All stories › Fantasy › Clean and Dry › Episode 1
The Big Tub
Episode 1 of 3 of Clean and Dry by Mitchell Haas · free to read
I had the sprayer in one hand and sixty pounds of wet black standard poodle in the other when the poodle cleared his throat.
It was a real throat clearing. The kind a man did before a toast.
“Excuse me,” the poodle said. “Before you rinse my face, may I ask you something?”
I turned off the water. The only sound in the shop was the radio over the grooming table, playing a song about a boat.
“Your card says Bishop,” I said. “Seven years old. Lamb clip, clean face, no allergies.”
“Celia filled that out. She fills everything out.”
Celia Isley had dropped him off at nine. She was brisk, and she wrote her phone number like it owed her money.
“You can talk,” I said.
“Only in the tub, and only during a full groom. My name is Vaughn. I’m a man, technically. I made an arrangement some years ago. Please don’t ask with whom. It was a Tuesday and I was very tired.”
I had been bitten, peed on, and once proposed to by a man picking up his schnauzer. No dog had ever said technically to me.
“Okay,” I said. “What do you need, Vaughn?”
“When the groom is finished and I’m completely dry, I get one hour as a man. But only if the groomer says yes.”
“Yes to what?”
“To the cost. For that hour, you get my nose.” He sneezed shampoo politely onto the tile. “Also, one drop of water on me ends it early. So mind the sprayer afterward.”
Most standard poodles looked at me like they paid for the building. This one looked like he owned the parking lot too.
“Your nose,” I said.
“It’s a good nose. You’ll find it’s a lot.”
My shop was one chair, one tub, and one high-velocity dryer in a strip plaza between a laundromat and a donut shop. I charged ninety-five dollars for a standard poodle and got maybe three a week. I was not a man who said yes to things in tubs.
“Sure,” I said. “Yes.”
Then I rinsed his face, because the conditioner was not going to rinse itself.
I blew him out on the table with the high-velocity dryer, rump first, nozzle a few inches off the skin. His coat held water like a grudge. I did his face with a towel and the stand dryer.
He couldn’t talk out of the tub. Every time I got close on the legs, he looked at the nozzle, then at me.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll back off.”
I cleaned his ears with solution and cotton and pulled the loose hair from the canals. I clipped his feet and face with a ten blade and brushed his teeth. I took the body down short with a four blade, then scissored the legs into neat full columns and the topknot round.
His nails were black, so I couldn’t see the quick. I ground them in small passes, checking each one for the gray dot that meant stop.
At 11:30 I finished the last nail.
The poodle on my table turned into a naked man in his mid-forties with excellent posture.
Then the smell hit me.
Oatmeal shampoo. Bleach in the mop bucket. Dryer sheets through the laundromat wall. A glazed donut twenty feet away. A cat that had walked past my door on Wednesday. I sat down on the floor.
“It settles,” Vaughn said. He wrapped a towel around his waist like a man at a nice hotel. “Mostly. Breathe through your mouth for the first ten minutes.”
“What is that? The sweet one.”
“The donut shop. You’ll want one. Get me two.”
I gave him the spare sweatpants and shop T-shirt I kept for bad anal gland days. He put them on, sat in my waiting chair, and crossed his legs.
The donut shop was run by Opal Jessup, who had worked that fryer since the plaza opened and seen everything twice.
“Who’s your friend?” she said.
“Cousin.”
“He’s got nice posture.”
“He works at it.”
“Tell him the coffee’s on the house,” she said. “For the posture.”
I walked back with two coffees, three glazed, and the certain knowledge that Opal had eaten sausage for breakfast and argued with someone about it.
Vaughn held his coffee at arm’s length, like it might go off.
“Coffee counts as water,” he said. “I tested it once. Very embarrassing for everyone.”
He spent the next twenty-five minutes reading my appointment book.
“You’re charging ninety-five for a standard,” he said. “The going rate is one thirty. And you brushed my teeth for free.”
“Teeth come with the groom.”
“Teeth are a ten dollar add-on everywhere else on this road. Are you trying to go out of business, or is it a hobby?”
“Were you an accountant?”
“For a long time,” he said. “Too long.”
At 12:15 the bell over my door rang.
Celia Isley came in, looked at Vaughn in my waiting chair in my sweatpants, and did not scream. She looked at the clock. Then she looked at me.
“You said yes,” she said.
“He asked nicely.”
“He always asks nicely.”
She set her purse on my counter and opened it.
Inside, folded flat, was a pair of men’s pants.