“Hey!” Des said. “Found it! Over here on this shelf by the—”
“Whoa!” said Stevie.
“What’s wrong?” Solange said.
“The window by the side door,” Stevie said.
“What about it?”
“It’s busted. Like … like somebody threw a rock inside.”
“Rock?” Des said. “I don’t see any rock. Maybe if …” All at once bright lights flashed on, filling the inside of the emporium with a brilliant white glare.
“Des! What are you doing?”
“Helping,” said Des. “How’re we gonna find a rock if we can’t—”
“Didn’t I tell you? No lights! People can see ’em from clear across the bayou. What if they call the cops?”
“Oh,” said Des.
The lights went out. Then came the sound of metallic things getting knocked over and rolling around on the floor. Stevie called Des a few bad names and then said, “C’mon, let’s get outta here.”
“Aw,” said Solange. “What about stopping the Gaux?”
“Some other time. Move.”
Their footsteps came our way again, then paused right beside us. A hand rose—I could just make it out in the darkness—and rested on the boat, practically right in front of our faces. Birdie stopped breathing.
“Stevie?” said Des. “What’s up?”
“Suppose it’s not just throwing a rock through the window?” Stevie said. “Suppose it’s a break-in?”
Des lowered his voice to a whisper. “And they’re still here?”
Now Stevie was whispering, too. “There’s a .45 in my dad’s desk. I’ll—”
Des whispered back, “Let’s just split.”
“Wuss,” whispered Stevie. “I’m a dead shot.”
“That’s all we need,” said Solange in a normal voice.
There was a long pause, Birdie still not breathing. Then the hand pushed off, like it was sending the boat on its way. Footsteps started up again. The front door opened and closed.
Birdie took a deep, deep breath, and I felt better about everything. The night went quiet, except for the two of us rocking back and forth in the boat. This was kind of nice.
“Bowser,” Birdie said, very softly. “Quick. Let’s go!”
Fine with me! We jumped out of the boat—Birdie lowering herself over the edge, me simply leaping off—and left the emporium the same way we’d entered, but we’d only taken a step or two when Birdie stopped. “Oh, no—I left that flip-flop.” She turned back to the window—her face very clear, the two-pointed moon now much higher and brighter—and called herself a dope, which was the first wrong thing I’d heard her say. “No time,” she said. “Run!”
We took off, Birdie running surprisingly fast for a human, the remaining flip-flop in her hand, and me loping along, trying not to get too far ahead. Running on a warm night under a two-pointed moon: Life was good! We zipped through the flower patch, along the grassy verge by the bayou, and were halfway across the bridge when a blue light shone through the trees on the other side. A flashing blue light, with a pair of headlights just below, also flashing: yes, a police cruiser, approaching the bridge.
“Oh, no!” Birdie glanced around, her eyes wild like … like a trapped animal. I myself had been a trapped animal, and more than once, so I knew. Although in truth I didn’t feel the slightest bit trapped at that moment.
“Bowser! We’ve got to jump!”
Jump off the bridge? What a great idea! One thing I was learning fast: No one knew how to have fun like Birdie. The next moment we were both in midair, the polka-dot flip-flop flying free and spinning high in the air. Then came a fall somewhat longer than I’d expected, and … SPLASH!
HAVE I ALREADY MENTIONED I’D NEVER swum in my life and didn’t even know if I could? And there I was, plunging down through bayou water that grew darker and darker and colder and colder. It sure would have been nice to have known the answer to this swimming-ability question ahead of time. Was I afraid? You bet! When I’m afraid, my heart starts pounding away and I do one of two things: attack or take off. Down in the water under the bayou bridge there was nothing to attack at the moment, so I took off. Taking off means running my fastest. I ran my fastest underwater, not really very fast on account of water being so heavy. But what do you know? Right away I was swimming! Swimming turned out to be running in the water, at least for me. In fact, I didn’t even have to run. Trotting was good enough, and I can keep up a trotting pace just about forever. I swam toward the moonlight, my head bursting through the surface and up into the night air. There’s no scaring ol’ Bowser!
Lovely night air: I took a nice deep breath, looked around, and saw Birdie, her back to me, treading water and calling, “Bowser! Bowser!” in a kind of strange whispering shout. She sounded worried about something. I was worried myself: Did Birdie know how to swim? It was my job to get her to shore, and pronto. I swam up to her and laid a paw on her shoulder.
“Gaaah!” she screamed, not a whispered scream but a real one. She whipped around, saw me, said, “Oh, Bowser, you scared me—I thought you were a ga—”
At that point, brakes squeaked above us on the bridge. A flashing blue light turned the night sky blue and then not-blue, over and over. Had to be the cruiser. One of its doors opened and I heard footsteps on the pavement. Birdie put an arm around my neck. I felt her legs kicking underwater. We glided right under the bridge just as a beam of yellow light shone down on the water, missing us by not much at all. Birdie, her wet hair plastered down on her head and her eyes wide open and scared, kept one arm around me, and reached out to a bridge support with the other.
A radio-type voice sounded from inside the cruiser. “Perkins? Where are you?” I knew that voice, the hard voice of the sheriff, no doubt about it.
A deep rumbly voice answered from right above us. “At the Lucinda Street Bridge.”
“Well, step on it,” the sheriff said over the radio.
“I’m, uh, actually stopped on the bridge at the moment, boss,” Perkins said.
“You didn’t get that battery charged?”
“I did, boss,” Perkins said. “All charged up, good to go. But the thing is, I thought, uh, I saw a coyote jumping off the bridge.”
“Perkins? Maybe this is a bad connection. Come again?”
“Those reports we’ve been getting of coyotes attacking pets, Sheriff? Just thought I’d take advantage of—”
“Coyotes don’t jump off bridges, Officer Perkins. Plus you’re on a suspicious activity call to Straker’s place. Proceed there immediately.”
“Ten-four, Sheriff.” The yellow light beam vanished.
Footsteps moved back across the pavement. The springs of the cruiser made a sound like groaning. The door closed. The cruiser sped off and the sky stopped flashing blue. Birdie looked at me. I looked at her.
“Oh, Bowser, we’re in trouble.”
We were? I didn’t see why, not when I’d turned out to be such an ace at swimming. Back to job one, which was getting Birdie safely to shore. I got my paw back on her shoulder and started pushing.
“Bowser? Are you taking care of me?” She gave me a quick pat on the top of my head. “It’s okay—I can swim.” And she started swimming, out from under the bridge and toward the side of the bayou—our side, not old man Straker’s. I swam along beside her, swimming even better now that I’d had some experience. For example, I’d learned that all I really had to keep above the surface were my eyes and nose. How easy was that? I trotted along through the warm bayou, nudging at Birdie whenever she seemed to be swerving off course. We were almost there when Birdie just about shot right up out of the water.
“Yikes—what was that? Did you feel something?”
Huh? Why did Birdie look so scared, her face all twisted in the moonlight? All I felt was the bayou, bubbling pleasantly by, although in those bubbles I did pick up an odd smell—snaky, but not snake. Froggy, but not frog. Toady, but not toad. Lizardy, but not lizard. I sniffed the air.
“Quick, Bowser, quick!” Birdie started motoring full speed toward land, full speed involving a lot of splashing and kicking, and a strange sort of dodging from side to side, like she was trying to avoid something that was after her. But it was only me, gliding along splashlessly. Nothing like a nice nighttime swim. I hadn’t really been living until now, not the full-to-the-brim living that the Birdie-and-Bowser team was all about. Were we going to jump off bridges and swim every night from now on? I’m there!
We came to the bank of the bayou, a grassy bank with a gentle slope. Birdie scrambled up, whipped around, and peered back at the water, its surface unbroken and not that interesting in my opinion, but something about it made her shiver. I moved in beside her, shook the best shake I’d ever shaken, sending water flying everywhere, including all over Birdie, but she didn’t mind, being soaked already.
“I felt a gator,” Birdie said. “I’m sure of it.”
Ah! So that was it. Too late to be scared now, even if you were the scareable type. I’d actually had a brief experience with a gator, a gator name of Smiley who was given to one of the street gangers for Christmas, an experience not quite brief enough. I growled at the bayou, just to make the point that … actually, I wasn’t sure about the point. Across the water the lights went on in Straker’s World Famous Fishing Emporium.
“Let’s go,” Birdie said. She reached into her pocket. “Lost the flashlight, Bowser.”
No problem. Were we headed for home? No flashlight necessary. I could smell the way there, a kind of path of my scent and Birdie’s scent bound together in the nicest of ways.
The last house on Gentilly Lane—our house—was still and quiet, just how we’d left it. We crossed the lawn and—what was this? Oh, no! I went closer to the big tree and yes, for sure: The mysterious marker had laid his mark on top of mine yet again. That meant I had to lift my leg one more time and—
“Bowser!” Birdie hissed. “Not now.”
Not now? It had to be now—I was way past the point of no return. So I got busy, laying my mark on top of this annoying dude’s mark, although maybe not with my usual thoroughness, on account of Birdie grabbing me by the collar and sort of dragging me toward the breezeway, my leg still raised, meaning that a wide-ranging marking of the front yard went down. Anything wrong with that? Actually kind of fun, now that I thought about it.
We stepped onto the breezeway—me on all four paws by that time—and paused, Birdie cocking an ear toward Grammy’s side of the house. She nodded in a satisfied way, like everything was cool. So that creaking sound—possibly mattress springs—followed by the slap-slap of two bare feet coming down on the floor was cool? Fine with me. Birdie took the key from the zipper pocket of her shorts, opened the door, and in we went, safely home and practically all dried off, at least in my case, although I couldn’t help noticing the drip-drip that fell from Birdie’s clothes and onto the floor. Maybe she didn’t know how to give herself a good shake. I’d have to teach her. Was now a good time? We went down the dark hall—Birdie leaving the lights off—and into our bedroom. Birdie was just starting to take off her wet clothes when I heard a key in the lock, a sound that put me on high alert.
“Bowser?”
Next came the sound of the front door opening. Birdie heard that, all right. She gasped—one of those panicky human sounds you hear from time to time—and jumped into bed, wet clothes and all, pulling the covers up over herself. Then she patted the bed in a demanding pat-pat-pat that I took to mean: Bowser! On the bed! Now! Zoom. I landed on the bed, stood over Birdie, my tail wagging full speed or even faster. Birdie pushed me this way and that. What did she want me to do? Lie down? I couldn’t think of anything else, so I lay down beside her, at the very moment that Grammy stepped into the room and flicked on the lights.
She looked at Birdie. Birdie lay on her back, under the covers, eyes closed, heart beating so loud I could hear it easily. Then Grammy looked at me. I looked at her. She wore a bone-white robe and some sort of netting in her hair, exposing her face in a way I hadn’t seen. Her face turned out to be beautiful in a strange way, although the gaze she was giving me couldn’t have been called friendly. Was she mad at me? It seemed like a possibility, and then she shook her finger at me and I was sure. But what had I done? She turned off the light and went away.
The night went quiet. Moonlight flowed through our window. Birdie opened her eyes. She got up. Were we headed outside again? I was a little tired, although I’d never admit it. Birdie took off her wet clothes, put on her pajamas, got back in bed.
“It’s wet in here,” she said in a low voice. She rolled over in my direction. Her heartbeat slowed down to normal. We went to sleep.
“Bowser looks hungry,” Birdie said. This was the next morning, over in Grammy’s kitchen, Grammy stirring boudin slices—like sausage but even better!—into eggs she was scrambling and Birdie sitting at the table, sipping her orange juice. Boudin happened to be a personal favorite of mine, not too hard to find in trash barrels behind certain restaurants back in the city. I edged closer to Grammy. She looked down at me in a way that would have made a lot of dudes think to themselves, No boudin today, buddy boy. But not this dude.
“Instructions were one bowl of kibble every evening,” Grammy said. “He’s got a few things to learn.”
“What do you mean, Grammy?”
Grammy stirred the eggs a little harder, like she was angry at them. How could you get angry at eggs, or any kind of food, for that matter? I backed away from Grammy, not so easy with the smell of boudin pulling me the other way. She turned to Birdie.
“Are you aware of what he was up to last night?” she said.
Orange juice slopped over the rim of Birdie’s glass. “Um, ah, I, uh …”
“What’s the matter?” said Grammy. “Cat got your tongue?”
What a notion, maybe the single most horrible thing I’d ever heard in my life! I got my tongue well back in my mouth, safe from danger. Perhaps you’re unaware of how sharp cats’ teeth are. Take it from me.
Birdie shook her head, reached for her paper napkin, mopped up the juice spill.
“Telling me you slept through the entire episode?” Grammy said.
“What—what episode, Grammy?”
Grammy took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Then she slid the scrambled eggs—scrambled with boudin slices, in case I haven’t emphasized that enough—on a plate and set it in front of Birdie.
“Thank you,” said Birdie, not looking at Grammy.
But Grammy was looking down at her. “You really have no idea what I’m talking about?”
Birdie shook her head, just the tiniest movement, still not meeting Grammy’s gaze. A gaze that hardened for a moment, before Grammy went back to the stove. She served herself some eggs and sat at the other side of the table.
“Something the matter with my eggs?” she said.
“No, Grammy.”
“Then why aren’t you eating them?”
Birdie dug her fork into the eggs, ate a very small piece. “It’s good, Grammy.”
“You feeling all right?” Grammy said. “You don’t look good.”
“I don’t?”
“No way you could have slept soundly, not with this customer around. I’m amazed he didn’t wake you. He sure as heck woke me.”
“I’m … I’m sorry.”
“Nothing for you to be sorry about, child. I heard him moving around and came over to find that your new friend had been pretty active in the night.”
“Uh, active?”
“Up to no good, that’s for sure. He’d tracked water all over the place.”
“Water?”
“Well, of course that wasn’t my first thought. But it did indeed turn out to be water. Must have been playing in the toilet—that was all I could come up with.”
Playing in the toilet? What a brilliant idea! Why had it never occurred to me? I could hardly wait.
“I’ll, um, make sure he stays in the bedroom at night,” B
irdie said.
“You do that,” Grammy said. She rose. “Mind opening the store for me this morning? I’ll be in by nine thirty.”
“Sure, Grammy. Where are you going?”
“An appointment.”
“What kind of appointment?”
“The aggravating kind,” Grammy said. “Here’s the key.”
Birdie put the key in her pocket. “What time’s Snoozy supposed to be in?”
“Snoozy? Didn’t I fire his butt?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Meant to,” Grammy said. “If he shows up before me, you do it.”
“You want me to fire Snoozy?”
“Be a good learning experience,” Grammy said. “But maybe not.” She cleared her place and left the room.
Birdie put down her fork, gazed at the wall for a while, then turned to me. “I hate lying to Grammy,” she said.
What was that about? I didn’t know. Birdie started cleaning up. Cleaning up involved scraping the remains of breakfast off the plates and into the trash under the sink. Grammy had pretty much polished off her scrambled eggs, but Birdie had hardly touched hers. You have to be quick at moments like that, and I can be as quick as they come. Boudin turned out to be everything I remembered and more. The day was off to a great start. I gazed out the window, as any innocent dude might do at such a moment. A shiny black pickup was cruising down the street. It had tinted windows but one was cracked open a bit, the tip of a red-and-white tail poking out.
“First thing we do,” Birdie said, unlocking the door and letting us into Gaux Family Fish and Bait, “is open all the windows and get some air in here. What we hardly ever do is turn on the AC.” Birdie went around the store, opening windows. Morning air flowed in, moist, slightly cool, full of flower smells and also rot—no getting away from rot in this part of the world. And who would want to? A bit of rot in the air makes life more interesting. “AC costs money, Bowser. We can get along without it.”
Fine with me. And then came something even finer, namely a sudden upsurge of boudin in my stomach, an upsurge that had me enjoying the taste of it all over again! I was one of the luckiest dudes around: a new development in my life, and very nice.
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