Who let the dog out?

I was walking to my car the other day when a HUGE pinecone fell from the tree above the Lucy Light and burst upon impact. A dozen or so fairies spilled out in a flurry of giggling sparks. Their version of a Disney ride, I guess...

Pepe Le Pew de Santiago Diablo Ventura was an obnoxious little yappy thing that we called kickpup for short. He belonged to my cousin, Lucinda, a comely hispanic woman with big eyes and bigger boobs. In the history of our youth, my cousins had a myriad of dogs, all mean and nearly all killed strangely. For instance, one actually hung itself; we went camping, we came home with a string of fish, the dog was hanging from the clothesline.

Now, I'm not a mean person, but I must say I didn't shed a tear for Pepe Le Pew when he died strangely. In fact, when I heard the story of his death, I laughed.

Pepe was pretty much worthless. Most of the dogs my cousins had were farm dogs - blue heeler mixes for the most part, although the one that hung itself was a pit bull. Pepe was a chihuahua. Tell me, what business does a chihuahua have on a farm?

Lucinda loved Pepe, and would carry him around in a sleeper and blanket as if he was a baby. She spent hours teaching him tricks, only one of which he ever learned - to lay perfectly still for 15 minutes straight. That ability, and his tolerance of sleepers and fleece blankets, is what earned him the role of baby Jesus in the local Christmas pageant, a live re-enactment of the manger scene. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the unmarried minister wanting to boff Lucinda.

Lucinda's two older brothers, Pablo and Diego, hated Pepe Le Pew. Their favorite pastime was driving around town in my uncle's old pickup, a '47 Ford, and playing "Touchdown," a game that required a tin of chew, a car window and a working hand. The object of the game was for the offensive player to spit a wad of tobaccy through the window frame while the defensive player rolled the window up and down in an attempt to prevent the "ball" from sailing through these goalposts. If the spit made it through the opened window, the offense was awarded touchdown points; if it hit a passerby, an additional 3 points would be awarded, and 5 points were given if it hit Pepe.

Two days before the Christmas pageant in which Pepe was to play baby-Jesus-in-a-onesie, the brothers were cruising town and playing their favorite game. The dinner hour was fast approaching, however, and so they headed home, pulling into the gravel drive just as Pepe was let out for his evening sniff-and-poop. The brothers looked at each other and silently agreed to one last go at touchdown before they called it a night.

Pablo readied his wad; Diego flexed his good right hand. The window came down, the spit flew and Pepe took a direct hit in the side of his pea-brained head.

The brothers simultaneously shouted "Touchdown!" while high-fiving, then exited the vehicle. Diego rounded the hood of the vehicle to approach the house. Pepe was small, but quick of temper; the wad of chew dripping down his tiny ear didn't help his mood, and he charged Diego with teeth bared.

Diego reacted instinctively, loosing a kick that lifted Pepe into the air and gave credence to the name "kickpup." Pepe flew with a certain tobacco-spattered grace in a splendid arc that cleared the open window on the vehicle, nailing Pablo in the chest. As Pepe slid to the ground, both boys shouted, "Touchdown!" then ducked quickly behind their father's truck to avoid being seen by Lucinda, who was busy setting the dining room table.

"Hey, Diego," said Pablo, "I think you killed baby Jesus."

"No problemo," said Diego, "Let's stuff him in the freezer till day after tomorrow."

Grandma kept a freezer in the cellar, for venison and fish stockpiled throughout the year to augment their winter meals when money was scarce. Supplies ran lowest at the end of winter/early spring when the boys were still out of work. It being the dead of winter, some room existed in the freezer, enough Diego reasoned, to hold a kicked pup.

"Good idea," said Pablo, "I'll grab some plastic, you grab the dog!"

"Ok, but hurry," said Diego, "I'm hungry."

Pablo slid furtively along the side of the truck, then darted into the open workshop to grab a freezer bag. Diego, meanwhile, inched towards Pepe's limp body. He grabbed the front paw of an outstretched leg and pulled, intending to slide the dog closer to the relative obscurity of the truck so he could handle it without being seen through the living room windows.

It's irrelevant if Pepe was employing his one-known trick or truly unconscious; what was relevant at the moment was the low rumbling in his chest, the bared teeth that had nothing to do with rigor mortis and the hand on his paw. Despite any disorientation he must have been suffering from his recent flight, he had the wherewithal to sink his ratty little teeth into the first two digits of Diego's good right hand, the one used to crank the window during a game of touchdown.

Again, Diego reacted instinctively; he howled and yanked his hand back, flinging a still attached Pepe into the side of the truck where, with a resounding crack, the dog slid, well and truly dead this time, to the ground. When Pablo returned, Diego sat innocently sucking his injured hand.

They spent very little time in bundling the truly-dead Pepe into a baggie and shoving him in the freezer having found a spot where sat a haunch of deer earlier that week. They washed and bandaged Diego's shredded fingers, then slipped into their chairs at the dinner table to eat and drink and discuss their afternoon spent standing in the unemployment line.

Lucinda was late for dinner, not having yet returned from looking for Pepe who'd now been gone for more than 30 minutes. His sleeper, which she assiduously removed each time she let him out, lay on the arm of their father's cloth-covered lazyboy with its doily-covered armrests. A look passed between the boys, and Pablo discreetly reached over to covertly remove the sleeper and tuck it under his butt for use at a later date. He farted to cover up the awkward movement.

Later that night, the boys dressed the half-frozen dog in the sleeper and reinserted him into his ziplocked coffin for preservation. Lucinda was beside herself with grief when all efforts to locate Pepe failed. Her pastor provided a shoulder for her to cry on, which provided him a vantage point from which to gaze upon the lace-lined swell of her heaving breasts.

Pepe remained encarcerated until Sunday night when the boys exhumed his body from its frozen tomb and laid him in the manger fifteen minutes to showtime. They then went to find their sister and break the news that Pepe had been found and was being readied for his debut. Lucinda insisted on seeing her Pepe, but the boys were able to convince her that he required a moment of calm to perform his trick, and was even then being prepped for his part in the upcoming pageant.

The pastor, eager to prolong his new-found position of providing Lucinda with physical and emotional comfort, agreed with the boys and gently guided Lucinda to the end of a long line of spectators gazing appreciatively upon the mostly-live reinactment of the birth of a hairy Christ.

When the last of the viewing audience had passed the manger scene, while Lucinda was safely in the can, Diego and Pablo whisked the Christ child away from the manger scene and out to the parking lot where they wedged his defrosting body under the rear wheel of the pastor's 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme stationwagon.

They returned to the church and waited for their sister to emerge. When she did, she made it clear that her Number One Priority was to shake the living daylights out of "that naughty little Pepe."

"That won't be hard," mumbled Pablo.

"What did you say?" asked Lucinda.

"We saw him prancing around the parking lot a minute ago," said Diego. "He stole the show and everyone's making a fuss over him."

The boys and Lucinda crossed the parking lot to join the pastor who was just then backing up - the pastor was driving Lucinda home and he was looking forward to "sharing" her "joy" at having found the dog. You can imagine his surprise, then, when he felt his tires rise over a bump and Lucinda started to scream.

Needless to say, the minister was forced to abandon all hope of ever gettin' with Lucinda, whose father gave her a mastiff to assuage her grief. The mastiff died two years later with singe marks on either side of its blocky head caused, said Diego and Pablo, by a lightning strike which they of course "witnessed." The brothers still play Touchdown, although Pablo nearly always wins; Diego has a spot of trouble cranking the window down with his arthritic right hand. And Pepe lies deep beneath the ground in a fleece-lined cardboard box.

Or so Lucinda thinks.