Howl (7 page)

So that was that. I didn’t need to fill out an application or explain whether I had a fenced-in yard or if I intended to test my bathtub LSD on Dewey’s little brain. No one there could afford to act as if it mattered. Dewey was going to die if I left him; if I took him and abused him, he’d at least bought a few more days on the planet, for what that was worth.

I went out to my truck and brought in the baby wipes and towels I’d brought, along with some biscuits and rawhides. I’d imagined having a normal meeting with Dewey, the sort one has with dogs wherein you offer them a treat and they see you as the Big Treat Giver and know you are Good. Now the whole bag looked paltry and naive.

After Dr. Morris was done with her exam and had given Dewey his shots, I asked that he be put on the floor, where he at least might feel comfortable in the knowledge he wasn’t going to fall off the shiny steel table. Large Hormonal Girl insisted on moving him, still afraid he might bite me. Kenny stepped back into a corner. I sat down next to the dog, and slowly began wiping some of the blood off his face and chest with the baby wipes (added benefit: no diaper rash). He trembled and cried, his tail tucked between his legs, his back arched like a cat’s. Kenny shook his head and clucked. The Large Girl looked down at us dreamily. “He’s going to be so happy with you, I can just tell,” she said, slowly. I nodded. Everyone in that clinic was completely mad, I now understood. Because Dewey was never going to be happy again, not anywhere, not with anyone.

“By the way,” Kenny said, scratching his chin under his thick beard. “I don’t think old Dewey there has ever seen grass. He was kept in a kennel outdoors with a concrete floor. When he first got here I tried to take him out to go to the bathroom, and when his paws touched the grass he jumped back like he was on FAHR.”

I wanted to ask, What more? What more could you possibly tell me? He’s a bearer of monkeypox? He’s packed with explosives? I cleaned him up as best I could, then just accepted what I’d done, like the good little existentialist I used to be. I put the collar on Dewey I’d brought from home, and the leash, and tried to get him to follow me out the door. As we passed the front desk, all the women in their Carhartts waved, wished me well. They were distracted. Dogs and cats were coming in, going out, dying and being saved all around them, all day. They were doing the best they could. The dog made it out the door, then began howling and trembling again as soon as his feet touched the grass. I picked him up and carried him to my truck.

During the four-hour drive back home, Dewey regressed into catatonia. In many ways this was preferable. He didn’t raise his head, move a muscle; I didn’t even see him blink. He stared at the glove box, silently. I considered what I’d just done. Not only was I bringing this dog home to live with my children, I was (and perhaps more important) inflicting him on Harry and Fay, the mayor and deputy mayor of Dogland. Harry (my dog) and Fay (my daughter’s) were so perfect, so dear and well-behaved, so trusting of my judgment, I feared they would see Dewey as an astonishing betrayal. I glanced over at him. He didn’t move. To my shock and horror, I realized he looked less like a Chihuahua/Pit mix than a
hyena.
A hyena crossed with a fruit bat. Hyenas are another of God’s little reminders that the world is a horrific place best not considered with too much precision. If anyone reading this is a charter member of the Hyena Lovers Foundation, don’t even bother sending me hate mail. I know the truth about hyenas, which is that they have hinged jaws, they can swallow and breathe at the same time (allowing them to eat on the hoof, as it were); they chomp right through bone and swallow it, and their poop looks like chalk as a result. CHALK-POOPERS. In addition, the females have an enlarged clitoris known as a hemipenis. All of this is nasty and grotesque and nightmare-inducing and not to be borne. And Dewey was one of them, I could clearly see. We drove.

When we got home he continued his nefarious plan of motionlessness. I had about twenty-five minutes before my son and daughter got home from school, and I decided the best way to use the time, and to exploit Dewey’s catatonia, was to give him a bath. I couldn’t do anything about the whites of his eyes, which were still bloody, but I could at least make him a little more presentable before Kat and Obadiah saw him.

I put Harry and Fay outside before I brought Dewey in, so as not to traumatize any of them, then carried Dewey over for his bath. He sat in the sink without any fuss, as would the dead. I was careful of his broken and bruised places, and watched the blood and foulness from his two days at the shelter swirl away down the drain. Then I wrapped him in towels and sat down with him on the couch. He leaned against me, shivering periodically. I thought to myself, I just drove eight hours; I crossed over a mountain range; I stopped at a country store; I met Kinny; and I brought home the Jack Nicholson character from the end of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Postoperative Jack. Here he is on my lap. He is my dog.

Kat pulled in the driveway after picking up Obadiah from kindergarten. Dewey was a fine test of character for them: Obadiah was a kindergartener; Kat was a seventeen-year-old senior in high school. As they walked in the door, I said, “Don’t make any sudden moves; I’ve got this weird crazy dog on my lap.” Kat noticed that his towel configuration resembled Palestine. (The comparison to Yasser Arafat’s headwear was prescient, and I took note of it.) For just a moment, this story is about my dear children, who, even though they’re separated by gender and twelve years, reacted exactly the same way. Neither said, “You brought home THAT?” Nor did they move too quickly or frighten Dewey. Both simply said, “Poor sweet little fella,” and got down on their knees to look at him.

What a different story this would be if he had bitten one of them! Ha! Because I could end the essay right here with “And then I killed Dewey.” Instead, his tail began to wag just slightly. It would have wagged more, but he was completely swaddled by the Gaza Strip. I unwrapped him, and he stepped over to Obadiah, smelling his hands, timid, but clearly happy to see a child. After we’d all petted him and talked to him and told him what a good boy he was, we decided to let the other dogs in. Fay and Harry, who were both then twice Dewey’s size, approached the couch gingerly. And here is a classic example of how One Just Never Knows: Dewey sprang off the couch, his tail curled tautly over his back, staring the other dogs in the eye and smelling their nether-regions, as is customary in Dogland. All the dogs became very stiff, if I may. I wasn’t sure whether a scuffle was brewing or not, and then Dewey did something I’ve never seen a dog do before. He leapt straight up off the floor, all four feet at once, and turned 180 degrees. It was positively freakish. He looked first at Harry, then leap! turn! at Fay. Everyone found this breathlessly amusing, including the dogs, who lowered their chests to the floor in the bow that signals play, and after that they were off. They wagged crazily, bit one another’s lips, exposed bellies, rolled around like doughnuts, ran in circles. Happy happy happy. Happy to be alive, to meet another of their tribe. There wasn’t a moment of tension between them. Eventually I opened the back door and off they went into the yard, where they played until bedtime. I told Kat that whatever had happened to Dewey in his brief, sad life, it hadn’t been done to him by other dogs.

I couldn’t continue to call him Dewey, and not just because of how much it sounded like Bosco. I didn’t want him going through life hearing that name, given the contexts in which he might have heard it before. So I renamed him Lucas, and he came running the first time I called him. Smart boy.

More must be said about the fact that Lucas wasn’t neutered when I brought him home. Specifically, I must be honest about his testicles. I decided not to have him neutered immediately, because I wasn’t sure of his age (his grown-up teeth were brand-new), and because he was so traumatized. I decided to wait a month and let him settle in. Fay had been spayed, and there was no chance Lucas could get out of our fenced-in yard and make more little hyenas, so I didn’t worry much about it. But I’d never had a, shall we say, intact male dog before. I prefer females (a real dog person would write “bitches” there; oh, and I shall). I prefer bitches. Walk around saying that. The only male dogs I’d had were already taken care of in the reproduction department.

The first thing I noticed about Lucas’s parts was that they were really noticeable. He’d been with us only a couple of weeks when my daughter gave him the nickname Fat Tony, because he swaggered like a wiseguy in the Mob. In fact, he acted in all ways like a mafioso; it had something to do with his demeanor around dogs much larger than he (he came to us weighing about sixteen pounds to Fay’s fifty, for instance), as if he had nothing to talk to them about because he was packing greater heat. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he was packing the genuine article, and his testicles were visible with every step he took. I couldn’t get over it. I’d see him run through the house toward the back door: testicles. He’d jump up on the couch with me: there they were. I wasn’t sure where to look.

And also I didn’t know how adorable those little guys can be. Lucas slept sitting up like an old man in a recliner, with his head thrown back. He also snored. He preferred to do this leaning up against me. So one night Kat and I were sitting up late talking; I was in one corner of the couch with Lucas on my lap. He was sound asleep, bent like a question mark. Kat was at the other end of the couch. I pointed out to her (in an educational way) that Lucas’s testicles resembled little furry eggs. I said, “Look! Look how cute they are.” Perhaps I had said this a few times already.

She said, “Yes, Mom, I see them.”

“Do you think he’d notice if I just poked them?”

“Oh for the love of God,” Kat said, exasperated. “No, I don’t think he’d notice.”

So I did that. When Kat tells this story now, she makes a little gesture with her first and middle fingers together and says “poke poke,” which was exactly what I did. They
felt
like little furry eggs, too, which I took to be a bonus. Lucas not only didn’t mind, he didn’t even stir. He just kept snoring through his black lips. He slept so hard he eventually slid down my left arm and ended up on his side on the couch.

Maybe fifteen minutes had passed, and Kat and I had moved on to more important topics of conversation, like Kant, or the death penalty, something like that, when Kat suddenly leapt off the couch screaming, “OH MY GOD!” and pointing at Lucas.

He was enjoying what I learned in seventh-grade health class to call a
nocturnal emission.
I’m sorry to say that it wasn’t merely the nocturnal part occurring, but also the emitting. I too jumped up with great haste, but was unsure what to do after that. Does one awaken an ejaculating dog, or does one absolutely not? For his part, Lucas appeared to still be sound asleep (although quite happy). I decided to just let him have his moment, as it were, and headed toward the laundry room for towels and upholstery cleaner. Kat covered her face and said, “I am scarred for life. I am SCARRED for LIFE.”

By the time I got back to the living room, Lucas was awake and seemed confused. I picked him up and put him on the floor, and began cleaning the couch cushion. “Okay,” I said to my daughter, who was by this time pacing, “when you get into therapy in a few years, you’re welcome to say that I poked at the little furry eggs. I encourage you to be honest. But please don’t jumble this all up in your mind and make it look like satanic ritual abuse.” I was afraid of losing the right to ever open a day care.

I eventually had Lucas neutered while I was out of town. That was the only way I could go about it. I never expected to feel the way I did: me! Ms. Neuter All of Them! Including most human men! But when it came right down to it, I didn’t want anyone to hurt Lucas, and I didn’t want some of his little parts to just vanish. I kept thinking of his days at the shelter at the foot of the mountain; how diminished he was when I found him. He’d emerged with almost nothing but his big personality and his, well, other things. And I couldn’t help feeling like he deserved to hold on to what he had, what he’d entered the world with. But in the end, so to speak, I did the right thing. When I came home and saw him prancing around, just a little blank space between his legs, I felt a moment of real sadness, then considered what a better world we might have lived in if someone had done the same thing to Lucas’s former owner. Kinny would have done it at a discount, I’ll bet.

Ball and Chain

[William Wegman]

Dog of the Day

[Laurie Notaro]

M
Y DOG
M
AEBY
has always gotten good grades.

Every evening when I pull into the driveway at the doggy day care center that she attends, Maeby, a fluffy Aussie/Lab mix, is waiting for me, along with her daily report card.

Although it is fanciful thinking that one day the center might provide classes in “The Mailman Is Only in It for the Pension and Not Your Territory, Therefore the Barking Looks a Little Silly,” “A Fart Is a Fart and Not an Invisible Stench Rocket, So Stop Looking for It,” or “Picking Up Your Own Poop,” my dog consistently got good marks in areas of interest such as playing nicely with others and making new friends, and was apparently well heeled in the saucy arts, since it was reported that the flirty miss had a new boyfriend every week. While I wasn’t exactly proud that my little Lady was shaking it up for the Tramps on the playground, I was delighted when she was promoted to the position of “greeter” at the center, which is a dog who is assigned to play with new dogs in the doggy day care pack to get them adjusted and make their transition easier. She was even asked to participate in a marketing video for the day care center in which, according to her report card, “Maeby stole the show with her playtime skills.”

I mean, really. That one is
still
up on our refrigerator.

So, honestly, I was a little surprised when day after day, week after week, I would pick Maeby up from day care, get her report card, and glance at the chalkboard of honor that stands at the entrance to the center, only to see that the Dog of the Day—the highest honor of distinction that any dog could receive—was proclaimed to be Blackjack.

Last week it had been Mossimo.

The week before it had been Sammie.

The week before that, Ziggy.

The previous week, it went to Hercules Wu, whose parents had once taken our leash because theirs looked similar and then returned it a week later with
HERCULES WU
written across the back side of it in black permanent marker, along with Hercules Wu’s phone number.

You know, I thought to myself as I drove home with Maeby fast asleep in the back of the car, I don’t know what’s going on here, but something’s got to give. Look at her, so busy greeting and teasing all the boys on the playground that she falls asleep the minute she gets in the car! My dog is a hardworking hussy, pouring her heart out,
giving her all,
and what does she get in return? A nice report card. A scratch on the ears. That’s not enough, I said to myself; that is not enough for my dog.

“I hate to break it to you,” my husband said that night at dinner after I had voiced my Dog of the Day concerns. “But I highly doubt Maeby is upset about not being The Chosen One. She is far more concerned at the moment with licking the floor where you dropped a hot dog yesterday.”

“That’s not the point,” I argued. “Do you not remember that Maeby was the one who
stole the show with her playtime skills
? Because if you’ve forgotten, I can show it to you.”

My husband sighed. “She doesn’t know how to spell ‘Maeby,’” he offered. “Just point to the sign the next time you’re there and tell her she is the Dog of the Day.”

I was stunned. “If that’s how you prefer to handle a crisis—with deceit and trickery—then I don’t even want you in this house when I finally have to tell her she’s adopted,” I stuttered.

“Did you ever think,” he finally said, “that maybe those dogs got the distinction because they earned it? That maybe they just gave a little bit extra?”

I gasped, not knowing what to say, but my mind began to race. Was it possible that the other dogs got better grades than Maeby? Could it be true that other dogs contributed more, were harder working? How could that be? Maeby was a greeter, showing new dogs the way, making them feel at ease, helping them with the introduction to the group. That was real dogitarian work. What could the other dogs possibly be doing that could outshine that? Was Sammie brokering peace accords between Indian and Pakistani dogs? Was Mossimo peacefully fighting for the rights of dogs not to be forced into wearing hats and sweaters if they chose not to? Was Blackjack removing land mines, making the playground safe for everyone else? Had Ziggy finally talked Mr. Winkle into retiring? And what was Hercules Wu doing, besides stealing leashes? Was Hercules Wu a greeter? I really doubted it. Was Hercules Wu asked to be in the video? Probably not. Did Hercules Wu steal the show with his playtime skills and his appropriated leash? Not very likely.

So I decided to do the only thing I really could do, and that was ask. I wanted to know what the Dog of the Day criteria were, what the mitigating factors might be, and then tackle the problem from that angle. But when I went to pick Maeby up after her next day at the center, I was not at all prepared for what I saw.

It was an empty chalkboard.

No one had been proclaimed Dog of the Day yet.

This was my—and Maeby’s—chance.

I stood still for a moment, listening. I heard nothing, not the rustling of collars, or leashes, or barking. Everyone, it seemed, was outside on the playground.

Maeby stole the show with her playtime skills.

Maeby stole the show with her playtime skills.

I took a step forward toward the front desk.

Maeby stole the show with her playtime skills.

Where they keep the chalk.

I took another step. And another. And another, my steps becoming quicker as I neared the desk. And the chalk. And my dog’s redemption.

And I saw it, a pink, slim tube of chalk, right there next to the computer keyboard. I was a step or two away from reaching over and grabbing it, because it was lying right there in the open, when I stopped.

Maeby stole the show with her playtime skills.

It was true. But how would Maeby feel if she knew that I stole the title of Dog of the Day and gave it to her, with her name written all over the back of it in pink chalk? I didn’t take another step. Instead, I waited there for Mandie, the center’s owner, to bring Maeby out with Hercules Wu’s leash, and then told her that Maeby would be coming in an extra day that week because I had finally made an appointment to have my terminally ill nineteen-year-old cat, Barnaby, cross over into the Kitty Light. It would be better if she spent that day shaking her milkshake on the playground at the likes of Ziggy and Blackjack, I told Mandie, than to be at our house when something sad was going to happen.

And I was right; the day we sent Barnaby to a hereafter stocked with an all-you-can-eat buffet of Fancy Feast and Pounce was awfully sad, beginning with the moment we brought Maeby over to his cat bed to say good-bye to him. She nudged him gently, licked his head, sat and waited for Hercules Wu’s leash, and was off to day care.

When I went to pick her up later that day, I couldn’t wait to see her. Although Barnaby’s passing couldn’t have gone any smoother due to our sympathetic and patient vet, it was as emotional as any experience of letting a friend of nineteen years go could be. My eyes were red and puffy when I arrived, and as I walked into the lobby, Maeby bounded in through the side door.

“What a good girl!” I said as I scratched behind her ears and she jumped and hopped around with excitement. “I’m so happy to see you!”

“That’s not all you should see,” Mandie said, and I looked up to see her pointing away from us.

I looked in that direction, and that’s when I saw it. The chalkboard, on which Maeby’s name was written in pink, swirly letters.

“You’re Dog of the Day?” I asked as she jumped and I jumped a little too, as I petted her head and she panted with excitement. “That’s wonderful! Look at that! Maeby is Dog of the Day!”

Mandie handed over the leash and we were just about to walk out the door when I realized I still had a question and was dying for the answer.

“So,” I said before I pushed the door all the way open. “How do you know who’s Dog of the Day? In what way do you judge who deserves it?”

Mandie laughed. “It’s not who ‘deserves’ it,” she explained as she smiled. “It’s who needs it the most.”

“Oh,” I said as I smiled back. “I think that’s a great way. That’s really nice. Thank you.”

“Don’t forget her report card,” Mandie said as she pulled it from her pocket. “Maeby has two new boyfriends on the playground, you know.”

[
Back from scattering birds, all dogs swagger a bit.—Dan Liebert
]