One day, around Christmas, I got a mixed box of chocolates—milk for Olivia, darks for me—and noticed, in the evening, that some were missing, and that Butterscotch had brown around her muzzle. “She’s eaten chocolate!” Olivia cried. Chocolate is very bad for dogs. She went at once to the forum. “My hand trembles as I write this,” she typed, “but my baby has eaten chocolate!” Blessedly, we got an avalanche of counsel from Havanese-lovers all over the world: check her, watch her, weigh a chocolate, weigh the dog, keep an eye on her all night. Finally, I put her to bed in her back room, and promised Olivia I would monitor her. Olivia chewed her lip and went to bed, too.
“Howard, I think the dog wants to go out.”
It can’t really be dangerous, I thought; I mean, these creatures eat out of garbage cans. At four in the morning, I went in to check on her. She stirred at once, and we looked at each other, shared that automatic enigmatic gaze that is the glue of the man-dog relation. I stayed with her until the light came, annoyed beyond words at the hold she had put on our unwilling hearts. She made it through the night a lot better than I did.
Dogs aren’t the Uncle Toms of the animal world, I thought as dawn came; they’re the dignified dual citizens who plead the case for all of mute creation with their human owners. We are born trapped in our own selfish skins, and we open our eyes to the rings of existence around us. The ring right around us, of lovers and spouses and then kids, is easy to encircle, but that is a form of selfishness, too, since the lovers give us love and the kids extend our lives. A handful of saints “love out to the horizon,” circle after circle—but at the cost, almost always, of seeing past the circle near at hand, not really being able to love their intimates. Most of the time, we collapse the circles of compassion, don’t look at the ones beyond, in order to give the people we love their proper due; we open our eyes to see the wider circles only when new creatures come in, when we realize that we really sit at the center of a Saturn’s worth of circles, stretching out from our little campfire to the wolves who wait outside; and ever outward to the unknowable—toward, I don’t know, deep-sea fish that live on lava and then beyond toward all existence, where each parrot and every mosquito is, if we could only see it, an individual. What’s terrifying is the number of bad stories to which I was once inured, and which now claim my attention. A friend’s dog had leaped from a window in a thunderstorm and only now could I feel the horror of it: the poor terrified thing’s leap. Another friend’s dog had been paralyzed, and instead of a limping animal I saw a fouled friend, a small Hector. My circles of compassion have been pried open.
We can’t enter a dog’s mind, but, as on that dark-chocolate night, I saw that it isn’t that hard to enter a dog’s feelings: feelings of pain, fear, worry, need. And so the dog sits right at the edge of our circle, looking out toward all the others. She is ours, but she is other, too. A dog belongs to the world of wolves she comes from and to the circle of people she has joined. Another circle of existence, toward which we are capable of being compassionate, lies just beyond her, and her paw points toward it, even as her eyes scan ours for dinner. Cats and birds are wonderful, but they keep their own counsel and their own identity. They sit within their own circles, even in the house, and let us spy, occasionally, on what it’s like out there. Only the dog sits right at the edge of the first circle of caring, and points to the great unending circles of Otherness that we can barely begin to contemplate.
The deal that the dog has made to get here, as all the dog scientists point out, is brutal. I’ll act all, you know, like, loving and loyal, if you feed me. Yet don’t we make the same deal—courtship and gentle promises of devotion in exchange for sex, sex in exchange for status? Creatures of appetites and desires, who need to eat, and have not been spayed, we run the same scam on each other that Butterscotch runs on us. And a scam that goes on long enough, and works more or less to everyone’s benefit, is simply called a culture. What makes the dog deal moving is that you two, you and your dog, are less the willing renewers of it than just the living witnesses to a contract signed between man and wolf thirty thousand years ago. What’s in the fine print that you don’t read is that if you accept the terms it no longer feels like a deal.
Butterscotch, meanwhile, seems happy. She’s here, she’s there, a domestic ornament; she takes a place at the table, or under it, anyway, and remains an animal, with an animal’s mute confusions and narrow routines and appetites. She jumps up on visitors, sniffs friends, chews shoes, and, even as we laughingly apologize for her misbehavior and order her “Off!,” we secretly think her misbehavior is sweet. After all, where we are creatures of past and future, she lives in the minute’s joy: a little wolf, racing and snorting and scaring; and the small ingratiating spirit, doing anything to please. At times, I think that I can see her turn her head and look back at the ghost of the wolf mother she parted from long ago, saying, “See, it was a good bet after all; they’re nice to me, mostly.” Then she waits by the door for the next member of the circle she has insinuated herself into to come back to the hearth and seal the basic social contract common to all things that breathe and feel and gaze: love given for promises kept. How does anyone live without a dog? I can’t imagine.
| 2011 |
FOR A GOOD DOG
My little dog ten years ago
Was arrogant and spry.
Her backbone was a bended bow
For arrows in her eye.
Her step was proud, her bark was loud,
Her nose was in the sky,
But she was ten years younger then,
And so, by God, was I.
Small birds on stilts along the beach
Rose up with piping cry,
And as they flashed beyond her reach,
I thought to see her fly.
If natural law refused her wings,
That law she would defy,
For she could hear unheard-of things,
And so, at times, could I.
Ten years ago she split the air
To seize what she could spy;
Tonight she bumps against a chair,
Betrayed by milky eye.
She seems to pant: Time up, time up!
My little dog must die,
And lie in dust with Hector’s pup;
So, presently, must I.
—OGDEN NASH | 1949 |
DOG HEAVEN
Fiction
STEPHANIE VAUGHN
Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again.
It’s twenty-five years later. I’m walking along Forty-second Street in Manhattan, the sounds of the city crashing beside me—horns and gear-shifts, insults—somebody’s chewing gum holding my foot to the pavement, when that dog wakes from his long sleep and imagines me.
I’m sweet again. I’m sweet-breathed and flat-limbed. Our family is stationed at Fort Niagara, and the dog swims his red heavy fur into the black Niagara River. Across the street from the officers’ quarters, down the steep shady bank, the river, even this far downstream, has been clocked at nine miles per hour. The dog swims after a stick I have thrown.
“Are you crazy?” my grandmother says, even though she is not fond of dog hair in the house, the way it sneaks into the refrigerator every time you open the door. “There’s a current out there! It’ll take that dog all the way to Toronto!”
“The dog knows where the backwater ends and the current begins,” I say, because it is true. He comes down to the river all the time with my father, my brother MacArthur, or me. You never have to yell the dog away from the place where the river water moves like a whip.
Sparky Smith and I had a game we played called Knockout. It involved a certain way of breathing and standing up fast that caused the blood to leave the brain as if a plug had been jerked from the skull. You came to again just as soon as you were on the ground, the blood sloshing back, but it always seemed as if you had left the planet, had a vacation on Mars, and maybe stopped back at Fort Niagara half a lifetime later.
There
weren’t many kids my age on the post, because it was a small command. Most of its real work went on at the missile batteries flung like shale along the American-Canadian border. Sparky Smith and I hadn’t been at Lewiston-Porter Central School long enough to get to know many people, so we entertained ourselves by meeting in a hollow of trees and shrubs at the far edge of the parade ground and telling each other seventh-grade sex jokes that usually had to do with keyholes and doorknobs, hot dogs and hot-dog buns, nuns, priests, preachers, school-teachers, and people in blindfolds.
When we ran out of sex jokes, we went to Knockout and took turns catching each other as we fell like a cut tree toward the ground. Whenever I knocked out, I came to on the grass with the dog barking, yelping, crouching, crying for help. “Wake up! Wake up!” he seemed to say. “Do you know your name? Do you know your name? My name is Duke! My name is Duke!” I’d wake to the sky with the urgent call of the dog in the air, and I’d think, Well, here I am, back in my life again.
Sparky Smith and I spent our school time smiling too much and running for office. We wore mittens instead of gloves, because everyone else did. We made our mothers buy us ugly knit caps with balls on top—caps that in our previous schools would have identified us as weird but were part of the winter uniform in upstate New York. We wobbled onto the ice of the post rink, practicing in secret, banged our knees, scraped the palms of our hands, so that we would be invited to skating parties by civilian children.
“You skate?” With each other we practiced the cool look.
“Oh, yeah. I mean like I do it some—I’m not a racer or anything.”
Every school morning, we boarded the Army-green bus—the slime-green, dead-swamp-algae-green bus—and rode it to the post gate, past the concrete island where the M.P.s stood in their bullet-proof booth. Across from the gate, we got off at a street corner and waited with the other Army kids, the junior-high and high-school kids, for the real bus, the yellow one with the civilian kids on it. Just as we began to board, the civilian kids—there were only six of them but eighteen of us—would begin to sing the Artillery song with obscene variations one of them had invented. Instead of “Over hill, over dale,” they sang things like “Over boob, over tit.” For a few weeks, we sat in silence watching the heavy oak trees of the town give way to apple orchards and potato farms, and we pretended not to hear. Then one day Sparky Smith began to sing the real Artillery song, the booming song with caissons rolling along in it, and we all joined in and took over the bus with our voices.
When we ran out of verses, one of the civilian kids, a football player in high school, yelled, “Sparky is a dog’s name. Here, Sparky, Sparky, Sparky.” Sparky rose from his seat with a wounded look, then dropped to the aisle on his hands and knees and bit the football player in the calf. We all laughed, even the football player, and Sparky returned to his seat.
“That guy’s just lucky I didn’t pee on his leg,” Sparky said.
Somehow Sparky got himself elected homeroom president and me homeroom vice-president in January. He liked to say, “In actual percentages—I mean in actual per-capita terms—we are doing much better than the civilian kids.” He kept track of how many athletes we had, how many band members, who among the older girls might become a cheerleader. Listening to him even then, I couldn’t figure out how he got anyone to vote for us. When he was campaigning, he sounded dull and serious, and anyway he had a large head and looked funny in his knit cap. He put up a homemade sign in the lunch-room, went from table to table to find students from 7-B to shake hands with, and said to me repeatedly, as I walked along a step behind him and nodded, “Just don’t tell them that you’re leaving in March. Under no circumstances let them know that you will not be able to finish out your term.”
In January, therefore, I was elected homeroom vice-president by people I still didn’t know (nobody in 7-B rode our bus—that gave us an edge), and in March my family moved to Fort Sill, in Oklahoma. I surrendered my vice-presidency to a civilian girl, and that was the end for all time of my career in public office.
Two days before we left Fort Niagara, we took the dog, Duke, to Charlie Battery, fourteen miles from the post, and left him with the mess sergeant. We were leaving him for only six weeks, until we could settle in Oklahoma and send for him. He had stayed at Charlie Battery before, when we visited our relatives in Ohio at Christmastime. He knew there were big meaty bones at Charlie Battery, and scraps of chicken, steak, turkey, slices of cheese, special big-dog bowls of ice cream. The mess at Charlie Battery was Dog Heaven, so he gave us a soft, forgiving look as we walked with him from the car to the back of the mess hall.
My mother said, as she always did at times like that, “I wish he knew more English.” My father gave him a fierce manly scratch behind the ears. My brother and I scraped along behind with our pinched faces.
“Don’t you worry,” the sergeant said. “He’ll be fine here. We like this dog, and he likes us. He’ll run that fence perimeter all day long. He’ll be his own early-warning defense system. Then we’ll give this dog everything he ever dreamed of eating.” The sergeant looked quickly at my father to see if the lighthearted reference to the defense system had been all right. My father was in command of the missile batteries. In my father’s presence, no one spoke lightly of the defense of the United States of America—of the missiles that would rise from the earth like a wind and knock out (knock out!) the Soviet planes flying over the North Pole with their nuclear bombs. But Duke was my father’s dog, too, and I think that my father had the same wish we all had—to tell him that we were going to send for him, this was just going to be a wonderful dog vacation.
“Sergeant Carter has the best mess within five hundred miles,” my father said to me and MacArthur.
We looked around. We had been there for Thanksgiving dinner when the grass was still green. Now, in late winter, it was a dreary place, a collection of rain-streaked metal buildings standing near huge dark mounds of earth. In summer, the mounds looked something like the large grassy mounds in southern Ohio, the famous Indian mounds, softly rounded and benignly mysterious. In March, they were black with old snow. Inside the mounds were the Nike missiles, I supposed, although I didn’t know for sure where the missiles were. Perhaps they were hidden in the depressions behind the mounds.
Once during “Fact Monday” in Homeroom 7-B, our teacher, Miss Bintz, had given a lecture on nuclear weapons. First she put a slide on the wall depicting an atom and its spinning electrons.
“Do you know what this is?” she said, and everyone in the room said, “An atom,” in one voice, as if we were reciting a poem. We liked “Fact Monday” sessions because we didn’t have to do any work for them. We sat happily in the dim light of her slides through lectures called “Nine Chapters in the Life of a Cheese” (“First the milk is warmed, then it is soured with rennet”), “The Morning Star of English Poetry” (“As springtime suggests the beginning of new life, so Chaucer stands at the beginning of English poetry”), and “Who’s Who Among the Butterflies” (“The Monarch—Anosia plexippus—is king”). Sparky liked to say that Miss Bintz was trying to make us into third graders again, but I liked Miss Bintz. She had high cheekbones and a passionate voice. She believed, like the adults in my family, that a fact was something solid and useful, like a penknife you could put in your pocket in case of emergency.
That day’s lecture was “What Happens to the Atom When It’s Smashed.” Miss Bintz put on the wall a black-and-white slide of four women who had been horribly disfigured by the atomic blast at Hiroshima. The room was half darkened for the slide show. When she surprised us with the four faces of the women, you could feel the darkness grow, the silence in the bellies of the students.
“And do you know what this is?” Miss Bintz said. No one spoke. What answer could she have wanted from us, anyway? She clicked the slide machine through ten more pictures—closeups of blistered hands, scarred heads, flattened buildings, burned trees, maimed and naked children staggering toward the camera as if th
e camera were food, a house, a mother, a father, a friendly dog.
“Do you know what this is?” Miss Bintz said again. Our desks were arranged around the edge of the room, creating an arena in the center. Miss Bintz entered that space and began to move along the front of our desks, looking to see who would answer her incomprehensible question.
“Do you know?” She stopped in front of my desk.
“No,” I said.
“Do you know?” She stopped next at Sparky’s desk.
Sparky looked down and finally said, “It’s something horrible.”
“That’s right,” she said. “It’s something very horrible. This is the effect of an atom smashing. This is the effect of nuclear power.” She turned to gesture at the slide, but she had stepped in front of the projector, and the smear of children’s faces fell across her back. “Now let’s think about how nuclear power got from the laboratory to the people of Japan.” She had begun to pace again. “Let’s think about where all this devastation and wreckage actually comes from. You tell me,” she said to a large, crouching boy named Donald Anderson. He was hunched over his desk, and his arms lay before him like tree limbs.
The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs Page 4