“Thank you, Mrs. Korjev, their names are Alvin and Mohammed. It’s on their collars.”
“You have food for them?”
“There are some steaks in the freezer. Just give each one of them a couple and stand back.”
“How they like steaks done?”
“I think frozen will be fine, they eat like—”
Mrs. Korjev raised a finger in warning; it lined it up with a large mole on the side of her nose and looked as if she was sighting down a weapon.
“—like horses. They eat like horses,” Charlie said.
Mrs. Ling did not take her introduction to Alvin and Mohammed with quite the composure of her Russian neighbor. “Aiiiiieeeeeeeeee! Giant shiksas shitting,” exclaimed Mrs. Ling as she ran down the hall after Charlie. “Come back! Shiksas shitting!”
Indeed, Charlie returned to the apartment to find great steaming baguettes of poo strewn about the living room. Alvin and Mohammed were flanking the door to Sophie’s room like massive Chinese foo dogs at the temple gates, looking not so fierce as shamefaced and contrite.
“Bad dogs,” Charlie said. “Scaring Mrs. Ling. Bad dogs.” He considered for a moment trying to rub their noses in their offense, but short of bringing in a backhoe and chaining them to it, he wasn’t sure that he could make that happen. “I mean it, you guys,” he added, in an especially stern voice.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Ling,” Charlie said to the diminutive matron. “These are Alvin and Mohammed. I should have been more specific when I said I’d gotten new pets for Sophie.” Actually, he had been vague on purpose, hoping for some sort of hysterical reaction. Not that he really wanted to frighten the old lady, it’s just that Beta Males are seldom ever in a position to frighten anyone physically, so when they get the opportunity, they sometimes lose their sense of judgment.
“Is okay,” said Mrs. Ling, staring at the hellhounds. She seemed distracted, mainly because she was. Having recovered from the initial shock, she was doing the math in her head—a rapid-fire abacus clicking off the weight and volume of each pony-sized canine, and dividing him into chops, steaks, ribs, and packages of stew meat.
“You’ll be all right, then?” Charlie asked.
“You not be late, okay?” said Mrs. Ling. “I want to go to Sears and look at chest freezer today. You have power saw I can borrow.”
“Power saw? Well, no, but I’m sure Ray has one he can lend you. I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Charlie said. “But let me clean this up first.” He headed to the basement in hopes of finding the coal shovel that his father had once kept there.
As they parted ways that day, both Charlie and Mrs. Ling were counting on Sophie’s history of high pet mortality to quickly solve their respective poop and soup problems. Such, however, was not to be the case.
When several weeks passed with no ill effects on the hellhounds, Charlie accepted the possibility that these might, indeed, be the only pets that could survive Sophie’s attention. He was tempted, many times, to call Minty Fresh and ask his advice, but since his last call might have caused the hellhounds to appear in the first place, he resisted the urge.
Lily’s research trips yielded little more:
“They talk about them all through time,” Lily said, calling from the Berkeley library on her cell phone. “Mostly it’s about how they like to chase blues singers, and evidently there’s a German robot soccer team called the Hellhounds, but I don’t think that’s relevant. The thing that comes up again and again, in a dozen cultures, is that they guard the passage between the living and the dead.”
“Well, that makes sense,” Charlie said. “I guess. It doesn’t say where that passage is, does it? What BART station?”
“No, Asher, it doesn’t. But I found this book by a nun who had been excommunicated in the 1890s, isn’t that cool? This library is amazing. They have like nine million books.”
“Yes, that’s great, Lily, what did the ex-nun say?”
“She had found all the references for hellhounds, and the thing they all seemed to agree on was they serve directly the ruler of the Underworld.”
“She was Catholic and she called it the Underworld?”
“Well, they threw her out of the Church for writing this book, but yeah, that’s what she said.”
“She didn’t have a number we could call in case they got lost.”
“I’m over here on my day off, Asher, trying to do you a favor. Are you going to keep being a smart-ass about it?”
“No, I’m sorry, Lily. Go on.”
“That’s it. It’s not like there’s a care-and-feeding guide. Mostly, the research implies that having hellhounds around is a bad thing.”
“What’s the title of this book, The Complete Guide to the Fucking Obvious?”
“You’re paying me for this, you know? Time and travel.”
“Sorry. Yes. So I should try to get rid of them.”
“They eat people, Asher. Who’s riding the duh train now?”
So, with that, Charlie decided that he needed to take an active role in ridding himself of the monstrous canines.
Since the only thing about the hellhounds that he could be sure of was that they would go anywhere he took Sophie, he brought them along on their trip to the San Francisco Zoo, and left them locked in the van with the engine running and a shop-vac hose run from the exhaust pipe through the vent window. After what he considered to be an extraordinarily successful tour of the zoo, in which not a single animal shuffled off the mortal coil under the delighted eye of his daughter, Charlie returned to the van to find two very stoned, but otherwise unharmed hellhounds who were burping a burnt plastic vapor after having eaten his seat covers.
Various experiments revealed that Alvin and Mohammed were not only immune to most poisons, but they rather liked the taste of bug spray and consequently licked all the paint off the baseboards in Charlie’s apartment in the week following the exterminator’s quarterly service.
As time wore on, Charlie tried to measure the danger of having the giant canines around against the damage that would be done to Sophie’s psyche from witnessing their demise, as she was obviously becoming attached to them, so he backed off the more direct attacks on them and stopped throwing Snausages in front of the number 90 crosstown express bus. (This decision was also made easy when the city of San Francisco threatened to sue Charlie if his dogs wrecked another bus.)
Direct attacks, in fact, were difficult for Charlie (as the only true Beta Male martial art was based entirely on the kindness of strangers), so he turned on the hellhounds the awesome power of the Beta Male kung fu of passive aggression.
He started conservatively, taking them for a ride over to the East Bay in the van, luring them onto the Oakland mudflats with a rack of beef ribs, then driving away quickly, only to find them waiting in the apartment when he returned, having covered the entire living room with a patina of drying mud. He then tried an even more indirect approach: crating up the hounds and air-freighting them to Korea in the hope they would find themselves in an entrée, only to find that they actually made it back to the shop before he had time to sweep the dog hair out of his apartment.
He thought that perhaps he might use their own natural instincts to chase them away, after he read on the Internet that the essence of cougar urine was sometimes sprinkled on shrubs and flowers to keep dogs from urinating on them. After a fairly exhaustive search through the phone book, he finally found the number of an outdoorsman’s supply store in South San Francisco that was a certified mountain-lion whizz dealer.
“Sure, we carry cougar urine,” the guy said. He sounded like he was wearing a buckskin jacket and had a big beard, but Charlie might have just been projecting.