Chapter 37
Jack
Shelley adored the pig races and kept jumping up and down on the bleachers.
“Look! They’re giving them Oreos for a reward!”
“I’d run around a track for Oreos, too,” I told her.
She grinned and gave me a one-armed hug. “Me, too! Ooh! Look! They’re bringing out the piglets for the swimming race!”
Sure enough, as soon as Spamela Hamderson won the last race around the track and the pigs all snorfled their reward cookies on their way to their trailer, the woman in charge of the event led a group of eight piglets out. They were cute, even I had to admit. Maybe sixty pounds each and shiny clean. They wore ribbons and bows around their necks.
“How old do you think they are?” I asked Mike, knowing nothing about pig life cycles.
He studied them with his farmer’s eye. “Probably three or four months.”
“They can train them to do this that young?”
“Pigs are smart. They probably start training them when they’re four or five weeks old.”
“Can we have one? Can we, Uncle Mike?” Shelley’s eyes filled with piglet-shaped stars. “I’d take care of it!”
I expected him to say no, but he thought about it. “How about this? We spend this year seeing how things with Pickles go. If you still want to raise a piglet, come this Christmas, we’ll talk about it. It would be your responsibility to do all the work, though. Ruby is not a fan of pigs.”
“Yay!”
I winced and rubbed my ear, wondering if my eardrum had just shattered. Ten-year-old-girl excitement and superior tiger hearing didn’t make a great combination for the tiger.
Tess, on the other side of Shelley, leaned over toward me, behind her sister. “Hey. I see the new chemistry teacher over there with Rick Peabody. She texted me she’d bring the perfume bottle, and I could get it here. I have her refund check in my purse. I’ll be right back.”
Shelley and I cheered for the piglets, who raced around the oval track, climbed a short ramp, and dove into the pool, curly tails wagging. They swam across to wild cheers from everyone, even me, and crunched down on their cookies.
“Who won?” I’d missed it, when I’d turned to see Tess walk over to the woman, presumably the new teacher, standing with Peabody.
Shelly pointed at the smallest piglet and the black-and-pink one next to it. “Kim Kardashaham almost won, but in the end, Porker Posey took it all!”
We applauded wildly. In my peripheral vision, I noticed Tess, Peabody, and the teacher walk toward us, laughing. The woman reached into her tote bag, pulled out the bottle, and held it out for Tess. Just then, though, two little boys raced around the side of the bleachers and ran into them.
The bottle flew up into the air; the stopper popped off, and the contents of the bottle sprayed out and landed all over Tess, who shrieked.
They were still ten feet away from me, but the perfume had the same effect on me as it had at close quarters: I started sneezing, over and over, and couldn’t stop.
Here’s the thing about sneezing: It is almost impossible to keep your eyes open when you do it.
So, I didn’t see the danger until it was too late.
Somebody in the crowd yelled, “Watch out!” and then everybody started shouting. I forced my watering eyes open just in time to see Porker Posey and Kim Kardashaham whip their heads around, start running, and fix their beady gazes on … Tess.
The piglets—all eight of them—raced toward the fence that kept them from the crowd.
Correction: the fence that had kept the piglets from the crowd.
They plowed through that flimsy barrier like a hot knife through butter, squealing and grunting and coughing and even making weird barking noises.
“Oh, crap,” Uncle Mike said. He stood and grabbed Shelley before I could, swinging her up behind him and onto a higher riser on the bleachers.
“Oh, crap is—achoo!” I groaned. “That perfume … oh. No. It couldn’t be.”
“Couldn’t be what?” Mike shouted over the noise of the crowd.
The pigs kept coming, and every single one was focused on Tess.
“The enchanted perfume! Ursula said it could affect animals!”
Tess, perfume dripping all over her, finally noticed the cavalcade of bacon-on-the-hoof heading toward her. She yelped and looked at me.
“Jack!”
I leapt up off the bleachers and stood directly in the path of the piglets.
“How’s that for heroic, Monkey?” I muttered, wondering when my life had turned into a circus. Then I started sneezing again, this time so forcefully the sneezes actually rocked me back on my heels.
“Jack!” Tess started running, which was probably the wrong move, because the squealing amped up in volume, and the litter of piglets divided into two columns and flowed around me like I wasn’t even there.
I was sneezing too hard to even try to stop them. When I could finally open my eyes and catch a breath, I whirled around to see Tess running down the open pathway between the pop-up carnival tents and stands.
And all eight piglets raced after her, running so fast that all four of their little legs would rise off the ground at each bound.
People on the path yelled and yanked kids and strollers out of the way, but some were too slow. The pigs took them out like porky bowling balls knocking down pins. Tess looked back over her shoulder, and the look of terror on her face spurred me into a lucid moment and I finally remembered that tigers are not allergic to perfume.
At least this tiger wasn’t.
Seconds later, people started screaming for a different reason, when a quarter-ton Bengal tiger shot down the grounds after the pigs.
“Whee!” somebody whooped, and I glanced to the side to see Monkey and his friends raising their glasses of beer to me in a toast. “You get that bacon, dude!”
I—heroically, again—refrained from biting him.
And I kept running.
Here’s a true thing: tigers can run faster than piglets, and nobody even has to give us Oreos to get us to do it. But by the time I reached the end of the fairway, Tess had ducked between two food trucks and started back toward the racecourse.
I roared to get her attention, and the lady doing face painting at a small booth across from me shrieked and threw a box of paint at me. I felt it hit my side, ignored it, and kept running.
I was a tiger, but Tess had a heck of a head start. The piglets were highly motivated, and there were a lot of people in my way. I didn’t catch up to them until Tess was back at the course.
Where, when she was too busy looking back at them to realize what was happening, the pigs chased her clear up the ramp and into the pool.
She realized her mistake when her feet slipped off the ledge, and she yelled my name.
And then she landed on her butt in the water, and all eight piglets followed her in.
That’s when, for one brief, cowardly moment, I wondered if anybody would notice if I turned around and headed out of town for a week or two.
But I kept running toward her.
She flailed around in the water, trying to stand, piglets surrounding her and giving her hearty snout kisses, until she saw me soar through the air, leaping across the fence, the grass, and the ramp. I landed in the water just behind Porker Posey and immediately realized it hadn’t been the best idea, when the force of the water I displaced knocked Tess back down in the pool.
The piglets, finally catching on to the fact a tiger was in their midst—maybe the water had washed off the perfume—squealed in alarm and trampled all over me to get out of the pool.
I shifted back to human and sat up, staring at Tess, who was soaking wet and bedraggled. She looked exactly like a drowned … pawnshop owner, and her eyes were twin blue flames of indignation.
“You—you—you?—”
“I’m so sorry, Tess,” I started miserably. “I tried, but I kept sneezing! And then?—”
She suddenly threw her head back and howled with laughter. “Why was your fur pink with sparkles?”
“It was?”
Monkey, who’d pushed his way through the crowd, held out his phone to show me a photo. “Sure was, dude.”
There I was, a tiger racing flat out after piglets, with a streak of sparkly pink paint down my side.
Still sitting in the water, I looked up at Monkey. “I’ll give you five hundred dollars to delete that photo.”
Best five hundred bucks I ever spent.