Gully's Travels

by Tor Seidler

  After an hour or so, a puttering sound interrupted him. It stopped. The gate clanged open, then clanged shut. Gulliver squirmed out from under the bush.

  Roberto was draping a tarp over a motorbike.

  “Hey, guy,” he said. “How’d you get so dirty?”

  Roberto headed back into his hut but left the door cracked behind him, and Gulliver soon followed him inside. After turning on an oscillating fan, Roberto kicked off his Adidas, tugged off his Multiplex uniform, and ducked into the bathroom for his hairbrush, which had been retired since he’d gotten his buzz cut. When he plunked down on the edge of his bed in his underwear, Gulliver came over and positioned himself between his feet.

  Gulliver’s tail was soon wagging in spite of itself, for Roberto’s brushing technique was even more invigorating than the woman’s at Groom-o-rama. When Roberto stopped, Gulliver couldn’t help letting out a little moan.

  “Mañana for more, buddy,” Roberto said. “We got a midnight show on Saturdays. I’m totally whipped.”

  In fact, Gulliver was totally whipped, too. He’d always thought of the day of his first, untranquilized flight to Paris as the most harrowing of his life, but it had been a walk in Washington Square Park compared to being mocked by mutts, drowned half to death, squeezed half to death, choked half to death, starved and parched half to death, then consigned to grueling manual labor.

  After brushing his teeth, Roberto climbed into bed. “You can crash here if you want,” he said, patting the blanket.

  Gulliver looked up longingly but didn’t have the energy to make the jump.

  “Here you go,” Roberto said, grabbing him under the belly and lifting him.

  Roberto opened the drawer of his bedside table, pulled out The Complete Shakespeare, opened to one of his favorite speeches, and started declaiming:

  To die, to sleep —

  No more — and by a sleep to say we end

  The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

  That flesh is heir to.

  Even if Roberto was a ham, it was nice being read to like this. But by the fifth line of the speech Gulliver’s eyes had drooped shut, and by the seventh he was fast asleep.

  When Madame Courgette slipped him a tender medallion of veal, he looked across the café at his professor, who nodded his approval.

  “Shall we split it, Chloe?” Gulliver said chivalrously.

  “Oui, merci,” said Chloe.

  They were eating the delectable piece of meat from both ends, her adorable snout drawing ever closer to his, when there was a loud knocking.

  “Is Gully in there?”

  Gulliver opened his eyes.

  “Bug off, Nita,” said Roberto, pulling a pillow off his head.

  The door to the hut flew open. Disoriented, Gulliver didn’t immediately recognize Juanita. Instead of a bathing suit, she had on a frilly white dress and a white ribbon in her hair.

  “Gully!” she screeched, rushing up to the foot of the bed.

  In the space of a few seconds Gulliver went from a lovely Parisian dreamworld to the wrenching reality of being crushed to this horrid girl’s breast.

  “Why are you waking me up?” Roberto muttered.

  “We’re already back from church!”

  Blinking at his alarm clock, Roberto saw that he’d slept till noon. He didn’t go to Mass with his family, for on his eighteenth birthday he’d announced,rather dramatically, that he didn’t believe in God.

  Gulliver had never given the question of God much thought, but if he had, he would have been siding with Roberto by the end of his first few days with the Montoyas. What sort of God would take away his wonderful professor and deliver him into the sadistic mitts of screeching Juanita? What sort of God would switch his Prime Premium for crummy dry food, his private bowl of pure water for a communal bowl polluted by dogs with no table manners? What sort of God would deprive him of Manhattan and Paris and dump him in Queens? Replace his operas with reality TV shows, refined companions like Rodney and the lovely Chloe with ill-bred mutts like Pudge and Frankie and Pogo?

  Pudge and Frankie mocked and bullied him relentlessly, but in a way he preferred this to Pogo making eyes at him and giving him sponge baths with her tongue. She also insisted on telling him about herself. What possible interest could he have in the origins of her name? (Evidently she’d bounced up and down a lot as a puppy.) What did he care about a trip to the beach where she’d confronted a horseshoe crab? Or the time Roberto had pulled a disgusting thing called a tick out of her neck with needle-nose pliers?

  But hard as it was to get away from Pogo, there was someone even harder to escape. It all started his second evening with the Montoyas. Roberto was at work, so the hut was unavailable, and it was pouring rain — Roberto had taken a bus instead of his motorbike — so the backyard was unavailable, too. After forcing down a bit of dinner, Gulliver padded into the Montoyas’ living room. His bed was unoccupied, and since the smell of mutt on it had dissipated, he sucked it up and climbed onto the chintz cushion. Despite the blaring TV, he soon drifted off into a pleasant nap — only to be awakened by Juanita’s shrill voice.

  “J.C.’s gone, Mom!”

  “What are you talking about, sweetheart?”

  “Come look! His cage is empty!”

  While the family was searching the house for the missing gerbil, Gulliver felt a weird tickling on the back of his neck, just above his collar. Then he heard a tiny, squeaky voice:

  “Yo, Gully.”

  “J.C.?” Gulliver whispered. “What are you doing?”

  “It was my only chance, man. Tonight that cat was out to snuff me for sure. If you rat me out, they’ll put me back inside, and that’ll be curtains for little old me.”

  “Why would I rat you out? Just get off me.”

  “But if I get off you, the cat’ll nab me. No one can see me here. You got such nice long hair on the back of your neck, Gully. It’s like silk.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” Gulliver said. “And the name’s Gulliver.”

  He devoted the rest of the evening to trying to get rid of his pesky passenger. Needless to say, he wasn’t the sort of dog who rolled over on his back and presented his naked belly to the world. But all his arguments proved useless, and finally, when Roberto got home from work, Gulliver dashed out into the rainy backyard, stopped under the outdoor table, and rolled over in the relatively dry grass. With a squeal, the gerbil squirted away.

  Roberto had left the door to the hut ajar. As Gulliver moved toward it, he heard a telltale creak and looked over his shoulder. The cat had slipped out the Ponsons’ pet flap and was creeping down the stairs in the rain, eyes fixed on the tiny creature shuddering under the dripping table.

  Poor Gulliver. What choice did he have but to trot back and let the gerbil climb aboard?

  And, in truth, it could have been worse. The gerbil hardly weighed a thing and was so small that not even Pogo noticed the bump on the back of Gulliver’s neck. Two or three times a day the gerbil slipped off to scrounge for food or go to the bathroom, but otherwise he stuck fast to Gulliver. For the first couple of days J.C. yammered on and on about his idol, a wise-guy rat who’d occupied the cage next to his in the pet store where he’d started out. He soon figured out that Gulliver was unimpressed by this lowlife character, however, and quieted down a bit. Gulliver got as used to him as he had to his collar.

  Though Juanita was distraught at first, her attention span was too short for a long grieving period. As for the cat, she gave Gulliver darker looks than ever, but whether or not she was aware of his secret rider was impossible to tell.

  J.C. aside, there were two things that kept Gulliver’s new life from being complete torture. One was Roberto. His hut was a sanctuary from Juanita and the mutts, and Roberto not only let Gulliver sleep on his bed, he often talked to him late at night, trying out speeches a
nd poetry on him and confiding in him about his budding acting career.

  “You know, boy, they didn’t exactly go ape over my scene last night. I thought I rocked, and so did Ms. Treadle. But the rest of the class . . . Think maybe they’re jealous of my talent?”

  Being spoken to this way by a human being was good for Gulliver’s ego. Moreover, he appreciated being brushed after his digging.

  This was his real salvation: his nightly digging. Like a husky pulling a mail sled through a blizzard, or a Saint Bernard hiking up an alp to save a stranded hiker, he had the one thing that makes a dog’s life worth living: a purpose. He was determined to escape and somehow find and help his professor.

  The night finally came — it was his third Wednesday in Queens — when the hole under the fence was deep enough to slip through. But he didn’t set out on his adventure then and there. He had no clue how to get to Manhattan from Queens.

  He usually slept as long as Roberto, who was a late sleeper, but the next morning Gulliver woke at seven sharp, pushed his way out the hut’s door, and dashed across to the ground-floor pet flap. Consuela was standing at the kitchen sink in her bathrobe. Carlos, in his doorman’s uniform, was drinking coffee at the kitchen table.

  Soon Carlos sighed and said, “Guess I better take off.”

  “Don’t forget about Pedro’s game.”

  “I’ll come over as soon as I get home.”

  Outside the pet flap, Gulliver whispered, “Psst, J.C.”

  “Mmmm?” J.C. said sleepily.

  “Sorry, but this is the end of the line.”

  “What do you mean, man?”

  “I’m going back to Manhattan.”

  “What’s Manhattan?”

  “An island. It’s the most important borough in New York City.”

  “I thought Queens was.”

  “That’s because you’ve never been out of it.”

  “So . . . I’ll just hook a ride and get a load of this Manhattan place.”

  “But it could be dangerous.”

  “Sticking around here with her is safe?”

  “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  But in fact Gulliver wasn’t sorry to have the company, and without the gerbil, who had street smarts despite all his cage time, he wouldn’t have gotten far. Thanks to the bangs that fall over their eyes, Lhasa apsos have poor peripheral vision, and if J.C. hadn’t poked his head out from under Gulliver’s mane on the very first crosswalk and shrieked “Heads up, man!” they would have been flattened by a city bus.

  Carlos, several paces ahead, noticed none of the antics behind him. On the next street corner, he picked up his Daily News, and on the one after that, he ducked down into the subway. The platform was a steam bath, but the train pulled in before his uniform started getting sweat blotches, and not only was the car air-conditioned, he actually nabbed a seat. He opened to the sports pages and was soon so wrapped up in the box scores of yesterday’s ball games that he totally missed the commotion farther down the car.

  “Is he with you, lady?” a stout man in coveralls asked.

  “Certainly not,” said the lady in question, who had on owlish glasses. “Aren’t they supposed to be on a leash?”

  “Maybe he’s going to see his vet in the city,” cracked a teenager with cornrows.

  “Look at him, he’s scared to death,” said a kind-looking woman in a nurse’s uniform. “He’s shaking like a leaf.”

  “Bet it’s a she,” said Cornrows. “Check out the girly collar.”

  “Maybe somebody should take her to the ASPCA,” said the woman in the big glasses.

  “What is she, anyway?” mused the nurse.

  “A shih tzu?”

  “One of them mixes,” the man in coveralls said. “Part terrier, part spaniel, something like that.” Fortunately for Gulliver, he didn’t catch any of this. Even if he’d had more of an ear for human speech, he wouldn’t have been able to hear what they were saying over the clacking of the train wheels and the booming of his heart. He’d been terrified on his first flight to Paris, and on his first day with the Montoyas, but nothing like this. Each time the train sped up, the vibrating under his paws made him wish he was back on the trampoline. When the train slowed to a stop, the screech of the brakes made him wish he was with Juanita. And whether the train was moving or stationary, there was such a racket that any reassuring words from J.C. were totally drowned out.

  Still, Gulliver never took his eyes off Carlos’s scuffed black shoes, and when Carlos finally folded his newspaper and got off the train, Gulliver squeezed out behind him and zigzagged through the sea of legs on the platform, keeping Carlos in sight even as people laughed and pointed at him. It was all very humiliating. But that was forgotten a few minutes later as he followed Carlos down a blissfully familiar walkway in Washington Square.

  “That’s my building, J.C.!” he said when the tower of One Fifth Avenue loomed into sight.

  J.C. peeked out. “Not bad, man. But what’s the one way up there?”

  Gulliver squinted up Fifth Avenue. “That’s the Empire State Building.”

  “Wow. Ain’t seen nothing like that in Queens.”

  Gulliver grunted smugly.

  He stationed himself under one of the laurel bushes by the entrance to his old building.

  “What’s the plan, Stan?” J.C. asked.

  “To get to the seventeenth floor. I have a feeling he’s very sick, maybe even dying.”

  “No offense, but what could you do?”

  “Well, I don’t want to sound full of myself, but I’m sure getting me back would give him a shot in the arm. I’m his best friend.”

  Several people, some familiar, some not, went in and out of the building. Each time, Carlos opened the door and then let it swing shut. But eventually a very old man hobbled out on a cane, and while Carlos was helping him into a cab at the curb, Ms. Tavendish, the plump woman from the seventeenth floor, returned from walking her cocker spaniel in Washington Square. She opened the door for herself, and Gulliver dashed in on the spaniel’s heels.

  “Haven’t seen you in a while,” the spaniel remarked as they crossed the cool lobby.

  “I’ve been on a little vacation.”

  “Well, you look good.”

  “Thank you!” Gulliver said, pleasantly surprised. It must have been Roberto’s brushings. “So do you.”

  Only when he followed them into the elevator did Ms. Tavendish notice him.

  “What happened, did Dr. Rattigan go up and leave you behind? That French floozy must be sapping his brain cells.”

  Ms. Tavendish hadn’t been overjoyed by the recent spectacle of Professor Rattigan with Madeline de Crecy on his arm, but she hadn’t given up hope. Last night, when she got off the elevator upon coming home from her bridge group, she’d heard arguing through the professor’s door. And now here was a chance to do Professor Rattigan a good turn.

  She got off at seventeen and, instead of unlocking her own door, knocked on Professor Rattigan’s. To Gulliver’s amazement, Madeline de Crecy opened it. At the sight of the dogs she quickly backed away, calling “Oswald!”

  Professor Rattigan soon appeared in her place. To Gulliver’s double amazement, he looked to be in the pink of health.

  “Ms. Tavendish,” he said.

  “Hello, Dr. Rattigan,” Ms. Tavendish said, wondering if they would ever get on a first-name basis. “Look who you left downstairs.”

  “Gulliver!”

  The shock of seeing his professor looking perfectly well was softened by the obvious enthusiasm in his voice. And when his professor swept him up in his arms — something that hadn’t happened since he was a puppy — he let out a little yap of pleasure, even as J.C. let out an alarmed squeak.

  Instead of carrying Gulliver into their apartment, however, Professor Rattigan called something
inside and closed the door.

  “My, um, houseguest is allergic to long-haired dogs,” he told Ms. Tavendish. “So I farmed this little guy out to Carlos. He must have brought him for a visit.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Ms. Tavendish.

  She and her spaniel went into her apartment. Professor Rattigan carried Gulliver into the elevator and pressed L.

  “How’ve you been, boy?” Professor Rattigan said, stroking Gulliver’s belly on the ride down. “I’ve missed you.”

  In the lobby he set Gulliver on the marble floor and led the way over to Carlos, who was sitting in his chair inside the doors, still absorbed in his Daily News.

  “So you brought my old friend along,” Professor Rattigan said.

  Carlos jerked to his feet.

  “What in the world . . . ?” he said, astonished. “What’s he doing here?”

  “You didn’t bring him?”

  Carlos shook his head emphatically.

  “You’re pulling my leg, Carlos.”

  “Swear to God, Dr. Rattigan. He . . . This doesn’t make any sense.”

  Gulliver sat there impatiently while the two men talked. This was supposed to be his big reunion scene with his professor, and now here was Carlos the doorman again. And what was the French lady doing here in New York? Was that why they hadn’t flown to Paris? Because she’d suddenly arrived here?

  “Your pal doesn’t seem so sick,” J.C. whispered.

  “Perhaps not,” Gulliver murmured. “But he’s overjoyed to see me.”

  After talking with Carlos for some time, Professor Rattigan squatted down and scratched Gulliver fondly behind the ears, nearly flushing out the gerbil, who clung to Gulliver’s neck tighter than ever but was smart enough not to make a peep. The professor said something, then he stood up and headed for the waiting elevator. When Gulliver trotted after him, Carlos tried to call him back. Naturally Gulliver ignored this. But when he started to follow his professor into the elevator, his professor held up his hand.