🌟 Putting the “poo”in “shampoo”

“No, Mom!” I said with a subtle pull on the leash. “It’s a trap! He’s trying to dognap you!”

I pulled the blankies out of the corner and I dug until I had ruffled them into the perfect nest. I’m not usually so picky about my bed in a moving car-house, but this was an emergency. Water was streaming off of my belly-fur so fast that my non-digging legs were already standing in a blanket-puddle. I needed to make the blankies as scrunchy as possible so they’d soak up all the extra water before I moved on to a dry spot for a nap.

You’d better not be digging back there,” Mom said from the driving chair without turning around. "I want you touching as little of that blanket as possible. Just lay down where you are and don’t move until I tell you it’s okay.”

“But this spot is all soggy,” I said.

“Good. Make it as uninviting as possible so they will stay where they are, too.” She scratched the back of her neck and made a queasy noise. “Dogammit!” She held her pincher fingers between her eyes and the road long enough to see the tick’s wriggling legs before flicking the speck out the window. “They’re on me too!” She pulled her hat off and scratched through her hair like she was trying out for the before person in a shampoo commercial. “Just hang on. We’ll be there soon.”

“Where?” I asked. Ever since we left the lake, the hills had been shrinking and the roads and buildings had been growing.

“We need a mechanic to figure out why my phone won’t charge.” She pinched the tick that was crawling toward her armpit and flicked it out the window. “We won’t get far without it.”

“A car-hospital?!” I gasped. “Don’t you remember what happened the last time?”

“Don’t worry. I won’t leave you in the van this time. While they’re working on the van we’ll have time to...”

I waited for her to finish. When she didn’t, I guessed, “While they’re working on the car, we’ll sit in the air-conditioned waiting room?” Now that the windows had mostly blowdried my fur, air conditioning sounded nice.

“I can’t take you inside someone’s business. You’re crawling with ticks.”

“Then where? Where will we go while they’re working on the car?”

"You’ll see.”

Before I could ask again, the Witch butted in. “In two miles, you will arrive at your destination.”

"Hi, do you have any room in your schedule today?” Mom asked the greasy-smelling dognapper standing outside the car hospital.

The man wiped the dark stains off his hands with a towel that was just as stained. "What seems to be the trouble?” he asked, stepping curiously toward the window.

“She isn’t leaving my side, so BACK OFF,” I half-growled deep in my throat. I hoped he wouldn’t notice the wagging that happens every time someone looks at me.

“I don’t know, but the charger stopped charging my phone and I noticed that the fridge isn’t cooling either. I’m supposed to be living out of this thing for the next couple of weeks. If I can’t keep my phone charged and my food fresh, it’s game over.”

The man looked at the cat-carrier-sized box on the floor beside the copilot’s chair. “That’s a cooler. Why don’t you just put ice in it?”

Silly man. He had no idea how kitchens work. “If she filled it with ice, there would be no room for all my cheese,” I told him.

“Do you have time to take a look?” Mom asked.

“We have to do a diagnostic. That’s $180.”

"That’s it?” Mom asked. “What if whatever is broken costs less than that?”

“That’s just for the diagnostic. You pay for whatever else needs to be fixed on top of it.”

Mom sighed. “Well if you’re doing a full work-up, will you tell me what the diagnostic turns up before you do any work? It’s an old car and I don’t know how well the post office took care of it. Maybe I shouldn’t take it too far from home.”

“Just come into the office and we’ll get your information.” The dognapper turned and walked toward the air conditioning, waving a stained paw for Mom to follow.

Mom stiffened. “But I can’t leave the dog in the car. It’s too hot.”

“It’s okay. You can bring him in. It’s air conditioned.”

“Yes, please,” I said, trying to pull Mom toward the door he was holding open for us.

“But...” Mom stood fixed to the spot until the man noticed she wasn’t beside him and turned to look at her. “But my dog is covered in...”

“Aw, don’t worry. We have dogs in here all the time.”

Mom gulped and the man led me, Mom, and all sixey gazillion of my passengers into the cool air with me. There was a mat by the desk. I tried to lay on it while Mom filled out the mailman van’s admission forms.

“Don’t you dare,” Mom said with a warning look. She shifted her position to stand at the very edge of the mat, sneakily pushing me onto the slippery floor. “You stand at attention and don’t touch anything upholstered until I tell you it’s okay,” she thought at me before turning her attention back to the man and his papers.

Mom and the man passed papers back and forth like a game. Mom must have won, because soon enough, the Man ripped a paper from a clipboard and briskly handed it across the counter to her. “We'll call you in an hour or so,” he said, turning away.

“Thanks.” Mom tried to hide her hurry as she rushed me out of the cool air.

When we were back under the baking sun, she asked the Witch to point the way to whatever marvelous place she planned for us to play while the mailman van was at the vet.

“This place isn’t very nice for hiking,” I said, looking toward the fat roads and the scrawny trees that did nothing to hide the strip malls behind them. “How about we take a nap?”

“We’ll have to go on foot,” Mom said, eyes stuck to the Witch. “I gave him my keys to the van, remember? It’s okay. It’s not far.”

“Go where? I can’t take the suspense anymore. Where are we going? What’s my surprise?” I asked, zigzagging in front of her to keep her from walking away without telling me. “Wait, wait! Don’t tell me! Let me guess... Are we going to one of those carts full of hot dogs like you see in movies about New York? Or... no! Wait! Are we going to a small fenced-in yard filled with excitable sheep? Oh my Dog! Are we going to a golf course to roll in the grass next to all eighty holes?”

“Erm. If I told you, it would ruin the surprise.” Mom dug a finger under her hat to scratch at the root of her ponytail. “I guess you’ll just have to wait and find out.”

“Oh boy, oh boy,” I said. “What if I get to chase sheep around a golf course covered in hot dog carts?”

Now that we were farther away from the store part of town, the street was leaner and mostly lined with houses. Most of the houses had signs in front so you would know that they were stores in disguise. The sugary smell of a bakery came from one and the sad, couch-like smell of a therapist’s office came from another.

Mom looked up from the Witch at a shady cottage behind a sign with pawprints all over it. Something didn’t smell right about the place. I sniffed the air for spaghetti monsters, but it wasn’t like that at all. It smelled like stress-dander, the fart-like scent of used thermometers, and... Was that... No, it couldn’t be—the smell of... human? Was there a dog-eating witch inside waiting to bake me into a pie like Hansel and Gretel?

As we walked up to the door, the light inside the cottage didn’t look right either. It was too fluorescent-bright, pouring straight out of the ceiling in an un-cozy glare. Mom opened the door and the realization hit me with the smell.

I hung back in the doorway scanning the room as Mom walked inside. Diet kibble. A scale. A big desk too tall to get my paws on...

IT WAS A VET’S OFFICE!

The moment I realized where I was, the door clicked shut behind me.

“Hi. Do you sell tick medication?” Mom asked the giant man with the heavy brow behind the towering counter. “He takes the topical stuff every month, but I must have picked 50 ticks off of him today. What do you recommend?”

“Oh, um. We can’t give any medications without a prescription,” the man’s voice boomed.

“Okay. We'll be on our way, then. Thank you very much for your help,” I said, turning for the door and pulling Mom by the leash. She didn’t follow.

“Uh. Okay. Um...” Mom said to keep the man from turning away, too. “If I call his vet and have them send the prescription, can you fill it?”

“Not without an exam,” he said in a bored voice.

“Mom! No! Exam their secret code word for thermometer! Don’t fall for it!”

Mom betrayed me again. “How much is an exam?”

“We don’t have any available appointments,” the ogre grunted. “The doctor is booked out until next week.”

Mom looked at me with a sigh that said she wasn’t that curious about my temperature. “Okay. Well, I’m worried about my dog. Can you please give me some advice? He’s absolutely crawling with ticks and we’re headed out on a road trip. I don’t want him to infest the inside of the van.”

“They sell flea and tick shampoo at Walmart,” the troll suggested.

“Does that stuff actually work?” Mom asked.

“You’re not actually going to fall for that, are you Mom?” I gasped. “Nothing good ever came from a long night under the stars with a bottle of shampoo.”

“It should get most of them off. His oral medication will get the rest by morning,” rumbled the ogre. “And don’t worry. A tick has to be latched on for almost a day before it can transmit enough Lyme to infect an animal his size. The medication will get them before that.”

Mom scratched the fur on the back of her neck as another question formed in her thought bubble. What happens when an animal twice his size gets bit? And what if that animal doesn’t take flea and tick medication like her responsible life partner does? The questions filled her thought bubble but never made it to her mouth. Instead, she said, “About that... Dogs aren’t allowed in campground bathrooms. Any chance you have a room with a hose? Or maybe you can bend the rules about an exam and write the prescription anyway, because it’s an emergency and all?”

“Why not just stay in a hotel?” he asked.

“Because we have a mailman van and I bark in hotels,” I told him.

“That’s a good idea. Thanks for your help,” Mom said, finally turning back toward the door. Quietly, so that only I could hear, she muttered, “And why does everything have to cost money?”

“How can you say that?” I asked. “That nice man just saved you the cost of getting my temperature taken. I was suspicious of him at first, but he’s a good guy after all.”

We sat in the shade on the front porch of the vet’s office while Mom picked through my fur like one of those giant monkeys on a nature show. By the time the Witch buzzed her attention away from my lustrous fur, it’d been a while since she’d found the last tick.

Mom pressed the Witch to her cheek and listened. “Okay. Great. I’ll be right there,” she told her shoes. “No more than ten minutes. Thank you.” She picked up my water bowl and leash and stepped off the porch.

The first thing Mom asked when we stepped into the dognapper’s air-conditioned waiting room was, “Will you need to keep it overnight?”

The man waved his stained paw in the sign for us to follow him outside. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

“No, Mom!” I said with a subtle pull on the leash. “It’s a trap! He’s trying to dognap you!” I pulled a little more aggressively, but my stiff legs and clamped butt were no match for the slippery floor.

“You blew a fuse,” he said as he led us toward where the mailman van was parked with its mouth propped open. “That’s why the outlet wasn’t working.”

“Cars have fuses?” Mom asked. In her thought bubble, where only I could hear it, she explained, “If a car is a big machine, and machines run on electricity, the fuse must be a very important part of the machine. The important parts are the most expensive parts of a car.”

“Do you agree to have us do the work?” the man asked.

“You haven’t told me how much it’ll cost for parts and labor,” Mom said.

“Two bucks,” he said, leading us to the front of the mailman van’s gaping mouth. “Labor included.”

“What?” Mom asked.

“Even I can count to two,” I helped. “Nothing costs two.”

To build suspense, he handed Mom a clipboard. She scribbled something on it and handed it back.

Once the man had Mom’s binding scribble, he pulled a Lego-like block from his pocket. It wasn’t one of those giant Legos that are too big to fit in a small people-puppy’s mouth, but a tiny one like professional Legosophers use to build grand castles, spaceships, or Batmobiles. He stuck the Lego into the mailman van’s mouth and turned to Mom. “Okay, go plug something in.”

Mom leaned across the driving chair and the leash tugged and jerked as she fiddled with the control panel. She was practically dancing when she twirled back toward the man. “It worked! It worked!” She tap-danced back to his side. “What caused it? Will it happen again?”

“It’s because you’re trying to use that thing as a fridge.” He waved the clipboard at the food fortress. “Something like that is made for a truck. It pulls too much power for the 12-volt outlet on a normal vehicle. Especially one as old as this.”

Mom looked at the cheese chest and her eyes got a little wobbly. “But how will I keep things cold? What about the milk for my tea?”

“Have you thought about ice?” the man asked again, now that he’d proven that he knew more about science than Mom.

She sighed. “Well at least it was only $2 to fix.” She flipped through the papers in her wallet and handed him two of them.

“Plus $180,” he reminded her. “We had to run the diagnostics to figure out what was wrong.”

“But you didn’t even have to figure anything out. You just plugged in that little machine and looked at what it said on the screen!” Mom squeaked.

“You can pay inside,” he said helpfully.

Mom dragged me out of that air-conditioned waiting room way too fast, like she was in a hurry to get back into that stuffy old mailman van.

“Hundred and eighty-two... for a stupid one-dollar...” Mom muttered as the Witch directed the mailman van through intersections as big and complicated as space stations.

Mom’s grouchy mood gave me that icky feeling behind my teeth that made me want to rip open a trash bag and eat whatever was inside.

“Turn right. Then you will arrive at your destination,” the Witch directed.

The mailman van turned. I gulped.

Phew! It was only a Walmart. The mailman crept the shadowiest corner behind the building, where only trucks and trash hung out. My teeth itched for the sweet relief of the trash bins.

“Okay. I’ll be right back, Spud.” Mom kissed the spot between my eyes and left me alone. I watched her walk out of sight around the corner of the building and thought about dognappers. I was probably safe. It seemed like the dognappers were in the past, like the Zodisack, but could you ever really be sure? And Mom left me back here in the shade with no witnesses...

I lay down on the damp spot and started chewing on the blankie like a gob of Hubba Bubba bubblegum. Soothing squirts of lake water spurted onto my tongue with each chomp.

Mom came back a lifetime later carrying a box the size of a coffin, several bags of ice, and another bag filled with something that looked like bottles of assorted... salad dressing? maple syrup? spray paint? Gatorade? ... Large flashlights, perhaps?

“What’s that?” I sniffed when Mom thwonked the coffin onto the foot of the bed. If she answered, I couldn’t hear it over the clatter of the ice she started pouring inside. I sniffed again for clues, but all I smelled was plastic.

“Get outta there,” Mom said. “You’ll see soon enough. But first, we’ve gotta find...”

Mom shrank under the shame as she said, “...a hotel.” She remounted the driving chair and put the mysterious bag on the copilot’s chair so she would have both paws free to talk to the Witch.

“You don’t need a hotel,” I told her as she pulled the seat leash across her chest. "Remember? Because we have the mailman van.”

“Yeah, but there’s one thing— Get outta that bag! —one thing we can’t do in the van.”

“What? We can sleep, eat, stay in campgrounds where you can shower, nap, snack... What else do you need?”

Mom didn’t answer. Instead, she directed the mailman van out of the shadows of the Walmart and back onto the road. She hunched ever-tighter over the driving wheel as we drove through more tangled intersections, baring her teeth with even more aggressive determination than when she was looking for the lake earlier.

“Are you just worrying about imaginary danger again?” I asked. “Like the Zodisack?”

She didn’t say anything. The silence filled the mailman van in a way that sounded like it was hiding something. I looked around for something to change the subject.

“So... Walmart, huh? Usually that puts you in a good mood. Did they have Hubba Bubba bubblegum?" I stuck my nose experimentally into the bag on the copilot’s seat and made a theatrical sniff as if I was just joking.

“Get out of there!” She bunched the loops on the bag into her fist to keep clues from leaking out and put the bag possessively in her lap. “Don’t worry, you’ll eat like a king tonight.”

I was about to ask if cheese was allergic to melted ice when the Witch ordered us to turn into a car kennel. “I’ll be right back,” Mom said again. She kissed my forehead and ran inside, leaving me alone with the mysterious bag.

I waited until the invisible butler slid the glass door closed behind her before turning to the bag. When I finally got a good snort inside, I couldn’t smell anything that would explain why Mom was guarding it as jealously as a fresh tennis ball in the dog park. There wasn’t any cheese or bubblegum in there. Only a few plastic bottles—not the kind you drink out of, the other kind—a metal brick, and a spray can. Were they magic potions, perhaps?

The sound of the magic door slipping open interrupted my investigation. I backed into the bedroom and I tried to look bored as Mom remounted and guided the mailman van into a different parking spot farther from the road. When the engine was quiet, she stuffed some clothes into the packpack, picked up the bag of bottles, and led me to one of the doors that lined the side of the building.

The door opened to a room with a bed, a chair, and a sink. It smelled of thrift stores, powdered soap, and the faint bite of old smoke.

“This place is fancy!” I said, jumping onto the bed, where a comforter made of the delicate fabric of a summer dress was pulled tight as a drum. “They trusted you with this place?”

“Yup. The luxurious Motel 6. Only the best for us.” The way she said it didn’t sound like pride. “Come on. Get down from there.” She held her bag-free arm out at collar height and hooked her fingers so they’d be ready to guide me where she wanted me to go.

I looked around the room for where she might want to take me. There was only one part of the room we hadn’t explored yet. “You can go potty by yourself,” I encouraged. “I’ll just wait here till you’re done.”

“Come on,” she said like I was trying a sneaky trick and she wasn’t falling for it. She hooked a finger under my collar to lead me gently off the bed, as if it were my idea. When I jumped on the floor like she asked, she still didn’t let go. She led me all the way into the bathroom before letting go.

“It’s a little cramped in here. I think I’ll wait outside,” I said, giving Mom a gentle shove to prove my point as I turned toward the door. I tried to sneak around her, but she blocked my way and closed the door in my face.

“I just remembered something I left in the mailman van,” I said. “I’ll just run and get—” She unclipped my collar and put it on the back of the toilet.

Mom opened the bag and put all three bottles in the shower. She left the spray can and the brick next to my collar on the back of the toilet. Then she turned on the water.

I perked up my ears. “Did you hear someone calling my name? Your weak ears can’t hear over the water. I guess I should go see what they want. Enjoy your shower.” I pressed my nose to the side of the door under the knob and thought, Open sesame with all my might. Instead of opening the door, Mom scooped me up like a forklift.

“Unhand me!” I wriggled. The fighting only made me slip when she plonked me in the tub, but I had to try something. Anything to get out of a bath!

“I’m sorry, Spud, but we’ve got to wash you with the tick shampoo. I brought every brand they had, just in case one didn’t work.”

Mom washed me from head to tail with one bottle. When the suds around my ankles were clear again, she washed me from head to tail a second time. When she was done with the first bottle, she washed me twice with the second shampoo. And the third after that.

When she was done, Mom made me stay in the shower to watch her wash her own fur with all three shampoos, rubbing the suds all over her skin as it dripped toward her feet.

When the water finally stopped and Mom pulled back the curtain, I jumped out of the tub so fast that I took part of the curtain with me. I stood with my eyes fixed on the door as Mom petted me all over with the towel.

But Mom had one more thing planned before she set me free. She picked up the can from the back of the toilet, rattled it a few times, and aimed it at me. A shower of dots smelling of something between medicine and mop water settled onto my soggy fur.

Finally, Mom opened the door, and I followed the cloud of shampoo-breath, mop-stink, and shower smog back into the bedroom. I lay on the bed while Mom re-hung the shower curtain. She came back out with a towel on her head and the final surprise from the bag in her paw.

“We’re having hard-boiled eggs for dinner,” she announced, opening the food fortress. “But I got you something special to go with it as a reward for being so brave.” She held up the brick-shaped can.

I barely lifted an eyebrow. “What’s that?”

“It’s Spam. You’ll love it.” I lifted my other eyebrow and both ears as she pulled the tab on top of the can. “You can have Spam; Spam and eggs; Spam, eggs, Spam and Spam...” She peeled open the top and the smell of pig-lip jelly filled the room. “...Spam, Spam, baked beans and Spam...”

“Yes, please,” I said as she scooped out a ball of the stuff like ice cream into my bowl. It looked like a giant wad of bubblegum and smelled like special occasions. “I’ll take the eggs on the side so I don’t have to wait,” I said around a mouthful of delicious, gelatinous meat.

“You’re supposed to say, But I don’t like Spam,” Mom corrected.

“But I do!” I inhaled another scoop without bothering to chew. I didn’t even have to taste it on my tongue to know it was wonderful.

“I can’t chant Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam unless you say it,” Mom pleaded. But I was too busy chewing.

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