The Case of the Vampire Vacuum Sweeper

by John R. Erickson

  Miss Viola happened to be the one woman in a million who saw the humor in all of this. I mean, she had to be the calmest, easy-goingist, forgivingest . . .

  She was one heck of a fine old ranch gal, is the point, and when she saw Slim standing there with the unhinged door in his hands, the cowlick sticking up at the back of his head, and a silly grin on his face, she laughed and said, “You know, Slim Chance, visiting your house is always an adventure.”

  He parked the door against the wall, ducked his head, and grinned. “The house looks pretty bad, Viola, and I’m sorry. I tried to get ’er cleaned up but . . .”

  But you played Vampire Vacuum with the dogs.

  “. . . next time maybe you’d better give me twenty-four hours’ warning. This place kindly goes to seed, and it happens so quick, it always catches me by surprise.” He must have noticed that she was staring at his bare feet. “I didn’t have time to put on my boots.”

  “And the rag?”

  “Oh, that’s a bandage. For my ankle.”

  “What happened to your ankle?”

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”

  She burst out laughing. “Wouldn’t notice! Who wouldn’t notice?”

  “Well, you know what I mean.”

  She cocked her head to the side and smiled at him. “What happened?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck and squinted one eye. “It sounds crazy. I stepped on a turkey neck bone and twisted my derned ankle.”

  Her eyes popped open and she tried to smother her laughter, but she didn’t quite get it done. Out came a big rollicking laugh. “A turkey bone! What was a turkey bone . . . oh never mind, I’m not sure I want to know anyway.”

  He shrugged. “It was in the middle of the living room floor, that’s all I can say. I’ve got an idea that your friend Hank had something to do with it.”

  Huh? All at once I found myself out in the open and exposed, and everyone was staring at me. I, uh, whapped my tail on the floor and gave them a friendly smile that said, “I don’t know anything about this, no kidding.”

  It must have worked, because they went on to other matters. Whew! Innocent Looks had saved me again.

  Chapter Eight: We Go on Stray Dog Alert

  Miss Viola clapped her hands together. “Well! I came for some coffee.”

  “Oh yeah, but can’t you stay a while? Me and the dogs went to a lot of trouble to clean this place up. It’d be a shame for you to leave so soon. You want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?”

  “No thanks, Slim, I’d better get back down the creek.”

  He was disappointed, I could tell. So was I. Having Miss Viola on the place was a pretty special event.

  Slim limped into the kitchen and began searching for the can of coffee. It took him a while to find it, and guess where it was: in a grocery sack on the floor beside the ice box. He’d bought it two months before and had never gotten around to putting it up on a shelf.

  “You save shelf space that way,” he explained to Miss Viola.

  Well, she had fulfilled her mission. She put on her coat and hat, and Slim and I walked her to the door. Just before she walked out into the night air, she stopped.

  “Oh, I almost forgot. On the way over here, I saw a pack of dogs crossing the road.”

  Slim’s face became serious. “A pack of dogs?”

  “Yes, four of them, and I don’t think they belong to anyone on the creek. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “You bet I do. I’ve got a hundred and forty-six calves in the weaning trap, and what they don’t need is a pack of stray dogs runnin’ ’em through fences. We had a little incident with them dogs about two hours ago. Thanks, Viola, we’ll be on the lookout for ’em.”

  She said good night and left. Slim watched at the window until she was gone, then he heaved a sigh and turned back to me.

  “That’s a mighty fine lady right there. If I had any sense, I’d ask her to go dancin’ some time . . . only I can’t dance. Oh well, after seeing this house, she probably won’t speak to me again anyways. I don’t know how it gets in such a mess.” He scowled and glanced around the room. “We’d better go check them calves. I wonder where my boots ended up.”

  He went to the hall closet and opened the door. It burst open and all the things he’d stuffed in there came spilling out. He muttered something under his breath and picked through the rubble until he found two boots that matched. He pulled on the right boot and tried to pull on the left one—and we’re talking about serious grunting and tugging—but his swollen ankle wouldn’t fit.

  He kicked the boot across the floor—in my direction, by the way, and if I’d been half a second slower, it would have hit me—and said in a growling tone of voice, “Thanks a bunch, Hank. What do I do now?”

  Me? What . . . had I asked him to step on the turkey bone? Had I planted it there, just so he could . . . oh well. Part of a dog’s job is to take the blame for everything that goes wrong in the world.

  This was followed by another round of muttering and aimless wandering around the house, until he found a sheepskin house shoe that was floppy enough to hold his swollen ankle. Then he dug out his oilskin coat and hat, gloves and wild rag, and we were ready for business.

  He called us dogs and we went out into the cold night air. Slim limped along in his one-boot-one-slipper arrangement. I trotted beside him, a loyal dog to the end, and tried not to notice that he looked fairly ridiculous.

  We reached the corrals and Slim draped his arms over the top board. I sat down beside him and together we studied the Calf Situation. We could see their dark forms in the moonlight. Some were still snatching bites of hay from the feeder, while others had bedded down nearby. They knew we were there, but our presence didn’t seem to frighten them.

  We watched them for ten or fifteen minutes. I was about ready to get back to some serious Stove Guarding, when suddenly and all of a sudden, the silence of night was fractured by . . .

  What was that? Barking in the distance?

  Slim heard it too. “That ain’t a coyote’s bark. That’s the bark of a dog.” He cocked his head and listened. “Several dogs. Viola was right. Them dogs may try to come back. The question is, what do we do about it?”

  Well, that was simple enough, wasn’t it? He and Drover could camp out near the cattle. That would leave me to, well, guard the stove, so to speak. That stove sure needed guarding. You never know when someone might break into the house and try to steal the, uh, stove.

  It sounded like a good plan to me.

  Slim pulled on his chin and chewed his lip. He was a slow thinker, but at last he spoke.

  “Dogs, I know what needs to be done. I ought to drag my bedroll and shotgun down here and camp with the livestock. That’s what a real cowboy hero would do. Trouble is, I ain’t as heroic as I ought to be. I don’t like sleeping on the hard ground and I hate being cold. That stuff’s for the young bucks, which I ain’t.”

  He grinned at me and winked one eye. “Us older bucks have to use our heads. You see these gray hairs?” He pointed to several gray hairs in his beard. Yes, I saw them. “Well, each one of them gray hairs comes from me making a dumb mistake. Now, it just happens that I’ve got exactly the right number of gray hairs so that I ain’t fixing to camp out on the cold hard ground. I’m gonna break with tradition and use my brain on this deal.”

  Hmmm. Well, that would be something new, sure enough, but I wondered what he had in mind. If it involved me sleeping on the cold hard ground, I was sorry to inform him that I had other plans for the evening.

  “Let’s go to the house and think this over next to the stove. My brain works better when it’s warm. Come on, dogs.”

  Hey, that sounded more like it. Good old Slim. What a fine ranch manager he was turning out to be. Over the years, I’d had a few doubts about him, but yes, age and experience had put a sharp edge on
his mind. I agreed one hundred percent with his decision not to camp out with the cattle.

  He was a very wise man—not overly clean in his personal life, but a very wise man and an outstanding ranch manager.

  Drover and I went streaking up to the house. Slim limped along at his own pace. We reached the front door at least two minutes before he did.

  As you might expect, Drover was moaning. “Oh, I’m so cold! I’m not sure I can make it through another winter.”

  “Will you dry up? Just be glad we don’t have to sleep outside tonight.”

  “We don’t? Oh good. I thought we might have to camp out with the cows.”

  I glared at him. “They’re not cows, Drover. They’re calves. Cows are adult breeding females. Calves are the offspring of cows. If you’re going to live on a ranch, for crying out loud, you ought to know the difference between cows and calves.”

  “Okay. What’s the difference?”

  “I just told you.”

  “Yeah, but I’m so cold I can’t think straight. And my leg’s killing me.”

  “Drover, you have a morbid preoccupation with your leg.”

  “Yeah, it’s killing me.”

  “It’s not killing you. If it were killing you, you’d be dying. You’re not dying. You’re moaning and complaining.”

  “Yeah, but that’s the first step. First you moan, then you die.”

  “Drover, you’ve moaned enough in the last month to kill off a hundred dogs.”

  “Yeah, I’m just lucky to be alive.”

  “If you’re so lucky, then quit moaning about it.”

  “I can’t. I’m freezing out here.”

  Fortunately, Slim arrived on the porch just then and opened the door. That was good, because I had run out of things to say to Mister Moan and Groan. Make no mistake about it, that’s a weird little dog. Sometimes I think . . . skip it. Thinking about Drover is a bottomless pit.

  He opened the door—Slim did—and Drover and I had a little pushing and shoving match to see which one would be the first inside. Somehow Drover won, and he flopped down in my spot right in front of the stove. I had to go to Fangs and Growls to move him out. Then . . .

  Ahhhh! I did a quick circle of the spot and collapsed. It felt wonderful! No dog could wish for more than to . . . snork murk the honking murgle.

  Perhaps I dozed. I mean, the warmth coming off that stove just seemed to reach out and enfold me in its warm embrace, and before I knew it . . .

  Slim was sure making a lot of noise. What was the deal? Didn’t he know that some of us were trying to sleep? I raised up and beamed him a glare that said, “Would you please knock off the noise and quit banging around?”

  Oh. He had just dragged his mattress from the bedroom and was . . .

  “Move, pooch.”

  Move pooch? No thanks. I had won my spot in front of the stove, fair and square, and . . .

  “Okay, don’t move.”

  Would you believe that he dumped the mattress right on top of me? I was shocked, astonished, outraged, but . . . okay, okay, if he was so determined to . . . I scrambled out from under the stupid mattress and . . .

  Hmmm. Had he brought that mattress for me? Maybe so. What a nice guy. It didn’t smell so great, but what the heck, it sure beat the floor. I moved my camp onto the mattress, did a little Digging and Fluffing to get it just right, and was about to . . .

  “Get off my bed, you clam-brain.”

  Huh? Okay, maybe he’d brought the mattress for himself, and I sure didn’t have any problem with that. The floor was fine with me. I staked out another spot near the stove and flopped down.

  See, I happened to know that Slim was a sound sleeper and it had occurred to me that, once he was asleep, I could, shall we say, restake my claim to the mattress.

  Heh, heh.

  But what was he doing with a ball of string? He’d just come out of the kitchen with a ball of string. That struck me as odd. What could he pos­sibly want with . . .

  You’ll never guess what he had in mind for that string. It turned out to be a whole lot worse than anything I could have dreamed.

  Chapter Nine: Slim’s Super-Duper Burglar Alarm

  I went back to sleep. If Slim wanted to play with string at bedtime, that was okay with me. I had my own list of things to do, and at the top of the list was to launch myself into a long and beautiful night of . . . porkchops around the . . . snork.

  Oh wonderful sleep! Oh warm and loving stove! Oh what the Sam Hill was he doing?

  I tore myself from the delicious vapors of sleep and raised up. Slim was right there beside me, kneeling on the floor. He seemed to be . . . he appeared to be . . .

  Huh? Tying one end of the string around my collar?

  What was the deal? How could a dog sleep with him blundering around the house and playing with his silly string? I didn’t want to appear rude, but I really didn’t need . . .

  There was a big smile on his face. Somehow that worried me.

  “There. That’s your half of Slim’s Super-Duper Burglar Alarm. Now I’ll hook up my end.”

  Slim’s Super-Duper . . . what? Burglar Alarm? What was this guy doing now? I mean, did he have something against a good, honest night’s sleep? Hey, I’d had an exhausting day, and if he didn’t mind . . .

  Tying the other end to his BIG TOE?

  I whapped my tail on the floor and searched his face for some hint or clue that might . . .

  No. NO!

  Surely he wasn’t . . . I mean, he’d come up with some nutty ideas before, but surely he wasn’t thinking what I thought he was thinking. But just in case he was, my answer was NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT.

  No, no, and no! I refused, absolutely refused to be . . . I mean, this was crazy!

  You know what he did? He picked me up off the floor, the nice warm floor, and carried me outside—against my will, in spite of my protests—he carried me outside the wonderful warm house and set me down on the porch!

  THE PORCH, which happened to be frigid and frozen and as hard as bricks. And there, he revealed the sneaky plan that lay behind all of this follyrot.

  “Now Hankie, I’ve got a real important job for you. You’re going to be the main part of my high-tech burglar alarm. You stay out here on the porch and keep an eye out for them stray dogs. If they come back, you bark and tug on the string. That’ll send a message to my big toe, see, and I’ll come a-running with my shotgun. Is that brilliant or what?”

  I stared at him in complete shock and disbelief. That was the stupidest idea I’d ever heard in my whole life!

  And no, I would not be a part of such a harebrained, idiotic idea. I refused. I would go out on strike. I would hold my breath until I fainted. I would . . .

  He had left the door open a crack. I made a dash for the house. If I could just shoot through the crack, I would vanish into the depths of the house. He would never find me.

  “Hank.” He blocked my path with his foot. “Be a good puppy and help old Slim in his hour of greatest need. See, if you camp out in the cold, I won’t have to.”

  Right. He would get a good night’s sleep beside the stove and I would freeze my tail off. No thanks.

  “This is your big chance to be a hero instead of a dingbat.”

  Oh yeah, right. A hero with no tail because it froze off. A hero with no buns because they wasted away from all the shivering. No thanks, Charlie. If I had wanted to be a hero, I would have joined the fire department. No!

  “It’s an easy decision for you, Hank, ’cause you ain’t got a choice.”

  There, you see? That was the kind of ranch government we lived under. No choice, no freedom for dogs, no Bill of Riots.

  He went inside and shut the door behind him.

  . . . no chance to appeal an unjust decision, no chance to control our own destiny. This was tyranny! This was an ou
trage! This was . . .

  The door opened. Drover came flying out. Slim waved his fingers and said, “Nighty-night, y’all. Wake me up when we get to the good part.”

  Slam.

  I stared at Drover. He stared at me. He was shivering. So was I. He began to moan. I listened to his moaning and whining for two whole minutes. That was enough.

  “Drover, please hush.”

  “What did I do to deserve this? I was just minding my own business and being a good little dog, and he threw me out into the cold cruel world!”

  “If I have to sleep out here, so do you.”

  “But it’s not fair.”

  “Fine. It’s not fair. Life is often unfair. What are you going to do about it?”

  “Well, maybe we could sing. Do you know any songs about freezing to death on the porch?”

  I gave that some thought. “By George, you’re right, Drover. Just because life’s unfair doesn’t mean we don’t have to take it without a grain of salt. We’ll sing a protest song, how about that? I just happen to know one. It’s called ‘Freezing on the Porch.’ Let’s do it.”

  And with that, we bursted into song and pro­tested the injustice of life. Here’s how it went.

  Freezing on the Porch

  I’m so cold, I think I’m going to croak.

  My ears are froze, my breath has turned to smoke.

  My tail is like an ice cube, my feet are frozen stiff

  And I think I’ve got an icicle growing on my lip.

  Yes, we both think we’ve got icicles growing on our lips.

  It’s not fair that we’re out on the porch.

  Slim’s no friend. He’s left us in the lorch.

  We gave him our best efforts, for loyalty we strove,

  And we kept marauding crinimals from hauling off his stove.

  Yes, we kept marauding crinimals from hauling off his stove.

  I’m so mad, I’d like to throw a fit.

  But I’m so cold, I doubt that I could spit.