Spot and Smudge - Book One

by Robert Udulutch

  They sipped in silence for a while, avoiding the other gorilla in the room.

  Finally Mimi said, “And what about those wee pups?”

  Aila let out a long breath and said, “Yeah, the pups. Ben wants to continue to stay over here a few nights a week so he can spend time with you, and so you can still spend time with the pups. I told him you might want a bit of a break after this summer’s constant puppy-a-thon.”

  “Actually was me that thunk it up,” Mimi said, “I love having them around. Truthfully, I do. I miss your dad a bit, and having Ben and the dogs here has been a treat. It’s brought the noise level around here almost back to normal. But, if you can’t be bothered and are worried about the wee bairn’s homework…well we can just give it a pass.”

  “Don’t be silly, Mom,” Aila said, unimpressed with her mother’s weak martyrdom attempt, “Four months ago I would had been worried, but he did well balancing his time between both houses during the pups’ quarantine. I say we give it a try.”

  Ben had taken over Kelcy’s room in the farmhouse, the small bedroom at the end of the first floor hallway near the pantry. There wasn’t much more than a bed in there but Ben liked it. The room was close to the kitchen so he wouldn’t wake up Mimi when he was back and forth with Smudge at all hours during her recovery. After the pups were reunited all three of them slept in there so Ben could let the pups out for their late bathroom break, and so they didn’t track muddy paws upstairs.

  Ben liked spending a few days a week with Mimi, but he mostly stayed there because the pups really seemed to enjoy the farm. They loved having the run of the place, and mom and dad grumbled more about hair on the couches than Mimi. Smudge had also taken over Ben’s attempts at getting a start out of Mimi. She hid, she stalked, she plotted, and even though she was pretty creative she had about as much luck getting the grandmother to flinch as Ben had. Even so, they both enjoyed her attempts and there were lots of wags when Mimi would say, “Nice try wee girl,” before she even turned around to give Smudge a pat.

  The pups also enjoyed bolting around the open spaces and the woods, and playing with the goats and chickens. There were no neighbors or roads within sight at the farm. When they were at home his parents had asked Ben to train the pups in the back yard. The family agreed not everyone would understand his unique dogs, so best to keep the more involved tricks out of sight. There was no bother with that at the farm.

  What Ben didn’t realize was the pups preferred the farm for another kind of freedom it allowed them.

  The dogs had been the ones to subtly push Ben to stay in the small bedroom. They had also been encouraging Ben to spend as many nights at Mimi’s as possible once they discovered that freedom, and they made sure the boy was plenty tuckered out by the end of the evening.

  One night, long after Ben had gone to bed and the pups had gotten up to patrol the house like normal, they discovered they could open the cellar door. They had already figured out how to open the pantry door and help themselves to an extra treat or two. Most of the old doors in the farmhouse didn’t latch properly and a well-placed paw in the gap below could pull them open. When Smudge pushed and then gently pulled on the cellar door it just popped right open.

  The pups stopped on the top step to let their eyes adjust to the dark and then followed the stairs down to explore the basement. It covered the entire area under the house and had fieldstone walls, a low ceiling, and a cracked concrete floor. The stone walls were chinked with mossy mortar. On the wall opposite the stairs was an ancient, sealed-off coal chute next to a bulkhead door. In the center of the floor stood a newer furnace and water heater and a large black fuel-oil tank. There were a few old cans of paint and some plastic totes but otherwise the basement was empty. A single bare light bulb hung down in the center of the room.

  The pups sniffed everything and tried the bulkhead and the coal chute, but both were sealed shut. They turned their attention to the equally spaced recessed windows that ran along the top of the walls. There were eight small window wells, two on each wall. These windows were below ground level with a corrugated steel ring outside the foundation.

  Spot nodded at one of the windows to Smudge. She backed up a few steps, flexed her muscles and took a running leap. She landed deftly on top of the narrow sill and pressed herself against the ceiling joist to keep from falling.

  Spot had been right to choose this window. The steel well outside the window was hidden beneath a thick hedge of evergreen bushes at the rear of the house, and more importantly the window latch was open. After some debate over the best approach Smudge wedged herself in between the two joists next to the window and grabbed the bottom of the latch with both paws. She flexed her powerful back and shoulder muscles and the window hinge creaked a bit before swinging open. Rust and years of dirt covered her as she squeezed between the joists, walked over the sill, and moved through the open window.

  Smudge turned and nodded to her brother.

  Spot ran back up the steps and listened for a moment before he went into the kitchen and opened one of the bottom drawers. He pulled out a dish towel and returned to the basement, dropping the towel behind the furnace. He walked back up a few of the stairs, turned, and launched himself down the steps. Taking two great bounds across the floor he flew up and through the open basement window to join his sister.

  Spot and Smudge started to explore the woods surrounding Mimi’s house every night, and every morning before dawn they would return through the basement window. Smudge would shove it carefully closed and the pups would wipe off their paws with the hidden towel before hopping silently back onto Ben’s bed.

  Chapter 48

  Doug’s headache had moved from a few icy pin pricks just behind his ears to a slowly increasing pressure that squeezed his eyes from the back like a tube of toothpaste.

  He had been hunched over the laptop making calls for hours. All he really wanted to do was get high and go to bed but he was almost finished. He opened the blinds a little more, pushed his eyes back into their sockets with the palms of his hands, and carried on.

  An hour later Doug hung up his cell and hit the last few keystrokes on the laptop. He got up and stretched his aching shoulders on his way into the kitchen. As he leaned over the sink and drank another full glass of water he stared, transfixed by the shafts of sunlight streaming through the blinds in the living room. The dust cloud he had created by moving through the room was still falling in swirls and rolling through the stark columns of light.

  The blinds started to move up and down like teeth, eating the dust as they bit their way across the room towards him. They sunk into the couch and splintered the coffee table before tearing up chunks of carpet. Doug closed his eyes and shook his head as he pulled another couple of pills from his hoodie pocket. He downed them with another glass of water and drummed his fists on the kitchen counter a few times before opening one eye. The blinds were back to hanging in their motionless position behind the couch. He let out a string of coughs, and couldn’t tell if it was the pills, his phlegm, or the water that tasted funky.

  It had taken him twice as fucking long to finish Jerry’s work as it should have. Partly it was Jerry’s records being a mess, which was no surprise, but he also had to stop every few minutes to wait for the laptop screen to stop turning into a distorted face. The words in the emails would rearrange themselves to form gnashing pointed black teeth. Sometimes he could make it go away by just blinking. Other times he had to close his eyes for several minutes and dream about the huge house he’ll soon have on the knoll overlooking the bay. The one with his new, sexy wife who would be waving to him from the big white porch. That had worked to push away the day-mares until the sexy wife was suddenly holding a black puppy. A puppy who turned and sunk its silvery needle-fangs into her neck, spraying an ocean of blood down her white dress and across the white porch.

  Doug was no stranger to odd drug effects. He was pretty sure he was just getting the mix wrong. The high quality shit Dr. D was supplying m
ust be clashing with the coke and pot he was getting from Liko. He filled another glass of water, and as he went down the hallway he tried to count how many glasses he’d downed over the last few days. It must have been more than a hundred. He couldn’t remember ever drinking so much damn water, and yet he was parched all of the time.

  He went into the bedroom and kicked the bed. Jerry mumbled something not nice and Doug dumped the entire glass of water on her head.

  “What the fucking hell crap are you doing?” She screamed hoarsely at him as she fought to get away from the wet sheets.

  “Get the hell up,” Doug said, “You’re going on another run down south.”

  Jerry mumbled something and turned over. Doug grabbed her by the ankles and noticed they were almost as thick as her calves. He pulled her off the bed with a thump. He dragged her to the bathroom and heaved her into the tub. Cold water splashed over her chubby feet when he opened the tap. She curled into a ball and groaned. Doug lifted the knob for the shower. As the chilly water sprayed out he stood back and watched her flop and sputter like a fish in a hot pan.

  “Fucking shit licking ass munch fucker!” she yelled as she tried to scramble out of the tub while throwing punches and kicks at him.

  He shoved her back under the water and stepped back. As he looked down at his soaked pants legs he said, “You can get cleaned up and come into the kitchen, or I can bash your fucking head in, chop you up, and seal your carcass in one of those barrels in the kennel.”

  He turned on the bathroom light and immediately regretted doing so. He had his first real look at her in almost a month and she looked like a maggot. He was glad he couldn’t see much of her face under the mess that was her clumped hair, but her arms and legs were sickly white and lumpy, and ended it dark hands and feet. Doug’s groin crawled a bit and he wondered how he had ever put his dick into that. The creep moved up to his stomach where it tried to push what little was left in there up an out.

  “You have five minutes,” he said, and turned out the light as he left the bathroom.

  Four minutes later Jerry collapsed into one of the kitchen chairs. She was wrapped in the blanket from their bed. It had escaped most of the water Doug threw on her but it was even more stained than normal, and some of it looked like blood.

  Doug said, “You are going to make another run down south. I’ve contacted all five shelters and you’re picking up two hundred and eighty.”

  She opened one eye to a slit, coughed, and croaked, “The van won’t hold that fucking many.”

  “Aaron is going with you in another van,” Doug said, “He’s bullshitted his folks about a sleepover at a buddy’s before school starts. We need to get this shit back on track.”

  “The rescue…” she started to say but a string of coughs cut her short.

  “Fuck the rescue,” Doug said, putting two pills and a full glass of water down in front of her, “You killed that fucking thing. Were focused on the real money maker now. Aaron will be here in an hour, get fucking ready.”

  An hour later Jerry and Aaron rolled the vans out of the kennel and down the dirt road. They pulled past the house and onto the road to start their twelve-hundred mile trek to Alabama.

  Doug was taping up the broken top half of a medium-sized pet carrier.

  He had scraped together carriers from anywhere he could find them for the second van and with this cheap one broken Aaron’s van was one short. Fuck it, Doug thought, maybe one of the rescues had an extra and if not the pups could just rattle around inside the back.

  Doug walked to the back wall of the kennel, stepping around the streaked stain of purple. It had remained even after the ooze from the broken drum had been hosed off a dozen times. As he tossed the fixed cage on top of the others he tried not to think about what kind of nasty shit could stain concrete like that.

  He looked at two horribly fat dogs jammed into a cage near the stack of toxic barrels. He wiggled his fingers at them from just outside the mesh door and they hissed and snapped at him.

  Doug punched the cage door and said, “Don’t get any funny ideas about escaping. The previous fucking inmate in that cell met with an untimely end.”

  As he walked back to the kennel doors he said, “Her puppies made it, however, and those little bastards seem to be just as fucking tenacious as that bitch must have been. Well, they’re going to get what’s coming to them soon enough.”

  Doug switched off the light, and as he closed the kennel doors he cackled a raspy laugh and said, “They all are.”

  Chapter 49

  School started without incident and after a few weeks the Hogans all settled into their new schedules. Kelcy reconnected with some of her neighborhood pals and Ben even made some tentative new friends. There were plenty of older kids who drove so they almost always had a ride to and from school. Aila, Dan, and Mimi took turns rotating with the other parents to shuttle the kids around as well.

  Mimi was an instant celebrity. The kids and parents all loved her accent. The more car-savvy ones also fell in love with Papa’s wood-sided Wagoneer. The classic Jeep had been a rare self-indulgence of Papa’s. He and Dan had restored it before the kids were born. Despite their best efforts to convince Mimi and Aila it was for their future grandkids, it was pretty well established that Papa had added the custom bumpers, lift kit, and large tires for himself. Not normally one for ostentatiousness, Mimi did have to admit she loved driving it.

  Dan and Aila had agreed the kids should avoid the bus altogether when they found out the younger Cooper boys always rode it. As they made casual acquaintances with the other carpooling parents it didn’t take long for several of them to share stories of their experiences with the Cooper parents. Apparently Bert and Rebecca were generally regarded as loud-mouth idiots.

  Kelcy was being dogged by her buds to join cheerleading, and Ben was already the star of his math and science classes. The puppies quickly adjusted to the change as well. They said goodbye to each family member in the morning and greeted them enthusiastically at the end of each day. A pattern had developed with everyone receiving their own version of sendoff and welcome. When Dan went to work the pups waited on the third step of the stairs for easy head pats as he left. Aila noticed the pups alternated position daily as Dan had only one free hand and frequently missed a scratch to the farthest head on his way out the door.

  The pups then trotted up the steps to help Kelcy pick out her outfit. Aila often heard her daughter giving the pups commands. “No, Spot,” she’d say, “Not the blue bracelet, that’s weak, bring me the gold one.”

  Ben was always the last one to wake up. As Dan was on the way out one morning he said to Aila “Curious how a boy who lived on little sleep all summer is so slow to rise on a school day.”

  Aila quickly learned to put the pups to good use when Ben was really slow getting out of bed. She just handed them each a clean sock from the laundry room and they wouldn’t stop until Ben put them on. Aila smiled into her coffee cup as she heard the boy yell, and then thump on the floor of his room after having been pulled out of bed.

  On the days they drove to school the pups got to ride along for the drop-off and pick-up, and they quickly became as popular as Mimi. Aila was amazed how they could immediately find Ben and Kelcy in the sea of shifting kids. She would also hear several kids saying, “Hey Spot, hey Smudge” as the black dogs weaved their way through the crowd. When Aila saw the pups nodding back at the kids in unison she reminded Ben to make sure to tone down the pups doing tricks around his pals.

  During their days at the Hogan house they would mostly play up in Ben’s room, or keep Aila company while she worked.

  Aila had forgotten how nice it was to live in the country during the summer and leave the doors open. She got so used to it she didn’t notice until the second week of school that the pups never bothered her to go to the bathroom. She caught them by chance one morning pushing open the back screen door. She watched them trotting off into the woods only to return together a few minutes late
r and pull open the screen door carefully with a paw. Spot held the door for Smudge, who nodded to her brother as she walked past him.

  Aila asked Ben about it after school.

  Without looking up from his homework he said, “It’s okay, Mom. I talked to them about the rules before school started. They agreed to stay near the house, and not bang the screen door.” Aila realized her son had also stopped scooping up poop and Ben just as calmly explained he had asked the pups to go in the woods to do their business.

  She caught herself forgetting just how unique their little dogs were. With the move and the start of school maybe she had simply lost track, but she also realized they made it easy to forget about them. They never barked unless it was for play and made less of a mess than the rest of the family. They never worried about the pups running into the street or into the neighbor’s yard. From the time they could walk they never needed to be on a leash and always came when called.

  She corrected herself on that point. Ben and Mimi didn’t even really call them, they politely asked them to come. Her mother, who insisted on proper manners from her children and grandchildren at all times, could swear a blue-streak at Papa’s dotty old dog Wallace. Her mom was even rude to Mr. Watt when he spit up his de-wormer, but Aila never heard her raise her voice to the pups. Of course Spot and Smudge just never did the stupid stuff that most dogs, or goats, did. Not even when they were tiny puppies.

  It was occurring to Aila that with the kids in school she was going to be spending a lot of time with them. She had to grasp the fact that these little black dogs were simply different. She thought about asking Dan to put up a run in the back yard but it just didn’t seem necessary. It even seemed a little cruel as she watched the pups put away Ben’s shoes for him, and then close the front hall closet with a soft rump-check.

  With the kids in school the house was very quiet during the day and she was getting a lot more work done. Still, she liked it when the pups wandered into the den a few times a day to say hello. She also found herself spending more time on the big leather couch with her laptop than at the desk. She liked to cuddle up with one or both of them, especially as the mornings started to turn chilly. Their initial interest in watching her work on the laptop waned but when she read the news online, or spread out one of her newspapers on the coffee table they always hoped up on the couch to join her.