any schnoodle shit on the way to your gazebo.”

  By design or not, “Swashbuckling Saturday” proved disastrous for Kip. He tallied some of his worst numbers as a salesman since he started working at Bed Mania. By the store’s closing hour at 10 P.M., Baylock appeared vexed enough to cast him headlong toward Davy Jones’ Locker. To worsen matters, Kip still hadn’t informed his boss that he needed a few days off. Baylock frequently scoffed at such requests in the past, so Kip procrastinated with the news until they were outside in the parking lot. In his haste, Kip had forgotten to change back into his regular clothes.

  “I know this is kind of last minute,” Kip explained. “I can’t afford to miss work, but I don’t have a choice.”

  “Unless there’s a funeral, you’ve got a choice,” Baylock said. His pirate lingo was noticeably pillaged from his voice at the moment. “You don’t have any vacation time until at least July.”

  Kip had never lied so much in such a short span of time, but the circumstances merited it. “Didn’t I mention that it was a funeral?” he said. “I guess it must’ve slipped my mind. That’s where I’m going.”

  “Who died?”

  Kip had to think fast and sound authentic at the same time, but he only managed to sputter, “My dog.” Naturally, his response stopped Baylock as if he traipsed directly into an invisible wall.

  “Excuse me? Did you say your dog?”

  “Actually, he’s not my dog. He’s my mother’s…or he was.”

  Baylock would’ve never been accused of being a genius, but even a man deprived of nostrils could’ve smelled the stink of this invention. “Kip,” Baylock said, “Maybe you don’t know this, but our company doesn’t give time off for pet funerals. Besides, you’ve never mentioned your mother owning a dog before.”

  “Well, it’s not something that usually comes up in conversation, is it?”

  “Hutch brags about his dogs all the time,” Baylock countered.

  “Yeah, but they’re his dogs. Who talks about their relatives’ pets?”

  Kip suspected that Baylock had a soft spot for animals. As a result, he sensed some malleability in his boss’s rigidness. “What kind of dog did your mom have?”

  Another test. Kip was almost ready to pass it this time around. He had to be swift with his response. He couldn’t decide on one breed, so he spliced two together and served forth this genetic wonder: “A Malweiler.”

  “A what?”

  “Um, it was a mutt, you know—half Maltese and half Rottweiler.”

  “Oh, well, not to be politically correct, but such dogs are called mixes. Referring to any dog as a mutt nowadays is obnoxious.”

  “I’ll remember that next time I’m within earshot of a mix.”

  “You know, I’ve never heard of that kind of a dog before in my life.”

  Kip felt himself losing traction on this ruse, but he couldn’t withdraw now; he dug his boot heels in and held stern. “It’s very rare, most likely one-of-a-kind. My mom got him from a governess. She was a little creepy, but nobody seemed to care.”

  “Really? Her name wasn’t Von Trapp, was it?” Baylock joked.

  Kip ignored his boss, because he believed it would’ve been a bad omen to reveal the nanny’s name now. “That dog and my mom were inseparable.”

  “Are you sure?” Baylock asked. “It seems like a questionable mix to me.”

  “I agree. But I don’t think the Maltese had a choice, if you know what I mean.”

  Baylock nodded his chin. Maybe he was just too tired to dispute the point. In any event, he granted Kip the three days off.

  Chapter 11