Dog Man and Puppy Boy
This is a piece of Flash Fiction. The topic: A person finds a die with a missing 6 alongside a quarter standing on end.
Millionaire playboy Jedediah Magillicutty power-walked down the street, waving to his unsuspecting neighbors as he continued his daily morning constitutional. Unknown to all but a select few, he is secretly Dog Man, the scourge of criminals everywhere.
Magillicutty paused as he noticed something unusual; he didn’t have anything like a Spider-sense, but he had the heightened intuition and investigatory instincts of a man who had been fighting crime for decades. A quick glance down and to his left and then, poof – like Keyser Soze, he was gone. Nearly breathless, he burst into the mansion, up the broad staircase, and into the library. “Cletus, c’mon.” Cletus, his youthful ward, smiled as he dropped his copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and quickly stood up.
“Hurry, something unusual and possibly sinister is afoot. It is time for us to suit up.” Cletus shook his head as Magillicutty ran to the bust of Ivan Pavlov that was sitting on a small table near a bookcase. As he pressed a little button under Pavlov’s chin, a hidden pocket door on the far wall opened to reveal the Canine Poles. They slid down into the Dog House.
Puppy Boy started to run toward the Hound Mobile but quickly stopped when he heard Dog Man yelp. “It did it again, my underwear is on backward. I was sure I had that thing fixed.” Puppy Boy examined himself and determined that everything on his crime-fighting suit was where it was supposed to be. “I think I am good, Dog Man. I’ll fire up the Hound Mobile if you want to fix your underwear.” Dog Man wiggled around in his suit, shrugged his shoulders, and raced toward the vehicle. They leaped into the Hound Mobile and blasted down the road. After about a minute, Dog Man jammed on the brakes.
Dog Man sniffed around for just a few seconds. There it was, a red die with a missing six next to a quarter standing on end. It was just where he had seen it during his walk. Dog Man adjusted his plastic nose, hiked up his Hong Kong Phooey leotards, stroked his chin, and…paused. He slowly got down on all fours to better examine the clues. Sniff, sniff. “The six is missing. What is special about that?” Puppy Boy thought: Um, well, it is a piece of dice candy, and someone licked six dots off of it, you moron. What he said was, “Gosh, 6 is the first perfect number; if you add up all its divisors – 1, 2, 3, then you get 6. Also, if you multiply 1 times 2 times 3, you get 6.”
“Right you are my canine companion. Now, what about the quarter?”
Puppy Boy knelt down to examine it. It was clear that it was standing on end because it was stuck in the seam between two concrete slabs. He thought: If it weren’t for that trust fund, I would yell at the top of my lungs that you are a damn idiot who needs serious medical attention. What he said was, “Golly Dog Man, I don’t know.”
Dog Man grew more and more agitated as he chewed on the clues. “6 is a perfect number and next to it a quarter. Yes, of course, 6 times a quarter is 25 fourths, right? Let’s go!”
“Wait…what?”
“C’mon. Let’s go!”
The Hound Mobile screamed down the road to number 25 Fourth Avenue, the home of Yvette Gregg, the actress who played Bitch Girl in their old TV show (the one aired during less enlightened times). Dog Man ran into the building, not noticing that Puppy Boy stayed behind. As Dog Man disappeared behind the heavy, red door, Puppy Boy pulled out his portable Mutt Phone and hit the Canine Alarm button.
Dog Man ran up the nine flights of stairs to Yvette’s apartment. He quickly knocked the door down with the sledgehammer he kept in his Doggy Belt. “Bitch Girl, where are you? Is everything OK?”
Yvette came running out of the kitchen, she was armed with a knife and a can of corn. She threw the can at Dog Man, hitting him in the shoulder.
“You idiot! I told you last time that if you ever showed up here again, I was going to call the police. Now get out!”
Dog Man took a quick look around the apartment and then backed out into the hall. He tried to put the door back in place, but he was going to need more tools than his Doggy Belt carried.
“I’ll have someone fix this for you.”
“Get out!”
As Dog Man reached the door and was about to head toward the Hound Mobile, a suspicious man came bounding down the sidewalk. He looked straight at Dog Man, poked him in the chest, gave him a dismissive wave, and then walked on. He was there only to create a diversion; the straightjacket was on Jedediah before he knew what hit him.
Four men boxed him up, tied him down, and loaded him into what appeared to be an ambulance. The whole thing was over in seconds. Puppy Boy waved as they drove off.
Cletus went home and threw his Puppy Boy costume in the garbage. He unlocked his personal wall safe, the one behind the large portrait of Lassie, and enjoyed what was left of a bag of dice candy. As he ate, he went over the documents the family lawyer had recently drawn up. Page after page of legal materials that gave him total control of all of Jedediah Magillicutty’s assets “in the event of said Magillicutty’s death or mental incapacity.”
Dog Man was never seen again. For years, the local authorities flashed the iconic Dog Bone signal into the night sky. After a decade with no response, hope began to fade. Eventually, the disillusioned people of Iriquois County lost all expectations. They all clenched their jaws and moved on with their lives.
Today, there is a garbage dump located in the southern part of the county. If you go there and poke around, you will find the remains of a large, rusted spotlight. Next to it is a broken Dog Man and Puppy Boy Big Wheel. That is all that remains of a bygone era, a time when the people of Iroquois County left their doors unlocked and stashed their money in their mattresses.
