Cormac: The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing (7 page)

“So what’s up?” Pierre asked. He patted Cormac on the head, who stayed at his knee only for a moment. He headed off to check out the rest of the record store. “What brings you to my little corner of world trade?”

I told him I had to figure out how to keep my store open while I knuckled down at home to finish the novel and a rewrite before May. “No problem,” he said, still shuffling records, like this was the easiest thing in the world. “I’ll move into your store and take care of everything.” He told me he’d already been thinking about it. Word had quickly traveled around town about my book deal.

“What do you mean, you’ll move in?” I asked.

“Just that,” he said. “My lease expired here a month ago, and I’m on a month-to-month basis with my landlord. I’ve been looking for a different storefront.” Pierre told me he’d move his inventory onto the premises at Over the Transom. “The floor space is big enough, easily,” Pierre said, adding he would sell my books for me in exchange for free rent and use of the phone and fax machine and computer. “I know your books as well as you.”

I didn’t hesitate. “When can you make the move?”

“This afternoon,” he said, then added that he could get some high school students to help him start the move tomorrow, and get it done by the weekend. “I can be in business at your place next week.”

“Pierre, this is great. It works for us both,” I said.

“You just set your mind on finishing that book,” he said. “This is your chance. Don’t blow it.”

“Oh, I believe I can do it,” I said. “And, all the better with your help. I’m grateful, Pierre. I don’t know what I would have done.”

“God, stop fawning,” Pierre said. “Just be sure I get a part in the movie. Will there be a mud wrestling scene?”

I told him that would be small payment, and I’d write the scene with him in mind. And with a handshake for good measure and to seal the deal, I called Cormac and we headed back to the bookstore. Cormac walked with his head high and his tail sweeping side to side. With a spunky air to his carriage and a spring in my own step, I wasn’t sure either of us could even finish out a week behind the counter.

Diana agreed this was a good plan. She and the boys and I celebrated that night with supper at Benny’s Pizza Shop. It took some talking to get John Luke and Dylan to understand why with me at home each day they couldn’t give up going to school. They became more agreeable when I promised to pick them up early on some days and join them at school for lunch now and again.

“You can go on my field trips,” said John Luke.

“Will you bring the cookies to the birthday parties?” Dylan asked.

“Yep,” I said to them both. I’ll even try my hand at writing a novel, I thought.

The morning of our first day into the new routine, Cormac waited for me at the door, ready to go to the bookstore. “Not today, Mickins,” I said. I went back to the kitchen for another cup of coffee, instead of out the door to the Jeep and town. Cormac stood in the foyer tossing looks at me over his shoulder. He turned to stare at the door, his pose reminding me of the hunting dog he really was. He could have been waiting among the cattails on the shore of an icy lake, ready to jump in to retrieve some duck I’d just shot. But I’m not a shooter, and he’s not a retriever of more than the occasional tennis ball or Frisbee.

He could, however, now be something of a farm dog, romping and playing all day instead of hanging out with me inside a bookstore. He could chase squirrels, bother the cat, and cut up with the next-door dog, Bailey, also a Golden Retriever but almost completely white. Our two-acre place was only six minutes out of town proper and still within the city limits, but with not many houses, almost no streetlights, it felt like another world. Cormac, like Hank the Cow Dog of the children’s books, was placed in charge of “ranch” security.

In his new role, the tiny part of our backyard that had been enclosed by the fence seemed unfair limitation on such important responsibility. I’d take down the chain-link fence that Diana never liked anyway because it was “so ugly” and have an electronic fence installed. With me working at my desk in the study, the Mick could rule the world of squirrels and birds. And with the new fence buzzing away, I’d not worry that he’d wander off.

The man on the phone told me the “fence” would amount to a thin wire buried a few inches deep in the soil. The wire was not expensive, so I’d have the entire two acres circumscribed. With the two ends of the wire connected to a transmitter, and a collar that had a built-in receiver to pick up the wire’s frequency pulse, Cormac would get a mild shock if he tried to cross where the wire was buried. But not before sounding a warning beep so that Cormac could engage his superior intelligence and stay away from the ouch place.

Until then, he was certain that he was supposed to be inside with me. And not only with me inside the house, but that he should take every step I took. Almost literally. If I got up from my desk to get another cup of coffee, he came along. If I walked to a window to enjoy the view of the big dogwood tree just down the hill, he’d have his own look-see.

Three years later, Cormac still does this, follows me all over the house, though I think his clinging to me nowadays is in large measure a consequence of his nightmarish adventure, like the way he sinks flat on the floor when I start packing for travel. Sometimes when I move from room to room, I speed up to get ahead of him and then duck behind a door to jump out as he passes and scare him the way Dylan likes to do to me. Cormac has not yet once appeared even remotely startled by my antics. I’m pretty sure it’s his nose that lets him see around corners. When I leap out with a big yaah! he only looks at me with his big brown eyes worried that I’ve lost it.

My new life as a novelist was like a monk’s insight after a long trek toward some evasive truth. Those first weeks of long hours spent writing, there was a time or two when I wanted to pinch myself: Emmylou Harris singing from the stereo, sweat pants and bare feet all day, my protagonist’s story unfolding for me like I had it all on tape, my dog on the floor while I pecked away at the computer keyboard. We had it easy. If I turned my head in his direction, he’d watch my eyes to see if I needed him to fetch something. But I did all the work and just let Cormac guard the muse so he wouldn’t abandon us. Cormac did a good job.

In the space of about a month my whole life had turned around, the cavalry had come riding over the hill, publishing contract in velvet-gloved hand. Sonny the novelist. I had the papers to prove it. Diana told me she’d known it all along, and had many times tried to tell me so. She reminded me more than once that Thoreau said our focus determines our reality. “Seems I remember,” Diana said, “saying something like you should focus on your writing.” She had told me precisely that.

And Cormac. Bless him. The doggie would not have to fret that any day might find me poking around in a bare cupboard, looking for a bone, and the poor dog would have none. No, sir. Cormac was ruler of his two acres. Until, that is, the king would one day feel abandoned upon his lands, and then a keen, deep fretting would extend the edges of his world into the outer dark.

TWO THICK-ARMED men in tight T-shirts pulled into my driveway with an array of supplies and wire-burying tools. Neither would step out of the pickup when the big reddish-brown dog bounded up to greet them. My friendly Cormac, a tail-swishing 75-pounder, standing down a 400-pound pair of men.

“Cormac! Leave the fellows alone. They don’t love you the way I do,” I said. My voice wasn’t loud enough to be heard over the rumble coming from the hole in the truck’s muffler. Neither did my smile get to them. They were stone-faced, frowning, and not about to step out of their truck until I did something with Cormac. The driver switched off the engine.

“Don’t worry, men,” I told them.

They didn’t budge.

“I’ll take him inside the house,” I offered.

“You want this wire buried in the dirt, you’ll do that,” the driver said. It seemed odd to me that these men who installed underground dog fences would be afraid of dogs. But I guess it wasn’t in their job description to deal with dogs, only to bury wire.

Cormac headed for the front door, every few steps looking over his shoulder toward the men still in the truck. I let him cross the threshold then closed the door. I walked back outside to discuss the work with the guys, each now taking a small machine trencher from the bed of the truck. I turned back to look at the house. Cormac had gone into my son’s bedroom and straight to the window there. He found the blinds raised and the curtains drawn back. He took his post, and fixed us in his stare the way a bank security guard watches a man with sunglasses and a ball cap third in line for the teller window.

I introduced myself. The driver, John, was the leader. I shook hands with both men, and showed them the layout of my two acres, told them I wanted to be sure the wire was set deeply enough that it didn’t migrate upward into the blade of my lawn mower. “We know ’bout that,” said John.

“Yes,” I said. “I imagine you do.” I told them I was grateful they’d responded so quickly to my call. Again John spoke. “We go where we sent. And we ain’t gettin’ nothin’ done talkin’.” Without so much as a word passing between them, the two men fell in tandem to their work, each starting the engine on his trencher and tilting the spinning blade into the soil of my yard. Dirt spewed as they cut the narrow slit, going off in opposite directions from a single starting point. Their work was precise, their movements fluid and graceful, and they spoke not a word.

They’d not covered twenty yards each when Cormac came out the garage doors. I’d forgot the downstairs door was open into the garage, and the garage doors were open. This time the canine confrontation went differently—for two reasons, I think:

First: The men were working.

When a man gets going with his work, gets in the groove, not much can keep him from his appointed rounds. The task is not about excavating a trench of a certain length. It’s about putting one foot in front of the other, hands sure and deft on the machine, and then a ditch happens.

This time Cormac did not faze these men. Maybe not even lightning splitting the heavens would have disturbed their trenching. I once watched a man dig a ditch in the rain of a thunderstorm and every time the sky burst with lightning and thunder shook the trees, he sped up. A trenching machine could not have dug a hundred feet any faster.

Second: Cormac looked goofy and sounded silly with my son’s football jammed crossways in his mouth, open so wide it looked as though his jaw had come loose at the hinge. His eyes bulged and he was trying to talk around the football. Drew would love to see this, I thought.

The men were now compelled to look at the dog standing a few feet away from them. They let their machines come to a quiet idle. Cormac stopped still, not approaching them any closer, as if respectful of their work. This time the mens’ eyes conveyed not caution or fear, but a kind of incredulity at the mumbling dog.

Cormac’s articulations, shall we say, have two distinctly different voices. The first one he accomplishes with something in his mouth. Cormac’s second voice is a kind of purr he uses when he’s really laid back, like just waking up in the morning, a language I think he learned from our cat, Smokey. He will sit and look up at me as I’m putting on my socks, and with each exhale he goes, “awwwrrrrhhh.” Of course, I echo his sound, but only when we’ve got the room to ourselves. Our family hasn’t yet witnessed or overheard our unusual dialogue.

The men surveyed the spectacle before them, looked at each other, and both grinned and shook their heads. Cormac’s football and humming had completely hooked them. The bigger man, John’s helper, laughed aloud. “Look there,” he said. “Ain’t that dog a sight?”

“Cormac, put down the football! That’s not yours,” I said. He dropped his head, got a case of sad eyes, but kept his clamp on the pigskin. “Dylan’s gonna tie your ears together.” I put my fists on my hips and cooked up my best fake scowl. “Cormac!”

“Hey, man. Why you wanna call a good dog like him somethin’ nasty like Floormat?” John rested, using his trencher handle like a walking cane. He caught his breath behind a laugh. Still flashing a good smile he said, “You oughta call him King, or somethin’. Floormat ain’t a name for a dog.”

“No,” I said, catching the smile. “Not floormat. His name is Cormac. C-O-R-M-A-C.”

And Cormac sounds phonetically close to cognac. When I would later be on the trail of my lost dog, and a veterinary assistant would tell me they’d had a Golden Retriever in their clinic whose name was Cognac, I believed that whoever had brought him there had read the name Cormac off his tag. I knew also my name and contact information on the same tag had been ignored.

“Cormac, you say?” John asked. “What kinda name is that?”

“The name of a king in old Ireland,” I answered.

“Why don’t you jus’ call him King? Be easier, wouldn’t it?”

“I expect it would,” I said. I thought of Diana’s entreaty to drop the talk of Irish kings. It seemed unavoidable. “But he likes his name. You hear him talking, don’t you? He told me himself he likes to be called Cormac.” I could not have known this talking thing I kidded about would one day help me ID him, and help the negotiations to get him home.

John just shook his head. “Come on, man,” he said to his partner. “We don’t get to diggin’ my truck payment be callin’ me Nate the Late.”

The wire was laid in less than two hours. I thanked the men, who told me the trainer would be along soon after they left. “We supposed to call quick as we hit the driveway. He be right along with the bill.” John bent to rub Cormac’s head. “You just take good care of old King here,” he said. “He a good dog.”

I called Cormac away from his inspection of the newly turned earth lining the edge of our yard. I lay down on the warm grass. Closed my eyes against the morning sun. Cormac came to stand right above me. He stood still, his handsome head poised above me. He looked down at me for a long minute. Then he shook his head, his ears and lips flapping, and walked away like he had business and couldn’t lollygag around with me. Already taking over security. I was so proud of him.