“For those of you who missed it,” he went on, “it’s about a primitive empire that forms around an enormous, semi-mythical bear. Well, it happens I know something about that empire that Adams forgot to mention, and now’s as good a time as any to pass it along. You see, the only way to become a knight in Shardik’s empire was to apply for a personal interview with the bear. This had its drawbacks. If he liked your audition, you were knighted on the spot—but if you failed, Lord Shardik was quite likely to club your head off your shoulders with one mighty paw. Even so, there were many applicants—for the peasantry were poor farmers, and if a candidate failed for knighthood his family received, by way of booby-prize, a valuable sheepdog from the Royal Kennels. This consoled them greatly, for truly it is written…”
And here he actually paused to sip his scotch again, daring us to guess the punchline:
“…‘For the mourning after a terrible knight, nothing beats the dog of the bear that hit you.’”
A howl again began to arise—and then suddenly a howl arose.
I mean a real howl.
So of course we all swiveled around in our chairs, and damned if there wasn’t a guy with a German shepherd sitting near the door. I hadn’t seen them come in, and it took me a second to notice that the dog had a glass of gin on the floor in front of him, half-empty.
As we gaped, open-mouthed, the dog picked up the half-full glass in his teeth (without spilling a drop), carried it to the hearth, and with a flick of his powerful head, flung it into the fireplace hard enough to bust it. He turned and looked at us then, wagging his tail as if to make sure we understood that he was commenting on the Doc’s tale. Then, to underline the point, he turned back to the fireplace, lifted his leg and put out a third of the fire.
We roared with laughter, a great simultaneous outburst of total glee, and the dog trotted proudly to his master. I looked the guy over: medium height, a little thin, nose like an avalanche about to happen and a great sprawling fungus of a mustache clinging to its underside. He wore Salvation Army rejects like Mr. Emmett Kelly used to wear, clothes that looked like what starts fires in old warehouses. But his eyes were alert and aware, and he was obviously quite proud of his dog.
Then he caught Callahan’s eye, and winced. “You got a house rule on dogs, Mister?” he asked. You could hardly see his lips move under that ridiculous mustache.
Callahan considered the matter. “We try not to be human-chauvinists around here,” he allowed at last. “But if he dumps on my floor, I’ll clean it up with your shirt. Fair enough?”
“Are you kiddin’?” the guy mumbled. “This dog mess on the floor? Why, this is the Smartest Dog In The World.” He said it just like that, with capital letters.
“Uh-huh,” said Long-Drink. “He talks, right?”
A strange gleam came into the shabby man’s eyes.
“Yep.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” Doc Webster groaned. “Don’t tell me. A talking dog has walked into Callahan’s Place on Tall Tales Night. If that hound tops my story, I’m going on the wagon—for the whole night.”
That broke everyone up, and Long-Drink McGonnigle was particularly tickled (say that three times fast with whiskey in your mouth). “Patron saint of undershorts,” he whooped, “it makes so much sense I almost believe it.”
“You think I’m kidding?” the stranger asked.
“That or crazy,” the Doc asserted. “A dog hasn’t got the larynx to talk—let alone the mouth structure—even if he is as smart as you say.”
“I’ve got two hundred dollars says you’re wrong,” the stranger announced. He displayed a fistful of bills. “Any takers?”
Well, now. We’re a charitable bunch at Callahan’s, not normally inclined to cheat the mentally disturbed. And yet there was a clarity to his speech that belied his derelict’s clothes, a twinkle in his eye that looked entirely sane, and a challenging out-thrust to his chin that reminded us of a kid daring you to hit him. And there was that wildly improbable handful of cash in his hand. “I’ll take ten of that,” I said, digging for my wallet, and a dozen other guys chimed in. “Me too.” “I’ll take ten.” “I’m in for five.” Doc Webster took a double sawbuck’s worth, and even Fast Eddie produced a tattered single. The guy collected the dough in a hat that looked like its former owner had been machine-gunned in the head, and the whole time that damn dog just sat there next to the table, watching the action.
When the guy had it all counted, there was a hundred and seventy bucks in the hat. “There’s thirty unfaded,” he said, and looked around expectantly.
Callahan came around the bar, a redheaded glacier descending on the shabby man. The barkeep picked him up by the one existing lapel and the opposite collar, held him at arm’s length for a while, and sighed.
“I like a good gag as well as the next guy,” he said conversationally. “But that’s serious money in that hat. Now if you was to ask that dog his name, and he said ‘Ralph! Ralph!’ and then you was to ask him what’s on top of a house and he said ‘Roof! Roof!’ and then you was to ask him who was the greatest baseball player of all time and he said ‘Ruth! Ruth!’, why, I’d just naturally have to sharpen your feet and drive you into the floor. You would become like a Gable roof: Gone with the Wind. What I mean, there are very few gags I’ve never heard, and if yours is of that calibre you are in dire peril. Do we have a meeting of the minds?” He was still holding the guy at arm’s length, the muscles of his arms looking like hairy manila, absolutely serene.
“I’m telling you the truth,” the guy yelped. “The dog can talk.”
Callahan slowly lowered him to the floor. “In that case,” he decided, “I will fade your thirty.” He went back behind the bar and produced an apple. “Would you mind putting this in your mouth?”
The guy blinked at him.
“I believe you implicitly,” Callahan explained, “but someone without my trusting nature might suspect you was a ventriloquist tryin’ to pull a fast one.”
“Okay,” said the guy at once, and he stuffed the apple in his face. He beckoned to the dog, who came at once to the center of the room and sat on his haunches. He gazed up inquisitively at the shabby man, who nodded.
“I hope you will forgive me,” said the dog with the faintest trace of a German accent, “but I’m afraid my name actually is Ralph.”
There was silence, as profound as that which must exist on the Moon now that the tourist season is past. Then, slowly at first, glasses began to hit the fireplace. Soon there was a shower of glasses shattering on the hearth, and not a drop of liquid in any of ’em. Callahan passed fresh beers around the room, bucket-brigade fashion, his face impassive. Not a word was spoken.
At last everyone had been lubed, and the big Irishman wiped off his hands and came around the bar. He pulled up a chair in front of the dog, dropped heavily into it, and put a fresh light to his cigar.
“Sure is a relief,” he sighed, “to take the weight offa my d…to sit down.”
You must understand—we were all still so stunned that not one of us thought to ask him if he was bitching.
“So tell me, Ralph,” he went on, “how do you like my bar?”
“Nice place,” the dog said pleasantly. “You guys always tell shaggy-…uh, -person stories?”
“Only on Wednesday nights,” Callahan told him, and explained the game and current topic.
“That sounds very interesting,” Ralph said, parodying Artie Johnson. His voice was slightly hoarse but quite intelligible, “Mind if I take a shot at it?”
“You just heard the Doc’s stinker,” Callahan said. “If you can beat that, you’re top…”
“Please,” Ralph interrupted with a pained look. “As you told me a moment ago, I’ve heard them all before. All right, then: I have an animal story. Did any of you know that until very recently, a tribe of killer monkeys lived undetected in Greenwich Village?”
The Doc had nearly found his own voice, but now he lost it again. Me, I’d already crapped out�
�but it was fun to see the champ sweat. I resolved to buy the dog a beer.
“To some extent,” the German shepherd went on, “it was not surprising that they escaped notice for so long. They had extremely odd sleeping habits, hibernating for 364 days out of every year (365 in Leap Years) and emerging from the caverns of the Village sewers only on Christmas Day. Even so, one might have thought they could hardly help but cause talk, since they tended when awake to be enormous, ferocious, carnivorous, and extremely hungry. Yet in Greenwich Village of all places on earth they went unnoticed until last year, when they were finally destroyed.”
The dog paused and looked expectant. Sighing, Callahan reached over the bar and got him a glass of gin. Ralph lapped it up in a twinkling, looked up at us, and delivered.
“Everyone knows,” he said patiently, “that Yule gibbons ate only nuts and fruits.”
Not, I am certain, since the days when Rin-Tin-Tin ran in neighborhood theaters has a German shepherd received such thunderous applause. We gave him a standing ovation, and I want to say Doc Webster was the first one to rise (despite the fact that, by virtue of his earlier rash promise, he was now on the wagon for the evening). Callahan nearly fell off his chair, and Fast Eddie tried to strike up “At The Zoo,” but he was laughing so hard his left hand was in G and his right in EB. As the applause trickled off we toasted the dog and blitzed the fireplace as one.
And the man in shabby clothes, whose existence we had nearly forgotten, stepped up to the bar (minus his apple now) and claimed the hatful of money.
Callahan blinked, then his grin widened and he returned behind the bar. “Mister,” he said, drawing another gin for Ralph, “that was worth every penny it cost us. Your friend is terrific, and I’m honored to have you both in my joint. Here’s another gin for him, and what’re you drinking?”
“Scotch,” the shabby man said, and Callahan nodded and reached for the scotch—but I used to work in a boiler factory once, and so I choked on my drink.
Callahan looked around, puzzled. “What is it, Jake?”
“His lips, Mike,” I croaked, wiping fine whiskey from my beard. “His lips.”
Callahan turned back to the guy, gently lifted the scrofulous mustache and examined the guy’s lips. There were two. “So?” he said, peering at them.
“I read lips,” I managed at last. “You know that. That guy’s voice said ‘scotch,’ but his lips said ‘bourbon.’”
“How the hell could you tell?” Callahan asked reasonably.
“I swear, Mike—he said ‘bourbon.’ Here: look.” I wear a mustache myself, middlin’ sanitary, but I covered most of it and all of my mouth with my hand. Then I said, “Scotch…Bourbon…See what I mean? It ain’t the lips, entirely—the mustache, the cheek muscles—I’m telling you, Mike, the guy said ‘bourbon’.”
Callahan looked at the guy, then at me…and then at the dog.
“I’m sorry, Joe,” the dog said miserably. “I thought sure you’d want to stick with scotch.”
The shabby man shrugged eloquently.
“Well, I’ll be a son of a…” Long-Drink began, then caught himself. “You’re the ventriloquist!”
Doc Webster roared with laughter, and Callahan’s eyes widened the barest trifle. “I surely will go to hell,” he breathed. “I shoulda guessed.”
But I was watching the look exchanged by Joe and Ralph, the way both of them ever so casually got ready to bolt for the door, and I spoke up quickly.
“It’s okay, fellas. Don’t go away—tell us about it.”
They froze, undecided, and the rest of the boys jumped in. “Hell, yeah.” “Give us the yarn, Ralph.” “Let’s hear it.” “Get that dog another drink.”
Ralph looked around at us, poised to flee, and then he met Callahan’s eyes for a long moment. He looked exactly like a dog that’s been kicked too often, and I thought he’d go. But he must have heard the sincerity in our voices, or else he read something on Callahan’s face, because all at once he relaxed and curled up on the floor.
“It’s all right, Joe,” he said to the shabby man, who still stood undecided. “These people will not make trouble for us.” The shabby man nodded philosophically and accepted a bourbon from Callahan.
“How come you can talk?” Fast Eddie asked Ralph. “I mean, if it ain’t no poisonal question or nuttin’.”
“Not at all,” Ralph answered. “I was…created, I suppose you’d say, by a demented genius of a psychology major named Malion, who was desperate for a doctoral thesis. He had a defrocked veterinary surgeon modify my larynx and mouth in my infancy, apparently in the mad hope that he could condition me to parrot human speech. But I’m afraid his experiment blew up in his face. You see,” he said rather proudly, “I seem to be a mutant.
“This, naturally, was the one thing Malion had never planned for. How could he? Who could guess that a dog could actually have human intelligence? For all I know I am unique—in fact I fervently and desperately hope so. If there are other dogs of my intelligence, but without the capacity for speech, who would ever know?” Ralph shuddered. “At any rate, I destroyed all of Malion’s hopes the first time I got tired of his damned yammering and told him what I thought of him and Pavlov and Skinner in no uncertain terms. At first, naturally, he was tremendously excited. But within a few hours, as I reminded him of highlights of our past life together, I could see dawning in him the fear that any lab-researcher—let alone a behaviorist—might feel upon realizing that one of his experimental animals is an aware attack-dog.
“And eventually, of course, he realized the same thing that had kept my own mouth shut for so many months: that if he attempted to write me up for his doctorate, they’d laugh him off the campus. He abandoned me, simply kicked me out in the streets and locked my doggy-door. The next day he left town, and hasn’t been heard from since.”
“Cripes,” said Eddie, “dat’s awful. Abandoned by yer creator.”
“Like Frankenstein,” Doc Webster said.
“Damn right,” Ralph agreed. “I’d like to get my paws on that pig, Malion.”
Then he realized what he’d just said and barked with laughter. The Doc drained his own glass with a gulp and tossed it over his shoulder, squarely into the fire.
“I beg your pardon,” the shepherd continued. “Anyhow, I got by for quite a while. It’s not too hard for a big dog to survive in Suffolk County, especially when the summer people go. But what drove me crazy was having nobody to talk to. After all those years of keeping my mouth shut, so as not to spoil my meal ticket with Malion, I was like a pent-up river ready to burst its dam. But every time I tried to strike up a conversation, the other party ran away rather abruptly. A few children would talk to me, but I soon stopped that too—their parents gave them endless grief for telling lies, and one day I found myself obliged to bite one father. He took a shot at me—with a silver bullet.
“So I tried to sublimate. I found a serviceable typewriter in a junk-yard, swiped paper and stamps and became a writer—of speculative fiction, of course. Since I lived mostly in the remaining farmland east of here, I selected pastoral pen names like Trout and Bird and Farmer—although occasionally I wrote under an old family name, Von Wau Wau.”
“Holy smoke,” Wyatt breathed. “So that’s what that hoax was all about…”
“Eventually I acquired something of a following…but answering fan mail is not the same as talking with someone. Besides, I couldn’t cash the checks.
“Then one day, outside a bar in Rocky Point, I happened to overhear some fools making fun of Joe here, because he was a mute. ‘Dummy,’ they called him, and his face was red and he was desperate for a voice with which to curse them. So I did. They fled the bar, screaming like chickens, and ten minutes later Joe and I left the empty bar with the beginnings of a partnership.”
“I get it,” I said, striking my forehead with my hand. “You teamed up.”
“Precisely,” Ralph agreed. “I could have the pleasure of conversing with people, at least by p
roxy—and so could Joe, simply by letting me put words in his mouth. He grew that mustache to help, and we worked out a fairly simple ‘script’ and ‘cues.’ To support ourselves, we hit upon the old talking-dog routine, which we have been working in taverns from Ronkonkoma to Montauk over the last six months. The beauty of it is that while people virtually always pay up, they never believe I can truly speak. Always they speak only to Joe, congratulating him on his fine trick even if they can’t figure out how he does it. I suppose I should be annoyed by this, but truthfully, I find it hilarious. And at any rate, it’s a living.”
Doc Webster shook his head like…well, like a dog shaking off water is the only simile I can think of. “And to think it took you guys all this time to come to Callahan’s Place,” he said dizzily.
“I feel the same,” Ralph said seriously. “You are the first men who have ever accepted Joe and me as we are, who knew the truth about us and did not run away. Or worse, laugh at us.
“I thank you.”
And Joe pointed at his own chest and nodded vigorously. Me too!
Callahan’s face split in a broad grin. “Sure and hell welcome, fellas,” he boomed, “sure and hell welcome—any time. I can’t think of any two guys I’d rather have in my joint.”
And another cheer went up. “To Ralph and Joe,” Long-Drink hollered, and two dozen voices chorused, “To Ralph ’n’ Joe.” The toast was drunk, the glasses disposed of in unison, and the place started to get real merry. But an idea struck me.
“Hey, Ralph,” I called out. “You want a job? A real job?”
Ralph paused in mid-lap and looked up. “Are you crazy? Who’d hire a talking dog?”
“I know the only place around that might,” I told him confidently. “Jim Friend over at WGAB has been talking about taking a year off, and he’s a good friend of mine. How’d you like to run a radio talk show at 4 A.M. every morning?”
Ralph looked stunned.
“Yeah,” Callahan agreed judiciously, “WGAB would hire a talking dog. Hell, maybe they got one already. Whaddya say, Ralph?”
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