Peck and the Diamond Dog by Tom Allen

Peck and the Diamond Dog by Tom Allen

That rascal Peck? He drifted into Jasper County last fall — round about sheep-mating time — and he spent the dark months haying and mucking, and his off time causing mischief. Word is he loosed a skunk in the Bryson turkey plant the week before Thanksgiving, but that I can’t swear to. He did sprinkle itching powder in the police chief’s Santa suit, that I do know. Never met a young man more prone to mischief than Henry Peck, sergeant, and I once lived in Milwaukee.

Small wonder then that, come summer, when Sheriff Kane brought a Diamond Dog to the county fair and offered ten large to anyone who could outlast it, Peck thrust himself forward to accept the challenge. Hmm? Peck. P-E-C-K. Well sir, that’s the name he answered to.

Now, I enjoy a good patriotic spectacle as much as the next citizen, particularly if they’re the wagering sort, so I was on the sidelines Saturday when Henry loped in to join the gaggle of contestants milling around in Henderson’s pasture. I suppose he figured bare feet were less likely to slip on the wet grass, so he chucked his shoes over the fence at us. Nearly beaned a security guard on accident.

A couple of his rivals teased him: in a sea of camouflage, his psychedelic shirt and shorts stood out like bluebirds in a pig sty. But Peck only laughed, and stretched his legs, and flirted with the gangly fellow beside him. Yes sir, he was like that, very generous with his affections. What? No, no. I like my steak thick and well-aged, sergeant, let’s put it like that.

Anyway, the mayor — she cut the ribbon on this interrogation center just two years back, did you know? — stood up in front of her fancy new projection screen, her image ten feet larger than life, and held forth on this great nation’s ingenuity, its implacable strength, how President Diamond restored it to magnificence, and so on. Stirring words indeed, but I’m afraid nobody paid much attention, not when we could marvel at the remarkable contraption the sheriff led in.

Can you blame us modest country folk if we whispered like cattails in a June breeze? We don’t see such devices first-hand like you in the cities do, where they keep the subversives in line day and night. Out marched this mechanical hound, looking for all the world like a child’s coffin with four legs attached. Steel claws punched holes in the damp soil with each step, and the weapons on the outer casing glistened in the sun. A plexiglas dome perched at the front, a skull full of sensors that fed an artificial brain buried somewhere deep inside. Why, sir, more than one of us promptly reassessed our wagers.

The Diamond Dog scanned each contestant in turn — click-kerwhee, click-kerwhee — its stare lethal even though its firepower, we were assured, was not. Ah, I saw you smirk just now. I’ll admit, I’ve seen some of those videos too; what honest voter hasn’t? Frightful stuff. Well, when the Dog’s gaze reached Henry, he cheerfully gave it the finger. You know, like this.

A cluster of high school students snickered, and the social worker standing next to me tsked. Old McGinty, the bar owner, had her hands full making book for her less-than-sober patrons. Yes, I may have been one of them. After a few pointed coughs by her advisors, the Mayor finally noticed that her audience’s attention had wandered. She stopped orating, raised the starting pistol, and with a flourish, fired.

Peck took off running. Like most of the others, he sprinted for the woods at the south end of the pasture, and after a five-second delay the Diamond Dog pursued them. I admit, we laughed to see the first few slowpokes brought down by that prancing gizmo. The spectacle of young punks stumbling in a muddy meadow was what we came to watch, after all. But the Dog grew more aggressive once the stragglers had been tagged and branded. In quick bounds it closed in on nearby contestants, then with a harsh zap tasered them, leaving them twitching as it applied its mark. Our laughter faded.

Henry had slipped into the underbrush, his few remaining rivals right on his tail. Instead of pursuing, the Dog halted and took aim. One after another the youngsters dropped in the tall grass, legs wounded by plastic bullets. One man behind me was still shouting, “Get ’em! Get ’em!” but the rest of us were silent.

“Peck’s still in it,” one little girl piped up. She got a muted response, many of our more solid citizens no doubt recalling the night Henry let loose a pair of rutting pigs at the Valentine’s dance, or the time he and his crew nailed a rabbit costume to a cross for Easter. The young folk still cheered him on — you know how kids are, sergeant — as a surveillance drone hovering over the woods monitored his progress.

The Diamond Dog strode into the woods. It picked its path with precision through the brush and fallen branches despite all the foliage obscuring its vision. A few yards in it paused, focusing its sensors on Peck’s sparkling shirt, which hung pierced through by a snapped branch and fluttered in the breeze. With quick sporadic jerks, the Dog inspected the area, until it picked up Henry’s trail and bounded after him.

Through the drone we caught glimpses of the Dog as it raced beneath the fluttering leaves. Finally it came out of the woods and halted near Watson’s Creek, that dirty little stream on the edge of the pasture. There, dangling from a young beech tree like a banner, hung Peck’s gaudy trousers, torn and splotched with muck. The Dog approached, then swiveled left and right, back and forth again and again, its visual and infrared sensors unable to pick up Peck’s trail. It circled the sapling once, then twice, then a third time, as the minutes clicked by.

Suddenly, like a hawk on a hare, Henry plunged from a tree onto the Dog’s back. Naked and slathered in mud, Peck hefted a jagged branch and plunged its ragged tip directly through the doohickey’s plexiglas skull and into the gadgetry beneath it, stabbing and twisting and slashing until the robot twitched and stumbled and collapsed onto the ground. He kept on poking and prodding, but the machine lay motionless. Finally he lifted his makeshift spear in victory, grinning at the hovering drone.

A few minutes later, when he emerged from the woods, his posse rushed out to meet him, slapping him on his grime-streaked back, telling him in fulsome terms how they’d rooted for him all along. Others of us were more reserved, begrudgingly congratulating him from afar, keeping our clothes and our reputations clean.

Peck walked up to the sheriff and the mayor, whose glares would have given a bear pause. What? No, P-A-U-S-E. Henry held out his grimy hand, palm up; as he’d clearly avoided capture, he said he expected he’d earned the ten grand.

Now you can just imagine how that went over. Sheriff Kane’s ears grew redder than his sunburnt neck, and his mustache quivered like an anxious caterpillar. He sputtered something like, ”You destroyed a machine worth a hundred times that! I should arrest you for vandalism.” He may have used more colorful words, but that’s the gist of it.

Henry looked over his shoulder at the crowd, many of whom had their phones out, filming. He scratched his behind and said, “A naked man with a pointed stick just demolished your state-of-the-art peacekeeper. You sure you want to make a big to-do about that?”

The mayor whispered in the sheriff’s ear. The sheriff frowned but didn’t reply. He looked fit to burst. Well, the long and the short of it is, that the fairground was soon awash in overpriced beer and greasy sausages, all on the tab of a newly flush rascal.

But you fellas know all this, don’t you? You showed up the next day in your tan suits and shiny badges, and you’ve been asking questions of everyone. Can’t say I know much more than anyone else. Peck left sometime that night, just up and vanished, couldn’t tell you where or why. I see on the news that the Dogs were recalled, probably on account of the surveillance footage that leaked, though who knows how that happened.

Well sir, as a simple upright taxpayer, I wish you luck with this costly investigation. Maybe the next version of the Dog will be less vulnerable to troublesome farmhands. I expect President Diamond hopes so. But with Henry Peck still out there somewhere, I wouldn’t bet on it.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Tom Allen 2025

Image Courtesy: WikiImages from Pixabay