“Any reason you’re doing that?” Brett asked. “You don’t stuff them, do you?”
“No. Ranchers around here hate ’em. Always digging holes for stock to get their legs into, and to keep them from shooting and poisoning the little boogers, someone came up with this device. I bought one, modified it to suit me. Church offerings weren’t that good, so I needed a bit of a profession.”
“Sucking prairie dogs out of the dirt is a profession?” Brett asked.
Herman grinned. “As a matter of fact, it is.”
“Seems to me a device like that would cost more than it was worth,” I said. “You aren’t a rancher, are you?”
“No, but I got the dogs on my land.”
“What you going to do with all them dogs when you get ’em?” Leonard asked.
“Sell ’em,” Herman said.
“Who buys them?” Red said.
“Japanese are a big market. They pay up to five hundred dollars for the little suckers.”
“Do they eat ’em?” Leonard asked.
“Oh, no,” Herman said. “They make pets out of them.”
“Hell,” Leonard said, “for five hundred dollars them little suckers ought to clean your house and turn down the sheets.”
“Just pets,” Herman said. “There’s Yankees do the same, only they pay about half that price.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Leonard said. “Now I’ve heard of everything.”
“Watch this,” Herman said, and flipped a switch on the device. The motor whined, there was a sound like someone clearing their nose, and suddenly, riding up the transparent hoses, speeding along like bullets, came dark shapes.
“Wow!” Red said.
“Yeah,” Herman said. “I think we got three of them that time.”
“Christ,” Brett said. “Don’t that hurt them little dudes?”
“Just ruffles their hair, lady,” Herman said. “And I doubt Our Savior enjoys his name being exploded like that for the sake of prairie dogs.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Brett said, “I was him I’d want to take a look at something like this.”
Herman smiled, walked us around to the other side of the machine, showed us a transparent plastic cage where the dogs had been delivered. There were three all right, and they looked puzzled as all get out. I suppose I would too, I was sitting in my living room, was suddenly sucked up a hose and into a plastic container. I reckoned prairie dogs were developing a rather interesting set of stories about alien abduction.
“Well, ain’t they the cutest little things,” Brett said. “You don’t just box ’em up and send them to Japan, do you? I mean, I can’t see a bunch of them dogs in a box with air holes cut in the sides.”
“I sell them to a distributor,” Herman says. “He has them shipped. Big business, actually. After everyone gets their cut, I make about a hundred and fifty a dog. Most of the time. Sometimes the market’s a little less.”
“Looks to me like you’d run out of dogs,” Leonard said.
Herman waved his hand expansively. “This is seven hundred acres, and it’s all mine,” Herman said. “Got it for a song.”
I looked out over the land. Bleak and gray and ugly, with splotches of mesquite. I hoped he got it for a short song. A ditty maybe.
“Place is riddled with dogs,” Herman said. “I farm ’em. I come out here and watch ’em some afternoons. Kind of educational, really, watching them pop out of their holes and look around. You get so you know when the babies are grown up enough to suck out of the ground. I don’t like to get no little bitty dogs. I want them to grow up. Then I’ll suck ’em up. If I was to run out of dogs here, there’s plenty of ranchers be glad to see me coming with this baby.”
Herman detached the cage from the vacuum and slid a perforated top over it. He sat it in the bed of the pickup. The dogs rose up and pressed against the plastic and pushed their noses to it.
The vacuum was hooked up to a little motorized device. Herman fired it up with a jerk of a cord, sort of steered it to the pickup by holding on to the back of it. At the pickup, he cut the motor back with a switch, pulled a wide piece of plyboard out of the bed of the pickup and fixed it so one end was in the truck and the other slanted to the ground. Pushing the throttle switch, steering the device with his hands, Herman guided it up the ramp and into the truck and killed the motor. He pushed the board up alongside it, said, “Y’all climb in somewhere.”
Leonard got in front beside Herman, leaving me and Red and Brett to ride in the bed. We sat with our feet dangling over the open tailgate and Herman drove us slowly to the church, bouncing along the hard ground.
“I don’t know why Leonard didn’t let me sit up front with Herman,” Red said.
“I do,” I said. “We don’t want you telling your brother a line of shit before we got time to lay things out.”
“Don’t think ’cause you’re with some family,” Brett said, “that everything is hokey-dokey. You’re still our prisoner, and we still got guns under our shirts, and I’m just dyin’ to hit you on the other side of your little punkin’ head.”
“There’s that little stuff again,” Red said. “There’s just no peace from it.”
18
