Bath Time

Rowdy pushes open the patio door to the kitchen and calls out, “Mom, he’s back. The circus dog is here! And he brought my lucky stick.” He holds the door open for Mr. Mutt who pokes his head through the doorway and looks about. It pays to be cautious in the woods.

Rowdy’s mom is checking on tonight’s dinner roasting in the oven. The house smells like a restaurant on a busy day. Mr. Mutt takes one deep breath and is instantly in nose heaven. He doesn’t recognize everything he’s smelling, but mystery has never smelled so good. In a daze of curiosity, he ambles inside and Rowdy slides the patio door closed.

Rowdy’s mom turns from the oven as her son walks in, followed by a very big dog. She looks the dog over and sees a lot of mastiff in him. She’d had a mastiff as a little girl and she’d loved that dog more than anything. And that dog loved her back even more. “So this is the dog from the circus that beat you at tic-tac-toe?”

Rowdy makes a face. “No need to bring that up.”

She smiles. “What’s his name?”

Rowdy pats the dog on his back. “Mr. Mutt.”

She winks at Rowdy. “Mr. Mutt, the Drooler.”

The dog looks at the boy and nudges him with his snout. “What did she say?”

The boy smiles. “She says you drool.”

“I don’t.”

Rowdy points to the puddle of drool pooling on the linoleum between the dog’s front paws. “What do you call that?”

“That’s floor polish.”

Rowdy turns to his mom. “He says it’s floor polish.”

She hands him a paper towel. “I’m sure it is, honey, so get to polishing. Let’s see that floor shine.”

Rowdy rolls his eyes at the dog. “See what you got me into?”

The dog nods. “Sorry, kid, not my department. I’m solely clean up, not polish. That requires a different breed, one that loves to lick.”

Rowdy’s mom watches the exchange. It sounds like they’re carrying on a conversation, like a couple of playmates, but all she hears from the dog’s side is a strange sounding mooing, like a cow but in a dog’s growl. The dog’s fur is full of burrs and bits of caked-on mud, much like Rowdy when he doesn’t clean up before dinner.

She’d seen Rowdy playing alone a lot recently and been considering getting him a puppy next month for Christmas. She’d been hoping a stray would come along, a good dog they could give a home to. The sight of her son standing proudly next to his new friend makes her glad one has.

“Okay, Rowdy,” she says, “I’ll make you a deal. Mr. Mutt looks like he could use a bath so you take him upstairs to the hall bathroom and give him a good scrubbing in the tub. I’ll call your dad and tell him what’s up so he won’t be surprised when he gets home from his laboratory. Mr. Mutt can stay for a while. At least until we figure out what’s what.”

Rowdy leads the way upstairs to the hall bathroom, but when he tries the knob, it’s locked and one of his sisters shouts at him from the other side to go away. He doesn’t know which one because they all have started to sound alike. It’s that hive mind thing.

There is another bathroom with a tub upstairs on the girls’ floor, the one his sisters share, and that’s where he leads Mr. Mutt. He kicks off his shoes and socks, rolls up his pants and steps into the tub. He lifts the handheld shower head off the wall and turns on the water, waiting for the water to get warm.

When it is, he waves the dog into the tub. “Come on in, it’s safe. You’ll like this, but mind my sisters’ shampoo bottles.” There’s a row of plastic bottles along the edge of the tub against the wall. Their labels are a cascade of pastel girly colors Rowdy would never be caught wearing.

Mr. Mutt steps over the edge of the tub and drinks from the sprayer Rowdy is holding. “Mmm…Warm water. Very tasty.”

“When you’re done drinking from it, I’m going to spray you down and then scrub you clean with one of these bottles of soap. You’ve got a lot of dirt caked in your fur. You must like to roll in mud. I bet that’s fun.”

The warm water makes the big mutt so relaxed and sleepy he doesn’t notice all of the bottles of shampoo and conditioner Rowdy empties on his back. He looks like he’s sleeping standing up like a horse. When Rowdy stops scrubbing and switches to rinsing the smorgasbord of teenage girl hair products out of the dog’s fur, Mr. Mutt wakes up a bit.

“I’m wet like I went swimming in a heated lake,” he says, holding back a growing instinctual urge to shake his body free of water.

When the rinse water runs clear, Rowdy turns the water off and says, “Okay, you’re all clean and soap free. How does that feel?”

Mr. Mutt flexes his legs as he arches his back like a giant cat, then his toes dig in for the body shake that’s coming—a body shake he can’t stop from coming even if he wanted to—which he doesn’t.

Mr. Mutt drops his right shoulder, then he spins his shoulders in the opposite direction, back and forth. The shake starts with his head and ears and ends with his tail snapping about behind him. It’s a cascade of dog spray where everything gets wet, the mirror, the walls, Rowdy, and even the ceiling.

It’s at this moment that his sisters poke their noses into the doorway to see who has the nerve to be using their bathroom. All four girls get a face full of wet dog spray smelling distinctly of their own shampoos. At least they can’t complain about the smell. When they see all of their fancy shampoo bottles, now empty, littering the bathroom floor, they call out to their mom and run downstairs.

Except for the eldest, Patty, who thinks she’s Mom half the time. She enjoys being the eldest a little too much. “A dog? Really? I thought you gave up on that like the rest of us did. Are they letting you keep him?”

Rowdy nods. “It’s looking good.”

She gives the dog a pat on his wet head and hands Rowdy Cynthia’s towel, the second eldest sister. “Dry him off with this one.”

Rowdy dries off Mr. Mutt and tosses the towel on the toilet seat. Patty picks it up, smiles at all of the dog fur stuck to it, and hangs it back up where she got it. With her index finger to her lips, she says quietly, “It’s Cynthia’s towel. She didn’t share her pudding with me today at lunch. I doubt she’ll notice, not with that mousy brown hair of hers.”

“So you don’t mind me using up all your shampoo to wash Mr. Mutt?”

A slight smile touches her lips. “No, mine was already empty.”

“So that full one under the sink wasn’t yours? That’s good,” he says, but her smile, now turned sour, says otherwise.

Mr. Mutt looks at Rowdy and asks, “What was that all about?”

“My sisters fight a lot, that is, until I do something that disturbs their hive. Then they unite and it’s time to run.” He hears the sound of the other sisters grumbling about their shampoo as they climb the stairs. “And that’s what we need to do right now. Follow me, we gotta bolt.”

Rowdy runs out of the bathroom and Mr. Mutt chases after him. They race down the hall to the back stairs that used to be the servants’ stairs. Rowdy’s footfalls echo against the walls as he takes the stairs two steps at a time, his bare feet leaving a trail of wet footprints even his sisters could track.