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.
“Honey, you understand why Daddy told you not to ever do that again, right? Why people can’t know that you can do that?”
“We’re different than other people?” Sophie said.
“That’s right, honey, because we’re different than other people,” he said to the smartest, prettiest little girl in the world. “And you know why that is, right?”
“Because we’re Chinese and the White Devils can’t be trusted?”
“No, not because we’re Chinese.”
“Because we are Russian, and in our hearts are much sorrow?”
“No, there is not much sorrow in our hearts.”
“Because we are strong, like bear?”
“Yes, sweetie, that’s it. We’re different because we’re strong, like bear.”
“I knew it. More tea, Daddy?”
“Yes, I’d love some more tea, Sophie.”
So,” said the Emperor, “I see you have experienced the multifarious ways in which a man’s life is enriched by the company of a good brace of hounds.”
Charlie was sitting on the back step of the shop, pulling whole frozen chickens from a crate and tossing them to Alvin and Mohammed one at a time. Each chicken was snapped out of the air with so much force that the Emperor, and Bummer and Lazarus, who were crouched across the alley suspiciously eyeing the hellhounds, flinched as if a pistol was being fired nearby.
“Multifarious enrichment,” Charlie said, tossing another chicken. “That is exactly how I’d describe it.”
“There is no better, nor more loyal, friend than a good hound,” said the Emperor.
Charlie paused, having pulled not a chicken from the box, but a portable electric mixer. “A friend indeed,” he said, “a friend indeed.” Mohammed snapped down the mixer without even chewing—two feet of cord hung from the side of his mouth.
“That doesn’t hurt him?” said the Emperor.
“Roughage,” Charlie explained, throwing a frozen chicken chaser to Mohammed, who gulped it down with the rest of the mixer cord. “They’re not really my dogs. They belong to Sophie.”
“A child needs a pet,” said the Emperor. “A companion to grow up with—although these fellows seem to have done most of their growing.”
Charlie nodded, tossing the alternator from an eighty-three Buick into Alvin’s eager jaws. There was a clanking and the dog belched, but his tail thumped against the Dumpster asking for more. “Well, they have been her constant companions,” Charlie said. “At least now we have them trained so they’ll just guard whatever building she’s in. For a while they wouldn’t leave her side. Bath time was a challenge.”
The Emperor said, “I believe it was the poet Billy Collins who wrote, ‘No one here likes a wet dog.’”
“Yes, and he probably never had to get a squirming toddler and two four-hundred-pound dogs out of a bubble bath, either.”
“But they’ve mellowed, you say?”
“They had to. Sophie started school. The teacher frowned on giant dogs in class.” Charlie flipped an answering machine to Alvin, who crunched it up like a dog biscuit, shards of dog-spit-covered plastic raining down from his jaws.
“So what did you do?”
“It took us a few days, and a lot of explaining, but I trained them to just sit outside the front door of the school.”
“And the faculty relented?”
“Well, I spray-paint them with that granite-texture spray paint every morning, then tell them to sit absolutely still on either side of the door. No one seems to notice them.”
“And they obey? All day?”