The Dog Who Made It Better

1

Once upon a time, there was a brave, handsome, dazzling, and delightful dog who saved his entire family.

You look like you do not believe me, but it is true--except the entire part.

Maybe you do not like the beginning? Well, that is how stories are supposed to start: Once upon a time. Trust me; I have heard a lot of stories.

Perhaps you think it is unoriginal? Fine. I will change it. I am not in the mood to fight. Give me a second to think of a new start.

Now, hold still! And pay attention! There is going to be a quiz at the end.

Okay. I am ready. Here goes.

The Dog Who Made It Better. Take two.

2

My name is Doctor Blob. But I am not a doctor. And I am not a blob.

I am a dog. A Bernese mountain dog, to be precise.

I do not know why Good Boy named me Doctor Blob. He was only four then, so many of his actions did not make sense. But the day Mom brought me home, Good Boy picked me up and pressed his sticky face to mine and cried, “Doctor Blob!”

At least, that is what everybody thought he said. His mouth was stuffed with pea-nut butter crackers, though, so it was hard to tell. Maybe he actually said, “Tractor Slob!” or “Soccer Mob!” I do not know for certain.

What I do know is that bits of cracker fell from his mouth when he spoke. And that was beautiful, the way the crumbs sprayed through the air like confetti. Then Good Boy noticed one extra-peanut-buttery bit on the rug, so he bent down, picked it up, and placed it on my puppy tongue.

That was good, and he was a boy. So I named him Good Boy. See, when I name someone, the words are logical and true. Doctor Blob is not a phrase that ever would have escaped my lips.

Speaking of lips, I will now tell you what I look like. I will paint a picture with words so you can imagine my magnificent, furry form in your mind.

So, as I said at the beginning--well, at the original beginning--I am brave, hand-some, dazzling, and delightful. But when my story begins, I am not brave, O Pre-cious Person, not yet. No, my bravery came later, and this bravery, like all things worth obtaining, had a price.

But we are not at that part of the story.

Right now we are at the part where I describe myself. I would like you to imagine me in two poses: at rest and on the run.

First: Doctor Blob at rest. I am tricolored. My long fur is mostly black, but I have a white stripe down my forehead and a thick white patch on my chest. I have two brown eyebrows, and my lower limbs are also brown. Good Boy says I look like I am wearing gauntlets.

I am a large breed. My head comes up to Good Boy’s hips. The hip is not my favor-ite part of Good Boy. It is pointy and hard, and when I follow him, if he makes a sudden turn, his hip bone often knocks against my ear. But that is okay. You can dislike one part of somebody--such as their pinkie toe or hip bone--but still love their whole person. And I love Good Boy’s whole person very much.

Now, erase that pose from your mind and replace it with a new one: Doctor Blob on the run. I like to run, and I have always been very fast. When people see me, they stop to marvel at my speed and agility.

Mom is who taught me to run. Every morning after Dad left for work and Good Boy and Nina got on the school bus, Mom would put Pip in the stroller, and the three of us would run down the road. Mom did not care if it was hot or cold or raining or snowing. Every day, she ran, and I was beside her.

“What’s a little rain, right, Doctor B.?” she would say as the water slid down the bridge of her nose.

“A little rain is nada. A little rain is zilch. A little rain is nothing to us runners!” I would cry, and then I would do my best to match Mom’s pace.

Running down the road with Mom was my favorite, but because Mom only ran once a day, while I preferred to run at least two hundred ninety-seven times, I had to come up with an alternate location. So my second-favorite place to run was in the cornfield behind my house. In the summer, I ran down the rows, between the stalks. It was like I was in a jungle, with the green vegetation all around me. Be-fore the Very Bad Thing happened, that was what I pretended. Running, I would imagine I was gliding through the jungle: Doctor Blob, lion. King of the Dogs.

But then Good Boy told me something. He said lions do not live in jungles. And then he said lions are not dogs. He said a lion is a type of C-A-T.

I know. That is ridiculous.

Lions are dogs. They are big and powerful, with thunderous roars. They are not small, weak, tiny-voiced C-A-Ts. Good Boy is wrong about that. Sometimes I have to remind myself that Good Boy is only twelve, which is still just a pup in human terms. There are things he does not know yet.

There is so much I want to tell you, O Precious Person, but when you tell a story, you have to put things in the right order. If you do not, the story will not make sense. So, for example, before I tell you about the wishing well, I have to tell you about the children.

There are three in my family. Good Boy is the oldest. He is tall and skinny, like a broomstick. His skin, when I lick it, tastes like cookie dough, and his hair is sandy brown and wavy. It is always sticking up. I do not think he combs it.

His real name is not Good Boy. His real name is too horrible to say because it ends with the sound a C-A-T makes. I never say his real name. I try not to even think about it. But I will say it for you, O Precious Person. I will say it one time.

Ready? Listen carefully. I am going to whisper.

Bartholomew.

There. I said it. And I shall never say it again. Please do not try to make me.

Even though a dog should not have favorites and should love everyone in his family equally, I do have a favorite. My favorite is Good Boy. I am always at his side: sit-ting at the dinner table, playing in the yard, working on homework. Sometimes he says to me, “Do you have to follow me everywhere? Like, can’t I just go to the bathroom by myself?” But I know he is joking. He likes my company.

Good Boy also likes writing stories in his spiral notebook and reading magazines about wilderness adventures and rescuing people trapped in cars. He wears a utili-ty belt around his waist and a red bandanna around his forehead. He knows how to light a fire without a match. He can use a hammer and a saw and build amazing things out of wood. I will tell you about one clever thing he made to solve a prob-lem. But not yet.

First, I have to tell you about Nina. Nina means “girl,” in case you did not know. And that is what Nina is: a girl who is eight years old. She is smaller than Good Boy, but she is tough. When I run and forget to pay attention and knock into her, Nina does not fall down. She stands right where she is and puts her hands on her hips and yells, “Watch where you’re going, you big oaf!”

Oaf, I think, is shorthand for dazzling and delightful dog.

Nina has wavy, sandy-brown hair, like Good Boy, but hers is long instead of short. She is missing her two front teeth, so she looks like a jack-o’-lantern when she smiles. Maybe that is why her skin tastes like pumpkin pie.

Nina wears a rabbit’s foot tied to a cord around her neck. The foot is purple, but I have never seen a purple rabbit, so I do not know where she got it. Nina says the rabbit’s foot brings her luck. She said that even after the Very Bad Thing hap-pened. She said it after the Swings of Destruction, too. If the Very Bad Thing and the Swings of Destruction are luck, well, perhaps Nina does not know what luck is.

There is one thing I do not like about Nina. It is this: She does not call me by my proper name. My name, as I told you, is Doctor Blob, but Nina calls me Blobby.

“Oh, Blobby,” she says when I greet her after school, “how good to see you.”

“Oh, Blobby,” she sighs when I tuck her into bed, “this has been a very busy day.”

“My name is not Blobby,” I tell her. “You must call me by my proper name.” But Nina does not listen. I think it is because of her missing teeth. The empty space in her mouth makes it hard for her to hear. That is my medical opinion.

The youngest child in my family is two. His name is Phineas John-Glenn Gregory. That is too big a name for such a small human, so I call him Pipsqueak instead. And even that is too long, so mostly I just call him Pip.

Pip is chubby and tastes like bananas. He has never had a haircut, which means his hair is so unruly that it looks like a furry animal died atop his head. Pip does not know how to use the pronoun I, and his favorite verb is want. Pip wants everything. He especially wants what someone else has.

“Me want stick!” he says, and pulls it from my mouth.

“Me want orange peel!” he cries, before I have a chance to sniff it.

“Me want dirty sock!” He rips it out from under my nose.

“Don’t worry,” Good Boy tells me. “Phineas will be better when he’s older.”

I make my I-trust-you-Good-Boy face, but in my heart, I am not sure this is true.

The worst thing about Pip is how slow he is. He is very, very slow. It is his legs that are the problem. They are short and fat. And even though he has had them for two years, he still is not very good at using them.

After the Very Bad Thing, he refused to let Good Boy or Nina push him in the stroller, so walking into town with Pip took forever. We would get halfway there, and Pip would start to cry because his short, fat legs were all worn out. “Me want go home!” he would say, and sit down in the ditch along the road.

So Good Boy would grab his arms and Nina would grab his legs, and they would haul him like a sack of potatoes all the way home. And then the three of them would be grumpy for the rest of the day and would not want to do anything fun, like search for dead birds or dig for ancient artifacts.

That is how it was every single time--until Good Boy built the Pip Porter.

One day I found him in the garage with some old bicycle wheels and pieces of lumber.

“What are you making?” I asked.

“The problem with a stroller is that Pip thinks it’s for babies,” Good Boy explained while he attached a wheel to one of the boards.

“Pip is a baby,” I replied. “In fact, he is the biggest baby I know.”

“The trick is to make a stroller that’s not a stroller. You see what I mean?”

I did not see what he meant. What I saw were old, bent bike wheels attached to a rotting two-by-four. But I did not want Good Boy to know that, so I said, “Oh yes, it is all quite clear. How brilliant.”

And it was brilliant when it was finished. Because what Good Boy had made was a cart. He pulled it into the driveway, picked Pip up, and set him inside it.

“What do you think?” Good Boy asked.

“Me go fast!” Pip cried.

Good Boy gave him a high five. Then he shot me a wink. “See? A stroller that’s not a stroller,” he whispered.

“Good Boy, you are spectacular.” I licked his cookie-dough fingers.

Nina put her hands on her hips. “Who’s going to pull the cart?”

“I’ll attach it to my bike,” Good Boy said.

“What?” I said. I wanted to be the one to pull the cart. Pulling carts is what Berne-se mountain dogs were born to do.

Luckily, Pip said, “Me want Doctor Blob pull me!”

“Hurray!” I cried.

“I’ll get some rope,” said Good Boy.

Nina shook her head. “He’s going to need a helmet.”

“Who? Doctor Blob?” Good Boy asked.

“Don’t be silly. Phineas, not Blobby.”

Then we all stood there, perplexed, because we did not have a helmet for Pip.

“Wait!” I told them. “I know!”

I ran back into the garage, where a cardboard box full of junk was stored under a table. I rummaged through the box, throwing items onto the floor--plastic ham-burger, rubber frog leg, broken broom handle--until finally I found it. I raced back to the children and dropped it at their feet.

“Oh, Blobby, that’s not a helmet.” Nina sighed.

Good Boy picked it up. “This is a wig. A princess wig, to be precise.” He looked at me sadly, like it was a great disappointment to have a dog who did not know the difference between a princess wig and a helmet.

O Precious Person, I hope you have never felt such humiliation. I hung my head in shame.

But then Pip--greedy, wonderful Pip--said, “Me want wig!” And he grabbed it from Good Boy and pulled it down over his chubby head.

He looked absurd, I must tell you. The wig was blond and curly and hung past his knees.

Nina burst out laughing.

“Well, I guess it’s better than nothing,” Good Boy said. He looped a rope through the cart handles and then fastened it around my middle.

And then we took off. Me with the Pip Porter, Pip with the princess wig, Good Boy and Nina with their bicycles. How we flew down State Route 721--I like a lion, and the children my frisky cubs.

We were racing to the best-smelling place on Earth: Chuck’s Chicken.