Stepdog

by Mireya Navarro

  “Yep. Might as well. Just want some fresh air. How does this leash go?”

  The leash itself was nylon, but the part around his neck was a sliding chain that his rescue place had recommended because the harder the dog pulled the tighter it got, which made it easier to control the feisty one.

  “Not so fast,” my beloved said after showing me how to secure the chain around Eddie’s collar and I turned to leave. Jim informed me that great danger awaited just outside our pastel-colored walls and sat me down for a briefing.

  It turned out enemies lurked around every corner, through fences and behind gates. Jim instructed me to be in a state of constant high alert to fend off impending attacks. First, the coyotes. Jim reminded me of the stories we had heard about coyotes taking dogs off the leash in the area, usually little dogs. There was an open field at the end of our street and that’s where they lived. Jim had a close call not long ago, when he was out with Eddie before sunset and he heard rustling in the field’s brush. In a second, not fifteen feet away, a big coyote came walking out of the brush and confronted them. Eddie let out a wail.

  “This was not a coyote who was just wandering around and stumbled upon us,” Jim had told me when he came home spooked out of his mind. “This guy was hunting.”

  My resourceful fiancé had first stomped his foot thinking the coyote would take off. He didn’t flinch. So Jim started backing up to the house without turning his back on the coyote. He was walking backward and pulling Eddie. After gaining some distance, Jim turned, scooped Eddie up in his arms, and started jogging, all the while praying the coyote wouldn’t follow. The coyote jogged along with them but lost interest when Jim cleared the corner.

  I wasn’t sure picking up Eddie and running had been the wisest idea. “What if the coyote bit you trying to get to Eddie?”

  “I wasn’t going to be a sitting duck and let the damn coyote take my dog,” Jim said vehemently. “That coyote meant business and his buddies may have been in the brush.”

  Jim stopped short of telling me what to do if I had a similar encounter. I think both of us knew that while I wouldn’t go out of my way to feed Eddie to the coyote, if it came down to Eddie or me—well, let’s not dwell on the unpleasant.

  Coyotes aside, there was still the business of Eddie’s foes in our extensive canine community. We were talking legions of them. Lest we forget, Eddie was a bellicose prick. In dribs and drabs, Jim had revealed his dog’s rap sheet. Eddie once almost bit Jim’s young niece, Joanna. Eddie also got kicked out of the airport day care Jim used when he traveled for work because of fighting. And Eddie and Max, a golden retriever puppy from the neighborhood, had gotten into so many fights on the trail along the creek that Jim had to tie a yellow ribbon to the trail’s entrance gate to signal to Max’s owner that it was not safe to come in.

  Like the father of the playground bully, Jim was always ready with excuses. Joanna annoyed Eddie by her play. Max was the attacker, always off-leash and always jumping from behind. “I’d go out of my way to keep my distance from Max, but one time I ran into Max off-leash by the creek,” Jim had explained. “He took off after Eddie. They started to get into it and I grabbed each by the collar and pulled them apart. Another time Eddie was off-leash and Max again broke off his leash and attacked Eddie. I pulled them apart and the momentum pushed me into some bushes and I got scratched up and Max started biting on my hand. The wife finally got her dog and then blamed me. I said, ‘Are you joking?’ He was twice as big as Eddie. This was a dog they couldn’t control. I can control Eddie.”

  The journalist in me suspected there was another side to this story. A certain Eddie-tries-to-eat-baby-pug incident in a dog park came to mind. But Jim was adamant that Max had traumatized Eddie and left him forever looking over his shoulder during walks, fearful of an ambush.

  None of this exactly explained why the kennel expelled his darling dog. Jim complained that the staff conveniently overlooked Eddie’s own injuries from the fights. The place separated dogs into big and small. First they put Eddie with the big dogs, but he kept getting into fights. The staff used water sprayers to break up fights, and they’d empty the entire bottle on Eddie and he wouldn’t back off. Eddie sort of fell in between big and small, so they tried to put him with the little dogs next. They hoped the little dogs would be more submissive and that Eddie would behave. But he fought the little dogs too. He’d be fine for an hour or two and then turn on them. Eventually, Eddie ended up in solitary confinement. They put him in his own little caged area and it worked for almost a year, until Jim came to pick him up one Monday and they told him Eddie was expelled. At some point in the comings and goings of the kennel, Jim was told, Eddie had bit another dog around the neck and the risk of lethal injury had just become too high.

  Jim still held his dog blameless.

  “I got home and I was petting him and I felt these funny bumps on his ears and I saw scabs and bite marks,” Jim told me. “His ears had been bitten through. Clearly some other dog had fought with him and gotten the better of him. It makes me think that the owner of the place had thrown Eddie out and made up the story about Eddie being the aggressor to try to prevent me from suing him for my dog being injured.”

  Sure. What logical person would not reach the same conclusion?

  Jim was forced to board Eddie in a private house for a while. The caretaker had an old and amiable Irish setter. There’s no need to repeat what happened. By the time I moved to California, Jim had been paying a babysitter to come and look after Eddie in his house when he was away.

  Now, as I was about to venture out in the company of this thug, Jim warned me to stay far away from Pete, Max (yellow-ribbon Max), and Ally.

  “Don’t let the cute names fool you,” he said. “These are ninjas in furry costumes.” Never was I to try to pass them or even make eye contact with the owner, he said. I was responsible for smelling them before we saw them so we could cross the street or turn around and retreat. As he spoke, Jim was quickly scribbling. “Here,” he said handing me a list.

  Seattle. Golden Lab. Friend.

  Chipper. Labradoodle. Friend.

  Ally. Fat black Lab. Foe.

  Pete. Ally’s friend. Blond Lab, also very fat. Foe.

  Chloe. Really pretty short-haired brown mutt. Friend.

  Dancer, the whippet. Molly and Tigger, two goldens. All pals.

  Casper. Golden retriever. Foe.

  Max. Golden retriever. Archenemy.

  “Watch out,” Jim reminded me. “Eddie really has a bee in his bonnet about this one.”

  I think I was shaking a little by the time Eddie and I managed to finally leave. It was like entering doggie Mordor. With the leash in my tight grip, Eddie started with a swagger, like a cowboy out to collect a debt. We strolled our street, Avenida De Cortez, and it wasn’t too bad. I discovered Eddie ate poop, apparently a delicacy for the refined palate of the cattle-herding blue heeler. He went for a turd left behind by a friend—or, more likely, a foe—but I pulled him away just in time.

  We turned left from our house and right up the hill to the next block. Seattle waited behind a wrought-iron gate. Kisses all around.

  Then sniff, sniff every blade of grass with identifying markers from other dogs, and we soon ran into some stranger, which was okay, Jim told me, as long as it was a girl or a geezer or a puppy. This one happened to be Buddy, a tiny terrier-looking thing with a mop of straight hair hiding his eyes. He was merrily lapping up water from the gutter with no owner in sight. I found a tag in all that hair and was able to track the owner to the house right in front of us before a coyote ate him. Buddy was a repeat escapee, the owner said apologetically. Eddie, anxious to resume his walk, couldn’t care less about Buddy.

  But down the same street, Eddie tensed up and started growling as we approached the house of a black and brown German shepherd lolling in the grass behind an iron gate that allowed him to view the front side
walk. Jim had not mentioned this one, but there was obviously some serious bad blood. As we got close, the German shepherd threw himself against the gate with great force and Eddie battled against the leash, snarling. It was so bad I could almost hear them think.

  “I’m going to rip your head off!”

  “No, I’m going to rip your head off!”

  The exchange was ferocious, but it was over in seconds. At some point Eddie grew bored and thrust his acrobatic rear leg into the air to let loose his most fragrant stream of urine on a nearby planter. The German shepherd went loco and I feared he’d impale himself on the gate as we walked away. Then, back on our street after circling the block, almost home free, our fearless hero made a totally dumb move and put his snout through the hole of a wooden fence so that two badass Pomeranians could bite him. I thought I’d be in trouble when I got home, but Jim totally understood. He knew his dog was basically a dumbass. But I felt sorry for Eddie later when I saw him curled up in one of his round beds, licking his wounded face. Every now and then he’d look up—giving me his “Do you have food for me?” pleading face—and I even felt affection.

  I avoided dog walking like the plague after that experience, but sooner or later the time always came when Jim was not available, Arielle and Henry were not around, and it fell on me to take Eddie out. Then one day the inevitable happened. In Eddie’s defense, the mail carrier drove his truck into a parking spot right in front of us as we minded our business on the sidewalk across from our house. What would Dum-dum be expected to do but lurch at the carrier through the open cab, bite a bundle of letters off his hands, and send paper straight into the wet gutter.

  “Just go, just go,” the mortified mail carrier told me, so off we went.

  Then our mail stopped coming.

  Apparently, thousands of carriers are bitten every year on their deliveries, forcing contrite dog owners nationwide to pick up their mail at the post office. In our case, no one was hurt, but the post office still made Jim sign some document giving assurances that we would contain our monster.

  I became even more reluctant to walk Eddie after that incident. For bonding purposes, it was much easier to run with Eddie. The previous winter—the time of the year when the average Los Angeles temperature plunges to 68 degrees—Eddie had lounged around too much, even for him, and started looking like a sausage. Jim took him out for power walks and I decided to pitch in. Up and down the canyon we went jogging every other day or so, with no breaks for sniffing or getting in trouble. He soon looked more toned than I did.

  But after several months, the dog still was not any more accepting of me. I pinned my hopes on Jim’s upcoming trip for work. For the first time, I’d be all Eddie had for a few days.

  “Woo, baby, woo,” Jim said, confident that if I courted favor with his dog with scratches and biscuits I’d win him over. He kissed me good-bye and left me in charge.

  I wasn’t sure what to expect. The house was big enough for four of us not to run into one another for hours, at times. I thought Eddie would surely jump on one of the kids’ beds and stay out of sight until I had to walk him. But the minute Jim left the house I couldn’t shake the stinker. At first he took a nap by the garage door, convinced Jim would soon come back. But after a while, a bubble appeared over his head. It read: “Uh-oh.” Alone with me, Eddie quickly transformed himself into a normal pet. He waited silently for me by the bedroom door in the morning. He clung to me all day long. We walked, we worked, we watched TV. There was no barking, no alligator stares. In reciprocity, I pet him and talked to him and left the kitchen’s glass door open so he could sunbathe at will, even if I had to put aside my own fears of home invasion. The neighborhood was always teeming with gardeners, leaf blowers, painters, remodelers, cable installers, and taco trucks, but I locked up doors and windows as if Charles Manson were still on the loose. Just for this new, improved Eddie, I kept the kitchen’s glass door open.

  “We’re in the midst of a breakthrough!” I reported back to Jim over the phone that night.

  The next morning, I came down for my breakfast and let Eddie out in the backyard. “You do your thing, mister, and I’ll do mine.” I walked him after I ate and got back to my office to work. Not an hour went by before Eddie stopped by the doorway, looking intently at me. He looked kind of crazed. I ignored him, but he didn’t move. I tried not to make eye contact. Still there. It was hard to concentrate.

  “I just walked you. Go back to your tanning. Go! Scram!”

  Eddie was going to have to adjust to me, not the other way around. Somehow he was not getting the message. He left with a long whimper at one point but was back at my door in less than half an hour. And after another half hour. And another.

  I called Jim.

  “Baby, Eddie is stalking me.”

  “You should walk him.”

  “I just did! After breakfast. His next walk is not due until after lunch.”

  “Well, I walk him whenever I go out for fresh air. It helps me think.”

  “I think just fine indoors. He’ll have to wait. He has to fit my schedule, not the other way around. Do you want to talk to him? Maybe it’ll calm him down.”

  “Sure.”

  I took the phone to Eddie’s ear, and we both could hear Jim talking nonsense (“You’ll go out, don’t worry”), but Eddie was not interested. He was jumping in place, jerking his body as if we were about to set off on a sprint to the door. What a nag. I hung up, yelled at him “No!” and closed my office door.

  Scratch-scratch-scratch.

  That fingernails-on-chalkboard sound was the sound of me losing.

  When Jim came home, I was relieved but satisfied that my relationship with Eddie had been forever changed. But after rushing to greet my husband and getting his full dosage of ear and butt scratches, what did Eddie do? He turned to bark at me! By the time Jim approached to kiss me, the dog was in hysterics. Before Jim had a chance to bend down to calm him, I grabbed Eddie by the collar and threw him out in the backyard, slamming the glass door behind me.

  “Where were we?” I said to Jim, leading him upstairs so we could greet each other in peace.

  Jim eventually let Eddie in, and dog and master were once again inseparable. For the rest of the day, Eddie and I exchanged dirty looks. Life resumed as if I had not invested three days of goodwill on this double-crosser. I felt betrayed. The dog fooled me into thinking he had come around.

  From then on, babysitting Eddie when Jim was away became just another periodic duty of keeping house, as mindless as cleaning up the oven. I would keep the dog alive, but that was about it.

  The aggression, the walking, the hair—most dogs were just too much trouble. I had dogs, cats, Easter chickens, and rabbits growing up—and a cat that killed my rabbit—but as a grown woman, my life was too busy for a dog. It was just too much responsibility. And now all this inconvenience by association. Eddie brought unnecessary hassles to our already hectic lives. As far as I was concerned, he was a liability and a traitor. Inside the house, Eddie couldn’t stand me, and only me. Did I mention the kids now insisted on taking turns sleeping with him? Of course, Eddie loved them! This was not the routine in Jim’s town house. There, Eddie slept in the crate. Now, in the new house, the children needed him as a security blanket. Maybe it was a reaction to me. My fiancé figured there was no harm, dismissing my reminders that his dog ate “caca.” The kids complained about waking up to Eddie’s snoring, but they lovingly put up with it. One night, Arielle hosted him in her full-size bed. The next night, it was Henry’s turn to cozy up to the dog in his twin bunk bed. I passed one of their bedrooms and there he was, sprawled on the mattress, giving me a ha-ha-I’m-in-the-bed-and-you-can’t-do-nothing-about-it look while Henry or Arielle sat at the computer. When the kids went to their mom’s, Eddie had the beds to himself. He sometimes barked at the kids too, when they approached Jim, but he tolerated them much better than he tolerated me.<
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  I scratched my head at this dog’s charmed life. At some point between the Depression and the Housewives of Beverly Hills, Americans became dog crazy, and I feared that the madness had yet to even peak. Pictures with Santa at the mall for dogs. Health insurance for dogs. Fat farms and thousand-dollar motorized treadmills. Nanny services. Hotels with oversized pet pillows and plush doggie robes. Licensed dog masseuses. Yoga for dogs. Faux-mink coats, hipster lumberjack vests. And on and on. Enough to make one wonder how many carbon emissions American dogs contribute to global warming.

  My perspective on dogs was an old-fashioned one, born out of growing up in Puerto Rico at a time when pets were treated like animals instead of family. My sister and I always had dogs, but our dogs lived in the backyard or on the terrace. We didn’t walk them, nor did we sleep with them. We didn’t buy them monogrammed sweaters or holiday presents. They were left behind when we went out. They did their business outside and were expected to fulfill their security guard job, scaring off would-be burglars. But even on the island, newspapers now ran “doggie socials” sections featuring pictures of dogs in front of birthday cakes.

  I got it that dogs can be trained to do wondrous things. Dogs can stop fence jumpers at the White House and protect the President of the United States better than the Secret Service. And dogs can help us be less depressed, lower our blood pressure, reduce our risk of heart disease, reduce stress, and help prolong lives, as some scientific studies show. They even sometimes save our lives. Blake Edwards, the late movie director, said he once tried to commit suicide but his dog wouldn’t let him.

  But dogs can also make you run into oncoming traffic or fall on your face. And what if the dog was a constant aggravation? What does it do to your health to live with a dog who doesn’t like you, who tries to trip you, who stresses you out? Where was the study about that?