Racing in the Rain (3 page)

Chapter Seven

W
hen it was just Denny and me, he used to make up to ten thousand dollars a month in his spare time by selling things to people over the telephone. But after Eve became pregnant, Denny took his job behind the counter at the fancy auto shop. The one that serviced only expensive German cars. Denny liked his job, but it ate up all of his free time, and he and I didn't get to spend our days together anymore.

Sometimes on weekends, Denny taught at a high-performance drivers' school run by one of the many car clubs in the area—BMW, Porsche, Alfa Romeo. He often took me to the track with him. I enjoyed these outings very much. He didn't really like teaching at these events because he didn't get to drive; he just had to sit in the passenger seat and tell other people how to drive. He fantasized about moving somewhere—to Sonoma or Phoenix, or even Europe—and catching on with one of the big schools so he could drive more. Eve said she didn't think she could ever leave Seattle.

Eve worked for some big clothing company because it provided us with money and health insurance. Also because she could buy clothes for the family at the employee discount. She went back to work a few months after Zoë was born, even though she really wanted to stay home with her baby.

With Denny and Eve working and Zoë off at day care, I was left to my own devices. For most of the dreary days I was alone in the apartment, wandering from room to room, from nap spot to nap spot. I spent a lot of time doing nothing more than staring out the window. I hadn't realized how much I enjoyed having everyone bustling around the house for those first few months of Zoë's life. I had felt so much a part of something. I played a role in Zoë's entertainment.

Sometimes after a feeding, when she was awake and alert and strapped safely into her bouncy seat, Eve and Denny would play Monkey in the Middle. They would throw a ball of socks back and forth across the living room; I got to be the monkey. I leapt after the socks and then scrambled back to catch them. Then I danced like a four-legged clown to catch them again. And when I reached the sock ball and batted it into the air with my snout, Zoë would squeal and laugh; she would shake her legs with such force that the bouncy chair would scoot along the floor. And Eve, Denny, and I would collapse in a pile of laughter.

But then everyone moved on and left me behind.

I sank into the emptiness of my lonely days. I would stare out the window and try to picture what it was like before everyone went away, how much fun we all had together. But it didn't help much. Until one day when a fortunate accident happened that changed my life. Denny turned on the TV in the morning to check the weather report, and he forgot to turn the TV off.

Let me tell you this: The Weather Channel is not about weather; it is about the
world
! It is about how weather affects us all, our entire global economy. Also our health, happiness, and spirit. The channel goes into great detail about weather of all different kinds—hurricanes, tornadoes, hail, rain, lightning storms. Absolutely fascinating. So much so that when Denny returned from work that evening, I was still glued to the television.

“What are you watching?” he asked when he came in, as if I were Eve or Zoë. As if it couldn't have been more natural to see me there or address me like that. But Eve was in the kitchen cooking dinner and Zoë was with her; it was just me. I looked at him and then back to the TV, which was showing the day's major event: flooding due to heavy rainstorms on the East Coast.

“The Weather Channel?” he scoffed, snatching up the remote and changing the channel. “Here.”

He changed it to Speed Channel.

I had watched plenty of TV as I grew up, but only when a person was already watching: Denny and I enjoyed racing and the movie channels. Eve and I watched music videos and Hollywood gossip. Zoë and I watched children's shows. (I tried to teach myself to read by studying
Sesame Street
, but it didn't work.) Suddenly, the idea of watching television by
myself
entered my life! If I had been a cartoon, the lightbulb over my head would have lit up. I barked excitedly when I saw cars racing on the screen. Denny laughed.

“Better, right?”

Yes! Better!
I stretched deeply, joyously, doing my best downward-facing dog and wagging my tail—both gestures of happiness and approval. And Denny got it.

“I didn't know you were a television dog,” he said. “I can leave it on for you during the day, if you want.”

I want! I want!

“But you have to limit yourself,” he said. “I don't want to catch you watching TV all day long. I'm counting on you to be responsible.”

I am responsible!

I had learned a great deal up until that point in my life. But once Denny began leaving the TV on for me, my education really took off. With the boredom gone, time started moving quickly again. The weekends, when we were all together, seemed short and filled with activity. And while Sunday nights were bittersweet, I took great comfort in knowing I had a week of television ahead.

I was so immersed in my education, I suppose I lost count of the weeks. So I was surprised by the arrival of Zoë's second birthday. Suddenly I was engulfed by a party in the apartment with a bunch of little kids. It was loud and crazy, and all the children let me play with them and wrestle on the rug. I even let them dress me up with a hat and a sweat jacket, and Zoë called me her big brother. They got lemon cake all over the floor, and I got to be Eve's helper cleaning it up while Denny opened presents with the kids. She used a Dustbuster and I used my tongue.

After everyone had left and we had all completed our cleaning assignments, Denny had a surprise birthday present for Zoë. He showed her a photograph that she looked at with little interest. But then he showed the same photograph to Eve, and it made Eve cry. And then it made her laugh and she hugged him and looked at the photo again and cried some more. Denny picked up the photograph and showed it to me, and it was a photo of a house Denny had bought.

“Look at this, Enzo,” he said. “This is your new yard. Aren't you excited?”

I guess I was excited. Actually, I was kind of confused. I didn't understand the implications. And then everyone started shoving things into boxes and scrambling around, and the next thing I knew, my bed was somewhere else entirely.

The house was nice. It was a stylish little bungalow like I'd seen on
This Old House
, with two bedrooms and only one bathroom but with plenty of living space. It was situated very close to its neighbors on a hillside in the Central District.

Eve and Denny were in love with the place. They spent almost the entire first night there strolling around in every room except Zoë's. When Denny came home from work, he would first say hello to the girls, then he would take me outside to the yard and throw the ball, which I happily retrieved. And then Zoë got big enough that she would run around and squeal while I pretended to chase her. And Eve would admonish her: “Don't run like that; Enzo will bite you.”

She did that frequently in the early years, doubt me like that. But one time, Denny turned on her quickly and said, “Enzo would never hurt her—ever!” And he was right. I knew I was different from other dogs. I had a certain willpower that was strong enough to overcome my instincts. What Eve said was not out of line. Most dogs cannot help themselves; if they see an animal running, they go after it. But that sort of thing doesn't apply to me.

Still, Eve didn't know that, and I had no way of explaining it to her, so I never played rough with Zoë. I didn't want Eve to start worrying. Because I had already smelled it. When Denny was away and Eve fed me and she leaned down to give me my bowl of food and my nose was near her head, I had detected a bad odor, like rotting wood, mushrooms, decay. Wet, soggy decay. It came from her ears and her sinuses. There was something inside Eve's head that didn't belong.

Given a speaking tongue, I could have told them. I could have alerted them to her condition long before they discovered it with their machines, the computers and supervision scopes that they use to see inside the human head. They may think those machines are sophisticated, but in fact they are clunky and clumsy. My nose—yes, my little black nose that is leathery and cute—could smell the disease in Eve's brain long before even she knew it was there.

But I couldn't talk. So all I could do was watch and feel empty inside; Eve had assigned me to protect Zoë no matter what, but no one had been assigned to protect Eve. And there was nothing I could do to help her.

Chapter Eight

O
ne summer Saturday afternoon, we spent the morning at the beach at Alki swimming and eating fish and chips from Spud's. When we returned to the house, red and tired from the sun, Eve put Zoë down for a nap; Denny and I sat in front of the TV to study.

He put on a tape of a long-distance race he had driven in Portland a few weeks earlier. It was an exciting race, eight hours long, in which Denny and his two co-drivers took turns behind the wheel in two-hour shifts. They came in first after Denny's last-minute heroics, which included recovering from a near spin to overtake two competitors.

Denny started the tape at the beginning of his final stint. The track was wet and the sky heavy with dark clouds that threatened more rain. We watched several laps in silence. Denny drove smoothly and almost alone. His team had fallen behind after making the crucial decision to pull into the pits and switch to rain tires; other racing teams had predicted the rain would pass and so had gained more than two laps on Denny's team. Yet the rain began again, which gave Denny a great advantage.

Denny quickly and easily passed cars from other classes. There were underpowered Miatas that darted through the turns with their excellent balance; big-engine Vipers with their lousy handling. Denny, in his quick and muscular Porsche, slicing through the rain.

“How come you go through the turns so much faster than the other cars?” Eve asked.

I looked up. She stood in the doorway, watching with us. “Most of them aren't running rain tires,” Denny said.

Eve took a seat on the sofa next to Denny. “But some of them are.”

“Yes, some,” he said. We watched. Denny drove up behind a yellow Camaro at the end of the back straight. And though it looked as if he could have taken the other car in turn 12, he held back. Eve noticed.

“Why didn't you pass him?” she asked.

“I know him. He's got too much power and would just pass me back on the straight. I think I take him in the next series of turns.” Yes. At the next turn, Denny was inches from the Camaro's rear bumper. He rode tight through the double turn and then took the inside line for the next turn and he zipped right by.

“This part of the track is really slick in the rain,” he said. “He has to back way off. By the time he gets his grip back, I'm out of his reach.”

On the back straight again, the Camaro could be seen in Denny's rearview mirror, fading into the background.

“Did he have rain tires?” Eve asked.

“I think so. But his car wasn't set up right.”

“Still. You're driving like the track isn't wet, and everyone else is driving like it is.”

Turn 12 and blasting down the straight, we could see brake lights of the competition flicker ahead; Denny's next victims.

“We are the creators of our own destiny,” Denny said softly.

“What?” Eve asked.

“When I was nineteen,” Denny said after a moment, “at my first driving school down at Sears Point, it was raining and they were trying to teach us how to drive in the rain. After the instructors were finished explaining all their secrets, all the students were totally confused. We had no idea what they were talking about. I looked over at the guy next to me—I remember him, he was from France and he was very fast. He smiled and he said, ‘We are the creators of our own destiny.'”

Eve stuck out her lower lip and squinted at Denny. “And then everything made sense,” she said jokingly.

“That's right,” Denny said seriously.

On the TV, the rain didn't stop; it kept coming. Denny's team had made the right choice; other teams were pulling off into the hot pits to change to rain tires.

“Drivers are afraid of the rain,” Denny told us. “Rain makes your mistakes even worse, and water on the track can make your car handle unpredictably. When something unpredictable happens, you have to react to it; if you're reacting at speed, you're reacting too late. And so you
should
be afraid.”

“I'm afraid just watching it,” Eve said.

“If I intentionally make the car do something, then I can predict what it's going to do. In other words, it's only unpredictable if I'm not . . .
possessing
 . . . it.”

“So you spin the car before the car spins itself?” she asked.

“That's it! If I deliberately do something, then I know it's going to happen before it happens. Then I can react to it before even the car knows it's happening.”

“And you can do that?”

On the TV screen, Denny could be seen dashing past other cars. His rear end suddenly slipped out and his car got sideways. But his hands were already turning to correct, and he was off again, leaving the others behind. Eve sighed in relief, held her hand to her forehead.

“I love you,” she said. “I love all of you, even your racing. And I know on some level that you are completely right about all this. I just don't think I could ever do it myself.”

She went off into the kitchen; Denny and I continued watching the cars on the video as they drove around and around the circuit drenched in darkness.

I will never tire of watching tapes with Denny. He knows so much, and I have learned so much from him. He said nothing more to me; he continued watching his tapes. But my thoughts turned to what he had just taught me. Such a simple concept, yet so true: we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves.

I left Denny at the TV and walked into the kitchen. Eve was preparing dinner, and she looked at me when I entered.

“Bored with the race?” she asked casually.

I wasn't bored. I could have watched the race all that day and all the next. I was creating my own destiny. I lay down near the refrigerator, in a favorite spot of mine, and rested.

I could tell she felt self-conscious with me there. Usually, if Denny was in the house, I spent my time by his side; that I had chosen to be with her now seemed to confuse her. She didn't understand my intentions. But then she got rolling with dinner, and she forgot about me.

First she started some hamburger frying, which smelled good. Then she washed some lettuce and spun it dry. She sliced apples. She added onions and garlic to a pot and then a can of tomatoes. And the kitchen was rich with the smell of food. The smell of it and the heat of the day made me feel quite drowsy, so I must have nodded off. Then I felt her hands on me, stroking my side, then scratching my belly, and I rolled over on my back to acknowledge her; my reward was more of her comforting scratches.

“Sweet dog,” she said to me. “Sweet dog.”

She returned to her preparations, pausing only occasionally to rub my neck with her bare foot as she passed, which wasn't all that much, but meant a lot to me anyway. I reached out to Eve, and she responded—a connection was made. Denny was right: We
are
the creators of our own destiny.