My Life in Dog Years (6 page)

The effect was immediate. Arnie was a survivor and when he saw Caesar he did what
he was best at—he turned and ran. Not up a tree, as one would suppose, but across the road and along a ditch. With a satisfied growl that sounded like thunder, Caesar gave chase.

My tripping feet had nearly caught up with him—I remember the heel of my one sandal slapping so fast it sounded like a motor running—and I was reaching to shorten the leash when Caesar went after Arnie, and I never quite caught up again.

We went through the neighbor’s yard at what felt like twenty miles an hour—cat, bounding dog and dragging, underwear-clad human yelling in monosyllabic shrieks. My neighbor was standing in his garage and waved—he may have thought I was waving.

By this time I was just trying to stay alive and couldn’t have cared less if Caesar got loose. Indeed I
wanted
him to get loose. But the leash loop was tight around my wrist.
I found to my horror that I was along for the ride, and what a ride it was! We went through three more yards and the back of a bike rental shop along the road and finally slammed into the back doorway of a small cafe where, I learned later, Arnie sometimes went to beg his meals.

Arnie disappeared into the kitchen. Caesar tried to follow him and would have made it except that I became jammed in the door opening and even he could not pull me free.

There was a large woman there holding a very impressive cast-iron frying pan and she looked at me as she might look at a cockroach—looked directly at my head and then at the frying pan, which she hefted professionally. “Who are you?”

“I’m with him,” I said, pointing at Caesar while trying to cover my body. My shorts were in tatters and my feet were badly scraped.

“It’s wrong to chase cats,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. Perhaps more than any time in my life I meant it.

“Go away.” She pointed to the door with her frying pan. “And take your dog with you.”

And so Caesar entered my life.

He became many things to us—friend, entertainer, horror show—but he was never, never boring and his life comes back now in a montage of memories.

There was the Halloween when he greeted a little boy who came to the door in a werewolf costume. There was one moment, priceless, when the two eyed each other, hairy monster-mask to Great Dane muzzle, at exactly the same height. I’m not certain what the little boy expected but he didn’t quail— he leaned forward and growled. I’m not sure what Caesar had expected either but it certainly wasn’t an angry werewolf. He made
a sound like a train in a tunnel and disappeared into a dark corner of the bedroom closet and would not come out until all the little people stopped coming and the doorbell quit ringing. And it might be noted here that he had a remarkable memory. Every one of the seven years that he was with us, when the first trick-or-treater came to the door on Halloween, no matter the costume, Caesar went into the bedroom closet, pulled a housecoat over his eyes and would not come out until it was over. He had great heart, but courage against monsters wasn’t in him.

Then there was the time I was playing “get the kitty” with him. Arnie wasn’t there— usually he was off eating or trying to get married—and I would run around the house yelling at Caesar, “Get the kitty, get the kitty!” He would lope with me, jumping over furniture and knocking down tables (for obvious reasons I usually played this game only when my wife wasn’t there), and I would run and
yell and yell until he was so excited he would tear around the house by himself. (I know, I know, but it must be remembered we had no television or other forms of home entertainment.) If it worked well enough I could go and pour a cup of coffee and drink it while Caesar kept galloping, looking for the mystery kitty.

On this one morning I had done it particularly well and he was crazy with excitement, running up and down the stairs, spraying spit (we often had gobbets on the ceilings when he shook his head), bounding through the air with great glee, and just then, at the height of his crazed romp, just then the front doorbell buzzed and without thinking I opened it to see a package-delivery man standing there with a box in his arms.

Caesar went
over
me, through the screen and into the guy at shoulder height. He didn’t bite, didn’t actually hurt the man at all. In fact when the man was down on his
back Caesar licked his face—an experience which I think could be duplicated by sticking your head in a car wash—but the effects were the same as if he’d attacked. The package went up in the air and crashed to the ground with a sound of breaking crockery (it had been a family heirloom vase sent by an aunt—and
had been
would be the correct words). The delivery man wet his pants and in a cloud of dog spit and dust clawed his way free, ran back to the truck and was gone before I knew exactly what had happened. Soon after, we received a polite note saying that that particular company would no longer deliver packages to us.

Caesar never became angry. I never saw him fight or be aggressive to another dog, and while he loved to chase cats, Arnie particularly, when the day was done I would frequently find Arnie curled up on Caesar’s back by the stove, the two of them sound
asleep. But Caesar would get excited and forget himself when there was food involved, particularly when the food was a hot dog. I think he would have sold his soul for a hot dog. With mustard and relish. When we had hot dogs or went on a picnic he would sit and stare until somebody handed him a wiener and then he would hit like a gator. You had to throw it or he would get your whole hand in his mouth, up to the elbow.

I once was invited to a picnic and softball game in a small town nearby and since it was a nice day I thought it would be fun to bring Caesar. Had I thought a little more I would have remembered two things—that it was a picnic and they would have hot dogs and that Caesar
loved to
play ball—but then had I thought a little more I probably would not have owned Caesar in the first place.

I brought him out of the back of the truck and people came to see him—one young boy
said he looked exactly like a four-legged dinosaur with hair—and after all the oohs and aahs at his size settled down, I left him in the truck with the windows open, told him forcefully, “Stay!” (ha!) and went off to see what was happening.

I had gone about forty yards, saying hello to people and picking up a can of soda, when I met an old friend and stopped to chat. I had my back to the parking area and I suppose heard some of the commotion that was starting but it didn’t enter my mind until the man I was speaking to looked over my shoulder and said, “Isn’t that Caesar?”

I turned and my heart froze. Caesar was standing next to a small girl—she couldn’t have been four—and he towered over her. That wasn’t so frightening as what the little girl was doing. She had taken a bite off a hot dog and was holding the remainder out to Caesar.

Images of destruction roared through my mind. He had truly enormous jaws (I could fit my head inside his mouth) and he snapped at his food violently, especially hot dogs. It was too far for me to run in time and I yelled but it was too late by ages and I wanted to close my eyes but didn’t dare and as I watched, Caesar incredibly, with the gentleness of a baby lamb, reached delicately forward and took the hot dog from the girl. He swallowed it in one bite, then licked her face and moved on—though I was calling him—looking for the next child.

They loved him. Kids came from all corners and fed him hot dog after hot dog and he was as careful and gentle as he’d been with the little girl. By this time he had the attention of the crowd and everybody loved him so much I thought they were going to riot when I tried to put him back in the truck.

I let him out when the game started, and
he went to work in the outfield. He would sit around center field, in back of the outfielders, and watch the batter. If the ball came long or went between the outfielders he would grab it and run to the nearest player and drop it. I know of two grounders he shagged to stop a double—I hit both of them and was held at first both times because Caesar stopped the ball when it slithered past both infielders and outfielders.

He loved the game and loved the day and when the afternoon was done we went back to the truck and a little girl came running up to me and held out a piece of paper.

Drawn on it in crayon was a picture of a dog, a big dog, with a yellow sun in back of him and stick figures hitting at balls, and scrawled across the bottom was:

WE LOVE YOU SEEZER.

He is gone now, gone some years from a combination of dysplasia and cancer that was
impossible to cure or fix but I still have the drawing in a box somewhere. It shows up from time to time when I am moving or straightening things, and I think of him and the perfect summer afternoon when we ate hot dogs and played ball and made some new friends.

Fred came to me in a small cardboard box filled with wood chips.

I had been in a bookstore in Bemidji, Minnesota, looking for a book on pickling fish. I love to eat pickled herring and had access to a large supply of small northern pike.

It was in this uncomplicated frame of mind that I met Fred.

I was at the curb when a small boy came up to me holding an old detergent box.

“Hey, mister,” he said with the air of a con man, “you want to buy a puppy?”

“Buy?” I stopped and peered into the box. There was nothing but a pile of wood shavings. “What puppy?”

“He’s in there, down in the wood. Dig him out.”

I dug around in the shavings until my fingers hit the soft fur. There was a moment’s hesitation, then a small growl; then a set of needle-sharp teeth ripped into the soft tip of my finger. “He bit me!”

The boy nodded. “He’s half Lab and half something that came into the yard one night Dad said he’d make a great watch-dog.”

I studied the boy. He was short, with frank
blue eyes and golden blond hair. He didn’t look like a con man.

“Let me get this straight. You want me to buy a puppy I can’t see, that bites me, and you aren’t sure who the father is?”

He thought a moment, then nodded. “Yep. He’s a good watchdog. Look how he defends that box.”

Just for the record, I was going to say no, but I looked down and a small black head appeared, with two floppy ears, a black button nose, two dark brown eyes and a little mouth that smiled at me. I know some people think dogs can’t smile, but they can, and he did. I was sunk. I’ve always been a sucker for puppies. I can’t get out of a dog pound without a dog, especially a cute one like Fred.

“How much?” I asked.

The truth was, it was silly to buy a puppy— you could go to any mall or shopping center parking lot and find someone trying to give
them away. Add to that the fact that I was terminally broke and it became doubly crazy.

“Fifty dollars,” the boy said without smiling or batting an eye.

“For a mutt puppy?”

He looked at me, calculating. “How about five bucks?”

“Done.”

I gave him the money and took the dog and box and wood shavings and put them on the floor of the cab of my old truck. I had just lost a friend to cancer. His name had been Fred and I thought it would be nice to hear his name now and then, so I looked down into the box while I drove and I said, “Your name is Fred.”

At home I took the pup out of the box and into the house, where he promptly peed on the floor and tore a hole in a couch cushion, spilled trash all over the kitchen floor, ripped open two bags of beans and rice in
the pantry, dismembered a doll that a neighbor’s daughter had left, ate the laces and tongues out of four pairs of shoes (but only the left shoe of each pair), absolutely destroyed a vacuum cleaner somebody foolishly had left in the same closet as the shoes, and stuck my wife’s cat, Matilda, almost permanently onto the ceiling.

This was in the first twenty minutes Fred was in the house, while I was looking for my wife to tell her I had brought a puppy home.

Of all the dogs I have had, Fred was the closest to being actually nuclear in his capacity for destruction. None of it was done with evil intent. He was a wonderfully happy pup and adult dog—inventive and with a great sense of humor, more of which later— but he was also amazingly persistent. Once he started a project, he simply would not stop until it was done. I think nothing illustrates this better than what came to be known as the great wire war.

Fred grew, in spite of early attempts by Matilda the cat to disconnect his head from his body. As an adult dog he became rotund and only fourteen inches tall—I think he must have been a Labrador-Norwegian elkhound cross—but his shortness did not extend to his thinking or his appetite. He was as devoted to eating as he was to finding things to destroy. This fact led to the war.

We lived close to the land then, with four gardens and a wood-heated cabin in the forest where we canned and preserved our own food. This included raising a pig for ham and bacon. Because we didn’t wish to become too attached to the meat supply, we simply called it Pig. (This didn’t work, of course, and we wound up with a nearly quarter-ton pet named Pig who lived to be a ripe old age and died with his head in the trough, eating potato peelings.)