Christopher Moore - A Dirty Job

“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?”

“Well, it’s just a half day right now, she’s only in kindergarten. And you have to promise them a cookie.”

“There’s always a price to be paid.” The Emperor pulled a frozen chicken out of the box. “May I?”

“Please.” Charlie waved him on.

The Emperor tossed the chicken to Mohammed, who chomped it down in a single bite.

“My, that is satisfying,” said the Emperor.

“That’s nothing,” Charlie said. “If you feed them mini—propane cylinders they burp fire.”

Fuck puppets,” Ray said out of nowhere.

He was on the stair-climbing machine next to Charlie and they were both sweating and staring at a row of six, perfectly tuned female bottoms aimed at them from the machines in front of them.

“What was that?” Charlie said.

“Fuck puppets,” Ray said. “That’s what they are.”

Ray had talked Charlie into coming to his health club with him under the pretense of getting him into the flow of being single. Actually, because Ray was an ex-cop, watched people more closely than really was healthy, had too much time on his hands, and didn’t get out much himself, the real reason he asked Charlie to come work out with him was so he could get to know him outside of the shop. He’d noticed a strange pattern that had developed since Rachel’s death, of Charlie showing up with people’s property shortly after their obituary appeared in the paper. Because Charlie kept to himself socially and was secretive about what he did when he was out of the shop, not to mention all the little animals that ended up dead in Charlie’s apartment, Ray suspected that he might be a serial killer. Ray decided to try to get close to his boss and find out for sure.

“Keep your voice down, Ray,” Charlie said. “Jeez.” Since Ray couldn’t turn his head, he was talking right at the women’s butts.

“They can’t hear me; look, every single one has on a headset.” He was right, every one of them was talking on a cell phone. “You and I are invisible to them.”