More Good Dogs
Rabbit Redbone
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and/or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
More Good Dogs
More Stories about Good Dogs and the People Who Love Them
© 2013 Rabbit Redbone
All Rights Reserved
Print ISBN: 978-1496158215
No reprints without permission.
For inquiries, please email [email protected]
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It’s right here that I guess I’m supposed to say that not a bit of this book is based off a people or places I know, but that ain’t exactly true. These are all stories from the folks who called into my radio show. Most times, they’d stay anonymous or just give a first name like ‘Floyd’ or ‘Joanne’, so I don’t know if that counts, but I still am telling their stories if you look at it that way. Maybe they’ll want to sue me, who knows. Lawyers are smart and will always find a way. Hell, maybe it’d be best if I just said:
Not one bit of this book is true.
There, all took care of. (You can’t see me, but I am winking at you right now.)
I got an email if you want to drop me a line. It’s an easy one, just my name, followed by the gmail part. Listen, don’t send a letter if your only goal is to tell me how cats is as good as dogs. Truth is, I agree with you. And I love hamsters, guinea pigs, lizards, snakes, chinchillas, gerbils, goats, horses, piggers, lambs, and of course, rabbits…they’re ALL good. But that’s just not what this here book is about. Maybe the next one, okay?
Anyway, here’s that address:
[email protected]
I’m on the Facebook, too. CLICK HERE to link on up with me. Send me a picture of your dog, if you want, and I’ll post it on there.
~•~
Rabbit Redbone’s first book, All Good Dogs, Stories of Good Dogs and the People Who Love Them can be found by CLICKING HERE.
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More Good Dogs
More Stories about Good Dogs and the People Who Love Them
by Rabbit Redbone
~•~
Contents:
Rabbit says ‘Hi’
Ann and Andy
Rabbit breaks in
Old Dogs, New Tricks
Anyone Can Change
My Angel, Sarie
If you need a hanky
Who Takes This Dog?
A good one
The Star
Rabbit wraps it up
~•~
If you read “All Good Dogs” then you can probably skip this next little bit, I won’t be bothered.
Hello there, friends, I’m Rabbit Redbone.
Back in the seventies, I had a little radio call-in show called “All Good Dogs”, and it was about…you guessed it…dogs! Now, I wasn’t what you’d call a celebrity, but folks did start to get to know me, and I had a decent little following. I did that for a few years before I went on to be the cook at a kids’ day camp. Turned out I was a halfway decent cook, which is about two-thirds better than I was at working the radio buttons. Still, though, it was nice to hear people’s stories, and I do miss it sometimes even to this day.
Let me tell you a little about it.
First of all, here’s how I’d start each broadcast:
“Hello there, friends, I’m Rabbit Redbone. Now, a course, that ain’t a hunner percent my real name, but it surely is what I know by now. My mom calls me Rabbit and my dad does the same. My three sisters call me Rabbit, too, and it’s all because my little brother couldn’t say ‘Robert’, and I guess it stuck mostly because that little tike died when he was three. I think it’s his voice I hear sometimes in the wee still hours…maybe he’s calling out to me from Heaven, trying to let me know that everything’s okay.”
That always got me a little, you know? So I’d take a swallow of air, and then I’d go on:
“But anyways, it’s the name I am most used to, so, you can go ahead and call me Rabbit. Friends, if you don’t know by now, then you’re surely finding it out today…I love dogs. Big dogs, little ’uns. Barkers, howlers, whiners. Breeds, mixes, mutts. Workers and couch potatoes alike. In fact, I ain’t never met a dog I didn’t like! Even the bad ones are good ones. Yes, friends, they are all good dogs.”
See, that’s how I got the name of my radio show and the name of my first book: “All Good Dogs.”
If you weren’t reading before, you can check back in right HERE!
Anyway, by the time my daughter, Emily, turned one and Angie, my wife, was pregnant with our second child, I had stopped hosting at that station. I was working as a cook at a day camp for kids and listening to their stories, instead. They had some good ones, too. I might have to put together a book of them someday soon.
In the meantime, though, I was still just getting used to my own daughter and feeling a little trepidatious about the one on the way. Emily surprised me, you know, with how much of a little person she was right from the start. I thought she’d be some combination of me and Angie, but she wasn’t–she was her own self from the word go. Now, when I was a little guy myself, I’d helped take care of my baby brother before he passed, and I was around my sisters, of course, but it’s different. You take a lot for granted when you’re a kid, I think. What is, is, if you get what I’m saying. It never occurred to me to examine the differences between us siblings and our parents and contemplate the puzzles of nature versus nurture–I was too busy diggin’ in the dirt.
Emily’s birth had been a scary thing; breech, it was. Back then it was a new concept to let dads in the delivery room, but I’d been kicked right outta there when things went south. Might sound strange, but something changed in me that day, you know. I was just a young man, and it was like I seen some kind of frightening secret–that our spinning old world could at any time turn off of true and cast you to the side, miserable and sick with your grief. The world just didn’t care.
I swore to Angie that she’d have to do the second on her own…no way was I going through that again. Angie said, “I reckon if I can go through it again, then you can too, Rabbit.” Not mean–she didn’t have a mean bone in her body–but just matter of fact.
It’s something you get used to, you know, the world being never quite solid enough. Age and experience give you a better footing. You get your sea legs, so to speak. But back then, there I was, kind of awestruck by the one baby and expecting another and still not ready. It put me in mind of one of the stories an old lady had called in with back in the radio show days.
Carol Ann, her name had been, and her story was not what I expected from her intonation–she was quavery and sweet, you know. I hate to admit it, but I expected an accounting of dressing her poodle with cunning little boots or some such. I learned not to judge a storyteller by their voice after that.
Ann and Andy
When I was seven, our dog, Belle–a sweet yellow lab–had a litter of twelve pups. Half were yellow like her, and half were brown like the daddy. Pa said they’d have to set them pups up in separate sides of the trailer, and he started laughin’ fit to split. Ma gave him a long look, kinda unsure, but then Daddy’d joshed her into laughin’ with him. I was just happy because they was, and it made me glad to see them laugh together that way. It was mostly a toss-up as to whether they’d be laughin’ or yelling at any given time, I reckon.
I was completely enchanted by those soft little potatoes. Pa told m
e, “You go ahead and pick two bed warmers, Carol Ann; long as you take care of ’em, I don’t care.” And Ma gave him a look like he was crazy, but he shushed her with a kiss. “Aw, Ma,” he said after he’d let her up, “we’re flush. Ten pups will bring us enough to carry us through the next few months, and then we’ll go from there. Something good is gonna happen. I know it.”
Ma always looked at Pa two ways when he said things like that, and I was too green to understand it exactly, because it was just words, wasn’t it? Daddy wasn’t doing anything. But I still knew, even then, that Ma was struggling with something in herself. I knew because I had that same struggle with one of the neighbor boys in the trailer park who was always being funny but stupid. He’d climb too high in a tree and then swing around making ook-ook monkey noises. I’d laugh, but inside I was always scared he’d tumble out. ’Cause he could have. He was reckless. The funny part made you love him, the stupid made you just…confused.
So I knew Ma struggled when Pa said things like he did, but I wasn’t sure why because words, to me, were not the same as actions–what harm could words do? Pa didn’t seem all that reckless to me; he never climbed trees or messed with beehives, or jumped into water he hadn’t taken the depth of first.
He was twenty-three that spring, same as Ma, but at seven years of age, I didn’t know that, either. I didn’t know how young they were. They were just my parents, and if they seemed a little younger than other kids’ mas and pas, well, I never let it bother me. I guess I didn’t think much on it.
When he said that good things were coming, she’d say where’s your crystal ball? When he said there was light at the end of the tunnel, she’d say it was a train. When he said that he deserved to have a little fun while he was young, she told him he was making her old before her time.
Then they would either fight until Pa stormed out, or they’d disappear into the back room of whatever shack we lived in at the time.
I was six when Pa brought Belle home, and I about thought the sun rose and set on that dog. She was already two years old and sweet as any dog could be. I asked Pa at the time if she was a present for me, and Pa said she was a present for the three of us and that she was the goose that would lay the golden labs. I laughed at his crazy talk–she wasn’t no goose. I didn’t understand him at all, but he grinned like he had the secret of making the world spin, so I felt content, I reckon.
We were living near a lake back then, in a little house with real windows, but moved soon after we got Belle. Ma cried the night we left, but Pa said, “If we’re gonna be bootstrap, then we might just as well use ’em to our advantage. Now, pull ’em on up, sweets, and let’s shag ass.”
We always left at night. I never got to say goodbye to anybody, and Pa always said it was better to keep a little o’ the mystery in relationships. I didn’t understand him, but Ma would swat his arm and sometimes laugh, sometimes not.
Then we’d drive and drive and occasionally camp out, as Pa called it. But it was not like real camping, even I knew that. We didn’t have no tent. Pa never made no fire nor ever fished. He’d lean back against a tire on our old POC (Pa always called it POC even though it said Ford right on the back of it), stretch his legs out, and sing.
He had the nicest voice. Sometimes Ma said, “You ought to be singing on the radio, honey, you’re just that good.” Then Pa would sing more and dance Ma around whatever little clearing we’d found to sleep out in.
Other times Ma said, “You can’t feed a little girl on a song, you know.” She never called him ‘honey’ when she said something like that.
And they didn’t dance when she said things like that, either.
The next place we lived was a trailer. Pa said he couldn’t abide by having so many neighbors so close, but Ma said the means had decided the terms and that we were staying. There was a little grocery she could walk to, and she’d get herself a job cashiering, and then we’d start to see some sunrise on our horizon and eggs at our table.
Pa said he would get to work, too, and get Belle a beau–maybe even start up a savings account with all the money we’d be bringing in. Maybe get a new car instead of helping along the POC. And he said he’d get me one new dress for each two pups that sold. I was dazzled at the thought–I only had one dress at the time. I couldn’t even picture where I’d put more. My little afterthought of a bedroom tucked behind the kitchen at the end of the trailer didn’t even have a closet.
So that’s the trailer we were in when I was seven and Belle had the half-and-half litter.
Pa said we were rich, and Ma said, “Yeah, rich in dog turds”–she was cleaning the kitchen floor where Belle lay with the squirming pups–but Pa only laughed. Told her she didn’t understand that he was building us a business. That’s when he told me I’d be picking out two of the babies for myself. “You’ve got four weeks to figure it out before I start bringing prospective customers in. Four weeks after that, the pups will all be gone. Make sure you pick you one boy and one girl, Carol Ann,” he said. “They’re your future, you know.”
I didn’t know how two of those crying little bundles were my future, but I didn’t care. I just loved them, and that was enough for me to want them, I reckon.
I watched those pups for hours on end, delighting in their every movement. Their blind nosing for Belle, the little smack smacks as they suckled. Then they started crying out, tiny yips and ooohs…it was enough to make me yip and ooh right along with them.
Pa tied colored yarn around each of the pups’ necks as soon as their eyes opened. Nine of the strings were pink, the other three blue, which Pa said was a jackpot situation. Once I had picked one little boy (brown) and one little girl (yellow), Pa took the strings off their necks. He said as how that would show people that those two were not up for grabs.
When they were four weeks along, people started showing up at the trailer and staring at the pups. Sometimes they would decide right then and there which one they wanted even though they had to wait another four weeks before the pups could be taken from Belle. They’d give Pa half the money, and Pa would tie a marker onto the pup’s string with the person’s last name. In less than a week, every pup was claimed. By the end of the next month they was all gone.
Except for little Ann and Andy–they were mine to keep.
I was so taken with them that I never asked about the five dresses I was supposed to get but never saw. I thought about asking the one time, when Ma said, “Where’s all them riches we got from the pups?” and Pa said, “Don’t sweat it, sweets, I got it tucked away.” And she told him he better not show up with no new car, and he laughed but like he was in pain. He said, “The amount of knowledge you have about starting a business could fit in an egg cup and not spill over. I have to put money back into it…cost of goods, investments, advertising…what do you think I been doing with all my time?”
“Mostly seems like settin’ up on the couch,” Ma said, and Pa’d throwed his hand over his eyes and groaned like she was just too dumb. Then she’d said, “Well, anyway, I gotta get my smock on and get over to Raleigh’s. Groceries don’t ring themselves up, you know.”
He peeked at her through his fingers and underneath his pinky, he’d started to grinnin’. “How about you five-finger us some of them cookies again?” She shook her head but then laughed and put her hands on her hips. She said, “Yeah? And what if I get caught this time? Then what? Ain’t nowhere’s else to work around here.”
He’d pulled her down onto him and told her that God would provide. Which was funny ’cause we never were churchgoers.
* * *
Belle seemed real tired after having the pups, and I tried to feed her little bits of my buttered bread, but Pa said go on and leave her be. Said she’d be right as rain in a few days. He told me go on outside and play because he needed time to think about his business and besides, school would be here before I knew it, and if I didn’t get those pups trained up, then Ma was likely to turn ’em loose once the bus was taking me away regular.
I went out into the dirt yard, and they tumbled out after me. I let them piddle around a minute and told them they was good dogs once they’d each squatted. Those were two smart pups. I didn’t think it would take very long to train them.
They each had a string collar that I’d made up for them. Just some more of that yarn, but I’d plaited it thicker and put a little loop one side and left it long on the other so they could grow into them. Ann had pink, and Andy had the blue. Not that you needed it to tell them apart, I reckon. They was two whole different colors.
They loved each other. As their brothers and sisters had been taken away one by one, they’d gotten closer and closer with each other, snuggling and wrestling and generally roughhousing. Andy was taller than Ann and his fur sleeker. Ann was still golden with puppy fuzz. But they gave each other what for.
There was a woods at the back of the trailer park, and I headed that way, trusting the pups to follow. They did, but with little hitches and fits and starts. Andy stopped sudden to smell a bug, and Ann piled into the back of him, raising his back feet off the ground. Then Ann ran on ahead, her tongue lolling and joyful. Andy ran after her, yipping with concern as though he thought she was getting too far ahead of us. He grabbed onto her pointy little tail, and she yelped. I laughed. They reminded me of Ma and Pa a little, I reckon.
I was almost to the woods when Dixon showed up.
Dixon was two years older than me at nine, and he didn’t live in the trailer park; he just came to visit his granny. When he did that, he and I would play together. He was a small boy, almost my size, and had blond hair that was so light that when he ran it lifted off his forehead like it was trying to fly away. He had a nice disposition, too. Calm. I hadn’t run across many calm people by then, so he was a little bit of a relief.
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