Bow Wow

by Spencer Quinn

  “Don’t hear it myself,” the sheriff said.

  “Me neither,” said Grammy. “Do you, Birdie?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “And even if he did say it,” the sheriff added, “I’m not seeing how it changes anything. Snoozy’s a grown man behaving like some of our grown men behave in these parts. So let’s just all relax.”

  “Agreed,” said Grammy.

  Birdie didn’t answer. Maybe she would have, but then came a knock on the door. Birdie and I went to answer it.

  A woman in a brown uniform stood outside, holding a big bouquet of flowers, tied with a ribbon. I heard the sheriff say, “I thought Birdie’s mama was away.”

  “On a rig off Brazil,” Grammy said.

  Birdie read the card and brought the flowers inside. “They’re for you, Grammy.”

  Grammy took the flowers, glanced at the card. The color of her face changed. I wouldn’t call it blushing, exactly, but something close to it.

  A hair-gelled dude in a red convertible was waiting for us at Gaux Family Fish and Bait when we got there to open up. Hair gel’s something I can smell from a long way off. Humans add so many scents to their natural selves, for reasons I can’t explain. Something I would never dream of doing myself, of course. The dude sprang out of the red convertible with a big smile on his face and strode over to us, a handsome dude in two-toned shoes of lovely soft leather, the nicest leather I’d ever seen. My mouth wanted very badly to get to know that two-toned leather.

  “Hi, there,” he said. “Mrs. Gaux, I believe? And this must be Birdie. I’m Roone K. Knight, program manager at WSBY, Voice of Bayou Country. Very pleased to make your personal acquaintance. I was wondering if—” Roone K. Knight stopped and looked down at his feet—where I happened to be, somewhat to my own surprise. “Heh, heh,” said Roone. “This your pooch?”

  “Yes,” said Birdie.

  “Very friendly,” Roone said. “Seems to be licking my shoes.”

  Hey! He was right about that! Quick on the uptake and sporting quality footwear: Roone and I were going to get along great. Even the shoelaces—

  “Bowser!”

  What was that? Birdie calling me? Maybe not. Maybe I was just hearing things. That can happen to the best of—

  “Bowser!!”

  Yes, Birdie calling me for sure. Not the most convenient time, but when Birdie calls, I come. That’s basic.

  “Heh, heh,” said Roone again. “Quite the character.”

  “One way of putting it,” Grammy said. “What can we do for you, Mr. Knight? If this is about us advertising on your station, I can tell you off the top we don’t do any advertising, period.”

  “No, no, nothing to do with that,” Roone said. “Although our ad department is running a very nice promotion now until New Year’s. But this visit is about Birdie.”

  “Birdie?” Grammy said. “I don’t understand you.”

  “Well,” said Roone, “you may or may not know about our song contest, featuring a five-thousand-dollar prize and a trip to meet a genuine Music City producer up in Nashville.”

  “I do not.”

  “Then maybe you don’t know that Birdie sent in a song.”

  “I did not.” Grammy turned to Birdie. When she turns like that, slow and deliberate, it’s a kind of heads-up for trouble on the way, but not this time. Grammy’s face softened and she said, “How come I didn’t get to hear it? I like music!”

  “I don’t even have a copy, Grammy. Junior sent it in. The whole thing was his idea, and Nola pretty much wrote it. I just did a little bit of the singing.”

  “Modesty,” Roone said. “A fine quality in a performer, and of course very marketable, goes without saying. But the fact is—well, before we get to that, Mrs. Gaux, I can actually play the song for you.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Better yet, I can play it on the sound system in my car.” We walked over to the red convertible, Roone leaned in, did this and that with buttons and switches, and then came the music, specifically those strange notes Nola had played on the guitar, not particularly loud but on Roone’s sound system so rich and full, like mighty waves in the air.

  “Wow!” Birdie said.

  “Not state-of-the-art,” Roone said. “But close.”

  The singing started up.

  “Are you real, Mr. Nice Guy?

  Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. Nice Guy,

  Or are you a bad, bad dream?

  Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. Nice Guy.”

  We listened until the end. Roone shut off the player.

  “It’s about the shark?” Grammy said.

  Birdie nodded.

  “Mr. Nice Guy’s a shark?” Roone said. “Like in more ways than one?”

  “Huh?” said Birdie.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Roone said. “What did you think, Mrs. Gaux?”

  “I like it,” Grammy said. “A lot.”

  “Really, Grammy?”

  “I’m with you, Mrs. Gaux,” Roone said. “It’s a nice song. But that’s not why I’m here.”

  “No?”

  “No,” Roone said. “Putting the song itself aside for a moment, what did you think of the singing?”

  “It was good,” Grammy said. “The way their voices went together.”

  “Uh-huh,” Roone said. “Sure thing. But did any voice stick out from the others?”

  “I don’t like to say, being no expert. And also a blood relative.”

  “I respect that. And I’m not really an expert myself, although I did spend ten years managing bands out in LA. But an old Nashville buddy of mine is a genuine, gold-plated, top-ten-hit producer. I played him this little ditty and, long story short, he wants to meet Birdie.”

  Then all eyes were on Birdie. No surprise there. Who wouldn’t want to watch Birdie? I do it pretty much all the time. She looked up at Roone. “This friend of yours—he wants to meet me and Nola and Junior?”

  “Just you.”

  “Not the others?”

  Roone shook his head.

  “But it was Junior’s idea. And Nola wrote almost the whole thing. I just sang a little.”

  “Lovely demeanor,” Roone said. “Were you aware you’ve got perfect pitch, Birdie?”

  “I don’t even know what that is.”

  Roone laughed. “Marketable and in spades. Forget about perfect pitch. There’s an unusual quality to your voice. Big—amazingly big, now that I see you in person—and honeyed at the same time. That’s according to my buddy. So—any questions?”

  “She’s eleven years old,” Grammy said.

  “Going on twelve,” said Birdie.

  “Young singers aren’t unknown in the music business, especially on the Nashville end,” Roone said. “But all we’re talking here is an introductory meeting—plus a trip to Nashville for you and your grammy with all the trimmings, on my buddy’s company.”

  “Nashville,” Birdie said.

  “Correct,” said Roone.

  “Does this mean we’re going to win the contest?”

  “The contest?”

  “Your contest—with our song about Mr. Nice Guy.”

  “Oh, that,” said Roone. “The winner hasn’t been decided, but I can tell you we’re down to three finalists and your song didn’t make the cut.” His eyes narrowed. “Is it the five K you’re thinking about?”

  “K?”

  “The five grand. The prize. Because if my buddy’s right and if things work out—no guarantees in this business—then five grand’s going to be like chicken feed to you.” Roone glanced at Grammy. “You and your family,” he added.

  Chicken feed? The first thing I’d understood in this whole conversation. I’ve tasted chicken feed. Not my favorite, but you can go way lower on the food chain, down to cigar butts, for example. So if Roone was promising chicken feed, it could have been worse. That was my takeaway.

  Meanwhile, all eyes were back on Birdie. She was biting her lip and gazing down at her feet. Birdie was wearing sn
eaks today, nice blue sneaks with silver stars on them. The laces were silver, too, a sparkling silver that looked very pretty, although the laces on one shoe seemed kind of … chewed up? How would something like that happen?

  “Could we—could Birdie have some time to think about this?” Grammy said.

  “Sure thing,” said Roone. “This is one of those cases where time is on our side. Not indefinitely—need to be realistic.” He handed each of them a card. “My contact info. Get in touch anytime.”

  Roone jumped into his red convertible and zoomed off.

  “What should I do?” Birdie said.

  “What do you want to do?” said Grammy.

  “I’m not sure. I don’t—I don’t even know how to … to …”

  “To start thinking about this?”

  Birdie nodded.

  “Well,” said Grammy, “suppose you’d made this record or whatever it is on your own.”

  “Without Nola and Junior?”

  “Exactly. Then what would you say to this Roone character?”

  Birdie closed her eyes. I could feel her thinking very hard, maybe harder than she’d ever thought. Was that how come she closed her eyes? I tried closing my own eyes. No thoughts came.

  Her eyes opened. “I’d say yes.”

  “Well then,” said Grammy.

  “But I didn’t do the song on my own.”

  “Right. But at least now you know what you’d want otherwise. Best thing now is to sleep on it.”

  Sleep? Now? It was still early morning. In fact, I could taste a few breakfast crumbs in my mouth, a pleasant discovery. But I didn’t feel at all sleepy and Birdie looked pretty wide awake herself.

  Birdie and I ended up going for a long walk instead. From time to time she’d say, “I just don’t …” or “Should I tell Nola and Junior, or only Nola …” or “If I feel so bad about this, how can it be the right …” or other stuff like that. All I knew was that Birdie was unhappy. I tried to do something about that, namely by bringing her little gifts, like a nice rock, a fast-food wrapper, and even a dead bird I came upon under a bush in a scrubby patch at the edge of town.

  “Oh, Bowser, put that down.”

  I laid the bird at her feet, expecting her to pick it up, admire it, possibly put it in her pocket. But she did none of those things. Instead, she looked around in a puzzled way, as though she didn’t know where she was.

  “Hey,” she said. “There’s Snoozy’s place.”

  We went up to Snoozy’s double-wide. Birdie knocked on the door.

  “Snoozy? Snoozy? Are you there?”

  No answer.

  “What if he came back and he’s sleeping so deep he can’t hear me?” Birdie raised her voice. “Snoozy! Snoozy!”

  No answer. Then a phone rang inside the double-wide. After a bunch of rings, I heard Snoozy’s voice. “Hello, hello, hello. This is the Snooze. Wait for the beep.” There was some silence, followed by a click. So Snoozy was inside after all?

  “I wonder,” Birdie said. “I wonder about that message machine.”

  I waited to find out what sort of wondering she was doing, but Birdie didn’t explain. Instead, she went over to Snoozy’s pipe-smoking lawn gnome and took the key from the bowl of his pipe. Then she returned to the door, stuck the key in the lock, and turned it. Were we up to something new and fun? What a great idea! Birdie, the one and only.

  WE ENTERED SNOOZY’S PLACE, STEP-ping directly into the kitchen. It was clean and tidy in Snoozy’s kitchen, with no dishes in the sink and the pots and pans hanging neatly on the wall. Also on the wall hung lots of fish photos—fish leaping, swimming, fighting on the ends of fishing lines.

  “Snoozy?” Birdie said. “Are you here?”

  I didn’t think so. There was a hint of Mr. Manly smell in the air, but not recent. We walked down a narrow hall, looked into a living room with barely enough space for a huge TV and a huge La-Z-Boy recliner, the most comfortable-looking chair I’d ever seen.

  “Bowser? What are you doing?”

  No time to try out the La-Z-Boy now, not properly. I trotted after Birdie. She was opening a door on the other side of the hall. We looked into Snoozy’s bedroom. The bed, piled with many pillows, was made up. On the desk lay a blue notebook, the kind Birdie sometimes brings home from school. Birdie picked it up and read the writing on the cover.

  “‘Secrets of Fishing, by Snoozy LaChance.’” She opened the notebook. “‘Think like a fish. End of story.’” She turned the pages. “The rest is empty, Bowser. What does it mean?”

  I had no idea. I was busy trying to think like a fish. No thoughts came at all. Was that the point? Wow! Snoozy turned out to be brilliant.

  We went back to the kitchen. A phone sat on the counter. It had a small round screen on it, a screen that was flashing red. Birdie gave it a close look. “Ninety-seven new messages.” She pressed a button. Then came a little bing and a woman said, “A fun Thanksgiving yesterday. Sorry you slept through the actual dinner, but everybody loved your crab cakes.” Bing.

  “Thanksgiving?” Birdie said. “But Thanksgiving’s next month. He hasn’t checked his messages in almost a year?”

  We listened to more messages about this and that, lots of them asking how come Snoozy didn’t return calls. “Why do I bother leaving messages?” was one. And “Wake up, moron!” was another.

  “Let’s just check the latest ones,” Birdie said. She pressed the buttons.

  Bing. A man with a very deep voice spoke. “Snooze. It’s me. Heard about this bounty? Got a proposition for you. Meet me on the boat.”

  Bing.

  “Hey, Snoozy LaChance? Name’s Deke Waylon, down in Baie LaRouche. Run a boat called Dixie Flyer. Maybe you seen it around. Interested in making some legit green? Gimme a call.”

  Bing.

  “Okay, Snooze, you win—fifty-fifty.” It was the deep-voiced man again, the sound he made so rumbly it seemed to vibrate the walls. “I’ll swing by tomorrow. Be ready—for once in your life.”

  Bing.

  Nothing but a faint hum.

  “That hum must be the call that came when we got here,” Birdie said. “No message. But at least we have some clues. The next step is to deduce.”

  Deduce? Had I heard about that recently? Possibly and possibly not, like some other things in life. My guess? Deducing was not easy. I got no further than that.

  Birdie opened the fridge. Did deducing have something to do with food? How interesting! We gazed into Snoozy’s fridge, saw a box of doughnuts and a lemon. “There are two boat captains in this story, Bowser—two guys after the bounty. Deke Waylon was second. This other guy, with the deep voice, got to Snoozy first. And he’s someone Snoozy knows. That’s what I deduce.”

  Wow! Birdie had deduced all that just from one lemon and a box of doughnuts? Imagine if the fridge had been full!

  She closed the fridge. “Is Snoozy all right? Or was there something fishy about that call of his?”

  Call of Snoozy’s?

  “You know—on the sheriff’s non-emergency line, when he said not to worry about him.”

  Oh, yeah! That one. As for the fishy part, anything involving Snoozy was fishy—let’s not forget the fish tattoos on his arms, plus Mr. Nice Guy, or at least part of Mr. Nice Guy, on his chest.

  “I think there was something fishy. But even if there wasn’t, I have to know for sure. I hate not knowing.”

  Not knowing had never bothered me before, but if Birdie said not knowing was bothersome, then that was that. I got ready to start knowing things, and fast.

  We went outside. Birdie made sure the door was locked. Then she put the key back in the gnome’s pipe bowl and we headed for home. I had a brief moment to lift my leg within splashing distance of the gnome, satisfying for me but perhaps not worth mentioning.

  Back at 19 Gentilly Lane, we’d barely gotten inside before the computer made a little ping. Birdie went to it, glanced at something blinking in one corner, tapped at the keys—and there on the screen was Mama�
�s face. She called once a week or so, meaning once a week or so must have come around again.

  “Hi, Mama!” Birdie said.

  “Hi, sweetheart.”

  Mama looked tired, with dark circles under her eyes and a line or two on her forehead I didn’t remember seeing before. In the background I could hear the rumble of some big machine at work.

  “How are you?” Mama said.

  “Good, Mama—and you?”

  “Weather’s been stormy but other than that no complaints.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that. This rig can take practically anything nature dishes out. But we’ve got some new crew members, so it’s a bit of a learning curve for them.”

  “Meaning they get seasick?”

  Mama laughed. “Constantly.” Then her expression changed. “I had an email from Grammy.”

  “About Snoozy?”

  “No. Why would you think that?”

  Birdie started in on a whole long explanation about Snoozy. I got lost pretty much from the get-go and just watched the changing expressions on Mama’s face.

  “Well,” Mama said at last, “I think Grammy and the sheriff are probably right—it’s just Snoozy being Snoozy. But this old boyfriend of Grammy’s is interesting. I’ve never heard of him.”

  “I don’t know if he was really a boyfriend,” Birdie said, “but he sent her flowers yesterday.”

  “What was her reaction?”

  “I think she kind of blushed, Mama.”

  Mama smiled. “That’s nice,” she said. Then she cleared her throat and the smile faded. “The email was actually about this song contest.”

  “Oh.”

  “Grammy says you have a tough decision to make.”

  “What should I do, Mama?”

  “No one can tell you that,” Mama said. “You have to do what feels right.”

  “What feels right,” Birdie said, “is if this had never happened.”

  Mama laughed. “That’s called turning back the clock. When you figure out how it’s done, let me know.”

  Birdie looked away from the screen, eyes on nothing.