Cormac: The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing (9 page)

The house was empty except for me. Diana had gone to work, and the boys were off to school. I hadn’t noticed the gathering dark in the clouds to the west. There was a low sonorous roll of distant thunder. I went to the front door and stepped out onto the porch. The wind rose, whipping the tall pines in my front yard.

There was the sound again. A thud, like something striking a wall. It was coming from inside. I went back into the house. The big thump came again. I went down the hall, into the kitchen. Then I saw Cormac, outside on the back porch, heaving himself against the French door. He stood on his hind legs to reach as high as he possibly could. I let him inside and, whining, he went around and around my legs. I sat down at the dining room table and patted my knees. Cormac came to lie on the floor, looking at me with his face between his paws. When the thunder boomed again, he jumped up and looked over his shoulder, then sat on his haunches between my knees. I looked at him, then sat on the floor and petted him, rubbing his head and down his back, until his breathing slowed to a normal rhythm.

I could not imagine what had changed for the doggins. Last week he had paid no mind to rumbling in the heavens; today the sound of thunder terrified him. It would come to pass that even the sound of rain would give him the jitters—Pavlov’s bell and all that. Cormac had, on some esoteric cue, reached back into his canine ancestry, back to a cave and the sound of a giant boulder rolling down a hill, to one of his forefathers smushed by the big rock, broken like the skull of a saber-tooth under the maul of one of the two-leggeds. The imprint on the gene coding was indelible.

Cormac, when he looks for a place to hide because thunder shakes the sky, would crawl into my lap if he’d still fit there. I wondered what that great trembling sound in the heavens represented to him and his kin. If an animal’s fear response is triggered by an adversary, what kind of Thing from the Mind of Stephen King could be romping around up there, hidden in those roiling black clouds? And, with this first experience, I just couldn’t fathom what had flipped the switch in his head.

Of course, when I told Drew about Cormac’s reaction to thunder, he said he doubted it was something new, that I’d only just noticed it.

“Are you suggesting I’m not paying attention to my dog?” I asked.

“No,” Drew said. “Anyway, it’s kind of a moot point to ponder,” he said.

And he was right. There was only the question of what to do about it. I phoned Belle, and asked her what could be done for Cormac. “Can he be trained to get over his fear of thunder?” I asked. She said no, and we talked about the condition, not uncommon among dogs. “I’m sorry, Sonny,” she said, “I’m afraid it’s Cormac’s cross to bear, and something of a thorn in your side.”

“Is it that biblical?” I had to smile. “Is there no salvation here?”

“Well, if there’s such a thing as situational salvation,” she replied, “then the answer is yes. There is relief for Cormac and for you.” I stood on tiptoes, waiting for her to bring down the tablet from the mount. I almost laughed when Belle offered to write a prescription for “doggy downers.” She told me that many pet owners keep a supply on hand.

I was stunned, and told her so. I told her there was no way I was going to turn Cormac into some kind of junkie. She laughed and said such would not become the case. I told her about my doctor asking me to get on medicine to bring my cholesterol down from the stratosphere, how I’d told him I’d get it down my own way, how I ate like a monk and walked two miles a day for six months, how I lost twenty pounds. I told her I wasn’t sure that I was trying to bring down my cholesterol, as much as I was trying to stave off being on some pharmaceutical for the rest of my life.

“Did your plan work?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “My LDL numbers actually went up after all that.”

“So you’re on the drugs?”

“I am.”

“But you don’t want to use drugs on Cormac?”

“No. There are a million thunder boomers that roll across Mobile Bay like Patton’s army come to Lower Alabama,” I said, and she agreed that living on the Eastern Shore means frequent invasions. “It seems to me,” I went on, “when the twentieth, or thirty-seventh, storm occurs without harm, there should come an end to the fear.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” the vet said. “The fear is primal and anti-intelligent.”

When I watched the movie Because of Winn-Dixie, adapted from Kate DiCamillo’s novel, I thought little Opal’s preacher dad was surely going to give Winn-Dixie, her newfound dog, his walking papers when he freaked out and transformed into a wild beast during a thunder storm and almost wrecked their mobile home.

But they were committed to the big, rambunctious dog.

They would take care of him no matter what.

Not all dogs, of course, have the phobia. Our neighbor’s Golden is completely oblivious to thunder. Bailey sits licking his paws and yawning while his friend from our side of the fence is freaking out.

I thanked Belle for her advice. I told her Cormac and I would work this out drug-free. Somehow. For one thing, I took my electric saw and cut a hole in the garage door and put a kennel crate in there in case I wasn’t home when thunder came calling. I put a piece of carpet on the floor and sides of the kennel so it would be quieter and more comfortable. I thought again that we really needed that stronger electronic fence signal. But Ken had said the transmitter was on back order.

Three days later another thunderstorm occurred while Cormac was outside minding the ranch. I waited to see if he’d make his fuss at the back door, and when he did not I went downstairs to check on him. I opened the door to the garage a crack and peeked through. Cormac had used his private door and crate as I’d hoped. I found myself thinking back to the hunting dogs and even the pets I’d known as a child and how all those dogs lived outside. Always. And how maybe I was being too uptight.

I TRY TO IMAGINE what it is like for Cormac when a storm rolls in. Here on the Gulf Coast that telling dark often brings a western sky down on our heads, making Cormac want to crawl inside the pocket of my jeans.

From his point of view, then, let’s try this:

My eyes blink open and my body flinches. The reverberation is not audible, it is something I feel in the marrow of my bones, and a shiver runs from my shoulders down my spine and pulls my belly taut. Every hair in my coat seems alive. I leap to my feet and stand on the porch, straining to detect a second pulse from the unseen one dragging its sopping muzzle along the floor that keeps the birds from flying to the moon. There. The thing is now awake and the growl in its chest moves to its voice and the great sound stirs the air like the thrum of a hovering dragon. The hair on my back bristles. My breathing goes faster and faster and my body trembles. My eyes strain in their sockets. I have seen in others of my kind their eyes white-circled with fear of the invisible one. Behind me the door is quiet. No sounds come from inside. Still, I spring against it. My body and legs crash hard against the door, and it rattles and shutters and refuses my plea. I stare at the door. My eyes water but I will not blink. I watch the yellow metal of the round knob and still the door does not open to receive me to safety. The hand that can open the door has been missing for two days. None who live inside are there. All have been missing for two days. Another one with good hands and a good voice has taken their place, but he does not answer my charge on the door. My ear and my neck burn from the impact. I stand on the door, my forepaws extended, and I rake down. My claws tear the wood. Again. And again. The rumble from the animal draws nearer and swings lower, thudding across the hills and tumbling low into the ravines. My breathing burns. It has moved to the tops of my lungs. My mouth is open and my tongue is dry where my hot breath burns across it. My heart is knocking inside my chest. The sky flashes and I know it angers the terrible beast that lives there and the beast will now curse the ones whose paws and hooves and claws hold them to the earth. Perhaps this time he will come to rip open my neck, or tear at my belly. My vision is blurred except at the center of where I look. I drop from the door and spin and look toward the trees. And it comes, the curse flung down on the ground so that it shakes, and the birds must be falling like the water brought by the clouds. When I cry out, my voice breaks inside my throat and a small sound falls from my tongue, but inside my head a red howl is raised and my legs gather beneath me and they release and I run. So that my blood will not soak into the wet soil I run. I run. I run.

WE DISCOVERED the intruder the day before I was to go out of town, to fly to San Francisco and begin the book tour for The Poet of Tolstoy Park. Cormac and I went around the corner of the house to the garage.

Cormac knew something was up before I did. When I reached down to take hold of the garage door handle and twist it to raise the door, he became excited, jumping from one side of my legs to the other, trying to dash around me.

“Just hold on,” I said. He barked, and leaped into the air. “What the—”

When I raised the garage door he dashed inside, barking and racing to the farthest corner. That’s when I saw what he was after: a huge brown and gray squirrel sprang from one shelf to another, knocking a gallon of paint to the floor. Of course, the lid came off and pea green paint splattered and spread across the floor. Which, for the moment, I was able to ignore.

The chase was on. I became the kid from Lamar County, Alabama, who had hunted rabbits with a Long Tom twelve-gauge single-barrel shotgun. I forgot that I was a civilized man. I yelled in a voice that hearkened to my Scottish highlands ancestry, a battle charge cousin Rob Roy would have been proud of.

“Where is he, Mick?!” I flew to the corner where the squirrel was hiding. Cormac actually jumped into the air when the blasted critter ran into view, twitching its tail, chattering. It scampered to a higher shelf.

Did I say I don’t like squirrels? A squirrel in a park is okay. A squirrel in my attic or in my garage is not good. I’ve known them to eat through electrical wiring and start fires in homes. They gnaw rafters. They gnaw holes into air-conditioning ductwork. And, if they had hairless, slick, and gray tails like rats, neither would anyone else like these arboreal rodents (tree rats).

The previous year, squirrels had invaded the attic at either end of my house. They dug into the insulation, down to the ceiling board right above my bed, and above John Luke’s bed down the hall. Both of us had to listen to them scurry around up there, their sharp little claws scraping just above our heads. I finally had to go into the attic and remove the gable vents at both ends of the house and toss out their leaves and straw. No, there were no baby squirrels, or big ones, for that matter, at home when I evicted them and their ton of yard debris. Now this squirrel was maybe shopping for new digs in my garage.

“Where is he, Cormac?”

Cormac was up on his hind legs, his forepaws on a bottom shelf. His ears were high and his eyes wide. His tongue wagged out after each time he barked.

“Get the squirrel, Mick!”

But it was hiding somewhere in the assortment of stuff on the shelves, so I grabbed a broom. I don’t know if Cormac somehow, according to his hunting dog genetics, equated the broom with a duck hunter’s gun, but it was the signal for him to go into really high gear on the squirrel search. Between the two of us, we flushed it from hiding, but neither of us was quick enough to catch it before it made a break into the sunlight outside the open garage door.

I don’t know, of course, what we would have done, either of us, if we’d caught the squirrel. It’s not a good idea to take a squirrel in hand. Its long incisors can sink easily through flesh and bone. To this day, however, that one brief hunting experience is sufficient for Cormac to go into full retriever dog mode when I say, “Where is it, Mick?” Spoken urgently, those four words get him alert and wide-eyed, standing braced with his tail straight, whipping his head this way and that to spot a squirrel.

Last week, in the car line at school, waiting to pick up Dylan, I saw a mallard on the little pond just beside the road. “Where is it, Mick?” I asked in a rough whisper. He immediately spotted the duck and went on point. Interestingly enough, he did not bark at all, only froze, standing on the Jeep’s back seat, looking out the window, staring out at the duck. Good thing for Mr. Quack we were in the car and there were no brooms in sight.

“WHAT SHOULD I DO?” Drew asked. I was quiet. I didn’t know what to say. Then I asked how long he’d been missing. “He was here this morning. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky when I left and I decided to let him play outside. I got stuck at a job site. There were maybe, what, two thunderclaps before I could get to your place. Then the whole thing passed. It didn’t even rain.”

I felt as helpless as I’d ever felt. Diana and I were both two thousand miles from Alabama. I’d finished the novel, the publisher had accepted it, and I was on a book tour in San Francisco. Diana would be flying home tomorrow, but I had signings and readings booked in Miami, Atlanta, Nashville, Blytheville, Oxford, Tupelo, Jackson, and New Orleans. I wouldn’t be home for ten days.

“Drew, when I asked you to house sit,” I said, pouring my defeat into the phone, “I wanted you there in my house to watch my dog. The house is not going anywhere. I told you Cormac might panic and bolt if a storm came up.”

“Yes you did,” Drew allowed. “That doesn’t matter now. Let’s be smart here,” he said. “When Cormac’s pulled a breakout in the past, where’d he go? Can I call someone?”

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Look up the numbers for Alan Trimble and George Wingfield. They’ve both got dogs. They live right down the street. I’ll dial the message service and see if they’ve called me.”

I phoned to listen to our messages. Diana paced the hotel room, returning again and again to the window to glance toward San Francisco Bay, like there was some news posted out there about Cormac. I sat on the hotel bed and listened to the recordings on our voice mail. Two were from the boys, who were with our friends the Meisters, as though their phone calls to our house would reach us wherever we were; one was from the underground fence man saying the parts for the upgrade had arrived; two were from Pierre who couldn’t find certain books for which internet orders had been placed; and the last message was from a woman who did not identify herself, but said our dog had been at her house. Her call had come in an hour and forty-five minutes before Drew phoned me.