“But some of us aren’t going to fit,” Chester pointed out, with a nod toward Hamlet and me.
“I’ve got it!” said Howie. “We’ll disguise ourselves. That’s what they do in the movies. Okay. It’s a nursing home, right? So let’s make ourselves look like nurses. First we need those little white hats. Wait, I’ve got a better idea. We could pretend we’re delivering pizza.”
“Excellent idea, Howie,” said Chester, rolling his eyes. “Maybe you could write it up and submit it in triplicate, hmm? Meanwhile, the rest of us will try to come up with an alternative.”
“Okay, Pop,” Howie said.
“Let me just give this some thought,” Chester said. “We need to be sure that no one sees Harold and Hamlet. Hmm.”
Hamlet cleared his throat. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, Howie’s idea may be useful.” Leading us to a large tree, he indicated a pile of cut-down branches. “In Shakespeare’s play Macbeth,” he told us, “an army disguises itself with the branches of a tree. We could do the same thing. If anyone spots us, we could just stand still and we’d look like—”
“A bunch of branches with furry feet and tails,” said Miss Demeanor. “That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard.”
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Now, wait a minute,” said Chester. “It might just work. After all, a bunch of branches is less like y to raise suspicions than a bunch of animals on the loose.”
We nodded our heads. All except Howie, that is, who was too busy trying to figure out what triplicate meant.
And so, with branches clenched firmly between our teeth, we set out across the parking lot, looking like a cross between an Arbor Day parade and a very strange family of deer with sprouted antlers. We got close enough to the window so that we could see some movement on the other side when suddenly a door opened and a man and a woman burst out. We froze.
Rooking out across the parking lot, the man said, Listen, Helen, it’s all well and good that you want to humor him, but this is a waste of time.”
“It may be, George,” said the woman. “But he is mentally sound. If he said he saw-what was it he said again?”
“‘Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane.’ Whatever that means.”
“Why, George, it’s from Shakespeare. And you know how Archie loves to quote from Shakespeare.” J heard Hamlet gasp. “Archie,” he said weakly.
That s just it,” said the man named George “He loves to quote from Shakespeare. That doesn’t mean we have to drop everything and run out here just because he saw a bunch of trees move. He was
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probably daydreaming about the good old days and—”
The woman placed her hand on the man’s arm and he stopped speaking. She pointed in our direction. I gulped and swallowed a little sawdust in the process.
“Look,” she said. “Over the roof of the blue Honda. What in the world are those branches doing there?”
The sawdust was tickling my throat. Hamlet, meanwhile, was starting to quiver with excitement from hearing Archie’s name. Between the two of us, Birnam Wood was getting a little shaky.
“Good heavens!” the woman cried. “They are moving. What is going on?”
The man shook his head. “I don’t have a clue,” he said. “But there’s one way to find out.”
With no more warning than that, the two of them moved briskly in our direction. Chester spat out his branch seconds before I sneezed and lost a grip on mine. “Run for it!” he squealed.
“The door!” Felony cried. “They left the door open!”
We ran out from behind the parked cars and scrambled toward the open door before George and Helen knew what was happening.
“Animals!” Helen cried.
“Stop them!” George shouted.
Several residents of the nursing home had gathered
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[Image: All dogs and cat jump and over the roof of the car]
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on the other side of the open door and instead of stopping us were cheering us on.
“Look,” said a woman with blue cotton candy hair, “there’s a cat that looks just like my Boopsie.”
Felony looked up in alarm. “Boopsie?” she said. “No way do I look like a Boopsie!”
“Boopsie! Here, Boopsie!” the woman called out after us. We raced madly down a hallway and through a door into the room with the open window. Hamlet had the lead; so it was that we all collided with him when he came to a sudden, jarring stop.
“Archie!” he woofed.
Sitting at a table in a tattered bathrobe and faded pajamas sat an old man with a face full of whiskers and eyes full of tears. “Hamlet,” he said, opening his arms.
Hamlet limped to him and laid his head on the old man’s knee.
Just then, Helen and George charged into the room.
“Good heavens!” cried Helen when she saw us. “Where did all these animals come from?”
“Out!” George yelled, waving his hands in the air. “Go home! All of you, go home!”
The woman with cotton-candy hair appeared in the doorway behind them, making clucking noises with her tongue. “Here, Boopsie!” she said. She picked up a piece of bacon from one of the tables
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and held it out in front of her. “Nice kitty, here, girl.”
Felony looked at the rest of us and licked her lips. “Hey, if she wants to call me Boopsie, who’m I to stand in the way of makin’ a little ol’ blue-haired lady happy?”
Or in the way of a free breakfast, for that matter.
“Oh, no, we can’t have that,” said Helen as Felony (also known as Boopsie) purringly accepted the bacon from the old woman’s hand.
The old woman looked up and said, “But they’re hungry, Helen.” With that, one plate after another found its way from table to floor and we were all treated to a delicious breakfast garnished with pats on the head—even The Weasel, whom one woman said reminded her of the collar of her favorite coat.
Helen and George tried to stop it, but it was no use. The old people were so happy to have us there that the two officials finally threw up their hands and went off to do something official elsewhere.
Hamlet was the only one of us who didn’t eat. He was too busy just being with Archie.
“I’m sorry, old boy,” Archie said. “I just couldn’t bear to tell you the truth. All our travels together, all the thick and thin times, how could I tell you I was leaving you behind for good? Danged nursing home, I don’t see what they’ve got against animals anyway. But this is the only place I could afford, boy. I know, I know, I always said I was rich. And I was. Rich in spirit. But let me confide in you a
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little secret, dear friend. I’ve lost my spirit. I’m poor in every sense of the word now, Hamlet. I’m alone. And that’s the worst kind of poor there is.”
Hamlet cocked his head and whimpered. Archie seemed to know right away what he was saying. “Willie? Oh, Willie and I haven’t had a good talk in months. Oh, sure, sure, he’s here, but we just don’t have anything to talk about anymore.”
Hamlet whimpered again.
“You want me to get him?” Archie asked.
Hamlet woofed.
“Really? You want to see Willie?”
The Great Dane panted and woofed some more as Archie’s face seemed to grow younger by the minute.
The residents of the nursing home were getting quite a kick out of this exchange.
“Who’s this Willie you’re talking about?” asked the blue-haired lady, holding—much to my surprise—a purring Felony on her lap. “I don’t remember knowing anybody here named Willie.”
“You’re not talking about William, are you, Archie?” asked a man with thick glasses and an even thicker mustache.
Archie shook his head. “William is a big fellow,” he said. “No, no, I’m talking about Little Willie. Why, it’s no wonder you’ve missed him. He’s only three feet tall.”
I looked at Chester, who had sidled up next to
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me. “I think,” he commented, “we may have reunited Hamlet with a nut case.”