Free A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel Page A

meant to convey stomping. He raised one of his gnarly old hands and pointed a finger at my dad.
    “You mark my words!” he said, then turned and strode back to his house, up down, up down, up the steps and back onto the padded chaise lounge where he spent his whole life. His sweet wife, Mary, was sitting on the padded glider. No one had ever seen her move more than her arms and her neck. Dad watched Reed’s slow progress, then waved at Mary in a neighborly way. She sweetly waved back.
    Our dogs barked all night that night. They were highly perturbed about something. I finally got up and went outside with a flashlight to see what was bothering them; it turned out to be a bat circling a streetlight, eating dinner. I went inside their pen and sat down with them for a few minutes, trying to calm them down, but Tiger was so pleased to see me that she shimmied and yipped and snorted until I feared she would hyperventilate.
    As I was closing the pen door to head back inside, I heard Reed call out from his porch, “You tell your dad I’ve had enough! This is the last time I’m going to tell him!”
    “Okay, Reed,” I yelled back. “Hello, Mary.”
    “Hello, sweetheart,” I heard from the darkness of their porch.
     
    THE NEXT MORNING I told my dad I was flat-out worried about what Reed might do to Kai and Tiger. Dad was casual, and said that he was working on it. He disappeared for a few hours, which was highly usual, and when he returned he was followed by a whole convoy of pickup trucks.
    Dad came home at dusk, and parked in front of our house. All the other drivers just stopped wherever there was room and began unloading the cargo they were carrying in their truck beds. There were wooden crates and metal boxes and carriers obviously made at home. One kennel was large enough to house a healthy calf. I stood on the sidewalk for a few minutes watching them, then ran inside to get my mom.
    “Mom! There’s about two hundred hunter-looking men in our yard with Dad!”
    Mom looked up from her book, granting me the unadulterated attention she usually reserved for really good science fiction.
    “What are they doing?”
    “They’re . . . I don’t know. There’s a bunch of them and they’ve all got boxes full of dogs.”
    Mom slowly lowered her book and began the process of removing herself from the deep indentation in the couch that she had been carving into it over the past twenty years.
    I ran back outside. Lined up all along the fence separating our yard from Reed’s were crates filled with coon hounds, thirty-six by my count. They were nervous and jittery, pacing and circling. Some of them were already working themselves up into a howling lather. My dad walked back and forth in front of them, trying to calm the most disturbed. The dogs’ owners left one by one without a word.
    Mom cleared her throat behind me, and Dad and I turned around at the same time.
    “May I ask?” She addressed Dad as if he had just made an announcement she found interesting, but not unexpected.
    “Ask away,” he said, shaking a Lucky Strike out of the pack.
    “What, exactly, are you doing?”
    “Dog-sitting.”
    “Dog-sitting. Are all of your colleagues going out of town at the same time?” My mom was patient as a saint, but she said the word
colleague
as if it were coated with the oil drained off a can of tuna fish.
    “Yep, that’s right,” Dad said, inhaling deeply on his cigarette. He had a habit of blowing all the smoke out through his nose, like a bull. “They’re going to a convention.”
    “Oh, a convention. Would that be for the Society of Drunken Philanderers?”
    “The SODP, we call it,” Dad said, nodding.
    “I see.” She stood still for a few more seconds, probably counting the dogs, then turned around and headed back toward the house.
    “Give me a hand here, Zip,” Dad said, uncoiling the hose, argument concluded. I helped him carry various buckets and pans out of his tool shed, which we filled with water and