Raising Cubby (14 page)

“Would we feed him fattening food and eat him when he got big?” I asked.

“No,” Cubby squealed. “He would be a pet. You don’t eat pets!”

I was encouraged that he understood that concept. He was actually downright indignant that I would suggest eating the dog, even though he had never had a pet of his own. I didn’t want to eat our pet either, but I had to be sure he felt the same way. Pet care and protection must have been innate to his nature, because I was quite sure we’d never had a conversation about pet consumption before.

“What would you do with a dog?” I asked.

To my surprise, Cubby’s answer was immediate. “He would be my friend! He would play with me.” I wasn’t sure if that was really true, but his thoughts were in the right place, so I continued.

What about feeding the pup? Cubby was very adamant. “I’ll feed him and take care of him!” I doubted the truth of that, but Little Bear was gradually getting on board with the idea, and I knew that being a mom, she would do most of the work.

For his sixth birthday, Cubby’s mom resolved to make it happen. I have asthma and I’m allergic to many pets, so we needed a hypoallergenic dog. I wasn’t exactly sure how we would find such a thing, but Little Bear did some research and decided a poodle was the dog to get. I would have gone for a free critter from the local pound, but we found a kennel in Pennsylvania that had some purebreds for sale. “Dogs from a professional breeder are always better,” she assured me, though neither of us had ever bought a dog before.

I knew about poodles because I had had one of my own as a toddler. My feelings about them were mixed. I’d liked mine well enough, but he’d bitten me more than once, and he’d once chewed a hole through my bedroom door. I knew poodles had sharp teeth, and I hoped whatever Little Bear brought back would be nicer than the dog I remembered.

After a two-day, four-state odyssey, Little Bear arrived home in time for Cubby’s birthday. Our newest family member revealed himself to be a nasty cur that growled for no reason at all and bit at the slightest provocation. I would have demanded my money back, but Cubby was instantly delighted. Since he’d never had any experience with pets, he thought the pup was great. He named him Shenzi, after a character in
The Lion King
. Shenzi was white, with thick curly hair, a short straight tail, and a bad temper. He was occasionally friendly, but if you grabbed him too quickly or teased him, he bit hard. God help you if you approached too close with a stick or a vacuum cleaner.

Still, he became part of the family. Shenzi was like a bad-tempered uncle who snarled and spit when he was drunk, and tore up the place every now and then. We figured he was with us to stay, and we made the best of the situation. We kept at a safe distance when
he was eating and learned to avoid the other things that set him off. He began accompanying us on walks and even traveling in the car at times. In fact, with the passage of time, he proved downright companionable, at least now and then. Cubby relished those moments, and we came to love him as one of our own.

One day, as Cubby was watching Shenzi wag his tail, I said, “You had a fine tail too, but we cut it off when you were little.”

Cubby looked at me, unsure as to whether I was serious. He was often skeptical of what I said.

“I did not have a tail!” He usually responded to unappealing news with denial.

I decided to tell him the story. When he was born, I began, he had sported a very fine tail, half the length of his leg, covered in fine blond hair. He wagged it almost immediately. Cute as it was, I knew the tail would be trouble. Some kids have small tails, which they hide in their pants. A tail like his, though, was too big to be hidden. In olden days a great big tail had been a badge of honor, but in modern America kids with long tails ended up exiled to the safety of their parents’ basements. If he appeared at school swishing a tail it would lead to teasing, and I didn’t want that to happen.

So we had it taken off, I told him. It’s a common operation; doctors do it all the time. The only problem was, his tail grew back. We had to take it off three times before it stopped regenerating.

With some kids, you can cut stuff off and it stays off. With other kids, it doesn’t. I was glad it was just a tail and not a third ear. I didn’t want Cubby to end up as a freak, or the subject of some B-grade documentary. When I was growing up, there had been a boy down the street with three eyes, and he’d spent his whole life in his uncle’s attic, sorting old coins and making incredibly detailed drawings of the termites and carpenter ants that lived with him in the rafters. I’ll bet he’s still up there now, I told Cubby.

Cubby looked a little alarmed at that, but I continued my story because every child needs lessons on diversity. I didn’t have a tail,
and neither did Cubby’s mom, I informed him, but his Grandpa Ed did. Tails were like that. Red hair was the same. They skipped generations. Cubby’s grandpa had grown up during the Depression, so his parents didn’t have much money. When his tail had grown back they’d just left it on, and he’d tucked it in his pants leg his whole life.

I explained to Cubby that there were other grown-ups with tails around us even at that moment. They were the people who never wore shorts, even in summer. Having a tail was embarrassing—a sign of poor upbringing. After all, even very poor people could take a sharp knife and trim their newborn babies’ tails. So what kind of parent left a kid to grow up with a tail and get teased and harassed?

Most people never knew Cubby’s grandpa had a tail. But we’d sometime stop by his house at night, and he’d be sitting there in his underwear, and the tail was plain to see. It stuck out just above the waistband of his underwear—thick, leathery, and covered with black tarry spots at the end because of his work as a paving contractor. Even when it was tucked into his pants, the tail would get tarry whenever he walked on fresh blacktop and his boots sank in. And you couldn’t miss the tail when he’d been drinking, because he’d swish it from side to side when he got tipsy. If he got really drunk, he could even break furniture with the thing. Luckily, that didn’t happen too often.

Cubby nodded in quiet agreement. The whole thing made a strange kind of sense. He wondered who else he knew with a tail. He liked the Old Boy, but he was never quite sure what to make of him.

When Cubby was little he would crawl over and try to pick tar off the tail the way you’d pick a scab. I reminded him of that, but he claimed he didn’t remember. Usually the Old Boy didn’t even notice, but sometimes he’d feel something and slap his tail on the floor, shaking the house and rattling the furniture. He seemed to do it unconsciously. He’d be talking and all of a sudden the tail would
smack the floor. At first I thought the tail had a mind of its own, but then I realized it was like a fellow swatting a mosquito on his arm while he was talking to you. Whatever the reason, it scared Cubby, and he learned to snatch his fingers away fast if the Old Boy swished the tail.

The Old Boy never let his tail out in public, but sometimes at home he’d do things like hold the door with his tail, and if he tripped he’d quickly swish the tail to regain his balance. It was useful enough that I never understood why kids teased each other over such a useful appendage. It seemed kind of sad and wasteful that the rest of us had to have our tails cut off. I guess it was just one of the things grown-ups do. They cut the tails off Doberman pinschers too. Stuff like that sounded nutty to me as a kid, and some still doesn’t make sense today.

Unfortunately, our good times with the Old Boy came to a sad end when Cubby was six. Grandpa Ed got sick while he was at his cabin in the Maine woods, miles from anywhere. Something started hurting inside him, he became weak, and he developed a scary 105-degree fever. When his wife finally got him to a hospital, his body was dangerously overheated and his heart was erratic. The doctors discovered he had a burst appendix, and they had to operate right away.

It’s shocking how suddenly something like that can come on. The last time we’d seen him, he’d been in fine fettle, but in the space of only two days, he moved from fishing in his backyard to fighting for his life in intensive care. Alice couldn’t even bring him home, because he was too sick to move. Little Bear raced to visit him in the hospital as we stayed home, waiting for news. The operation might have saved his intestines, but we’ll never know, because his heart stopped for a few fateful minutes. They got the heart going again, but his brain wave was a flat line. He never awoke.

He died a few hours after Little Bear arrived. She didn’t think he even recognized her. His eyes were wide open, but there was
not even a flicker of recognition. “It was like gazing into the eyes of a cow; there was no sign of my father in there,” she told me afterward.

The funeral was a few days later, in Granby. It was the first time someone close to Cubby had died. I don’t know if he fully understood what had happened, but he knew his grandpa wasn’t there anymore, and it made him sad. His mom was even sadder, though we tried our best to comfort her.

With the Old Boy gone, Little Bear did not have any close relatives in the area. Her mom lived in Florida, so we saw her once a year at most. She had divorced the Old Boy when we were teenagers and married a retired Canadian Mountie. They had moved south long before Cubby was born, so he never had the chance to know her the way he did her dad. She came to visit every summer, but she didn’t really play a starring role in the raising of Cubby. And my brother had moved to San Francisco.

It was just Little Bear, me, and my mom and dad.

One Sunday morning as we drove through Amherst, Cubby made an unexpected and disturbing discovery. “Look, Dad, a stone kid!” He was bouncing up and down and pointing. I looked at the object across the road. There was indeed a stone kid standing at the end of a driveway, right there on Red Gate Lane. He was light gray, frozen in position, with a lantern in his outstretched hand.

I slowed down so we could get a good look at him as we passed. Like many kids his age, Cubby was familiar with Transformer toys. He knew superhero action figures could change into rocket cars or even bizarre animals, so the idea that a kid could turn into something else was not totally alien to him. Even so, it was unsettling. How had such a thing happened? To my adult eye, the answer was obvious.

“There must be wizards in that house,” I said. “And I’m sure the kid did something very bad.”

“Yeah,” Cubby said, with a worried edge in his voice. What other explanation could there be? I remember wondering the very same thing myself. When I was his age, I saw the dinosaur skeletons in Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, and heard how they had
once been alive, millions of years in the past. Then they had died and turned into stone. They were scary, because you could see right through them and they looked fierce and unnatural. I had bad dreams about dinosaurs for a long time.

Then I saw stone people, and stone animals guarding the entrances to the museum. I wondered how long it had been since they were alive too. I wondered why they still looked like kids and animals, while the dinosaurs inside were just skeletons. I concluded they must be newer, and possibly friendlier too. I never had bad dreams about stone kids. But I sure did wonder about how they came to be the way they were. It wasn’t until years later, when I read about magic, that I learned the answer.

“I wonder what that kid did to aggravate the wizards? Do you think they will turn him back into a kid or just leave him stone forever?” Cubby looked concerned, but I was quick to reassure him. “We’re in a car, and there are no stone cars in sight. So I’m sure we’re safe as long as we don’t go any closer to the house.”

I could see that the idea of being turned to stone was troubling to Cubby, so I comforted him with a story from my own life. “When I was your age a wizard turned me into a dog for two weeks. I ate a squirrel and it was tasty, but mouse made me gag. Being a dog was kind of fun because I could run really fast and even bite strangers!” Cubby grinned at that, even though the idea of eating raw squirrel was sort of repugnant.

“If I was a dog, I’d bite
you
!” he exclaimed. Cubby was nothing if not spunky. He asked why the wizard had turned me into a dog, and I admitted I’d thrown rocks at his house. Cubby was glad he had not done anything to provoke the wizards on Red Gate Lane.

The idea of Dad as a dog lasted until we got home. Cubby trotted over to his mom and asked, “Did my dad really turn into a dog when he was a kid?” Little Bear was used to Cubby’s strange questions. She knew that our reality sometimes differed from hers.

“I don’t think your dad was ever a dog,” she said slowly.

That was the problem with Little Bear. I would tell Cubby something, and she would contradict me. For some reason, Cubby would believe her. That really bothered me. Cubby had no way to know which of us was right. I told him a nice story about my life as a dog. I filled it with fun tidbits like eating the squirrel, playing outside, and chasing children. My story was well thought through and eminently believable. In contrast, all his mother said was, “Your dad was never a dog,” and he chose her over me. Just like that, my careful creation went up in smoke.