9

Larry

Cathy took me out of the backpack and I stood beside her and watched as Tom, looking as if someone was pushing him, managed to make it across the stage. Then he sat down at the piano and played the introduction to our song.

The audience was restless since Clementine was very late; a bunch of people were already moving up the aisles toward the exits. But they must have recognized the song Tom was playing, because when they heard it some of them turned back to applaud and a few others moved back to their seats. It looked like that made Tom feel a little better. I actually saw him sitting up straighter.

And then he was singing our song. Just the way he had been for weeks. Just like I heard him singing it in the shower earlier that night. He was doing fine. Really fine, in fact, until he got to the bridge.

Oh, no! He forgot the words. Then he forgot the tune. Then he stopped cold.

I could see his eyes darting around as he tried to remember the lyrics. He looked out at the audience. Thousands of eyes were staring back at him. He froze. Nothing came out of his mouth. His fingers couldn’t play a note.

Cathy turned to Artie and shouted, “Do something!”

But Artie looked like a deer in the headlights too. There was no one else. It was up to me.

I took a deep breath and bolted between the legs of the stagehands, so fast nobody could stop me. White lightning! I had to save Tom.

I rushed out onto the stage toward the piano. When I got there, I used all the strength in my back legs to jump up on the piano bench. Actually, I was a little off the mark and plopped right onto Tom’s lap. It was probably a good thing, though, because that got his attention. Up to that point he was still sitting there petrified. Still staring out at the thousands of faces staring back at him.

I know it was a completely crazy thing for me to do. But I couldn’t help it. Leaning into the microphone the way I’d seen some of my favorite singers do it, I belted out the words we sang zillions of times around the house. And as I sang the song in my biggest voice, Tom remembered the words (thank heaven for miracles) and started to sing too. We sounded smooth.

When we finished I expected whistles and cheers. But the audience didn’t move. Worse than that, their mouths were hanging open. Not like what dogs do when our tongues hang out of the side of our mouths and we pant. No. It seemed as if they weren’t breathing at all.

Then, all at once, they screamed! And cheered and hollered and yelled.

I wanted to take a bow. Or, at least, to prance around the stage and show off. But now the people rose out of their seats and in a massive group they raced toward the stage, shouting.

“The dog must be a ventriloquist’s dummy!”

“No, a little person in a costume!”

“A hologram!”

“A puppet!”

“A robot!”

“How did he do it?”

They scrambled up the stairs to the stage but luckily, before they could get to me, Cathy managed to run past all the security guards backstage and snatch me up. And Artie hustled Tom away from the oncoming crowd, shouting, “Let’s get out of here before they start a riot!”

As we drove down the hill in Tom’s truck, we saw the limos of Clementine and her band driving up the hill. They didn’t know what they were in for.