The Collar Out of Space by Albert J. Manachino	“Morning Encounter” appeared in issue 423.
part 1 of 2

I suppose you might say our troubles with Annette began the night Ch’Jin returned her. And, I suppose he returned her the moment he discovered what a jackass he’d made of himself. Far from bestowing medals on him, his planetary council would, very likely, have fried him in low-calorie chicken fat the moment he attempted to pass her off as “The most intelligent life form existing on Terra.”

Space aliens are popularly supposed, by the moralistic journals, to be way ahead of us spiritually, intellectually and technologically, and if there is such a thing as low-calorie chicken fat, they’d know all about it. Of course, they wouldn’t let us have the secret because they’d want us to develop within the framework peculiar to our culture.

It was raining like hell the night Annette returned. There was a knock on the door which at first I mistook for thunder, and a blinding glare in the windows that was mistaken for lightning. She bolted into the living room the moment I opened the door. June and I got an unexpected as well as unwanted shower. Water flew everywhere as she shook herself dry.

All I saw of Ch’Jin was an open hand protruding through the doorway. There was a fragmented glimpse of his flying saucer parked on the front lawn and street.

“I believe you offered a one hundred dollar reward for the return of this... Weimaraner.” His voice was distinctly chilly.

Wordlessly, I counted out a century into the outstretched hand. I harbored a grudge against him for giving me the worst morning of my life so I paid him in singles and made him sign a receipt.

For my hundred bucks I got a frigid, “Thank you!”

“I hope you dissolve in this downpour,” I acknowledged his thanks courteously.

The hand was withdrawn and that was the last I saw of our space alien. At least, I hope it was.

Annette frisked joyously around the living room wetting down everything she came in contact with. She was so obviously delighted to be back with us, it touched a chord deep down in that rusty interior of mine.

“What’s that around her neck?” June asked. “That isn’t our collar.”

“That is an intergalactic video-audio transceiver. I’ll explode if you tamper with it,” Annette informed us and then asked matter-of-factly, “What’s to eat?”

June dropped the towel she was going to rub her down with. Annette was pretty smart as far as Weimaraners go, but to our knowledge she hadn’t mastered the English language as yet. Frankly, I hadn’t either. My eyeballs protruded far enough to hang a towel on.

“The collar hypes up your intelligence so that the wearer can be a more proficient observer,” Annette told us. “It’s Ch’Jin’s idea of studying the social life of planet Earth.”

* * *

I suppose, in the days that followed, we got used to having a talking dog and one that could do calculus as well. I had to work like a fiend to convince the neighbors I’d taken up ventriloquism. Doc Ahrms said he knew I talked through my hat, but through my dog? Never! I confess, it hurt to have a mutt in the house that was smarter than me... and a Weimaraner at that! How to get that collar off her and allow her to go back to being her normal, stupid, loveable self?

Of course we’d always treated her as a member of the family despite ASPCA warnings. That meant exposure to the sewage as well as the savory. I was anxious to remove that collar because I wasn’t anxious to have her giving the neighbors a blow-by-blow recital of some of the things that went on in our house.

By “sewage,” I mean those things in the family routine that are regarded with a little less than perfect joy, such as the irregular visits to the cemeteries, to the graves of June’s several hundred cousins who all managed to expire and get buried a comparative stone’s throw from the Bickerage.

I mean, June has more dead relatives than Rockefeller had dimes. In not a few cases, the relationship was so tenuous as to appear (to me) nonexistent. However, Uncle Frank was one of the real McCoys. I remembered him well... a tiny, fusspot bachelor in his late seventies who always moaned about not having had children to remember him or to carry on the family name.

I tried to point out to him where he had gone wrong. That was in the early days of our marriage. Uncle Frank passed away before June and I could enliven his existence with our bouncing brood.

June shed a few tears on his tombstone, she had really liked Frank. That’s because uncles are pushovers for ice cream cones and movies when properly worked by little girls.

“If Frank could only have lived long enough to see our children...” she sighed.

“I think he got out from under while the getting was good.” Our kids have grown up and have little monsters of their own.

“You can always pass the grandchildren off as your own,” Annette suggested. She hadn’t overcome her doggy habits and was sniffing around the tombstone.

“Don’t you think he’d notice the age disparity?” I asked wryly.

“Tell him you waited till you could afford to have them.”

June was quicker on the uptake than I was. “What do you mean, ‘pass the grandchildren off as our own’?”

“You can, you know. Death is a very insubstantial state. There are lots of people, and dogs, that creep back and forth all the time. Only, they don’t advertise it.” She took off after a sparrow, leaving us a very large mental cud to ruminate over.

The sparrow wasn’t taking any nonsense and Annette came galumphing back holding a tender nose with a forepaw. “Well, what do you say?”

“What do you mean, ‘What do you say’?”

“Don’t be dense. What’s it worth to you to bring your uncle back?” Annette had always been a fast operator... even when she couldn’t talk.

“You mean to tell me you can bring Uncle Frank back?” June finally forced the question out.

“You got the idea.”

“Not so fast,” I intruded. A talking dog I could take but a conniving one... “We’d better thrash this out from every angle. I don’t know that I’d care to have a dead uncle wandering around pinching the grandchildren’s cheeks.”

“You want to show them off to him, don’t you?”

I thought of Eugenia and the twins Nicole and Jennifer, and John Henry, who had never seen their grand uncle and I’m sure June was thinking along similar lines. The drive back to the Bickerage was unusually quiet. June and I were mentally eyeballing the momentous opportunity that had just been dumped in our laps and Annette was reading a restaurant guide to Long Island.

I was thinking that damned collar she wore was broadcasting and televising every word we spoke, every change of expression, to a receiver in a flying saucer. Out of capriciousness, I made a gesture with a single finger, that is, with the middle finger of my right hand in an upward thrust, in front of Annette. I realized Ch’Jin had some sort of exposure to our culture, not necessarily our higher culture, and if he was watching, and I hoped he was, he would certainly understand the social significance of my motion and what had motivated it.

By the time I’d turned the “Millennium Turkey” into our driveway and turned off the engine, I’d reached a decision of sorts. Eugenia was an adept in the magic arts, and an ambulating corpse wouldn’t have fazed her. The other three grandchildren, more or less, were exposed to varying degrees of occultism via Scarsi and the Nightmare Brick Company.

“Do you really want to go through with it?” I asked June.

“Yes, I think so. Frank was my favorite uncle.”

“Have you thought of the condition he may be in now? He’s been buried a quarter of a century.”

“Do you think that matters after Margrave?”

I had to admit it didn’t. I thought of the wizards Brown and Chain and the way they reanimated cadavers for their collection. Their cosmeticians were very skillful and could make the resuscitants look pretty lifelike even after they’d spent a hundred years or so underground.

Annette drove a stiff bargain, her price was three hamburgers garnished with dill pickles, french fries and cole slaw. That dog always was an opportunist even when she wasn’t so smart.

It developed there was only one very small detail that might possibly create a hitch in the consummation of the idea... Someone had to fill in for Uncle Frank in the cold, cold hereafter while he was alive. Do I make myself clear? Someone had to be dead the duration of the time he was alive. It’s what Annette called “compensation factor.” I bowed out gracefully at the inquiring look June bestowed upon me.

“You know we Italian men don’t have much of a reputation where heroics are involved. I might sacrifice my life gallantly on the altar of old age or incurable disease but this... No.”

“You don’t want to do it, is that it?”

“That’s it. I’m a dyed in the wool coward.”

“I don’t care about the wool part. All I’m asking you to do is die for a few days.”

“Not me, it might be habit-forming. Why don’t you take a trip down to skid row and see if you can find a burned-out acid-head or alcoholic. You might be able to interest him if you pay him off the books.”

The problem was solved more easily than I thought it might be. Earlier I had telephoned Scarsi about the collar. He dropped in to see for himself. Annette was watching old reruns of Lassie. The whole bag came out.

“What is it exactly that you want?” Scarsi sounded somewhat confused. June enlightened him. “Basically, you want to make the collar disappear without ruining your dog, and you want to ‘wake up’ your Uncle Frank. Have you thought of the complications? To wake up your uncle, she’s going to need the intelligence of the collar.”

Annette spoke up. “Don’t think I’m hard to get along with, but I want the collar left on. I’ve found out what a lot of fun it is to read a menu.”

“Be glad you haven’t read the list of ingredients on a can of dog food,” I told her. I turned back to Scarsi. “Can’t you take it off her after she’s returned Frank to his eternal rest?” and a thought struck me. “You’re a wizard, can’t you wake Frank up?”

“Only for about fifteen minutes at the most. These deals are usually question-answer sessions with the re-animator looking for buried treasure. In this case, where you’ll want Frank alive for a few days at least, space science is way ahead of necromancy.” He changed the subject, “Can you suggest a way of removing the collar?”

“Yeah, turn her inside out and have her spit it out.”

He gave me one of those weird stares.

“There isn’t much chance Frank is going to be awakened anyway.” I told him about the stand-in angle.

He didn’t blink an eyelash. “The going rate for that kind of work is fifteen dollars an hour. Because you’re friends of mine, I’ll do it for ten.”

Annette wasn’t the only opportunist. For that kind of money Scarsi would sell his own grandmother, not once but as many times as Xerox could duplicate her.

He laid down his terms of employment. “I want the best room in the house and the most comfortable bed; flowers, time and a half for holidays, and overtime after eight hours. Not based on a forty-hour workweek but daily. Violate any of those terms and everything’s off.”

To avoid flimflammery, he agreed to punch in every time he died and punch out at the end of his tour. June flatly refused to punch in at the beginning of each housewife day when I approached the subject.

“OK,” I told Annette, “I’ll try it for a week. At the end of which time, Frank ought to be pretty damned tired of the way we do things these days and anxious to return to his harp and gown. After that, we’ll have Scarsi remove that collar.”

Annette fingered the collar with a forepaw. “I like it. I don’t want to get rid of it.”

I hadn’t expected this but first things first... the visit from Frank. It would give me time to figure out some way of dealing with my four-footed friend.

* * *

Proceed to part 2...

Copyright © 2011 by Albert J. Manachino