The Return of the Charlie Monsters

by John R. Erickson

  “Right. I think it would, Pete.” I paced over to him. “We’ll go back to the turkey business, see, but this time without tricks and counter-tricks. Everything’s up front and on the table. All you have to do is make it clear what’s really and truly in your heart: Would you rather that I chased the turkeys or didn’t chase them?”

  He stared at me with his weird cattish eyes. “And you’re saying that I have to tell the truth?”

  “That’s correct. You have to be up-front and honest. Otherwise…well, it would be just another slimy trick.”

  He made a sputtering sound, probably a cough. “Very well, Hankie, let’s give it a try. Now, let’s see if I’ve got it straight. I’ll pick the outcome that I really and truly want, and you’ll do the opposite?”

  “Exactly. I’ll win, you’ll lose, and the game stays fresh and exciting.”

  “Hankie, this is the work of a genius.”

  “Thanks, pal. I hate to keep saying this, but there’s a reason why they made me Head of Ranch Security. Okay, choose your outcome.”

  He rolled his eyes up to the sky. “Very well, Hankie. In my deepest, most secret heart of hearts, I hope you DON’T chase the turkeys.”

  “You’re being sincere about this?”

  “Oh yes! It would upset me terribly if you happened to catch one.”

  I reached out a paw and gave the little guy a pat on the back. “Okay, Pete, it’s a new day and a new game. I think this is going to work.”

  “Oh, I hope so, Hankie. I’ll kee-hee keep an open mind.”

  “Let the game begin. Watch this.”

  Can you believe the little dummy fell for this? I had tricked him into exposing his Invisible Trick, see, and now all I had to do was…it was a little confusing, to be honest, but I was on track to deliver the little sneak the most shattering defeat of his life.

  Have you ever seen a top-of-the-line, blue ribbon cowdog run through a bunch of turkeys? Wow. I crammed the throttle all the way up to Turbo Six, and you talk about fireworks and feathers! I plowed ‘em.

  “Hank, leave the turkeys alone!”

  I chased and barked, barked and chased, plowed through the middle of them, did a one-eighty, and made another pass.

  “Get away from my turkeys, you hound!”

  Birds hopped and flew in all directions, and one of them happened to be slow and careless, heh heh, so I put a bite on his tail section.

  “Hank, if I ever get my hands on you…”

  I snagged him and, well, he began thrashing my nose with his wings. Ouch. It hurt like crazy but I held on for dear life, and happened to turn my head to the north and saw…

  Huh?

  Sally May?

  Chapter Five: Oops

  WHERE DID SHE COME FROM?

  She hadn’t been anywhere in sight when we’d started this deal, but she was in sight now, and storming straight towards me.

  Have we mentioned that when she’s in a bad mood, you can see it in her manner of walking? It’s true. She has what we call The Walk of Anger. She leans forward at the waist, swings her arms, and sets her feet down hard on every step. You’d almost describe it as “stomping,” only ladies don’t stomp, right? Oh, and the expression on her face was a little scary.

  That’s what I was seeing, and to be honest, it made me uneasy. I released the turkey from the grip of my grapple, and hurried over to the cat.

  “Pete, we’ve got a problem. Do you see who’s coming this way?” He nodded. “She looks mad, doesn’t she?” He nodded. “I think I’m in trouble.” He nodded. “This wasn’t part of our plan. I never thought…”

  There was something about the way he looked at me in that moment. It wasn’t much, just a tiny curl of the mouth and the cut of his eyes, but it caused the rafters to start falling in the attic of my mind. “Wait a second!”

  He fluttered his eyelids and whispered, “Congratulations, you won. Well, I’d better be going. You and Sally May have things to discuss.”

  And with that, the little sneak…the little liar…the little cheater went scampering back to the yard, leaving me with...oh brother.

  Do you see the meaning of this? I hope you don’t. It’s so embarrassing, I don’t want to talk about it, but there’s no way we can avoid it. Sally May arrived on the scene, and boy, was she mad.

  I knew what was coming and began preparing for the storm, flipping switches in the control room of my mind. I activated the Emergency Remorse Program which gave us Sad Eyes, Dead Tail, and Ears With No Hope. Are you familiar with ERP? The software actually changes the shape of the body, don’t you see, and bends the spinal region into the shape of an arc, with the head hanging down in front and the tail dragging the ground on the back side.

  It’s a dandy program and we save it back for extreme emergencies. This appeared to be one of those. I mean, the woman was seriously angry.

  I had just activated ERP when she arrived. She towered over me and parked her hands on her hips, always a bad sign. Her eyes blazed with unholy light, her nostrils were flared, and her lips were forming words I couldn’t hear.

  At last she spoke. “How many times do I have to tell you? DON’T CHASE MY TURKEYS!”

  Yes, but…

  “I want them to come up around the house.”

  Right, but Pete…

  “I want them to feel welcome. What’s wrong with you?”

  Well, I…

  “You are so dumb!”

  Ouch.

  Hey, her rotten little cat…it was complicated, and there was no way I could explain it with looks and wags. I could only hope that the Remorse Program would do its job and get me out of this mess.

  She shook her head, muttered, stared off into the distance, shifted her weight from one leg to the other, and brushed a wisp of hair away from her forehead. The seconds crept by and slowly the ice in her face began to melt. When she spoke again, she seemed close to tears.

  “I’m turning into a wicked witch. I hate being this way. I don’t want to spend my whole life yelling at the dogs, but Hank…” She sat down in the grass beside me and looked into my eyes. “Look, if you will just do as you’re told, we can get along. I don’t expect you to be a saint, but I have rules. You’re a dog and you have to follow my rules.”

  I didn’t know where this was going, but we appeared to be making progress. I went to Cautious Taps on the tail section.

  She continued. “The rules are simple. Don’t chase my turkeys. Don’t scatter my chickens. Stay out of the sewer. Don’t bark all night. Stay out of my yard. Don’t dig in the garden. Stop tormenting my cat. Does any of that seem unreasonable?”

  Uh…well, I’d been with her right up to the business about “tormenting” her cat, and that one...she had no idea! He was Mister Kitty Perfect while she was around, but the minute she went into the house…she just didn’t know.

  I increased the speed and sincerity of my wags and beamed her a message: “Sally May, we have a few differences of opinion, but I think we can work this out. No kidding. There’s nothing I want more than to patch up our relationship.”

  She looked up at the sky. “We have so much to be thankful for—our family, our home, good health, this ranch. We’re blessed beyond measure. Nobody on this place should ever spend a single day being unhappy, and I should never be…” her voice trembled, “…screaming at the dogs.”

  Great point.

  She heaved a sigh and fixed her gaze on me. “Come here, you poor, disobedient, misunderstood bonehead of a dog.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by that, but she’d said it in a gentle voice, so I dared to move a few steps closer. She extended her hand.

  “Oh, I’m not going to bite your head off. Come here and I’ll pet you, but don’t you dare lick me on the face.”

  Oops, that’s exactly what I’d planned to do, so it was a good thing she’d
given me the heads-up. With Sally May, we have to suppress Licks on the Face and Licks on the Ankles.

  I moved another step closer and she swept me into her arms. I was amazed. She pulled me into a hug, and we’re talking about a firm embrace with her cheek pressing against the top of my head.

  “Oh, you smell awful!”

  It was one of the tenderest moments we’d ever experienced.

  “I’m sorry I lost my temper and screeched and turned into an old hag. But Hank, please, stop chasing my turkeys, okay?”

  Was this touching or what? This was the moment we’d been hoping for and working towards, the event that would turn our relationship around. Yes, we could do it! I would take a pledge never to chase the turkeys again…unless her scheming little cat…no, I couldn’t go on blaming the stupid cat for all my problems.

  This was MY LIFE, by George, and from this day forward…

  I don’t know how this happened. Actually, I do know how it happened, and it was an incredible piece of bad luck. See, just as we had reached this precious moment in our relationship, a fly landed on my right ear and began drilling. I went to Ear Flicks, hoping to dislodge the little heathen, but he kept drilling. It hurt, and we’re talking about a serious, big-time hurt.

  So what’s a dog supposed to do? I jerked my head upwards with a mighty heave and…I’m not sure I can go on with this, I mean, it was dreadful.

  Could we talk about something else? I just can’t bring myself…sigh. We might as well get it over with.

  Okay, I gave my head a mighty upward jerk, don’t you see, and…well, the top of my head hit her on the face. Hard. Below the left eye.

  Oops.

  For a long moment, we were enveloped in a deadly, choking silence. Her hand moved to her eye and felt around.

  At last she spoke. “If you gave me a black eye…” She scrambled to her feet, bent at the waist, and brought her face right down to mine. Hmm. The skin below her eye seemed to be turning blue. “I have to teach Vacation Bible School this morning!”

  She whirled around and headed back to the house in a rapid walk. She hadn’t gone more than, oh, fifty steps, when she stopped and looked back at me. “Idiot! Leave my turkeys alone!” She stormed away and didn’t look back, but I heard what she said. “I hope you’re happy!”

  Well, I wasn’t happy. I felt terrible. I mean, you talk about lousy luck! We’d been so close to patching things up. We’d hugged and bonded and everything. She’d apologized for screeching at me and saying hateful things, and now she was back to screeching and saying hateful things. It appeared that our relationship had fallen back into ruins.

  And the saddest part was that it had all been caused by one measly fly—one measly fly and a certain slithery, slimy, little creep of a cat. Could I blame Pete for a fly that had drilled a hole in my ear and caused my head to leap up and collide with Sally May’s cheek? Of course I could! If he hadn’t actually caused it, he wished that he had caused it, and that was close enough.

  You know, dogs bring a very important perspective on world history. All those wars and famines and riots we hear about? Dig deep and guess what you’ll find at the bottom of it. A CAT. Cats have caused 97% of all the misery and turmoil in the…

  I couldn’t figure out how the little snot had lured me into chasing the turkeys. I did not understand it. It left me speechless. See, I’d known that Pete and I were engaged in a deadly game of chess. I’d been alert to his tricks, on my guard, watching his every move and gesture. And still, I got rolled!

  You know, it takes a great deal of courage to defend the position that cats are stupid. When they keep winning, it really messes up the argument, but I will continue to…phooey. He makes me sick.

  The point to take home from all this is that, in certain mysterious ways, Pete had injured Sally May’s face, and that’s all we need to know. I don’t want to talk about it any more.

  Which brings us to another dreary subject: Drover. He would get a fair and balanced trial, but we already knew the outcome. He needed a jailhouse, is what he needed, and I was just the dog to give it to him.

  I took an indirect route to the machine shed. I had no reason to suppose that my presence near the house and yard would cause eruptions of joy, shall we say, so I made a wide loop out into the horse pasture and came in from the west. I was walking along, preparing myself for the upcoming trial, when, suddenly, I found myself standing nose to nose with a cow—a red cow with big horns and an orange tag in her left ear, bearing the number 35.

  Those details will become very important later on, but somehow they didn’t register in my memory banks. I was busy, on my way to court, and in no mood to deal with cattle issues, so I gave her a bark. “Out of the way, you old bat!”

  That might have been the wrong approach. She dropped her head, snorted like a buffalo, pawed the ground, and came a-hooking. I won’t go into all the details, but it was a close call and a near-miss. I managed to escape, but it was a little tense there for a while.

  Then I resumed my march to the court house…and suddenly it hit me like a goose falling out of the sky: red cow, horns, tag #35. That was the Phantom Cow! I had just come face to face with…hang on, we need to stop right here and pull up her file.

  See, I’d had some dealings with this cow, and she wasn’t normal. Normal cows are herd animals. They stay with the bunch. The Phantom Cow stayed off by herself and lived a solitary life, I mean like a hermit. During the day, she hid out in the brush along the creek or stayed up in the canyons north of headquarters, and came out at night to graze. That is normal behavior for a deer. It’s not normal for a cow.

  For months at a time, nobody saw her and we never knew where she might turn up. A barbed wire fence meant nothing to her and she went wherever she wanted. She didn’t even come in to feed in the wintertime, which tells you just how weird she was, because cattle are gluttons in the wintertime. Show them a sack of free food and they’ll run over you to steal a bite.

  The Phantom Cow dined alone, lived alone, hated people and dogs, and stay away from civilization…yet I had just caught her hanging around ranch headquarters. What was the deal? It was a dark, disturbing mystery that eventually led me into…

  We don’t have time to go into it right now. Don’t forget, I was on my way to Drover’s court martial, but keep the Phantom Cow in mind. She will return like a bad dream, and when she does, you will be scared into next week. Honest.

  Chapter Six: Drover’s Court Martial

  Where were we? Oh yes, Drover’s court martial.

  I crept up to the big sliding doors on the front of the machine shed and was about to shout the order for him to come out with his paws in the air, when I thought I heard a sound coming from inside. I cocked my ears and listened. Yes, it was a sound, all right, and unless I was badly mistaken, somebody was in there…singing?

  Well, this promised to send the case in an entirely different direction. Drover wasn’t exactly famous for his singing, but who else could it be? My mind flashed over a list of possible suspects: Eddy the Rac, the coyote brotherhood, Wallace and Junior? Nothing matched up, so I crept through the crack between the sliding doors, cranked up Earatory Scanners, and monitored the situation.

  Here’s what I heard. You won’t believe this. Roll tape.

  Joe Fred, The Grasshopper

  The grasshopper said,

  “They call me Joe Fred.

  If you bring me some breakfast, I’ll get out of bed.”

  Then Joe Freddie hopped

  And said he could not

  Hope to hop farther before he got stopped.

  Sing hickory dickery dockery doe.

  I’ll tie a red ribbon around your big toe.

  Sing hickory snickory snockery snook.

  Joe went back to bed and opened a book.

  The grasshopper said

  As he laid in his bed,
r />   “Reading is fun but I need to be fed.”

  He murmured a sigh,

  “Please bring me some pie.

  Without it, I fear that I surely will die.”

  Sing hickory dickery dockery doze.

  I’ll tie a red ribbon around your big nose.

  Sing hickory slickory slockery silk.

  He washed down the pie with a pitcher of milk.

  He ate like a pig,

  His tummy was big,

  He fell out of bed and sat on a twig.

  He turned his head round

  And heard a big sound.

  The twig broke in half and he fell to the ground.

  Sing hickory dickery dockery deer.

  I’ll tie a red ribbon around your left ear.

  Sing hickory slickory slockery sled.

  Joe Fred was exhausted and went back to bed.

  And now I will quit, ‘cause that’s all of the song.

  Oh brother. What a piece of musical junk! By now, you’ve probably figured out who was responsible for it. Drover, who else?

  I’d heard enough. “All right, Drover, you can come out now. We’ve put the entire building under lockdown.”

  There was a moment of silence, then I heard his voice coming from the backest, farrest, darkest corner. “How’d you know I was in here?”

  “I heard you singing.”

  “Oh drat, I didn’t think about that. Did you like my song?”

  “Come out and we’ll discuss it.”

  “Oh, I’d rather stay here.”

  “Out! Now!”

  He took his sweet time, but finally he emerged from the shadows—walking at the speed of a turtle, gazing around, and wearing his patented silly grin. “Oh, hi. Here I am.”

  “Congratulations. I won’t bother to read you your rights.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You don’t have any.”