“And that’s supposed to keep dogs away?” Charlie asked.
“Works like a charm. Dogs, deer, and rabbits. How much do you need?”
“I don’t know, maybe ten gallons.”
There was a pause, and Charlie was sure he could hear the guy picking flecks of elk meat out of his beard. “We sell it in one-, two-, and five-ounce bottles.”
“Well, that’s not going to do it,” Charlie said. “Can’t you get me like a large economy size—preferably from a cougar that’s been fed nothing but dog for a couple of months? I assume that this is domesticated cougar pee, right? I mean you don’t go out in the wild and collect it yourself.”
“No, sir, I believe they get it from zoos.”
“The wild stuff is probably better, huh?” Charlie asked. “If you can get it, I mean? I don’t mean you personally. I wasn’t implying that you were out in the wild following a mountain lion around with a measuring cup. I meant a professional—hello?” The bearded buckskin-sounding guy had hung up.
So Charlie sent Ray over to South San Francisco in the van to buy up all the cougar whizz they had, but in the end it achieved nothing other than making the whole second floor of Charlie’s building smell like a cat box.
When it appeared that even the most passive-aggressive attempts would not work, Charlie resorted to the ultimate Beta Male attack, which was to tolerate Alvin and Mohammed’s presence, but to resent the hell out of them and drop snide remarks whenever he had the chance.
Feeding the hellhounds was like shoveling coal into two ravenous steam engines—Charlie started having fifty pounds of dog food delivered every two days to keep up with them, which they, in turn, converted to massive torpedoes of poo that they dropped in the streets and alleys around Asher’s Secondhand like they were staging their own doggie blitzkrieg on the neighborhood.
The upside of their presence was that Charlie went for months on end without hearing a peep from the storm drains or seeing an ominous raven shadow on a wall when he was retrieving a soul vessel. And to that end, the death dealing, the hounds served their purpose as well, for whenever a new name appeared in his date book, the hounds would drag Charlie to the calendar every morning until he returned with the soul object, so he went two years without missing or being late for a retrieval. The big dogs, of course, accompanied Charlie and Sophie on their walks, which had resumed once Charlie was sure that Sophie had her “special” language skill under control. The hounds, while certainly the largest dogs that anyone had ever seen, were not so large as to be unbelievable, and everywhere they went, Charlie was asked what breed they were. Tired of trying to explain, he would simply say, “They’re hellhounds,” and when asked where he got them, he would reply, “They just showed up in my daughter’s room one night and wouldn’t go away,” after which people not only thought him a liar, but an ass as well. So he modified his response to “They’re Irish hellhounds,” which for some reason, people accepted immediately (except for one Irish football fan in a North Beach restaurant who said, “I’m Irish and those things aren’t bloody Irish.” To which Charlie replied, “Black Irish.” The football fan nodded as if he knew that all along and added to the waitress, “Can I get another fookin’ pint o’ here before I dry up and blow away, lass?”)
In a way, Charlie started to enjoy the notoriety of being the guy with the cute little girl and the two giant dogs. When you have to maintain a secret identity, you can’t help but relish a little public attention. And Charlie did, until the day he and Sophie were stopped on a side street on Russian Hill by a bearded man in a long cotton caftan and a woven hat. Sophie was old enough by then to do a lot of her own walking, although Charlie kept a piggyback kid sling with him so he could carry her when she got tired (but more often he would just balance her while she rode on the back of Alvin or Mohammed).
The bearded man passed a little too closely to Sophie and Mohammed growled and imposed himself between the man and the child.
“Mohammed, get back here,” Charlie said. It turned out the hellhounds could be trained, especially if you only told them to do things they were going to do anyway. (“Eat, Alvin. Good boy. Poop now. Excellent.”)
“Why do you call this dog Mohammed?” asked the bearded man.
“Because that’s his name.”
“You should not have called this dog Mohammed.”
“I didn’t call the dog Mohammed,” Charlie said. “His name was Mohammed when I got him. It was on his collar.”
“It is blasphemy to call a dog Mohammed.”
“I tried calling him something else, but he doesn’t listen. Watch. Steve, bite this man’s leg? See, nothing. Spot, bite off this man’s leg. Nothing. I might as well be speaking Farsi. You see where I’m going with this?”
“Well, I have named my dog Jesus. How do you feel about that?”
“Well, then I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you’d lost your dog.”
“I have not lost my dog.”
“Really? I saw these flyers all over town with ‘Have You Found Jesus?’ on them. It must be another dog named Jesus. Was there a reward? A reward helps, you know.” Charlie noted that more and more lately, he had a hard time resisting the urge to fuck with people, especially when they insisted upon behaving like idiots.
“I do not have a dog named Jesus and that doesn’t bother you because you are a godless infidel.”
“No, really, you can not name your dog anything you want and it won’t bother me. But, yes, I am a godless infidel. At least that’s how I voted in the last election.” Charlie grinned at him.
“Death to the infidel! Death to the infidel!” said the bearded man in response to Charlie’s irresistible charm. He danced around shaking his fist in the Death Merchant’s face, which scared Sophie so that she covered her eyes and started to cry.
“Stop that, you’re scaring my daughter.”
“Death to the infidel! Death to the infidel!”
Mohammed and Alvin quickly got bored watching the dance and sat down to wait for someone to tell them to eat the guy in the nightshirt.
“I mean it,” Charlie said. “You need to stop.” He looked around, feeling embarrassed, but there was no one else on the street.
“Death to the infidel. Death to the infidel,” chanted the beard.
“Have you seen the size of these dogs, Mohammed?”
“Death to—hey, how did you know my name was Mohammed? Doesn’t matter. Never mind. Death to the infidel. Death to the—”
“Wow, you certainly are brave,” Charlie said, “but she’s a little girl and you’re scaring her and you really need to stop that now.”
“Death to the infidel! Death to the infidel!”
“Kitty!” Sophie said, uncovering her eyes and pointing at the man.
“Oh, honey,” Charlie said. “I thought we weren’t going to do that.”
Charlie slung Sophie up on his shoulders and walked on, leading the hellhounds away from the bearded dead man who lay in a peaceful heap on the sidewalk. He had stuffed the man’s little woven hat in his pocket. It was glowing a dull red. Strangely, the bearded man’s name wouldn’t appear in Charlie’s date book until the next day.
“See, a sense of humor is important,” Charlie said, making a goofy face over his shoulder at his daughter.
“Silly Daddy,” Sophie said.
Later, Charlie felt bad about his daughter using the “kitty” word as a weapon, and he felt that a decent father would try to give some sort of meaning to the experience—teach some sort of lesson, so he sat Sophie down with a pair of stuffed bears, some tiny cups of invisible tea, a plate of imaginary cookies, and two giant hounds from hell, and had his first, heart-to-heart, father-daughter talk.