Jeff Strand - A Bad Day for Voodoo

I threw up. More than once.

I was so dizzy that I didn’t really even care what the dog was doing. It was like the time when I was a kid, when I got on the chair in my dad’s office and just spun and spun and spun and spun until I fell off onto the floor and hit my head and had to go to the hospital, except a million times worse. I didn’t believe in interdimensional hyperspace vortex portals, but if I did, this felt like the way to open one.

I tried to push myself up, but my body said, “Nah, I don’t think so,” and kept me down.

When was this going to stop?

Maybe it was never going to stop. Maybe I was going to spend the rest of my life in this dizzy, spinny, pukey state.

The dog hadn’t yet ripped out my throat or apparently the throat of the doll. My initial thought was that he wasn’t a very good guard dog if those throats remained intact, but at the same time, I certainly wouldn’t be stealing anything from the junkyard on my way out, so maybe he was perfectly fine. I’d figure it out later when the Tilt-A-Whirl in my brain stopped.

The world was spinning a little less quickly. Or else I was just holding on to the earth better.

I thought I heard somebody calling my name, although they may have also been calling for Orville Redenbacher.

Okay, the planet was definitely slowing down. I could make out some shapes. I couldn’t identify these shapes, but at least now I knew there were shapes in my general vicinity.

“Tyler?”

Who was that? A leprechaun?

“Tyler!”

It sounded like a girl. I hoped it was a hot leprechaun.

Now there was an annoying clanging sound, as if somebody were rattling a chain-link fence. I tried to remember if I’d seen a chain-link fence recently. There was that one around the junkyard where that dog had stolen my voodoo doll, but that was years ago, wasn’t it?

I could see that there were colors attached to these shapes. One of the shapes was a black panting one that kind of looked like a mean dog. The other looked like a pile of scrap metal.

Junkyard. I was lying in the junkyard.

“Tyler!”

Yep, it was a girl. Adam? No, wait, Adam wasn’t a girl. I knew that voice. Kelley.

I looked over. Kelley was standing outside of the fence, maybe ten feet away. Or two hundred feet away. It was still hard to calculate distance.

“Are you okay?” Kelley asked.

“Not great.”

“Can you get up?”

With some effort, I got myself into a sitting position. My head felt like it weighed about forty pounds, but I was finally able to hold it upright.

“Do you think you can climb the fence?” Kelley asked.

I studied the fence. Maybe with an escalator I could.

“Do I have to do it now?” I asked. It sounded like somebody else was talking.

“Tyler, I need you to focus. You have to get out of there.”

“The doggie has the doll.”

“I know. We have to figure out how to get it back from him.”

“Do you have any dog biscuits?” I asked.

“No.”

“Do you have any chew toys?”

“No.”

“What about a tranquilizer dart?”

“Try to make friends with it,” Kelley suggested.

I turned my attention to the dog. Though it was a big, scary- looking Rottweiler, it wasn’t really growling or anything. It was just lying on the ground with the doll between its front paws. It could probably take the head off the doll in one bite. Actually, it could probably swallow the doll whole. What would happen to me then? Would my real body be sizzled by stomach acids while the doll made its way through the dog’s digestive tract?

I supposed there would be a lot of fame associated with being “the kid who was digested by a dog without actually being eaten by the dog.” But I’d be dead and unable to enjoy it.

Now the dog growled. It was a long, low growl. My family had never owned dogs, so I wasn’t entirely sure how to translate this. My cat’s communication was simple: Any noise it made meant either “Feed me” or “I hate you.” Though I knew enough about dogs to realize that the growling didn’t mean it wanted to be stick-fetching buddies, I didn’t know how close it was to biting the doll in half.

I put out my hand. “Hey, boy.”

The dog did not stop growling. I wished I had something to toss it as a treat. Unfortunately, I hadn’t brought either of my toes.

Dammit! I should’ve asked Adam to get them for me! They could be sewn back on!

“Who’s my precious baby?” I asked. “Who’s my lovey lovey wiggle wuggums?” I didn’t say this in the standard baby-talk voice, which probably reduced its impact. The dog looked at me as if to say.. .actually, I have no clue what the dog was thinking. Nothing good, I assume.

“Do you need me to climb over and help?” Kelley asked.

The fact that she hadn’t already climbed over the fence to help made it clear that she didn’t really want to do it. I didn’t blame her. At this point, I wouldn’t blame her if she lassoed me with a steak necklace and fed me to that beast.

“No, it’s cool,” I said. “I’ve got this covered.” I crouched down, putting myself at eye level with the ferocious monster. “What’s your name, buddy?”

There was a name tag on his collar, so I crept forward a couple of feet, v-e-r-y slowly, to get a better look.

The dog’s name was Tyler.

“Hey, we’ve got the same name,” I said. I gave the dog a great big friendly smile to show him that we were awesome friends and I meant him no harm. “That’s pretty cool, don’t you think?”

I’m not sure why I thought Tyler the Dog would give a crap that we had the same name. His growling continued. My hands were sweating like a zookeeper in a sauna (or, I guess, anybody in a sauna—I don’t know why I singled out zookeepers), so I wiped them off on my jeans and then crawled forward a bit more.

The growling definitely got louder.

“Maybe you should just leave it,” said Kelley.

Not a chance. If I was going to go after gun-toting thugs to get the doll back, I sure wasn’t going to leave it in the jaws of a ginormous dog. One of our neighbors had a dog, and I’d occasionally seen the white cotton innards of its stuffed toys scattered throughout the yard.. .and that was a wiener dog. If I didn’t get the voodoo doll back, I had no doubt that Tyler would shred it down to the individual threads.

I crept a bit closer.

The growling got even louder.

I crept back a bit.

The growling didn’t get quieter.

“You know, Tyler, we’re alike in more ways than just our name,” I said to the dog, not quite sure where I was going with this yet. I thought about it for a second. Nope, nowhere to go with that line of logic, so I switched gears. “If you give me back the doll, I will find you the biggest, juiciest strip of bacon that has ever been gouged out of a pig, and we’ll—”

“What do you think you’re doing?” asked a gruff voice behind me.

What was I doing exactly? Having an English-language conversation with a dog in an effort to persuade him to give me back a doll. It’s probably good that I was interrupted.

I glanced over my shoulder. It was an old man in a brown jumpsuit with lots of grease spots on it. He wasn’t pointing a shotgun at me, but from the looks of him, I suspected that he had shotguns hidden all over this place for easy access.

“Your dog has my doll,” I said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“That’s kind of what you asked, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Okay, maybe not. Your dog has my doll, so I’m trying to get it back.”

“You need to move along. You’re not welcome here, you thieving bastard.”

“I’m not thieving anything! I’m trying to get back what your dog thieved. Stole. What your dog stole.”