A Story for the Pups
you've managed to get into a confrontation with a hyper, dummy; now what?
“So there I was, walking down West Main street, carrying this BIG darn stack of soda boxes,” the old fox recounted. “back when I was helpin’ at Ray’s Pub, before the place closed down. All together, they had to weigh 50-, 60lbs. Big damn boxes, could hardly see over the top of them. So there I am lugging these boxes down from the supply store, and I walk in to something. Lost the top few boxes. BAM, ten bucks of soda on the ground. That was a lot of soda back then! First thought was ‘Ray’s gonna have my ass’, but then I get to thinking what I hit. Thought I’d hit a lamp post for how sturdy it was, but I’d a’ seen it if it were that tall. So I hear ‘Watch where you’re goin, ya jerk!’ come out’a whatever I just hit, so I try and get the rest of the boxes down, and this poor wolf lass is just COVERED in soda. She got the orange soda boxes all over her, and I just crack up! Everything about the poor girl was orange now, and she’s FUMING at me. I just about topple over, so I’m leaning up against the wall of the post office building laughin’ my behind off, and she’s just staring at me with her fancy white sweater all ruined, her fur drenched. I’m about to apologize when somethin’ starts to change about the girl. She was a short lil’ thing when I ran in to her, her ears only just about up to my neck, but when I look back, her loose sweater ain’t looking so loose anymore. Her arms were starting to look like like one of the brawlers that fought on the weekends down at the docks, big with some real meat on ‘em, even through the sweater. But it wasn’t just her arms, it was all of her! Her legs were gettin’ thicker, and her whole chest, and back and everything, just blowing up. So I think ‘What the hell is up with this dame?’ and before I know it, that orange-soaked sweater is filled to the brim with beef and some real serious knockers, too. Her sweater starts to rip, and her skirt’s absolutely filled with her heinie and legs, so that starts to go, and before we know it, she’s in the nude, on Main street, in the middle of the day! We’re right next to Ray’s, so half out’a fear, and half wantin’ to help, I hop down the alley to where we kept some of the barrels for the pub under a tarp. When I got back to her, her arms were as thick as the Ray’s darn jukebox! I thought... I KNEW I was gonna get beat to death and back when I got back to the front, but there she was, trying to cover up with just her hands and those hams of forearms. She was steamin’ at me, but she says to me ‘The hell you doin’ with that thing?’ so I tell ‘er ‘Might want ta’ try using it to cover up, seeing as that sweater ain’t helpin’ no more.’ So she and I squeeze down the alleyway and I help her put the damn thing on like an apron! So we get to talkin’, and she asks if I work at the pub. I tell her, ‘Yeah, I work the stockroom for the place.’ She’s still livid about the whole sweater thing, and she’s still got a good bit ‘a orange on her, so she ain’t talking that much. I get her all squared away with the tarp, and she heads off to wherever she was going, as decent as we could get her. It took every bit of the two of us to cover her up though, she could hardly bend her arms for her muscles, and hardly look below her ‘cause ‘a the boulders on her chest.” He gestured as if struggling to hold a pair of something large and round to his chest.
The fox took a sip of his drink and checked the clock. Dan and Marlene should be back soon. This might have been the first time the pups had heard this one, but Dan and Marlene had heard it before, many a time. Dan and Marlene had left the kids at his house for the weekend, and were due back soon, so he opted to pass the time with storytelling, and they were having a blast listen to ol’ grandpa ramble. The habitual trip to the movies and the town’s historical first ice cream store weren’t hurting either, but he had to come up with some way to make the kids want to come over every now and again.
He continued, “So I’m in the back of Ray’s and one of the bartenders comes back and he says to me, ‘Hey, there’s someone up front lookin’ for ya.’ So I go up to the bar and there she is, just like the first time I saw her, new sweater, new dress, just as short as she was when I dropped a half a pallet of soda on the poor girl. So there I am sweating, thinking she’s gonna blow up like a balloon and beat me to a pulp, and she says ‘Looks like ya’ remember me!’, so I say ‘Hard to forget a chick that ya’ dropped a few boxes of orange soda on, specially with the tarp and the sweater and all that.’ She says, ‘I wanted to thank you for that. Nobody’s done that sorta’ thing for me before. Plus, coming back after something like that takes some real balls.’ I says, ‘I still feel like a schmuck for ruinin’ your clothes with that stuff.’ So I reach in my pocket, just got paid, and I figure what she was wearin’ when I dropped the soda on her had to be what, thirty bucks? That would’a bought a damn lot back then. Her clothes had looked nice, and so I try to fork over what I got in my pocket, so my entire week’s pay and as much as I had left to try and do the right thing. I tell ‘er ‘Hey, I know it ain’t much, but I still wrecked your getup. I figure I owe you.’ I’m holdin’ the cash out to her, and she closes her hand and says ‘How’s about you come with me instead? I’m on my way to Darlies down a few blocks.’ I’m thinkin’, ‘Why’s this broad want me to come with for shopping? Last time I saw her I dropped sodas on her and laughed.’ But I don’t want ta’ see her bad side again, so I tell ‘er sure, and I get the bartender to cover for me for the rest’a the day. We head down Church to where the old shops used to be, and we go in to Darlies, she’s pulling me along like a kid in a candy shop. We’re looking at hats, we’re looking at dresses, and sweaters, and I’m thinking ‘What is this chick up to?’ She grabs some of the stuff she’s found, goes up to the counter, she hops down to the back of the store, and comes back all dressed up, and she asks me ‘Well? What’cha think?’ She looked real good. Everything just right with the way she kept her fur and the color a’ her eyes, so I tells her ‘You’re lookin’ like a real golden girl.’ She gets all blushy and stuff, and so she bounces back to change and I go to the counter and tell the guy we’ll be taking that stuff she’s got, and hand him the cash. She just about used up every nickel I had, but she was lookin’ like a doll in all that and like I said, I owed her no matter how ya’ slice it.”
Paul loved this story, and he loved telling it.
“So after that, we go down to Barry’s for a burger. Just the one, ‘cause she used just about everything I had to get the new clothes. Finally, I get around to telling her my name. So I says, ‘My name’s Paul. You got a name?’ ‘Course I got a name,’ she says with half a burger in her mouth. ‘Gonna tell me what it is?’ I ask ‘er, ‘Call me Dannie.’ ‘What kinda ‘a name is that for a dame?’ ‘Keep your pants on, guy. It’s short for Danielle.’”
The smallest of the pups piped up. “Oh, like grandma?” “Bingo!” Paul said. “But you said she was smaller than you?” another asked. “Hold your horses, squirts. I’m tryin’a tell you about it.”
Paul continued, “So when she and me had been seeing each other for a while, we were thinking ‘Hey, maybe we found the one for real.’ So when a guy and a gal like each other like that, they start goin’ out to dinner and watching movies and gettin’ real close to make sure they’re the one for them.”
One of the pups whispered to the other, “Did mom and dad do that too?” The other pup shrugged.
“It was two years or somethin’ before we had another problem like the soda problem. We were at this nice place in downtown eatin’ supper, and this other guy’s actin’ like he owns the place. Got a chick of his own on his arm, so Dannie and I are sittin in a booth by the window, and the guy comes up and says to us, ‘I think you’s sittin’ in our seats.’ I tell ‘em, ‘Sorry, fella, we’re eatin’ here.’ He don’t like that, so he says again real mean-like, ‘I don’t think you’s heard me. I says, you’re sittin’ in OUR seats.’ Dannie don’t like that one bit, so she starts to mouth off at ‘em, and he just starts laughing. So he goes, (don’t tell your ma and pop I told you this,) he goes ‘You think you’re gonna tell me off bitch?’ and then he grabs her arm and tries to pull her out of the seat, and now she’s pissed. So I’m sittin’ there thinkin’, am I gonna need to go grab a cop or somethin’? Is this guy gonna hurt Dannie? But then it hits me, you can tell under her clothes that she’s bulkin’ up quick, so that guy’s got it comin’ for him and he doesn’t even know. The guy can’t budge her, and now she’s so beefy that her clothes are just BARELY holdin’ in there. So this guy tries to back off, but she ain’t lettin’ him go. So she drags him to the door and tosses ‘em straight across the street, he hits the wall and he’s out cold. His gal friend already hit the road, and so we got back to eatin’. We’re talkin’ to the owner, Henry Barrett, real swell guy, and he tells us that guy had been harassin’ folks left and right like he owned the place. Said we did him a real big service gettin’ him out a’ there. I tell ya’ what, when we got back to the apartment BOY was she hot and bothered by that.”
“Dad! Don’t tell our kids that!” Dan shouts, walking in the door and hearing the familiar story about to become much less child-friendly. Dannie, having left Paul to entertain the pups with his own devices, popped out of the kitchen. The now-grayed wolfess happily greeted her son and daughter-in-law. The smallest member of the family by a large margin, Paul sat in his fuzzy recliner, which looked almost comically small next to the more robust seating. Dan took after his father in courting Marlene, a similarly-large woman of coyote descent, and had inherited more than his fair share of mass from his mother. she attributed size to his perpetual consumption of milk during his childhood, which Dannie was more than well-equipped to provide. Having continued the family tradition, even the pups, sitting cross-legged on the ground, rose above Paul’s recliner, but mostly by ears and traps.
“So, you were askin’ why she was smaller than me.” One of the pups nodded. “Times were different then. A heck of a lot harder to get clothes in her size, so when she’d go out, she’d squeeze down best she could to look all neat and presentable like.” “...and if I had walked around like this, your grandfather might not have spilled soda on me,” she chimed in. She leaned over and gave the fox a kiss on the top of his own graying head. She somehow managed to avoid crushing the fox and his recliner with her mass of breastflesh and muscle, but having been with her in much more hazardous situations (most of them in the bedroom), he didn’t give it a second thought.
-loW