by Nick Trout
My father was at work, so I was instructed to compress a tea towel into Fiona’s brain, for I was certain that was what I was doing, while my mum drove us to the hospital.
Sitting alone on a plastic chair in the ER waiting room, I began to feel the regret and shame ebbing away, replaced by a growing confidence that somehow my heinous crime had gone unnoticed and would therefore go unpunished. And as my little feet began swinging back and forth, listening while poor Fiona howled from behind closed doors as each nylon stitch was placed across her wound, I had my first “note to self” moment, undeniable and to a certain extent, quite pleasing for a little boy—“I am disturbingly comfortable with the site of blood!”
In the second pertinent incident, it was my turn to have a run-in with a surgeon.
Like most mammals, dogs, cats, and humans are all bedeviled with a variety of useless or outdated organs. Anal sacs, for example, are an evolutionary remnant from the days of territorial marking, of scenting an animal’s domain. Domesticity has rendered the anal sac pretty much redundant, but for many pet owners it can be the bane of their existence, emitting a foul discharge with a pungent, offensive odor as your dog rubs his bum across your living room carpet whenever friends drop by. Thankfully, we humans do not possess anal sacs, but then dogs and cats are spared the pitfalls of an appendix, a worthless vestige of our intestinal tract. As a churlish fifteen-year-old I discovered that the sole purpose of the appendix was to spontaneously become inflamed, making me throw up incessantly and reel from the pain whenever some klutz in a white coat poked the lower right quadrant of my abdomen and asked, “Does this hurt?”
With the exception of those who show their cats and dogs, most pet owners understand that a sterile surgical field necessitates the disappearance of a whole lot of fur and fluff. Depending on the location of surgery, the same also applies to humans, though I was surprised as I lay in my hospital bed—hungry, my mouth parched, waiting for my date with a scalpel—when a cheery young nurse popped her head around my door and informed me, “Someone will be by in a while to give you a shave.”
I smiled and nodded my appreciation, thinking it was too bad this kind of attention to detail never made it into the newspapers when the pundits disparaged Britain’s system of socialized medicine. How very civilized, almost decadent, of them. Using just the right amount of pressure with my fingertips I could definitely discern sufficient stubble on my cheeks to make it worth their while. Then it hit me. The nurse wasn’t referring to the twenty seconds of spa treatment needed to remove my sparse, downy whiskers. This was a warning of pending baldness for my nether regions.
These days I would argue that with appropriate draping, such a violation was unnecessary, but at the time I was a self-conscious teenager consumed with the concept of a stranger, possibly of the opposite sex, possibly attractive, scrutinizing, let alone touching, let alone shaving, my particulars. The ordeal was fraught with ways in which I might embarrass myself.
I wonder whether the nurses do this sort of thing to get a kick out of torturing adolescent boys, planting the seed of fear and watching it blossom before sending in a woman old enough to be my grandmother with the businesslike efficiency of a gentleman’s barber on a busy Saturday morning.
Wheeled down to the operating room for my appendectomy, I smiled as the overhead lights whizzed by just like they did in the movies and before I knew it, I was being invited to count backwards from one hundred while something liquid was pumped into a vein in my hand. The competitor in me wanted to get further than anyone before me, to unnerve the anesthesiologist, forcing anxious looks toward his colleagues as I effortlessly rattled off “forty-four … forty-three … forty-two,” but my speech slurred in the mid-nineties and as it did, they pounced. If what happened to me happens to my patients then we have to improve our anesthetic protocols because I can still remember “feeling” the sensation of being intubated, of having a speculum shoved down my throat and a plastic tube rammed into my airway. It lodged in a place where it should have made me cough, and I still had enough presence of mind to realize that I couldn’t cough—in fact, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t breathe. My last conscious thought was that this was what it must be like to suffocate.
When I woke up I was back in my hospital bed, a string of drool hanging from the corner of my mouth, a dull muscular ache on the right side of my belly. In the following week I made two useful discoveries that would forever heighten my sympathy toward fellow surgical patients, be they human, feline, or canine. First, it is worthwhile making a neat and cosmetically appealing job of the surgical closure. Though I was comfortable staring at the slice in my flesh, I was bothered by the sneering lips of my incision, which were crooked, weepy, and bruised, the stitches irregularly spaced. Second, never underestimate how much a pet wants to scratch an incision and, to a greater extent, the area of skin that was shaved. For all the stabbing pain every time I sat up, the unrelenting itchy prickle of my fresh Brazilian was almost more torturous.
Of course my positive veterinary experience had not been a fluke. Arthur Stone was as affable and accommodating as always, finagling a way to help me hang out with the veterinarians, especially Ryan James. Never one to miss a teaching opportunity, Ryan would pull me away from the walls when I was trying too hard to be politely inconspicuous. He would insist I help hold a dog, restrain a cat, palpate a mass, take a listen with a stethoscope. He forced me to interact. He allowed me every opportunity to hear what he heard, to feel what he felt, relentless until I got it, until he could see it in my eyes, watching me catch the exact same bug that grabbed him when he was my age.
In the meantime, there was a strange turn of events taking place back at the homestead. In the immediate aftermath of Patch’s death, the notion of getting another dog had been unthinkable, the subject taboo for my grieving father. For nearly a year, you could sit on our sofa and not have a mohair like coating on your clothing when you stood up. You could nonchalantly stroll around our backyard indifferent to your footfalls and friends even began to call for me by appearing at the front door rather than using the telephone. But, over time, I began to eavesdrop on conversations that told me Dad was coming back, recapturing his desire for a dog, my mother forced to reassert her original proclamation—“No more dogs!” Having to concede the word more meant acknowledging her past failure to prevent such a transgression, so, to provide extra menace this time around, she often tossed in a sentence or two that included the word divorce. Then the unthinkable happened.
“Mum’s beginning to weaken,” said Dad in a whisper over the cup of tea he was handing over as a bribe to get me up and out of bed for school. “Don’t say a word, but I think we have a shot at getting a dog.”
The combination of shock and disbelief made his request easy to carry out. I was careful not to leak my information to Fiona, fearful the womenfolk had laid a trap for us dog lovers, poised to expose and crush our pent-up desire for the return of canine company. I was careful not to weaken and let my mother catch me wearing a knowing smile, and any covert communication between my father and I during this period of delicate diplomacy was done far away from prying eyes and sensitive ears. We dared not risk a raised brow, a wink, or a nod. Mum needed to save face and cave on her terms.
The announcement, when it came, was delivered by both parents and shrouded in secrecy. Yes, we were getting a dog. No, it wouldn’t be another German shepherd (no one needed to clarify this decision—for all of us, there would only ever be one German shepherd in our lives). Yes, it would be another male dog, and no, we would just have to wait and see.
I tried to coax a hint out of Dad but to no avail. All I knew was my father appeared to be supremely happy but was sworn to silence, and a significant clincher in the deal involved his submitting to my mum’s choice of breed.
I hardly had a chance to point out that Mum, by her own admission, knew little about the characteristics of different dog breeds before things went from merely bizarre to almost unbelievable.
A countdown had begun, our unidentified dog set to arrive in under a week. Mum was at work when a gaggle of breathless kids converged on her kindergarten classroom, grabbing her by the hand and insisting she come with them. There, with her head firmly wedged between the metal railings that formed a perimeter fence around the front of the school property, was a forlorn and defeated black puppy, restrained as effectively as a prisoner in a medieval stock.
This should have been the point at which Mum passed the buck, yielding to colleagues who were forthright doggy types, but she stepped up, gently coaxing the poor dog’s head free, picking her up, and carrying her into the school.
Her kids did exactly what I would have done at their ages, they embraced the rescue mission and their role as saviors, doting on the frightened dog, fetching her water, raiding their lunch boxes for bits of sandwich.
“Is she a Labrador, Mrs. Trout?”
“She looks that way to me,” said Mum, though later I found her short on alternative suggestions of breeds for dogs that were black. In her defense, she did pick up on a critical inconsistency. “But this tiny white spot on her chest, this doesn’t look right.” The puppy had no collar and no form of identification, and none of the children in her class had ever seen it before.
The dog-resistant Mum I knew took the reins, driving the puppy over to the nearest police station and depositing her with an unsympathetic sergeant. Standard protocol dictated that the abandoned bitch would be transferred to a local dog pound. There she would be assigned to death row, her sentence commuted for just seven days, after which time, if she remained unclaimed, she would be put to sleep.
By the end of the afternoon, another woman entirely placed a phone call to my father. This woman may have looked and sounded like my mother, but she had to have been abducted by dog-friendly aliens, her brain fried, and the circuitry completely rewired.
“Duncan, do you think we could have another dog?”
I wonder if my father questioned who was on the other end of the line, whether he dropped the handset, and how long it took him to regain control of his vocal cords.
“But … we’re already committed to a dog.”
“I know, I know,” said Mum, “but I want you to see her.”
This they did, visiting the pound together after work. At the back of a damp and chilly concrete cell sat a tiny black puppy. It wasn’t the gentle whimpering that got to Dad as he picked her up. It was far more subtle. In her eyes, worse than dejection, more cutting, was a look of resignation, hopelessness, and acceptance of her lot.
Dad turned to Mum, cradling the puppy in his hands.
“We must have her,” he said, with a familiar, fierce determination that always bordered on tears.
Mum nodded, the smallest upturn at the corner of her lips all she would concede. Skillfully my mother had engineered an encounter between her sensitive husband and a dog in need knowing full well how it would play out. By leaving the final word with my father, she was now able to step back, divorced from the consequences, all the while ensuring, to my delight, that “her will be done.”
Only then were Fiona and I apprised of this new development.
“But Mum,” whined Fiona, “think about all that lovely crap covering the backyard, and two sets of sharp puppy teeth trashing your new furniture, not just one.”
I braced for my real Mum to wake up, to snap out of it, but she shooed the notion away as though it were ridiculous, saying, “By this time tomorrow, she’ll have been claimed, and your father’s notion of two dogs will be forgotten.”
I glanced at my dad, who seemed more than happy to take the fall. Fiona, on the other hand, huffed her disapproval and went off to tease her hair, or listen to Duran Duran or hunt for her missing Dynasty shoulder pads. I decided I would take a peek inside our medicine cabinet to try and discover what wonderful medication my father was using to poison his wife’s mind. I didn’t know how it was happening, but my dog-resistant mum appeared to be succumbing to the inevitable power of the dog-loving DNA I had glimpsed from time to time when she was around Patch.
Twenty-four hours passed and no one had come forward to claim a little black dog. I knew this not from my father, but from my mother, who quickly gained notoriety with the kennel staff at the pound for her persistent and anxious phone calls inquiring after the puppy who got her head stuck in the school railings. They should have waited a full week to make sure there wasn’t someone out there hunting for a lost Lab mix, but after five days of my mother’s badgering, they could stand it no more. The lost puppy was signed over to my mum and rode to her new home content on Mum’s lap as my father drove, a huge grin plastered on his face.
My father named her Bess after a famous black horse, Black Bess, the trusty steed of one Dick Turpin, arguably the most notorious highwayman in English folklore. Mother had been correct about her breed after all: black Labrador with a hint of something else, a dash of hound, a smidgen of terrier.
These days, I could have swabbed a little DNA from the inside of Bess’s cheek, submitted it to a laboratory, and discovered with roughly 90 percent accuracy which different breeds contributed to her genetic mix. I have read that this knowledge can give an owner valuable insight into a dog’s behavior or predisposition to certain diseases and anomalies but to be honest, most of the owners I know who have forked over the cash for this simple test do so out of curiosity, to discover their pet’s ancestry.
On only one occasion have I been truly impressed by the power of this genetic tool. A client visited me with what appeared to be a pit bull that had a lameness problem. The dog was fantastic, your typical friendly, rough-and-tumble “pitty” who would not hurt a fly, let alone a human, let alone a child’s face.
“Not everyone shares my enthusiasm for pit bulls,” said the owner. “Many of the households in the neighborhood have small children and a number of the parents got together to complain about my dog, saying the breed couldn’t be trusted, that it was only a matter of time before one of their kids was attacked.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You could say that about any dog in the wrong hands.”
“Yeah,” said the owner, “I’m telling you, if you put her in a ring with a rabbit my money would be on the rabbit! But I didn’t want them coming back at me, so I decided to try something I wouldn’t have ordinarily considered—genetically testing my dog to discover what she’s made of. And here’s the thing. She may look like a pit bull and she may act like a pit bull, but according to her DNA test she’s actually a cross between a mastiff and, of all things, a Dalmation. You should have seen the neighbors’ faces when I showed them the official report.”
But I digress, because back then, all you had to do was trust the experience of your veterinarian, and as far as Ryan James could tell, Bess was simply a Lab mix, the “mix” component open to interpretation.
“One good thing going for a Heinz fifty-seven,” James would later inform me, “is the benefit of hybrid vigor.”
“Hopefully,” said James, “Bess will have all the good breed traits and dodge all the bad. Part of the fun of having a mix is not knowing exactly what you’re going to get.”
Where there was ambiguity when it came to heritage, nothing was more indisputable than the puddles of urine and tiny poops abandoned in bizarre locations and the lost sleep due to nocturnal puppy whimpering. By the time my mushy, sleep-deprived brain was remembering not to walk around the house in bare feet, it was time for Mum and Dad to collect Bess’s canine companion. They disappeared one Saturday morning, maintaining their contrived shroud of mystery to the bitter end.
They would concede only one detail, that they would be gone for at least five hours, giving me more than enough time to ponder the possibilities. For a split second I thought about discussing the matter with my sister, inviting her to make a prediction. Then reality kicked in. Fiona would rather discuss the finer points of calculus or debate symbolism in the novels of Thomas Hardy than speculate about canine matters. And s
o, as the arrival time approached, I sat alone in our living room, little black Bess pooped out (literally!), curled up and sleeping on my lap, the two of us wondering who and what was about to become her new BFF.
Based on my mother’s recent purchase of royal blue wall-to-wall carpeting for several rooms I couldn’t imagine it would be a dog with a tendency to shed, a dog with a long fur coat of a fair color. Mother had weakened over a black dog with slick short hair reminiscent of an otter. Surely she would lean toward something similar?
I wondered whether she would go for a small dog, following her mother’s penchant for a toy breed. By now Marty had to be about fifty-three years old (okay, sixteen) and he was still going strong. Either he was the Benjamin Button of poodles or my grandma had been pulling off the old goldfish stunt, trading up for a look-alike, keeping the same name and hoping no one noticed. My mum’s cousin Pat bred and showed Tibetan terriers. These are fantastic little dogs, full of vim and vigor, but somehow I didn’t see a small breed of dog in our future. If Bess was going to be approximately Labrador in size, I didn’t imagine Dad striding off to the nearby fields with anything that could wear a pink bow in its head, needed a coat in winter, and could dress up for Halloween. Dad had been enjoying this game. I didn’t believe he would act that way if he wasn’t extremely satisfied with Mum’s choice.
When the car pulled into the driveway, Mum emerged clutching something swaddled in a plaid blanket, tucked tight into her body, as though she half expected to get jostled by paparazzi and needed to ensure the creature’s anonymity.
“Fiona, they’re back,” I shouted upstairs, not even expecting a reply and therefore surprised to hear feet bounding down the stairs as she ran to join me.
I opened the door for them and stepped back, Dad beaming, Mum behind him, turning slightly away from me and my sister as she tried to heighten the tension. It was like watching an American Idol finale and there’s Ryan Seacrest flaunting the sealed envelope with the winner’s name at the camera and you just want to slap him upside the head, grab the envelope, rip it open, and find out who won.