by Bark Editors
Lucas
[Haven Kimmel]
A FEW YEARS ago I adopted Bosco from a local rescue organization. Bosco was a frightfully attractive dog; he appeared to be some mixture of a Pit Bull and a Great Dane. So while he was lovely to me, to drug dealers he looked like a big pile of narcotics laced with money. How he was stolen and my search for him is another story, but while I was looking for him physically—walking into neighborhoods even the police wouldn’t enter—I posted his picture and name and tag numbers on the Internet and with the local shelters and vets’ offices, and that’s how I came to get an e-mail about Lucas.
Lucas’s original name was Dewey, which sounds almost exactly like Bosco. And while Bosco weighed 75 pounds at seven months, Dewey weighed fifteen, and looked precisely like nonconsensual intercourse between a Pit Bull and a Chihuahua. So an honest mistake was made on the part of the shelter. (Both dogs were black, Dewey all over and Bosco in a few places.) The shelter sent me a photograph of Dewey standing on a concrete floor with his very large ears poised like satellite dishes, and even though the digital picture was blurry, I could see that a more abject look of terror had never been affected by a mammal. The accompanying note said, in terms barely concealed by euphemism, that the shelter was full and Dewey was going to be put down. He was an owner-surrender, and had come in with a Poodle companion who was also scheduled to meet the Reaper.
At this point it might be interesting to pursue what happened to me internally, but it would certainly not be profitable, as all signs point to mental illness. I am moved to rescue animals the way others are moved to gamble, or collect aluminum foil, or take many wives. I just can’t bear it, the thought of an animal in distress and desperate for intervention when I have the power to intervene; to me all stray animals look like little war orphans. (My mother would point out here, perhaps a tad psychoanalytically, that War Orphan was one of my nicknames as a child, because I was scurvy-skinny and my clothes consistently came out of the dirty-laundry pile. Also the lack of shoes.) The older I get and the more resources I have at my disposal, the worse this becomes. Because what does it cost me after all? Some vet bills, a little extra dog food. I already have to vacuum every seventeen minutes, so what’s the big deal? Sure, my family and neighbors and friends fall down prostrate and plead with me to stop before Animal Control gets wind of my behavior and classifies me a “nuisance,” but I consider all of my loved ones to be slightly anal.
I called the shelter at which Dewey was smoking his last cigarette and accepting his blindfold. The woman who answered the phone said Dewey had three hours to live, and the shelter was four hours away from Durham, North Carolina, where I live. I tried to explain the discrepancy to the lovely receptionist, but she was unable to grasp the mathematics. I asked her if he could possibly be kept overnight, and I would leave the following morning. The question brought about extreme consternation on her part. Finally she said she thought he’d be okay in his makeshift crate.
“Can you tell me anything about him?” I asked, realizing that I’d committed myself to driving over the Blue Ridge Mountains and into a town doubtless populated by former Grand Dragons of the Klan, in order to adopt a dog I knew absolutely nothing about.
“Well, lahk I said in the e-mail, his owner brought him and said I don’t want this dog no more, nor the other one neither. He’s a’skeert, I’ll tell you that.”
“Does he bite? Is he injured, neutered?”
“He done bit Kinny.”
“He bit Kinny. Who would that be?”
She coughed for about 45 seconds, apologized. “Kinny works here. He went to take Dewey out of his cage, and Dewey bit him.”
“What’s his disposition like otherwise? Aside from biting Kenny.”
“Well, he’s a’skeert, and he pees.”
“Is he neutered?”
“No. That’s why he bit Kinny, if you ask me.”
Our conversation went around and around like this for a long time, and finally I was assured that Dewey could live one more night (under conditions I couldn’t have actually imagined), and then I had to explain to everyone I knew that I wouldn’t be home the next day because I was driving all the way across the state and over the mountains to rescue a dog I’d never seen and knew nothing about. And why was I doing this? In Bosco’s name. Bosco, who was by that time long, long gone.
The drive was lovely, but the location of the shelter seemed to adhere strictly to Zeno’s Paradox. No matter how close I got, I was still only halfway there. I followed the map carefully, but still had to stop at a “country store” and ask directions. Country stores are ubiquitous in western North Carolina, and are so called for reasons that escape me, as they generally only carry Sno-balls, cigarettes, and malt liquor. There was a time when “country” meant red-eye gravy and excellent jerky, but now it seems to apply exclusively to NASCAR, by which I mean “country” is a $700 gazillion affair. The woman behind the counter, who was smoking a cigarette and mourning the death of Dale Earnhardt (whom, when my daughter told me he was dead, I assumed to be one of her classmates), explained that the shelter was at the “foot” of the mountain. In Indiana, the land from which I hail, we keep our feet in precisely one place. I tried to explain this, then realized I was on the foot of the mountain, and had passed the shelter fourteen times. I passed it because it looked like a cinder-block house next to a double-wide trailer.
I pulled up in front of the cinder-block house and went inside, where I was stunned to discover upwards of six or seven women all wearing Carhartt bibbed overalls, the sort I wear on exactly one occasion, which is when I visit my sister’s farm and must deal with her horses. (Dealing with my sister’s horses inevitably involves prodigious mud and a temperature of four. This past winter, while visiting home, I listened to the weather report on the radio as I was getting ready to leave for Melinda’s house, and when the announcer said the temperature was four, I called my mom and asked could it possibly be true. She said, “I know it sounds less like a temperature than the age of a toddler, but alas.”) Wearing Carhartts as a matter of course is a fashion statement not widely understood outside the American South, but I quite respect it. These were women not likely to be afraid of dogs, and who were clearly fine milk-producers for their young. There were hips and upper arms on those women not seen since before the First World War.
I approached the desk and said I was the person who had just driven for many days to rescue the stranger, Dewey. I ended up dealing with the same woman I’d spoken to on the phone, who picked up the phone and called Kenny, the shelter-hand. He was apparently in the double-wide, where the dogs were kept, as opposed to the cinder-block, where the vets were.
“Kinny. That woman is here to pick up the Poodle–Shit Soo mix.”
I shook my head dramatically; no no no, I am not that woman. Anyone looking at me would know I’m not even remotely that woman. “I’m here for Dewey,” I said, pointing to his little picture, which I’d carried with me like a War Orphan looking for her parents.
“Aw wait. She’s here for Dewey.” She paused. “Okay, I’ll tell her.” She hung up the phone and I knew in my bones that he’d been gassed and was on a big corpse pile behind the cinderblock. “Kinny’s a’skeert of that dawg and don’t want to get him out of his cage. He says ever time he gits near him, that dawg tries to bite him. Kinny’s a’skeert.”
“So I hear. Do you want me to go get him?”
“I’ll go get him,” one of the younger Carhartts whispered. Her voice was so quiet I feared she’d been the victim of a rogue tracheotomy. Her hair was long and wavy, her breasts were large, and her cheeks were flushed with high color. She was a child formed by a rapid influx of estrogen, and I didn’t dare look at her too closely or too long, for fear I’d make her pregnant. She moved slowly through the clinic, slowly down the steps, and across the drive to the double-wide. A few minutes later she came in carrying Dewey.
I’ve seen some dogs in my life. I grew up in a town where dogs weren’t restrained, a
nd in fact could run for public office. I saw a rabid dog shot in the street, just like in To Kill a Mockingbird. (To be honest, the town marshal shot his own hat off and the dog fell down, scared to death.) I’ve seen dogs limping around barnlots with only a couple of usable limbs, and dogs dying of disease, and dogs hit by cars. But I’ve never seen anything quite like Dewey. His bat ears were lying flat against his head; his whole body was tensed; and he was screaming as if caught in a trap. He was bleeding from both eyes, and the blood had covered the white patch on his chest. The parts of him not sticky with blood were slick with urine and diarrhea. The girl who’d gotten him out of his cage carried him into an examination room and put him on a table, where he stood trembling so hard I thought he might be seizing. She stood close to the table and let him lean up against her.
And then into the room lumbered Kenny, who was roughly the size of a mature walnut tree, bearded, and built like a military vehicle.
“That dawg bit me good,” he said, in a voice that caused the floor to shake. “But he’s not bad in his heart.”
I turned and looked at him and my eyes filled with tears. I wasn’t sure what I was crying about, but the whole situation was so wretched I suddenly couldn’t help myself.
“How’d he get this way?” I asked, still not daring to approach the screaming dog.
“His owner got mad at him and that Poodle, kicked them in their heads. This one’s been bleeding from his eyes all night.”
Anyone who has worked with stray dogs knows that you have to read a myriad of signs before adopting or fostering, and not just the obvious things like how well they do with other dogs and children. What you look for first of all, and most importantly, is sanity, simple as that. What I was seeing was the most traumatized dog I’d ever met. Dogs go crazy from lots of things. Pit Bull Terriers, a breed that loves people more, maybe, than any other, can be broken from exile in a backyard, just from the lack of human contact. Abandonment will break the heart of most things, really. This dog had been brought to a ghastly place, separated from the companion dog with whom he’d lived his whole life, been forced to listen to the frantic and desperate barking of all the other dogs who were about to be euthanized. And just as a bonus, his owner had beaten him within an inch of his life before surrendering him.
“The guy who owned him,” Kenny continued, “went all the way through school with me, I’ve known him my whole life. But I’ll never be able to look him in the eye again.”
I approached the table and Dewey wailed even louder, pressing his body as hard against the Milk Maiden as he dared. There was so much blood on his head I couldn’t tell if he was still bleeding, if his skull was fractured, if those enormous ears were actually attached. I put my hand on his back just as the vet walked in, and at the sound of the door shutting he jumped straight up in the air, nearly falling off the table, which caused me to jump, and Kenny to scream like a nine-year-old girl.
The vet, Dr. Morris I’ll call her, was entirely calm and composed and caused all of us to regain our sensibilities, even Kenny, who was trailing a string of gauze wrapped around his left hand and who seemed a tad undone.
“His head seems okay,” Dr. Morris said, feeling around the dog’s eye sockets and looking in Dewey’s ears, even as his screams broke up into yips and hiccups and he shook until his feet were dancing on the metal table. “He’ll be able to see fine once this blood clears up, and he has a broken rib or two, but that will heal. His legs aren’t broken; I don’t think he has internal injuries, but you’ll need to keep an eye on him.” It was consistently difficult to tell if Dewey was going to bite someone. Half the time he seemed right on the verge of snapping, and the other half he seemed about to go into cardiac arrest. “He needs to be neutered, and I’ll give him his vaccinations before you leave today.”
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 ou
tside 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.