Chet The Dog

Posts Tagged ‘Heart of Barkness’

Super Bowl Week (More)

Football comes up from time to time in my work, going all the way back to Hard Rain, and it’s central to the plot of Reality Check, my YA novel that won an Edgar award. There’s also football in the Chet and Bernie series – in Bark To The Future, the most recent C&B, and in Heart of Barkness, where this is from, to cite two examples.

We walked onto the field, mostly dirt with tufts of grass here and there. Coach Flowers had moved out from between the two rows of players, now stood to the side. We stopped nearby. Coach Flowers put the whistle in his mouth, sort of nudging the stogie to one side, and talked around them.

“On the whistle, potato heads. Not before, not after. All set?”

He blew the whistle, a sound I hate, but at least I’d known it was coming. The two rows charged each other, thumping together with lots of grunts and shouts, none of the shouts actual words, more like the kind of noise you hear on Animal Planet. The kids finished knocking each other around, picked themselves up, dusted themselves off.

“What the heck?” said Coach Flowers. Or something like that – he wasn’t easy to understand with the whistle and stogie in his mouth. “Call that hitting? Don’t look like hitting to me. Looked like hugging your sister.”

One of the kids said, “I’m a sister, coach.”

Coach Flowers turned to her. “Did I ask for your opinion, Taneeka?”

“Not yet, coach.”

“Take a lap.”

Pigskin and Us

But of course! What other kind was there?

Beginnings

On Sunday we do beginnings, taking a look at the start of a Peter Abrahams novel, including those written under the Spencer Quinn moniker™. How about Heart of Barkness, since Song For Chet, which came out of that book, was one of our topics this week? In case you’re wondering, the C&B series can be read in any order!

“Red-letter day, Chet,” said Sergeant Rick Torres, our buddy at the Valley PD Missing Persons Department. “In the car.”

Red-letter day was a mystery to me, and maybe red is, too. Bernie says I can’t be trusted when it comes to red, something I’ve never understood. I knew fire hydrants were red, for example, knew that as well as I know my own name. Which is Chet, in case you missed it, right up there off the jump. I also know “in the car,” and never need to be asked twice. Or even once. Rick opened the passenger-side door of the black-and-white. I hopped in, sat up nice and tall, totally alert, ready for anything. Was my tongue hanging out? Possibly. I got most of it stuffed back in. We have standards, me and Bernie, just one of the reasons that the Little Detective Agency is so successful, except for the finances part. It’s called the Little Detective Agency on account of Bernie’s last name being Little, but we’re equal partners, Bernie handling the gunplay and the so-therefores and me bringing other things to the table. Maybe we’ll get to my teeth a little later.

If You Were Mine

Music is important in the Chet and Bernie series (and central to Heart of Barkness) and this song comes up a lot. Chet is especially into Roy Eldridge’s solo that closes it out. I actually saw him play at club on New York in the ’70’s. As for Billie Holiday all I can say is ou sont les neiges d’antan?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fke2b6ftQ_8