Red Dog

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ said John.

  ‘Well, there’s a new woman working in the mall, right? She’s called Patsy or something, and she didn’t know about Red. She sees him lying there, and all the blokes have come in because it’s lunchtime, and they’re sitting around eating their sandwiches and legs of chicken. Anyway, Patsy sees Red Dog and orders him out, and he refuses to move. So she grabs him by the collar and drags him out, with his feet sliding on the tiles because he’s determined not to go. She closes the door, and before you know it Red Dog’s come back and he’s lying down exactly where he was before. Patsy starts to kick up a fuss, and tries to drag him out again, and then all the fellas start having a go at her, you know, cat calling and throwing chicken bones and orange peel, so finally she gives up, and now she knows not to bother him again.’

  ‘That’s my dog,’ said John, and one of the miners tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Listen, mate. We’ve got to get to work, so be a good fella and see if it’s safe to get back in.’ John put his head in the bus and sniffed. Then he announced ‘Sorry, guys, it’s still a bit ripe. You’ll have to wait a bit more.’

  The miners groaned, and John said to Nancy, ‘There’s a new film on at the Open Air. Would you like to come and see it?’

  ‘What is it? she asked.

  ‘Can’t remember,’ said John. ‘Supposed to be good, though.’

  ‘All right then,’ said Nancy. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  On the evening of their date John cleaned out his car and sprayed it with air freshener and mosquito repellent. He shaved carefully so that he didn’t cut himself, splattered his face with slightly too much aftershave, and put on a clean new shirt and freshly pressed trousers. He had had a haircut that afternoon, and had polished his shoes. The only things left to do were to give Red Dog the slip, and pick up Nancy. Picking up Nancy wouldn’t be difficult, but Red Dog would certainly give him a problem, because Red was so devoted to him that he followed him nearly all the time, and couldn’t bear to let him out of his sight for very long. When John played football, Red Dog ran onto the pitch and joined in, and when John was playing cricket, Red Dog would find out about it somehow, run onto the pitch, get to the ball before the fielders, and then play keep-away with it.

  John was determined not to let Red Dog interfere with his night out with Nancy, so he called Red Dog and told him to hop into the car. He drove him all the way to the Hamersley Iron Transport section and left him there, telling the drivers to keep him busy at all costs. Then he went to pick up Nancy, and drove her all the way to Karratha to the Open Air cinema.

  He parked the car alongside all the other ones, and very soon the lights went down and the film began. John had unrolled the sunroof, and the stars sparkled in the sky above them. It was a lovely warm evening, and the crickets were scraping away in the long grass. John held out a can of Emu to Nancy, saying, ‘Like a stubbie? It’s good and cold.’

  ‘No, thanks, John,’ said Nancy, shaking her head. ‘Never could get a taste for beer.’

  John was disappointed because he liked to have a beer himself, but he knew that it wasn’t very nice to kiss someone who has been drinking it, when you haven’t had any yourself. It tastes horrible and stale. As he was hoping to kiss Nancy later on, he reluctantly decided not to have one himself. He pretended to be watching the film, whilst thinking about how to put his arm round Nancy’s shoulder without it being too obvious. He waited for a scary bit in the film, and when Nancy squealed, that was when he put his arm around her, just to comfort her, of course.

  The next problem was working out how to kiss her, and there just didn’t seem to be a decent opportunity. He thought he would probably have to wait for that awkward moment when he was leaving her at her door and wishing her goodnight.

  She laid her head on his shoulder and snuggled up a little, so that John was able to put a small kiss on her temple. Things were definitely looking up. He was about to take the risk of kissing her properly, when there was an urgent scratching on the door of the car. John had several scratches on it by now, where the paint had been scraped away.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Nancy.

  ‘It’s Red,’ said John. ‘He’s found us.’

  Red Dog scratched again, and John sighed.

  ‘Aren’t you going to let him in?’ asked Nancy.

  ‘Not if I can help it. You know what he’s like.’

  ‘Don’t be mean, John. Let him in.’

  ‘He comes to see all the films,’ said John, ‘and he always wants to sit with someone he knows. He must’ve got a lift.’

  ‘I’ll let him in,’ said Nancy. She opened the back door, and Red Dog jumped in, his tongue lolling happily and his tail wagging.

  ‘You shouldn’t’ve done that, Nance,’ said John.

  For a while it looked as though everything was going to be fine. Red Dog settled down in the back and watched the film, becoming excited only when there was an animal on the screen, and John managed to get his arm around Nancy during another scary bit. Once more her head rested lightly on his shoulder, and once more John kissed her lightly on the temple. Red Dog put his feet up on the back of the seats before him, and pushed his head in between them. ‘He’s jealous!’ laughed Nancy, and John told him to get back down and be quiet. A romantic scene was developing in the film, and John chose his moment to move in for that big kiss on Nancy’s lips, when a horrible stink rolled over them from the back of the car.

  ‘Strewth,’ exclaimed John, and Nancy opened the door and jumped out. ‘Red,’ said John, wearily, ‘you’re a real dag of a dog.’

  Red Dog looked pleased with himself, and John and Nancy never did get to have that kiss. It was one more romance that nearly happened. John used to say that as long as Red Dog was his companion, he probably wouldn’t be allowed to have a girlfriend.

  RED DOG

  AND THE POSH POOCHES

  One day Red Dog was lying under the workbench at Hamersley Iron Transport section, when he began to grow restless. There was not much going on, and he didn’t really feel like travelling around on the buses today. He had befriended one of the drivers of the enormous locomotives that took the iron ore from Mt. Tom Price to Dampier and had been all the way on it, back and forth several times. It took a very long while, but it was good to sit in the driver’s cabin and watch the landscape go by. In the evenings he saw wallabies and kangaroos, and he liked the look of the pools shaded by white gum trees in the places where creeks ran through.

  Today, though, Red Dog did not feel like spending several hours on a train, even if he could visit Paraburdoo afterwards by getting a lift with one of the miners. Today Red Dog had a feeling that something interesting was going on. He had an excellent instinct for knowing when something was about to happen, even turning up to supervise operations when somebody was moving into a new house, and then attending the house-warming party a couple of days later.

  Red Dog got onto one of the long yellow buses that was going into Dampier. There was somebody in his seat, so he growled until the man said, ‘OK, OK, Red, I get the message’ and ungrudgingly gave up his seat and moved to the back. At the junction with the main road Red Dog tugged at the sleeve of the driver, and kicked up a fuss until he stopped. He alighted there and went to wait for a car that he recognised.

  Shortly he detected the noise of Patsy’s engine. It had loose tappets and a small hole in the exhaust. As soon as it appeared he ran out in front of it, and Patsy skidded to a halt.

  ‘You nearly gave me a heart attack,’ she said as she reached over to the passenger door to let him in. Red Dog leaped in and made strange motions with his head, which Patsy rightly interpreted as a request to open the window on his side. They drove off together, he with his head out of the window to catch the breeze, and she recovering her equanimity after such a sudden halt. ‘One day,’ she said to Red Dog, ‘you’re going to get munched by a car.’

  Red Dog made no kind of acknowledgement. He wa
s used to being told off, and accepted it with the same amused indifference that an elephant would display if complained to by a mouse. Patsy accepted that Red Dog had his own ideas, too. She had learned the hard way, because she had been the one who had tried to throw him out of the air-conditioned supermarket. Since then she had grown to like and respect him as much as everyone else, and always watched out for him in case he needed a lift. She had once taken him to the vet as well, but that’s another story.

  They drove past the glistening white salt beds of the Dampier Salt Company, and past the narrow gully of Seven Mile Creek. It seemed to Red Dog that he could smell just a hint of lots of other dogs on the wind.

  Patsy wanted to turn right to go to the industrial estate at Karratha, but Red Dog had other ideas. He made her stop at the turning, and jumped out through the window, crossing the road and then trotting off into the town centre. He amused himself for a while by chasing the shadows of birds, and pouncing on them, and then he caught that smell of dogs again.

  Red Dog liked some other dogs, but he often got into fights with the ones that he didn’t. He was never afraid of a fight, but was annoyed by being dabbed with stinging antiseptics, so he avoided fights unless it was absolutely a matter of personal honour or extreme dislike. In this case he didn’t catch a whiff of any of his enemies. He followed his nose until he arrived at a patch of wasteland that would one day be a carpark for Karratha City shopping centre, and found to his delight that there was indeed something interesting going on.

  Most people had cattle dogs or kelpies, or mongrels, but some people in the Pilbara had pedigree dogs. These folk were proud of their animals, and regretted never having a chance to show them off, so they had formed a kennel club, and begun to organise shows and competitions. They met up on agreed dates, judges were appointed, rosettes and certificates were made in advance, and competitors obsessively snipped off stray hairs, shampooed and combed coats, tried to disguise blemishes, and put their pets through strict regimes of obedience training.

  Here they all were. There were whippets from Whim Creek, Rottweilers from Roebourne, poodles from Port Hedland, cairns from Carnarvon, Pekinese from Paraburdoo, pugs from Pannawonica, corgis from Coral Bay, Dalmatians from Dampier, English sheepdogs from Exmouth and even a mutt from Mungaroona, which its owner was claiming to be a new breed.

  They had got to the point in the proceedings when all the competitors were lined up in a row, waiting to step forward for their awards, and when all the judges were conferring in order to add up points and finalise their decisions.

  Red Dog surveyed this curious scene with much interest and decided that, of all the people there, the judges were clearly the most important. In order to make his mark he walked with great dignity up to their table, and peed onto one of its legs. Having thus left his visiting card he paraded slowly along the line of smart dogs and their equally smart owners. The dogs he ignored altogether, but he recognised many bitches that he had flirted with all over the Pilbara, and whom he visited whenever he could get a lift in their direction. He greeted them happily with sniffing and play fighting, much to the horror of their owners, whose comical and panicky attempts to shoo him away he ignored.

  The judges in the meantime were watching Red Dog’s intervention with both concern and amusement. Some of them had given Red Dog lifts in their own cars, and knew that he was a local celebrity. In later years they would even vote to have a picture of his head as the official badge of their club, but just now they were wondering what to do. Red Dog saved them any further trouble, however, because, having paraded along the line in one direction, he now paraded along it in the other, as if he himself were a judge with some difficult decisions to make.

  Finally he went over to the judges’ desk and peed on it again, although this time on a different leg, and then he decided to go home. He loped off back to the roadside, and waited for a familiar car. This time it was Nancy Grey who took him back to Dampier, and she made extra sure that all the windows were wide open.

  One of John’s friends telephoned him that evening and told him what his dog had been up to that afternoon. John looked down at Red Dog, who was fast asleep in the corner, and laughed. He said, ‘I’m surprised that he didn’t just jump right up on that table and award himself all of the prizes.’

  RED DOG’S EXPENSIVE INJURY

  One morning Nancy, her fingers shaking with anxiety, telephoned the transport section of Hamersley Iron. She rang when the men were having smoko, and got through almost straight away. ‘Is John there?’ she asked. ‘It’s really important.’

  John came to the phone, and as he listened to Nancy, his face turned pale. ‘It’s about Red,’ said Nancy.

  ‘Why what’s happened? What’s up?’

  ‘Look, John, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Red’s been shot.’

  ‘Shot? What d’you mean, shot?’

  ‘I found him, just now. He was dragging himself along the road, near Seven Mile Creek. Someone’s shot him.’

  What John said next, about whoever it was that had shot his dog, can be left to the imagination. He swore and cursed, and then, realising that Nancy was still on the phone, he said, ‘Sorry about that, Nance, I couldn’t help it.’

  ‘It’s all right, John,’ she said, ‘I’ve been feeling the same way. You’ve got to be sick in the head to go round shooting dogs.’

  ‘Where is he?’ asked John.

  ‘Well, I had Patsy in the car and she’s stayed with him at Seven Mile Creek while I came in to find a phonebox. Look, I’m nearly out of coins. I’ll get back there and wait for you, OK?’

  John put down the phone and, white-faced, worried and angry, turned to the blokes who had been listening to his side of the conversation, with their cups of tea halfway to their lips. ‘Where’s the nearest vet?’ he asked.

  ‘Port Hedland,’ said Jocko, who was originally from Scotland, but had been in the Pilbara for several years.

  ‘Strewth, that’s four hours’ drive,’ exclaimed John. ‘He could bleed to death before we get there.’

  ‘I’ll come with you, mate,’ said Jocko, ‘I’ll do the first aid.’ He was a part-timer with the St John’s Ambulance Brigade, and there wasn’t much he didn’t know about staunching blood.

  ‘I’m coming too,’ said Giovanni, who was known to everyone as ‘Vanno’.

  ‘And me,’ said Piotr, who was known as ‘Peeto’.

  John went to see their supervisor, and came back a few minutes later. ‘The good news is that we can go, and he’s going to organise a whip-round to pay for the vet. He’s calling up some of the blokes so we’ve got enough drivers on the buses. The bad news is that we get the day’s pay docked.’

  The men’s faces fell somewhat, but not one of them changed his mind about coming along. Red Dog was special, and this was a genuine emergency. He had ridden around in the buses with each one of them, they were fond of him and proud of him, and it was worth losing a day’s pay for Red Dog’s sake.

  Jocko ‘borrowed’ one of the First Aid boxes from the workshop, and they ran outside and piled into John’s Holden. Off they went at high speed, raising a cloud of russet dust behind them until they reached the tarmac of the public highway.

  At Seven Mile Creek they spotted Nancy’s car, with Patsy and Nancy kneeling beside it at the roadside, tending to the sad bundle of red fur that lay in the stones. They piled out of the car, and John reached down and ran his hand over Red Dog’s head, ‘Hello, mate,’ he said. Red Dog wagged his tail feebly at the sound of his master’s voice. ‘What’ve they done to you?’ asked John. Red Dog laid his head on the ground as if he were too tired to think of anything any more. He felt a terrible stinging and aching in his leg, and his thoughts had become hazy and disconnected. It was like being in someone else’s dream, a dream where you can’t understand what is going on, because it isn’t yours.

  ‘Jeez, look at that,’ said Peeto. He gestured towards the dog’s haunch. The rusty coat was matted with dark-red blood, and
fresh scarlet blood flowed from somewhere beneath the fur. John could hardly speak. He thought that Red Dog was bound to bleed to death, and this made him so sad that his throat felt as though it would never loosen up again. He didn’t want to shed tears in front of his mates, and they knew how he was feeling because they felt the same. This dog had become a fair part of their lives, and they felt that dread in the pit of their stomachs that comes when you know that you are about to lose someone you love.

  ‘What d’you think, Jocko?’ asked John.

  Jocko got down on his knees in the dust and opened the First Aid box. He got out a small pair of scissors and began to clip away the fur from around the wounds. Carefully he removed the clippings, and soon he had exposed two small dark holes from which blood was steadily streaming with each beat of the dog’s heart. He cleaned the wounds with antiseptic, and took a closer look. ‘We’ve got to stop this so that the blood gets a chance to clot,’ he said, almost to himself, and he made two small plugs out of cotton wool, soaked them in surgical spirit, and put them gently into the holes. Red Dog twitched from the pain, but made no fuss. Jocko made two big pads out of gauze and taped them over the area of the wounds. He stood up and looked at the others. ‘Should do the job,’ he said.

  Nancy said, ‘Is it OK if we leave you boys to it now? Can you manage all right?’

  ‘Should be fine,’ said John. ‘Listen, you two have been really tops. I can’t thank you enough, I really can’t.’

  ‘Anything for the old devil,’ said Patsy, and she bent down and ruffled Red Dog’s ears. ‘You’ll be right,’ she said.

  The two women drove away, waving their hands out of the windows, and John tossed the car-keys to Peeto. ‘You drive, mate, I’m going in the back with Red.’ He lifted the dog in his arms and Jocko opened the car door for him. He got in with some difficulty, and Jocko got in the other side. Red Dog lay across them, his head in John’s lap, with Jocko beside him, ready to deal with any emergency that might occur.