The Possibility Dogs

by Susannah Charleson

  Somewhere along here must be the home of Mizzen’s friends, the wheelchair-bound mother and her daughter. I wonder if these dogs we are passing are, like Mizzen, loved, familiar landmarks to them.

  We walk absently for over an hour, sunless, sometimes heading into wind and intermittent rain. The training mind of me observes Jake Piper’s focus and his loose-lead heeling; the rest of my mind is somewhere else. Maybe it’s those dogs, that route lined with evident affection and neglect, and thoughts of Puzzle that make me realize where we are.

  The last random turn has brought us two blocks from the house and shed where Jake Piper might have been born. Not interested in making him revisit some horror he escaped, I have never taken him back there. But he’s a different dog now. Our chance meeting with the white German shepherd—Jake’s eagerness followed by the calm, thoughtful goodbye—makes me wonder how much of his hard beginning Jake Piper still carries.

  We turn for the house that’s in the middle of that riddled neighborhood, more houses leaning, more houses razed, and just about the point I think we’ve somehow passed it, I realize the house and the shed that might have been Jake’s are gone. The raw turning of the driveway from the street is still there, and so is the scrub line of volunteer trees along the periphery, but that’s it. No house. No God-awful shed. Nothing. The demolition must have been fairly recent. A backhoe is parked where there was once a porch.

  It’s like a benediction. I hoot a cheer. I’ve never proven this place was Jake’s beginning, but it’s always represented his early misery anyway. The destruction of that damn shed feels like a victory.

  We walk onto the land, and I take off his vest to let Jake wander. He perks. He is certainly interested. He works his nose low, the curiosity of a dog finding all kinds of smells in freshly overturned earth. Jake has always been a dog that likes to share his discoveries, and he does so now—finding things, beaming up at me with excitement: A dog’s piss line near the sidewalk! a shred of Styrofoam cup! an earthworm! Oh, the sweet pleasure of rolling in earthworm. Nothing about Jake suggests fear or even recognition of this place. I too am looking for anything I remember here and find nothing at all.

  My cell phone buzzes in my pocket. A call has come in and the phone didn’t ring, or it rang, and in my thick thoughts, I somehow didn’t hear it. I recognize the number: Puzzle’s vet, who checks in daily. A voicemail has translated to a text. My voice-to-text service is famous for its terrible transcription, but in the mangle of this one, I think I read good news.

  FUZZED UP DOING SWELL. GIDDYUP SITUATION. HOME TOMORROW. BYEBYE.

  Does this mean Puzzle’s doing well and can come home tomorrow? After a crazy-making listen to the distorted voicemail, which sounds even more garbled than it spells (“Fuzzed up Phil doing swell. Giddyup bitching. Dangle home tomorrow. Bye bye”) and a hold when I call back the clinic, the receptionist confirms the vet’s message. Yes, Puzzle’s doing much better. Her skin is still a little raw, but she’s eating and bright-eyed again.

  And “giddyup situation”? The receptionist has no idea, “but if it sounds like good news,” she says, “I’d take it.”

  What does Jake Piper think of me, laughing out of nowhere, crouching down to him? He stops his exploring to sit very still with his head on my shoulder, occasionally licking my face, and he stays there while I work out the good cry that has never come easily. Jake is unsure what to make of the sound or the salt of it, so he tries all his comforting tricks: the lean, the puppy wag, the wash of my face. Caught by something odd about our posture, a passing driver slows, calls out the window of his truck: “Ma’am, are you okay?”

  We’re okay. Jake Piper has his eyes on me. I wave my thanks.

  Recovered, we walk across the abraded property. Funny how good news changes the whole aspect of a place. Puzzle coming home makes even the grit of a demolished house and a grubby backhoe look better. Rain patters over the mud, lets up, and then falls harder. A handful of sparrows are happy in the scrub hackberry, branch-hopping, shuddering their wings in the clean of it. The earth smells sweet. Jake, who hates a bath, is crazy for rain. He snorts and capers to the end of his lead and wags his way back again, muddy to the elbows. We are soaked to the skin. We’ve got a long walk ahead.

  Vest back on. “Home. Take me home, Jake,” I say to the white dog. He leads out in confidence, as though he knows where that is.

  He doesn’t.

  “Never mind,” says Paula later. “He’s still learning. Not every dog has to do every task.” She encourages me to think of it this way: in Puzzle, I’ve got a dog to teach the finding; in Jake, I’ve got a dog to teach the staying found.

  27

  MONTHS LATER, AN IMPROVED dog-to-teach-the-finding nudges blinds aside to stare through the window. Puzzle’s brow is furrowed. She sees me with a suitcase, and she sees Jake and Jake’s vest and Jake’s bag of gear all being loaded into the car. Departure is a rhythm Puzzle knows, and this is surely departure, but for years, she’s been the dog that dashed out of the house; she’s been the dog that leaped into a car full of gear. Today is the first time the motions of travel don’t include her. It’s a dark look she shoots me through the glass. Behind her, Mr. Sprits’l, who cannot get to the window, scolds. I could caption the meaning of it: Welcome to my world! This is what it’s like to be left.

  Jake and I are headed out on a road trip alone. While a service dog’s Public Access Test is exacting, it doesn’t take much time. A road trip like this one better evaluates a service-dog-and-handler team’s readiness to navigate an unpredictable world. Long hours driving, multiple public settings, obedience and task commitment in strange places with noise, new people, unfamiliar dogs—this is where we’ll evaluate Jake’s constancy as a service partner across days. This is where we’ll see, too, what I bring back to him. We travel for the sake of experience with change, not to a destination.

  It’s a proving opportunity. Some dogs that are comfortable on short trips develop intense carsickness on long ones. Some tense up with the stress of travel, and their good manners fail. On trips like this, even great dogs can get too distracted to be of service, too overstimulated to pay attention to even the simplest commands. If Jake has issues we need to address, they’ll probably show up this weekend. I hope he doesn’t have issues. I hope for good things—polite public presence and real commitment to the service tasks I ask him to provide—but Jake has never been on duty for so long on the move. This trip is a very big deal for a young dog beside a human feeling not altogether well.

  A peculiar journey we have before us too. While we have a route and a schedule, we’ll wander from it sometimes. I will try to find the unexpected beside Jake. We’ll visit small airports. We’ll pull over to construction sites—backhoes, dump trucks, nail guns! We’ll walk past tractors in motion, if we can find them. We’ll look for weird. Because more than one service dog has ultimately washed out from a fear response to black trash bags (some cower, some bark, some helplessly pee), we’ll cruise random neighborhoods hoping for trash day. A long walk down blocks of black bags and the possibility of noisy trash trucks—it’s not everyone’s idea of a weekend holiday, but for us, it would be a solid score.

  Jake needs to demonstrate his focus. Though he is an eager learner and has a willing heart, Jake is by no means a perfect dog. He has his temptations. The worst of them is probably children—sparky, fun-sized humans that he can often look straight in the face. Jake loves children, and children love him for his kindly expression and the spotted, akimbo ears, the way he pays attention and tilts his head back and forth when they giggle. Cute as it is, the mutual attraction can be a problem. Jake has learned that the Meet and Greet command means he can be petted by strangers, but he never gets that command while wearing his vest. For tempted Jake, that would send all kinds of mixed messages. It would also send mixed messages to many of the strangers we meet, who are often much confused by the petting policies of different working dogs in vests. So it’s cleaner all the way around if Jake learn
s he must be out of the vest for petting and he must be given the Meet and Greet permission. This is even harder for Jake than Leave It. I can tell. He could throw everything over—obedience, duty, even good manners—for a towheaded toddler with a gummy bear. We won’t exactly be bird-dogging for children on this trip, but kids and service dogs happen. He’s had great self-control lately, but one long-term service dog trainer told me that away from home, sometimes even a great dog’s discipline can go poof!

  There have also been new indiscretions. Jake’s been behaving very well in restaurants lately, tucking himself under the table, resting against my foot, and virtually disappearing during a meal. He has ignored crumbs, turned away from food flung by a nearby baby, resisted come-hither motions from servers. He has winced and buried his head against booth upholstery when a café singer with an edgy voice made my own ears hurt. But recently, as I was having a meal with a friend, a lively, animated woman, I noticed a random twitchiness about her. It got worse, that fidgeting, and when she jumped outright and looked beneath the table, I knew Jake was up to something. Good Jake, curled handsomely beneath us, was certainly being quiet and out of the way—at the same time he was licking my friend’s sandaled feet.

  He had never done this before—not to me, not to friends, not to strangers. Jake has never loved my feet at any time, but there was something about my friend’s that he could not resist. “Leave It,” he heard from me, and marked, and even shifted away when I told him to, but as the meal progressed, he returned to her in creeping measure, close enough to cold-nose her ankle in one moment, turn away as though he’d done nothing, and sneak in another kiss on the bridge of her foot minutes later.

  Dog kisses get a mixed reception among my friends. Some love them, some accept them in moderation, and some don’t like them at all. This friend was not a fan. Jake’s kisses were unwanted, and beyond that, from a service dog, they were completely inappropriate. It will be strange on this trip to choose restaurant tables by how close someone in sandals is sitting, but I’ll do it. If Jake can be tempted by feet, we’d better find out now.

  My own readiness is also on trial. My strength fluctuates and sometimes I cannot feel my steps altogether, and I’ve come to need Jake Piper more. Recent indications suggest that in time I’ll need a service dog daily. Even though I knew this might eventually happen—it’s been forecast often enough—I still struggle with the idea of slowing down. Where is the clean line between denial and giving in to something you could beat? I can never find it. Claiming to like straight-up realities (and having just spent several years working with service dog handlers who have taught me how important that is), I still try to ignore plenty of my own, reading up on the body’s gift for compensation, holding on to a memory of stamina I can no longer trust. Push, push, push. Some days I think I’m winning. Most days I am.

  But I had a bad fall stepping out of bed one morning. The numb foot that was there might as well not have been. I crashed into a nightstand and then onto the floor so hard it left a row of bruises up my spine. I lay there awhile, looked up to Jake Piper and Puzzle looking down, and thought: So there it is, and here we are, the service dog in training and I.

  I had thought Jake might be the dog I’d learn with, the dog to help teach others (including the dog I’d eventually need), but now I don’t know. We work on every task Jake might demonstrate for future dog teams in training, psych service and otherwise, and we work equally on those he might need to do for me. We move from theory to reality, Jake’s steady gait to my sometimes confident, sometimes faltering step. It’s an uncomfortable, challenging time, but I’ve managed to evade the depression often associated with chronic illness. Doctors, expecting it, have asked. I think the work beside the dogs has made the difference, and I say so.

  I tell Jake: “If this is what’s coming, kiddo, I’m glad it’s you beside me.”

  I tell myself: Pay attention. Have adventures! Trust the dog.

  Traveling with a service dog, even a kind, obedient, socialized service dog, is far less simple than traveling alone. Even everyday choices take some forethought. His things, my things—we are double the packed gear; I expect most of our activities will take double the time too. It’s a good test of us—this week my right foot and hand have gone especially numb. Stairs, uneven sidewalks, door thresholds can all be a problem. Task-trained to brace a potentially wobbly partner, Jake has recently transitioned to a stability harness. I can say “Brace” to him, and Jake will dutifully steady or counterbalance, whichever is needed. He has another command that yields a slow, steady pull when I’m going up stairs; he’s as solid as a handrail. Still, there will be luggage, and I’ve chosen guesthouses for us where I’ll have to figure out the logistics of bags, stairs, and service dog. If I have weak days, I’ll have to mete out my own strength carefully. It is the thoughtful process many handlers must manage.

  Though we’ve held off on this trip waiting for cooler weather and much cooler asphalt for Jake’s paws, autumn is slow in coming. I planned the trip for this weekend to coincide with a Friday morning cold front, but it’s stalled one state over, and on this day of departure for the Piney Woods of East Texas, the forecast high is 105. Jake doesn’t care. He leaps into the back seat, regardless, excited. Woo-hoo! His eyes are bright; the crazy ears are in motion.

  My thoughts are in motion too. Thinking like a handler is all about detail: when to stop, where to park, how to get Jake from one place to another without burning up his feet. (He has protective booties—amusing to the human, very puzzling to the dog—and the first time he wore them, they made him bust out in a kind of soft-shoe routine in the house. But his feet are so slender that ultimately Jake flips them off when he walks. They fly in every direction, some achieving remarkable distance.)

  We’re heading toward Louisiana, then we’ll wander south along the state line before curving west-northwest back home. I double-check the tire pressure, tick off the travel checklist. We’ve got a map and a compass. We’ve got a GPS. We’ve got food and water for the road, a first-aid kit that works for both of us, a list of emergency vets along the way. We’ve got Jake’s Public Access Test standards on the front seat, a spiral-bound for taking notes, and Bless my heart, bless my soul, we’ve got Alabama Shakes on the radio, telling us to hold on.

  Eastbound then southeast-bound for mile after mile. The Dallas–Ft. Worth Metroplex falls behind us. Plains give way slowly to the first tall trees of the Piney Woods. Brown terrain suddenly shifts to a surprising green, as though some arbitrary line divides who gets rain and who does not. We turn off the major freeway and onto the first of a series of county roads and state highways that will lead us along a chain of small towns toward Louisiana.

  SAR colleagues call this a Starbucks-free zone, and that’s true. The biggest of the small towns have a McDonald’s or a Subway. The smallest do not support even a fast-food franchise, and they are the places I like best, the ones that intrigue me most. It’s been a while, but I’ve driven home from searches through some of these towns. Battered by time, improbably resilient, most of them are anchored by a main street lined with buildings from the 1800s, modern businesses retrofitted into leaning brick walls and rusted tin ceilings. Sometimes you find old trees and shade in the center of these towns. Jake and I stop often in order to train. He hops out of the car bright and fresh each time.

  A first road-trip test item checked off: Jake doesn’t get carsick, even going long distances.

  Unload the dog, vest up the dog, Heel, Sit, Stay, Brace. Where once-wiggly puppy Jake made a game of it every time I put a leash on him, he is attentive now. At each stop he waits for the Unload command and holds still for all the straps and buckles of his service harness, which he ignores once it’s on. He waits for me to be ready without straining to get on with it. I wish I had a pant reflex. Jake’s more patient that I am with the relentless heat.

  Neither threatened by new places, nor overly stimulated, he seems happy to explore beside me at my pace. That pace is purposel
y slow. For Jake, every command on these stops is a service test item to be repeated dozens of times across the trip. I think of Puzzle, who would never enjoy this. My search dog’s public etiquette is gracious, but she has always seemed resigned, acquiescing in hope that a search might follow. I look down to Jake, a different glad-to-be-here dog, whose happiness at this quieter work may be the key to his success at it.

  We hug the shadows beneath awnings and peer into plate-glass windows that once framed hardware stores and soda fountains. In one town, an older man with a black Lab crosses the street not far from us. They hustle in step across the hot asphalt and head for a bench beneath a pecan tree. I think of Gene and Merlin as I watch the old dog ease down his hips and the man lean over to knead his ears like bread.

  At a next stop, two children and their mama meet us. It’s a nervy little moment for the mama, whose excited kids have been told not to touch the working dog, and—hands in their pockets—they’re trying not to. And it’s a nervy little moment for Jake, in his Sit, who loves children, and these are at his height, and yearning, with candy-smeared faces. The young mother and I hold the moment in trembling faith. Just long enough. We don’t push it. “Well done!” says the young mother, hustling. “Good boy!” I say to Jake, as we walk briskly, briskly away.

  Whew.

  We look for black trash bags, but don’t find them. We stop at one roadside stand that has kites and colored windsocks and garden whirligigs for sale. I try to imagine how a dog might frame them. It’s a hot, breezy day. We walk through all the fluttering without much problem. Jake is quite interested in nylon ducks and pink flamingos with rotating wings. He ignores a fluttering ghost and a zombie in shivering rags that dangle from a tree for Halloween. These things don’t faze him, but he freezes a moment in front of a spangled, inflatable pink party princess. Something about her is suspicious. He can’t meet her vacuous eyes.