Theotis lay at his master’s feet half-drunk from lapping up spilled piña coladas. There was an inordinate amount of drool oozing off the flaccid black lips of his lower jaw. He was deep in contemplation of Balmeister’s right shoe. It was a tan leather wingtip with many miles on it, just ripe for chewing. Theotis really, really wanted to chew on something. He was longing for his rubber squeaker toy, Roberto, the Indestructible Hedgehog.

As if in answer to his longing, a psychedelic rubber hedgehog thunked down on the sidewalk just ahead of him with a breathy squeak. Theotis raised his head and looked about for other dogs. He saw none.

While not Roberto—who was a lemony yellow made dull from weeks of chewing and repeated exposures to dog slobber—the hedgehog on the sidewalk could have been Roberto’s Haight-Ashbury cousin. All pink and orange and electric green, it seemed to promise new peaks of sensory stimulation, perhaps even ecstatic visions, for the dog that dared to bite it.

Theotis was that dog. He got to his feet and shook his long, floppy ears to clear his head.
Fla-whack fla-whack fla-whack went his ears—the sound of baseball cards in spinning bicycle spokes.

The act of standing up made Theotis realize he was more than half-drunk. He was totally shit-faced. The sidewalk was tilting wildly and he felt an urge to puke up his Gravy Chow all over Virginia’s new Nikes. His tail went stiff. Dog spit fizzed from his jowls as if it were carbonated. A sour belch escaped him. Then the sensation of nausea passed. Theotis examined the hedgehog anew.

It was twitching.

Was it alive? Such was the state of Theotis’s inebriation that he failed to notice the 30-pound-test fishing line securely fastened about the hedgehog’s midriff.

Thrilled by the prospect of live prey, Theotis pounced.

There was a scuffle. The hedgehog moved with uncanny speed for a rubber squeaker toy. There was no escaping the merciless, vise-like jaws of Theotis, however. Soon the hedgehog was squeaking like an anguished chipmunk as his yellowish canine teeth penetrated its soft underbelly.

Theotis Victorious! Theotis, the Conqueror Basset Hound!

Alas, his victory was short-lived. Theotis realized the whole thing was a set-up when the surf casting rod, two stories up on the roof of Old Camozzi’s Saloon, started reeling him in.

•     •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

Virginia sat back with her neck resting on top of her lawn chair, arms and legs splayed in a helpless piña colada stupor. She was staring straight up at the sky.

“Sometimes the clouds look like monsters,” she pronounced. “Sometimes the sky gets so blue I feel like it’s going to swallow me up.”

“Virginia, sometimes you talk like a woman with a paper head,” Balmeister replied with a muted belch.

•     •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

Theotis wasn’t about to give up the hedgehog without a fight. When the fishing line jerked taut, he jerked back, growling. He leaped into the air, wriggling, as the unseen dog-fisherman tried to snap his neck. When Theotis felt slack in the line, he galloped toward a nearby newspaper rack. He wriggled under it and sat there chuffing like an out-of-shape trout hidden away in a cavern of lakeweed.

The hedgehog squeaked and spluttered as Theotis dropped it between his front paws and gnawed on it thoroughly. It was thirsty work. Fortunately, Theotis was producing copious amounts of dog spit. He paused from his labors to swallow some.

The unseen dog-fisherman was canny. A sharp flick of the line yanked the hedgehog from Theotis’s paws, out toward the center of the sidewalk. Theotis gave chase. He scooped the hedgehog back up in his jaws and bore down upon it.

The surf casting rod above Camozzi’s bowed sharply. Theotis found himself being hauled straight up the front of the building. He growled and clamped down even harder. He was determined not to let go of that hedgehog….

•     •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

Two veterans of Pine Bluff construction crews, Thad Bickle and Ron Lowe, stood beside the wooden Indian in front Old Camozzi’s Saloon admiring the asses of passing girls, rather than focusing on the parade. They both saw Theotis leave the sidewalk, his hind legs kicking the air, and then kicking all the relish off Thad’s hot dog. Ron pushed back the brim of his grimy green John Deere tractor cap and watched as Theotis disappeared over the roof of the saloon.

“Damn! Did you see that dog?” Thad said, gesticulating with his molested hot dog bun.

“Sucker was flyin’,” Ron flatly observed.

“I’ll say.”

Ron took a meditative sip of beer from his plastic Budweiser cup. “Now why would anyone be fishin’ for basset hounds on a day like today, I wonder?”

Thad was philosophical, as befitted a man who had spent the last ten years of his life pounding 2×4’s for yahoo contractors and asshole weekend renovators. He said, “The Kiwanis Club must’ve run out of hamburger patties, would be my guess.”

Thad and Ron shared a ruminative chuckle over that one.

•     •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

Theotis, in all his years, had never ascended the sheer face of a two-story building on a fishing line before. He found the experience exhilarating. When the surf casting rod flopped him on the flat tarred roof of the saloon, Theotis scrambled to his feet and barked, once, at the birdrobotman holding the rod. It was more an expression of feisty joy than a warning. The bark popped the hedgehog out of Theotis’s mouth. It rolled behind a swamp cooler and Theotis chased after it.

Six dogs sat in a row on the other side of the swamp cooler: a mastiff, a pit bull, two dachshunds, a Yorkshire terrier, and a hairless Irish Wolfhound that Theotis recognized as Bart, Mrs. Andersen’s dog. Bart and Theotis had romped and chased chickens together during Virginia’s visits with Mrs. Andersen in years past. Strangely, hundreds of chickens were scattered all about the roof, walking around aloof and haughty. Bart, however, wasn’t chasing them now.

The excitement was too much for Theotis. He needed a release. There were so many chickens that he couldn’t decide where to begin his assault. Instead, he trotted over to the terrier and started humping her. But she was teeny and uncooperative— and with all the other dogs watching, Theotis felt foolish. He got off and skulked to the end of the line, where he stood next to Bart.

Bart wanly sniffed Theotis’s butt.

The birdrobotman came down the line and strapped a little tan knapsack on each dog’s back. The knapsacks had the same gunpowder smell as Balmeister’s hunting vest. Balmeister had tried to teach Theotis to be a hunting dog, but that hadn’t worked out so well. Theotis had an odd inclination to urinate on the birds—some instinctual idea about territorial markings gone amok….

Each knapsack had chrome antenna sticking out of it with a tiny speaker mounted near the top. When the birdrobotman spoke into a black box with red switches that he held in his fist, every dog heard his voice right behind their ears. It was not a nice voice, but it carried plenty of authority.

“Even if you have never been to obedience school, today you shall obey me,” the voice said. “The Lord God commands it. It’s our task to rid the world of happy hippie vermin and the small town liberals who tolerate their blasphemous ways.”

All that sounded like so much gibberish to Theotis’s ears, but when the voice started using words like “sit,” “heel,” and “attack,” Theotis knew exactly what to do.

•     •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

The double doors of Old Camozzi’s Saloon burst wide open with a clatter of dog paws and fierce domestic barking. Theotis and Bart led the other dogs past startled parade-watchers and out into the street. The mastiff knocked over a little old lady from Pacific Palisades just two lawn chairs down from Balmeister and Virginia.

“Goddamn,” Balmeister observed.

The dogs split up, each one alert and pacing back and forth with high, nervous steps, waiting for further instructions.

The speaker from Theotis’s knapsack crackled to life. “Basset, attack the Viking ship,” the voice commanded.

Theotis took off up the street after the Viking ship baying the long, throaty, drawn-out barks peculiar to basset hounds. It sounded like war whoops at half-speed from an adolescent Indian with a sinus infection.

“Hail! A scurvy sea monster on the starboard side!”

The Rotarians waved their cardboard swords at the charging basset hound in a boozy show of force.

“To Valhalla with ye, ye putrid-miened bandersnatch!” yelled Olaf Hernandez, owner of Olaf’s Cantina, a Swedish-Mexican eatery famed for its lutfisk burritos.

“To Valhalla!” the others shouted in one voice.

Theotis reared up on his hind legs, paws scratching at the ship’s beaverboard sides. He was barking his drunken head off.

“Out of my way, Olaf! I’ll make abelskivers of the creature’s innards!”

“Gizzardbitch the loathsome sneeve!”

A thicket of swords and moose antlers was thrust down at Theotis, but he just pinned back his long, floppy ears and barked even harder.

Balmeister and Virginia watched the action from their lawn chairs, not twenty yards away.

“Oh, Theotis! Bad Dog!” Virginia cried, waving her eighth or ninth piña colada in dismay. “Where’s your manners?! Get back here!”

“What’s got into that dog?” Balmeister wondered aloud. “Too lazy to chase cats, and now all of a sudden he’s out there giving hell to Vikings.”

“He’s your dog. Go get him.”

“Oh, Christ-on-a-corn-chip…” Balmeister groaned. The lawn chair creaked as he shifted his flabby bulk and pushed off from the arm rests.

On the roof above them, Calydon flipped a switch marked “B” on his little black box.

Down in the street, Theotis the Conqueror Basset Hound exploded.

There was a hollow boom and a huge ball of flames. The Rotarians screamed and lost their footing as the Viking ship tilted and sank on its own refrigerator box underpinnings. They waved their swords frantically as the creosote-soaked beaverboard caught fire and an oily black smoke billowed up all around them.

Balmeister resumed his seat with a sigh of relief. “Guess I won’t be getting that dog after all,” he muttered.

Virginia was stunned, but too drunk to be panicked, unlike most of the people around them.

“Omigod…” she said in her raspy old crow’s voice, “what happened?”

“You got me….”

“Basset hounds aren’t supposed to just explode like that.”

Calling upon his vast accumulated knowledge of dog lore and gastroenterology, Balmeister shrugged and said, “Maybe he ate a bad zucchini.”