The of the Booby-Trapped Pickup Read online

  Slim shook his head. “In five minutes, you’ll have parts strung out over three acres, and it still won’t start.”

  Loper brought a finger to his lips. “Shhh. You’ll never learn anything if you’re flapping your mouth all the time.”

  Loper leaned over the fender and went to work on the . . . whatever it was. Slim looked down at us dogs and grinned. “Y’all watch. He don’t remember what happened the last time we tried this, but I do.”

  Slim drummed his fingers on the steering wheel while Loper clanked and banged under the hood. After about five minutes, he yelled, “Okay, give ’er a crank.”

  Slim stuck his head out the window. “Reckon you ought to step back a ways?”

  Loper shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Slim, we’re burning daylight.”

  “That ain’t all we’re fixing to burn.”

  “Crank the motor!”

  “Okay, buddy, you asked for this.”

  Slim hit the starter and . . .

  KA-BLOOEY!

  The top half of Loper’s body disappeared inside a cloud of blue smoke while his hat and several pieces of the former air filter floated down to the ground. As the smoke began to clear, I could see Loper standing there with a dazed expression on his face. He was still in one piece, but it appeared that some of his hair had been singed and he’d lost about 30 percent of his mustache.

  Slim was chuckling when he stepped out of the cab. “Are you hurt?”

  “If I was, I wouldn’t tell you about it.” Loper snatched his hat off the ground and slapped it back on his head. “Find a nylon towrope and let’s haul this wreck into town.”

  “You going to trade it off, finally?”

  “No, I’m going to get it fixed. That’s a good pickup.”

  “Oh yeah, when it ain’t dead or blowing up. Loper, that thing’s got two hundred thousand miles on it.”

  “That’s right, and we’ll drive it another two hundred thousand. Let’s head for town.”

  “Loper?” Slim walked over and laid a hand on Loper’s shoulder. “As one of the few friends you have left in this world, I need to tell you something.” Loper shot him a suspicious glare. Slim leaned closer and whispered, “Half your mustache got blowed off. Before we go to town, you might want to trim the other side so you don’t look like a crazy person.”

  Loper’s hand went to his upper lip and felt around. He seemed surprised that Slim was right. “Get the towrope,” he snarled, and went down to the house to trim his whiskers.

  Well, that had started the morning off with a bang. (A little humor there. Did you get it? Started the morning off with a bang. Ha ha.) But when the cowboys left the scene of the explosion, I glanced around and realized that . . . Drover was missing! Fearing the worst, I searched the immediate area around the pickup and found no trace of the little mutt. What I found was . . .

  I’m not sure that I should reveal this next part. I mean, all my training in Security Work had prepared me for the tragic side of life, but I’m thinking of the kids. You know my Position on Kids: I hate to scare ’em or shock ’em too badly, or give ’em stories that’ll make ’em cry. And when I saw those little pieces of white fuzz on the ground . . .

  Oops. I wasn’t going to say anything but it just popped out, so now the cat is out of the sandbag. Okay, we might as well plunge into it.

  In the course of conducting an All Points Search for Little Drover, who was missing in action, I found several fragments of whitish fuzz lying on the ground. They looked very much like . . .

  I can’t say it. It’s too hard, too sad. I mean, Drover was the weirdest little met I’d ever mutted, but we’d worked together for years, and after all we’d been through together . . . a guy gets attached to his comrades, you know. We shouldn’t. In a dangerous business like Security Work, we’re always aware that, well, one of us might not come back from a haderous mission.

  A hadderzous mission.

  A hazzzeruss mission.

  A hazzarduss mission.

  HOW DO YOU SPELL THE STUPID WORD? I don’t care. Skip it.

  Now I don’t remember what I was talking about. This really burns me up, because I know it was something important. The weather? Maybe that was it. The weather that morning was pretty nice, a little chilly but . . .

  We weren’t talking about the weather. Bones? Maybe so. I love bones, all kinds of bones, but I guess my favorite is steak bones. Ham bones are pretty nice, especially when they’ve been cooked in a big pot of pinto beans, but for flavor and chewing excitement, you can’t beat . . .

  Wait. Drover had vanished, remember? And we had just discovered a few pitiful fragments of his . . . well, his exploded body. I hate to put it that way (the kids), but sometimes we can’t escape life’s terrible tragedies, no matter how hard we try.

  I heard a voice beside me. It said, “Boy, the air filter sure got shredded.”

  “That’s not an air filter, pal. You’re looking at the remains of a friend of mine.”

  “Gosh, how sad. What was his name?”

  “His name was . . . ” I turned and looked at the mysterious stranger who had . . .

  HUH?

  Never mind. Skip it. Sorry I brought it up.

  Chapter Three: Drover Wasn’t Blown Up

  You remember all that business about Drover’s tragic death in an explosion? Ha ha. Just a small error, no big deal, a tiny malfunction in some of our, uh, equipment. I was misquoted, see. I had reported finding small shreds of whitish fuzz, but by the time the story got out, it had been blown completely out of . . .

  Okay, here’s the deal. You’ll be shocked and surprised, so grab something solid and hang on. Drover didn’t get blown up, exploded, vaporized, or rendered into doggie hamburger. Do you know why? Because at the first sign of trouble, he slipped away and hid in the machine shed.

  I should have known. He does this all the time. He’s such an incredible weenie. I don’t know why I waste time worrying about him. The explosion has never been made that could move fast enough to catch Drover.

  So there it is, and by now maybe you’ve figured out that the so-called Mysterious Stranger was actually Mister Slinkaway. How do you suppose that made me feel? It made me feel like an idiot. There I was, standing over his shattered remains and actually feeling sad about it . . .

  Never mind. Our best course of action here is to forget the whole shabby affair and pretend that it never happened. In fact, it never happened. Honest. It was just a frigment of our imaginations.

  There, we’ve got that out of the way.

  Where were we? Oh yes, the pickup. Slim banged and clanged around in the machine shed until he found the big nylon towrope. He dragged it outside and hooked one end to the bumper of the broken pickup. He collected what was left of the air filter, pitched it on top of the motor, and slammed down the hood. By that time, Loper had returned from the house, and I noticed right away that he had done some snipping on his mustache.

  Slim noticed too. A little grin tugged at his mouth as he watched Loper coming up the hill. “I think you’re walking straighter now, with all that weight off the left side.” Loper wasn’t smiling. “Well, I tried to warn you.”

  “If we did it a thousand times, it would never happen again.”

  “Loper, if we did it a thousand times, there wouldn’t be anything left of you but bones and a couple of pieces of meat. You’re just too much of a donkey to admit the truth.”

  Loper walked up to him and glared into his eyes. “Am I going to hear about this for the rest of the day?”

  “Well, I know all the mechanics in town would love to hear about you starting a pickup the Cowboy Way.” Slim snorted a laugh.

  “Slim, how would you like to spend the winter digging sewer lines in the snow?”

  There was a long silence. Slim’s smile faded. “As I was saying, my lips are sealed.”


  Loper drove his pickup around to the machine shed and they hooked the two pickups together with the towrope. Loper climbed into the lead pickup and Slim headed for the broken one. By the time his hand touched the door handle, Drover and I were right there, poised and ready to spring up into the cab.

  See, we’d held a little conference and had decided that, well, it had been a long time since we’d been to town. And we probably needed to go. Or, to frame it up from a different angle, we knew that Slim would want us to go. I mean, who’d want to make a long, lonely trip into town without a couple of crackerjack cowdogs?

  He noticed us standing there, poised and quivering with excitement—the excitement that any normal, healthy American dog would feel at the prospect of going to the Big City.

  Slim gave us a sour look. “What’s this? You think you deserve to go to town?”

  Well . . . yes, sure. Definitely. I mean, we had suffered with him through the Pickup Crisis, right?

  “Okay, I’ll let you go, but you’d better behave yourselves.”

  Oh, sure. No problem there. We would be Perfect Dogs, no kidding.

  When he opened the door, I sprang upward with a mighty surge and . . . BONK . . . hit the steering wheel, you might say, and tumbled backward to the ground. But I leaped to my feet and tried it again, and made a smooth landing on the seat, and you’ll notice that I got there several seconds ahead of Drover. Heh heh. That assured me of getting my favorite spot in the pickup, the Shotgun Position beside the window on the passenger side.

  When we were all settled inside the pickup, Slim slammed the door and let his gaze drift over to me. “Did you hit the steering wheel?”

  Well, I . . . yes, maybe I did, but was that a big deal? I mean, any dog could have . . .

  “Heh. You’ve got to watch out for those steering wheels, pooch. They’ll jump right out in front of you.”

  Very funny.

  Loper took the slack out of the towrope and we began our slow trip into town. An hour after leaving the ranch, we were driving down the main street of Twitchell, Texas. Wow, what an exciting place! It had everything: cars, people, stores. We passed Waterhole 83, the Dixie Dog Drive-in, Stockman’s Western Wear, two gas stations, the picture show, and a grocery store.

  We made a left turn at the stoplight and pulled up in front of Hergert Ford. There, Loper and Slim got out of their respective pickups and went inside to talk to the service manager. Before he left, Slim leaned inside the window and said, “Y’all stay here and be nice. We won’t be long.”

  Yes sir! Being nice would be no problem at all. We were just thrilled to be in a huge city like Twitchell, even if we had to stay inside the pickup. What more could a couple of dogs from the country possibly . . .

  Just then, a small red pickup pulled into a parking spot nearby. A man stepped out, reached into the bed of the pickup, and brought out a cardboard box. The lettering on the side of the box said TREJO’S DONUT DELIGHTS. He carried the box into the shop and closed the door behind him.

  I thought nothing of this at the time, but several minutes later, my noseatory equipment began picking up signals of something . . . hmmm . . . good. Sweet. I gave the air a more thorough sniffing, and by George, the more I sniffed, the more I wanted to find out exactly where that smell was coming from.

  I turned to my assistant, who was staring off into deep space. “Drover, may I interrupt for a second?” No response. “Drover? Hello? Is anyone home?”

  At last his gaze drifted down and he gave me a silly grin. “Oh, hi. Are you back already?”

  “I didn’t go anywhere.”

  “Did you see anything exciting?”

  “I didn’t go anywhere. I’ve been sitting right here beside you.”

  “I’ll be derned. I thought somebody got out and went somewhere.”

  “That was Slim.”

  “Oh yeah, now I remember. Sometimes I get bored and my mind wanders.”

  “No kidding? Drover, I need to ask you a question. Do you smell anything unusual?”

  He sniffed the air. “Well, let’s see. Dirty socks?”

  “No. That’s just the normal smell of Slim’s pickup. Try again.”

  He sniffed. “Oh yeah, I smell it now. Two dogs. Maybe it’s us.”

  I struggled for patience. “Drover, please try to be serious. Take a deeper sniff and try to analyze the various odors in the air.”

  He drew in a big sniff of air. His eyes popped wide open. “Oh my gosh, there it is!” He darted over to the window, stuck his nose outside, and sniffed some more. “I think it’s coming from that red pickup. And it smells yummy.”

  “Exactly. Now we have two snifferations that point to something sweet and yummy. The question now is, what could it be?”

  “Yeah. I wonder what it could be.”

  “That’s what I just said. At this point, we don’t have any reliable data on that.”

  He squinted at the lettering on the door of the red pickup. “Trejo’s Do-nut De-lights. Gosh, I wonder what that means?”

  I joined him at the window. “The same message was written on a box the man took inside. Hmm, this is very strange.”

  Drover leaned forward and widened his eyes. “Yeah, and you know what? There’s a whole bunch of those boxes in the back of the pickup.”

  I took a closer look. “You’re right, Drover, nice work.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It appears that we’ve stumbled upon boxes and boxes of donuts. The question that faces us now is . . . what is a donut?”

  At that very moment, I notice a little gray poodle sitting in the seat of the pickup, with his eyes fixed on the door through which his master had gone. Drover saw him too. “Oh, look, there’s a dog. Maybe he can tell us what a donut is.”

  Little did we know or suspect . . . well, you’ll see.

  Chapter Four: We Meet a Mouthy Little Yip-Yip

  Have we discussed poodles? Maybe not. I’ve never had any use for ’em. They belong to the Yip-Yip branch of the dog family, don’t you know, and there’s no good that can come from a Yip-Yip.

  See, your poodles tend to be spoiled, pampered, and mouthy, and this little shrimp appeared to follow the pattern all the way down the line. He had gray curls all over his body. He’d been clipped and shampooed, wore a rhinestone collar around his neck, had a red bow tied into the curls on his forehead and a ridiculous stump of a tail with a little hair puff on the end.

  On a normal day, I wouldn’t have bothered even to say hello to a poodle, much less tried to carry on a conversation with one, but Drover had raised a good point. We had discovered a cloud of interesting smells coming from that pickup and the evidence was beginning to suggest that the smells had something to do with donuts.

  Since the yip-yip was sitting inside a pickup that appeared to be a donut-delivery vehicle, we had reason to suppose that he might provide us with important information.

  Don’t get me wrong. Our motives here were purely scientific. No kidding. We were just a couple of dogs with active minds, who hungered, so to speak, for knowledge about . . . well, Life and the universe and the wonders of . . . sniff, sniff . . . nature.

  Like astronomers who look at the stars night after night, we were driven by an unquitchable desire to unlock the secrets of the universe and to expand . . . sniff, sniff . . . the frontiers of so forth.

  See, for years and years, dogs all over the world had lived in the Dungeon of Ignorance, crying out in anguished voices, “What, oh what, is a donut?” And here we were, on the verge of the edge of the brink of making that very discovery.

  We were filled with the excitement of . . . sniff, sniff . . . discovery. Oh yes! Our eyes sparkled with the pure clean light of curiosity. Our hearts sang noble choruses and our mouths watered with . . .

  Never mind what our mouths were doing. You get the point. Our motives were as pure as the
driveled snow and we had no interest, almost no interest whatever, in . . . well, food or eating or such low-life pursuits.

  Honest. No kidding. It’s very important that you believe this, because . . . well, you’ll see.

  Anyway, it was very clear what we had to do. As soldiers in the Battle for Knowledge, we had to pursue our research, no matter the risk or the cost, and if that meant that we had to speak to a poodle, well, it had to be done.

  I gave Drover the signal that I would take the lead in this deal, and I opened things up by addressing the yip-yip in a pleasant tone of voice. “Hello over there. Yoo-hoo? You in the little red pickup? Hello.” He came to the window and looked at us. I continued. “Hi there. We’re visiting from the country and, well, wanted to meet some new friends. My name is Hank the Cowdog, and this is Drover, my assistant.”

  Drover grinned and wiggled his stub tail. “Oh, hi. We were just wondering what’s in those—”

  I cut him off just in time. “Shhh. Do you want him to get suspicious? I’ll handle this.” I turned a charming smile toward the mutt . . . toward the poodle, that is. “What’s your name?”

  In a squeaky little voice, he said, “Bear.”

  “Bear!” I burst out laughing.

  “Something funny about that?”

  “Flea would be closer to the truth. I mean, you’re just a poodle, right?”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Well, you know, the curls, the rhinestone collar, the bow in your hair. And you’re kind of a shrimp.”

  “You got something against little guys?”

  “Not especially. You’re a peewee, that’s all I’m saying.”

  He gave me a curled lip. “Check it out, buster. I’m not a poodle.”

  Drover and I exchanged glances, then Drover said, “Well, what are you?”

  The mutt hopped his front legs up on the window ledge. “I’m a rottweiler.”

  After a moment of startled silence, I managed to say, “No kidding. A rottweiler, huh?”