Fifteen Dogs

by André Alexis

  He was at the corner of Fern and Roncesvalles, trying to decide where he should go, when a ruddy-faced old man bent down and scooped him into his arms, saying

  – Who’s a pretty doggy? Who’s a pretty boy?

  This was most unpleasant. Benjy squirmed as if he were helplessly sinking into a pond of foul-smelling wool. From out of a pocket in his overcoat, the man extracted a biscuit that smelled of sugar, fish, carrots, lamb and rice. Suspicious, but captivated by the smell of the biscuit, Benjy stopped wriggling. He sniffed at the biscuit again, taking in the hints of salt, canola oil, rosemary, human sweat and apple.

  – What is it? Benjy asked, speaking English.

  As if it were natural for dogs to address him, the old man said:

  – It is a biscuit. I was told dogs like them. Do you not want it?

  Sniffing again at the air close to the biscuit, Benjy decided that the thing was what the man said it was: food. He took the biscuit from the man’s hand and, crunching it with the teeth on one side of his mouth, he allowed himself to eat what was, in the end, a memorable treat.

  – Thank you, said Benjy.

  The man put him down and absent-mindedly rubbed the fur along his back.

  – You’re welcome, he said. I’m glad you liked it. I’ve got to go, now, Benjy. See you later.

  It was a moment before Benjy realized the man had used his secret name. Did the human know him, then? He looked in the direction the man had gone and, almost instinctively, followed him. This was not as easy as it should have been. In Benjy’s experience, the humans that smelled as the old man had – that is, of wool, sugary urine, sweat and some indefinable decay – were slower than others. Not this one. He walked quickly. Then, too, it was a busy day along Roncesvalles. There were any number of obstructions: women with baby strollers, other dogs, and – worst of all – ambling humans who were always a threat to step on you or kick you out of the way. Then there were the distractions: post boxes, lampposts, garbage bins, telephone poles, the sour milk and roast chicken smell of the Sobey’s, the raspberry jam from a bakery, the sausage and cheese from the delis along the street … so many things that made you want to stop and smell them. Keeping up with the man was a task. Yet, Benjy did keep up, the grey of the man’s pants – the colour of ash – always before him.

  The old man – Zeus in mortal guise – walked south to the end of Roncesvalles, crossed the street on a diagonal and stepped onto the waiting streetcar. Abandoning caution, Benjy followed and jumped onto the streetcar just as its doors were closing. He easily found the old man – who was sitting at the back – and stood up to put his paws on the man’s leg. As if it were unexceptional to be importuned by a dog, the old man helped Benjy up onto the window seat.

  Benjy’s feelings were mixed. He was not used to streetcars and he found their motion and noise disconcerting. (He had last been on a streetcar years previously, with his mistress, and he had not at all enjoyed the ride.) But then, there was the old man beside him: a peculiar presence but kindly, and if there was one thing Benjy knew, it was that kindness could be exploited. In the end, though, the thing that settled him down – or distracted him from his disquiet – was the window. It was open just enough for him to stick his snout through and take in the scented districts of Queen Street: from the musty oleo of Parkdale, past a bridge that smelled as if it were made of pigeon shit, past grasses and urine-saturated posts, past boutiques that exhaled dust or perfume or the smell of new cloth, back to old neighbourhoods, sumac trees and maples; the fishy-mineral lake a constant, intoxicating emanation. It was all intoxicating; so much so that Benjy was in Leslieville before he knew it and before he realized that the old man was no longer beside him, had disappeared god knows when.

  Though the streetcar was not full, someone must have complained about Benjy, because at Woodbine, just past a place that smelled of human shit (in all its lovely complexity, but adulterated by something that reminded him of a garden of death), the streetcar’s driver strode toward him.

  – Whose dog is this? the man asked the air.

  You could tell he was not friendly.

  Benjy jumped down from the seat before the driver could grab him. He scampered to the front of the streetcar and, the doors being open, tumbled down the steep steps and into what was, in effect, a new country: unknown, a little frightening. Walking past a gas station, he went south, instinctively heading toward the lake.

  It wasn’t long before he was on the beach. The trees were still skeletal, their just-budding leaves like lime-green nubs. This time of year especially, a dog couldn’t help himself: one just needed to bite something. It was as if one’s teeth had desires of their own. So, snapping up a supple and tough twig, Benjy set off along the shore with no destination in mind, the sand stiff and cold beneath his paws.

  Of the fifteen who’d been changed by Apollo, Benjy was the dog who had best made peace with the new way of thinking. Essentially selfish, he used his intelligence almost uniquely to serve his own wants, needs, desires and whims. He was not often troubled by pointless speculation. Yet, there were moments when, in a manner of speaking, his intelligence took on a mind of its own. Now, for instance, looking out at the great expanse of water, Benjy wondered why it was there. Why should this bluish, non-land be? And how far did it extend?

  These thoughts reminded him, briefly, of the dog who had ­disappeared:

  The leaves, they run like mice,

  while birds peck at the ground.

  The wood has rotted in its bin.

  The grim axe has come round

  But Benjy’s mind was soon on to other, more important things. What would he eat and where would he stay for the night? If the humans here (beside this stretch of the endless water) were at all like those near High Park, he would surely find one to take care of him. Biting down on the tough stick, he continued along the beach, heading east.

  Happy, Benjy was too distracted to notice a mutt who cautiously approached. By the time he saw the dog – and was almost overcome by panic, because he could not immediately read the dog’s intent – the mutt was all over him, jumping up and down, sniffing at his anus and genitals, barking like one about to die of pleasure.

  – You are the small dog from my pack! said the mutt, tail wagging madly.

  At those words, spoken in a language only one of the fifteen could have understood, Benjy recognized the dog who had disappeared. That is, Prince. (How unpredictable life is, thought Benjy. I was just thinking about this dog.)

  – Dog who was gone, where have you been? Benjy asked.

  – He remembers! cried Prince. You remember our way of speaking!

  His joy surpassing his capacity to express it with words, Prince began to run in wide circles around the beagle, tongue lolling out. It was as if he were chasing the delight that animated him. Benjy knew what Prince’s running meant, of course, but he did not share the feeling. He had lived through strange times with Majnoun and, before that, with the pack he had killed off. That Prince was a member of that nearly extinct group did not make Benjy glad.

  – Dog, he said, stop running.

  – I have been in exile for so long, cried Prince, I thought I’d lost our language.

  – Our language isn’t important, said Benjy. The human language is what matters.

  – The human language? asked Prince. It is all noise. Do you speak it?

  – I do, said Benjy. I will teach you what I know, if you like.

  – Perhaps a few words, if you like, said Prince without enthusiasm.

  Benjy walked toward the lake, taking in the tang of it. What did it matter, he thought, if the dog clung to his ignorance.

  – Where have you been? Benjy asked.

  Prince had been many places since they’d last seen each other, but none of the places he’d been was as significant to him as the place he’d fled (High Park, the coppice) or the pack from which he’d been driven.

  – What has happened to the other dogs? Prince asked.

  With l
ittle emotion, Benjy gave him a severely truncated version of events. The others were all dead, he said, all poisoned by some unknown hand. And he himself had barely escaped with his life. In this way – brutally, with no mention of Majnoun – Prince learned of his pack’s devastation.

  O, what it was to be swept so suddenly through such a range of feelings! From joy to despair in a matter of moments. Prince sat up and keened. And his cries were such an unfettered expression of grief that even the humans in the distance stopped to listen.

  – We are the last, said Prince.

  – Yes, said Benjy. It is all very sad. But tell me what has happened to you.

  Benjy was not curious about Prince’s fate. What he wanted to know was whether or not Prince had learned anything useful. Prince, garrulous by nature, answered Benjy as best he could. But having just been devastated by the knowledge that he’d lost almost all of those who spoke his language, his heart was not in it.

  After following Hermes out of the coppice, Prince began what was, unbeknownst to him, a long trek east. He hadn’t wanted to abandon his pack or lose the thing that mattered so much to him: the new language. He thought to remain in the park, avoiding the others until time had passed and their rage had quelled, but it was as if an undercurrent drew him farther and farther from the den.

  To begin with, that winter, he was adopted by a family in Parkdale. He was happy, but when the spring came he lost them as he chased after a squirrel in a neighbourhood he did not know. The loss was not painful. He did not look for the family again. For a time, he was fed by a human whose breath and ear canals smelled of rancid fish. The rancid human lived east of Parkdale. Farther east still, in Trinity-­Bellwoods, he was attacked by a German shepherd and then taken in by a sympathetic human who fed him until his wounds healed. She had smelled of a breeze coming in off the prairie and he would have stayed with her, but, after a time, she stopped letting him in.

  From there – south of Dundas and Manning – he was abducted. That is, he was lured into a vehicle driven by adults but filled with young humans. He ended up somewhere far north of the lake: off Avenue Road, south of Eglinton. Prince was, fundamentally, good-natured. He was curious about the world and all that was in it, but here the younger humans would not let him alone. There was always some child – breath smelling of sugar and summer berries – draped around his neck like a kerchief of monkey. Despite this, he would have stayed on. In most ways, the humans were kind. The one way in which they were not, however, was in the leash they chose for him. It was a choke chain that he could not look at without feeling trepidation.

  Most of the leash was black leather. The leather had a clip that fastened onto a metal ring. The metal ring was attached to a silver chain made of metal links that was itself fastened to a metal ring. Once around his neck, the silver chain either hung loosely or, when pulled, constricted and strangled him. This was not only unpleasant in itself, but, when he was occasionally attacked by other dogs, he had to choose between strangulation (as the human tried to hold him back) or defence. That is, he was either bitten or choked. This turned walking with the humans into a daily source of anxiety. And so, feeling that he would go strange if he stayed, Prince opened the front door for himself one night and wandered off.

  After Avenue and St. Clair, he again drifted east, going from this plate of food to that treat, staying sometimes in people’s yards, scavenging for food in back alleys and behind restaurants. Moving across the city while sniffing out the lake, which was, when the wind was right, like a tantalizing hint of mineral and algae, a hint quickly lost in the congeries of city smells.

  Having moved across Toronto in a rough parabola (from High Park not far from the lake north to Eglinton then south and east to the Beach below Victoria Park and Queen), Prince would have been hard-pressed to say what the city was. Not its dimensions – which did not interest him – but its essence. Certainly, it had a particular heft in the mind. It was different from Ralston, where he’d been whelped and where his first and still-beloved master had lived. Ralston was ‘home.’ It was an ache within him and always would be.

  Toronto was, above all, a place for humans, their warm dens and unpredictable moods. It reeked of them: from the pleasing musk of their genitals and arses to the sweet, compound fragrances that clung to them. They were the city’s hazard and its sanctuary, its sense and its point. But what Prince loved about the city, the reason it was the setting for most of his poems, was the way it smelled. Whatever else he might be feeling or thinking, there was always some distracting smell to consider: humans, of course, but so much more, from the rotting carcasses of small animals around Grenadier Pond to the mouth-watering emanations from curry houses around Danforth and Victoria Park. A dog would have to be dead not to appreciate the sheer variety of the city’s reeks.

  At this point, bored by Prince’s account of his travels, Benjy said

  – Yes, yes, but where do you sleep and what do you eat?

  – I do not sleep in any one place, said Prince. I know of a number of dens where the humans feed me and let me stay inside.

  – Are these dens nearby? asked Benjy. I am hungry.

  – One is near, said Prince. Shall I take you?

  – Will the humans feed me?

  Prince thought about it for a moment. He’d never brought another dog with him to any of the places he knew, but then he had never encountered one of his pack mates out here by the lake. One of his pack mates? The last one and, so, the most important, worth more to him than all the humans together.

  – I do not know why they would not feed you, he said.

  And he led Benjy on a longish trek to a house near Rhodes and Gerrard.

  The house in question was small and rickety, looking a little like it might tip over. It was white (or whitish), its porch trimmed in a grandmotherly blue. Though it was late afternoon, Prince said

  – They are not awake this early. We will have to wait.

  Which they did, lying side by side on the porch. As they waited, Prince recounted more of his time away from the pack, his impressions of the city, interrupting his narrative to speak one of his newer poems:

  With one paw, trying

  the edges of the winter pond,

  finding its waters solid,

  he advances, nails sliding,

  still far from home.

  While listening to Prince, Benjy experienced a feeling he rarely felt: boredom. He knew no word for boredom, but the feeling was accompanied by a nearly palpable desire to have Prince stop talking. It was not that Prince was in the least offensive. It was that nothing the dog said was of use to Benjy. Besides, he hated the trouble it took to understand some of the words. He felt relief when the screen door screeched and a human stepped onto the porch. It was a man, tall and imposing, his hair black.

  He lit a cigarette and then, seeing the dogs, he called out:

  – Clare! Your dog brought a friend!

  Then dimly, from inside the house:

  – What?

  – Your dog! It brought another dog with it!

  The screen door screeched again and out stepped a short woman in a pink terrycloth robe: hair as dark as the man’s, eyes outlined in kohl. She took a drag on the man’s cigarette, then reached down to pat Prince’s back.

  – Hi, Russell, she said. Hi, boy! Where you been?

  Prince flinched at her touch, a ripple travelling along his flanks.

  – You see that? said the man. He’s got fleas.

  – He doesn’t have fleas! Leave him alone!

  Having so recently observed a human couple ‘up close’ and having spent time learning the rudiments of their language, Benjy assumed he understood the dynamic between the humans before him. More: he saw an opportunity to make a place for himself. So, when the female had finished asserting that Prince had no fleas, Benjy suddenly got up on his hind legs, put his front paws together as if he were praying and recited the beginning of Vanity Fair:

  – Eye’ll tuh pro-sent sendry w
ass een eets teens an un-shy-nee ore-ning een June …

  That was as far as Benjy got before he blanked, but he had made an impression. Though they had trouble with the dog’s accent, the couple recognized the rhythms of speech. They looked at Benjy in wonder, as if he were an impossibility. A good ten seconds passed before the man said

  – What in the fuck was that?

  – I don’t know, said Clare. Is he talking?

  Suddenly and with unexpected grace, the man picked Benjy up by the scruff of the neck and, with Benjy’s snout near his own nose, asked

  – Do you talk?

  Benjy could, of course, in his limited way, talk. What he could not do was speak while his neck was learning the weight of his arse. He struggled in the man’s grip, increasingly uncomfortable, managing only a kind of half-bark, half-plea.

  – Put him down, said Clare. How’s he going to talk if you’re strangling him?

  – This is how dogs are supposed to be picked up, said the man.

  But he put Benjy down.

  Prince, who’d jumped off the porch, called to his pack mate.

  – Let’s go, he said. The big human is not always good.

  But Benjy sat at the man’s feet, tail wagging expectantly.

  – You see? said the man. I didn’t hurt him.

  – Yeah, but you scared Russell, said Clare.

  – Who cares? asked the man. I bet this one does tricks.

  To Benjy, he said

  – Roll over!

  Which Benjy did.

  – Play dead! the man said.

  Which Benjy did.

  – Dance!

  Which Benjy did, getting up on his hind legs and turning in neat circles.

  – Talk! said the man.

  And once again, Benjy recited as much as he remembered of Vanity Fair.