Page 65 of Brett and Rowdy
This was one of the things.
Rowdy’s head tilted. “You sure you don’t want a beer?”
“I’m pretty sure if I’m going to say hello to Happy the Llama, I shouldn’t be drunk while I’m doing it.”
“Dude, if one beer gets you drunk, you’re in trouble.” Rowdy’s phone rang again, and he answered it. “Yeah?”
“Daddy!” Madison’s voice rang out over the speaker. “Happy’s sheep are out again!”
“Actually, I think they’re in again.”
“I’m already in my pajamas. Can you call Eduardo?”
“I did already.”
“Good deal, thanks, Daddy. I’ll look into anti-llama/sheep fences tomorrow.”
“You do that.” He hung up the phone and rubbed the back of his neck. “That girl. If they made churro sheep-proof fences, we would have them.”
“When I figure out what the hell that means, I’ll come up with a weighty reply,” Brett said, paraphrasing one of his very favorite movies of all time.
“I told you what churro sheep are, right?”
“You did, and I keep seeing things like fair food sheep with cinnamon and sugar sprinkled all over their wool in my head. So it still doesn’t help. I’ll meet the demon sheep tomorrow. Right now, I have to convince Mr. Mann that the apocalypse has not shown up in a furry suit.”
Rowdy chuckled. “Let’s detour so I can show you where the dog cookies are.”
At the word cookies, they were suddenly surrounded by German shepherds and a very interested Mr. Mann.
Rowdy blew out a breath. “Aren’t you yahoos supposed to be out there herding sheep? Isn’t that your job?”
Brett loved that Rowdy talked to his dogs like they were people, just like he talked to Mr. Mann. It gave them something else in common, as small as it was.
“Seriously, babe, let’s hand out cookies, and I’ll take you and Mr. Mann to your room so you can get settled a little bit. Well, my room, like I said. We’ll put Mr. Mann’s bed in there if you want.”
“Yeah, that’ll work great. I may have to go to Walmart to get him a couple more for the rest of the house. That way, he won’t be laying out in the middle of hallways trying to trip people and get cookies.”
Mr. Mann howled at the second mention of cookies, and they both laughed their butts off. While they distributed the dog biscuits, he heard a whistle outside and a furious little spate of barking. When Brett glanced out the window, there was a border collie out there working sheep, with an older-looking Mexican man just sort of standing back at the fence line and whistling instructions. It was fascinating to watch, and he had never seen anything like it except once when his grandpa had taken him up to the highland games in North Carolina where there had been a sheep-herding competition.
It was really interesting to see it in a practical application like this, and he had to admit that churro sheep and the llama looked way more contentious than the gentle, bleating sheep had seemed in North Carolina.
He said so to Rowdy, who just waved a hand in the air. “You know out here everything wants to bake your bones in the sun or abrade you with sand or spike you with cactus or cut you with something or bite you or sting you or whatever. I guess you gotta be tougher than wherever those sheep come from. The ones you have in North Carolina or South Carolina or wherever.”
“I think those sheep mostly come from England in the great scheme of things.”
“I think so too. Anyway, these guys are specifically bred for this climate and for the land we have here. So they’re a little nuts.”
Once everyone had been cookied, Rowdy started off to the bedroom again. Brett called for Mr. Mann to follow him. He wanted the old butthead to see where everything was in the house, and also where he was putting the bed and the suitcase so Mr. Mann wouldn’t worry about it. Basset hounds tended to worry over things.
“Wow, this is really comfy,” Brett said when they made it to the bedroom. He looked around curiously because this was Rowdy’s private space. The bed dominated the room, and he thought Rowdy really was something of a creature of comfort. The huge California king with the intricately carved headboard looked like maybe it was Spanish, and there were warm Navajo rugs on the floor, and rough-hewn furniture much like the front room filled the place. A bench at the end of the bed was padded so no one whacked a knee on it. A pair of nightstands with some iron lamps on them. He could do better than those. And once again, all of the artwork was nice, but it was super generic. These were all Native American-looking weavers and shepherds, but it was all prints in store-brought frames.
“We really need to up your art game,” he told Rowdy. “Give you something tactile, something you can touch every so often when you go by. Maybe some glass or some metal sculptures. I saw this one in a gallery that was fish, and they were all on little posts. When you got a magnet and brushed it over the wall installation, the fish would all turn different directions.”
Rowdy’s face lit up, the smile shining through like the sun through the clouds. “Oh wow. That would rock so hard. I can imagine that!”
And there it was again.
Why he was here.
