Extract: Letting Go The Leash

IT WAS THE worst Christmas ever. I had come home from work to find two cars in my front yard and my ‘gift’ from my oldest son, Alex, quietly sizing up my living room furniture.

Up to  this point, Alex had always shown reasonable judgment. Smart, athletic, solid good looks with a trim beard and a heart of gold; in my little family, he is our rock. He is the pragmatist, the peacekeeper of our fragile threesome: his younger brother, Anthony, and me. But this decision had me scratching my head.

How could he think that planting another dog in my life would be something I’d want for Christmas?

And now here I was looking down the barrel at a fifty-some-odd pound rescue who wouldn’t even look me in the eye. Black and white with short, coarse fur, a square head sported a crisp, white, wishbone pattern that shaped his face. A scrawny adolescent pup who looked poised to grow into an exceptionally large dog. His long boney tail stood straight out at an angle. It was not wagging. Like a gangster in a 1920s movie, his poker face gave nothing away as his eyes slowly cased the joint for exits.

I am still trim and fit in a banker’s suit Monday through Friday with a stock of thick white hair; I have been described as a Steve Martin look- a-like. As a single dad, I had spent the last twenty-five years helping two sons grow to adulthood which will forever stand out as my biggest challenge and greatest pleasure in life. And don’t get me wrong, I love animals. Over the course of thirty years, we’ve owned dogs, cats, lizards, a few fish, a gerbil, several hamsters, and a king snake named Clyde. Most all of them are buried in my backyard, and if some future builder decides to dig up the yard, they will find so many pet bones they’ll probably call it in. But at age sixty, I’d been looking forward to beefing up my nest egg, paying off debt, shedding responsibilities, and traveling to exotic places — not being a caretaker for another dog, human, or pet snake for that matter. The next twenty years were supposed to be all about me.

Anthony, younger by a year, with a stout chin and bright almond- shaped eyes, leaned over and chimed in, “Why’d you get dad a dog, Alex?” Our truth-teller, Anthony follows distant drums with a confident swagger; he may meet you in a sharp suit one day and resemble a street urchin the next. With a natural inclination to smile, he, too, was blessed with his mother’s good looks. His jet brown wavy hair like a curtain over his eyes as he stared at the mongrel, a smirk on his lips. “He looks funny. Did you find him on the road?”

The boys were quiet again, obviously waiting for my reaction, which was to promptly walk into the kitchen and fix myself a drink. One shot of vodka might help me sort this out. The dog followed me and eyed the back door. I opened it and he loped out, thankfully. I pondered the fact that he might break my flimsy backyard vinyl fence and escape. The thought gave me a grim smile. How was I going to get rid of this dog?

Then it hit me. This mongrel had been the first real adult gift from my son — he had thoughtfully planned it out, spent his own money, shopped for the ‘perfect’ dog. To see the disappointment on his face, that look of sorrow and dismay that the result of his best efforts to make me happy on Christmas had failed was not an option. Yeah … I was going to have to keep the dog, oh and yeah, probably buy another damned fence! I fixed another drink (two shots this time). Merry Christmas!

I walked outside and looked for the dog. It was night by then; I

worried that he’d already escaped through to the alley and turned over a few trash cans for good measure. I saw and heard nothing. I had left him out there too long. I started frantically searching for him, I had nothing to call him by, I did not even know his name, or even if he had one. Then I heard something behind me and turned.

It is difficult to describe the look on this dog’s face. I have seen dogs that showed fear, a grimace maybe, some even smile. But this face was unemotional, heartless, detached. I would even say callous. Whatever my feelings were for him, he was letting me know they were mutual. Well, at least we understood each other. Alex walked outside, and then all the hell and fury of a Baskerville hound let loose.

Apparently, one of the neighbor’s cats was out for a nightly stroll and got caught in the crosshairs. We all rushed the fence at the same time as the frantic cat tried to protect whatever number of lives it had left.

For ten solid minutes, our neighbors were alerted that not only did I have a dog, but their peace and feline population were very much in jeopardy. After corralling and guiding him to the door, I tried to push him back into the kitchen. He stopped, tensed up, and gave me a low growl and a look that was clear: There would be no pushing this dog in my future. A piece of bread finally did the trick.

It was time for a conversation.

“Dad, he’s a rescue.” Oh really? I thought he might be a Westminster

Champion. Silly me.

“Son, what were you thinking? Can’t you take him back to the … whatever?”

“No, dad. He has a chip in him now.”

“Well, that’s simple. Just extract the chip. Done.”

Silence and not the good kind pervaded our tense foursome.

The last dog that I was saddled with was his childhood German Shepherd mix named Girl. Such a sweet name for a dog that regularly liked to bite people. After my ex-wife remarried and moved a state away, there was no way she could keep her. Reluctantly, I had stepped in and offered to save the day, which proved to be quite the challenge since I had just recently adopted two dogs — a lab named Ranger and a cattle dog named Lacy. I ended up newly single with two very young boys and three particularly challenging dogs.

Girl broke out of the yard so many times I had to rig up enough electric livestock fence to make my little house in my clean suburban neighborhood  look like a Stalag. Needless to say,  I was no longer concerned about robbers, serial killers, or anyone else that wanted to break in. I was concerned about other things like the fact that Lacy, the cattle dog, had decided to challenge Girl for pack leader and was becoming aggressive.

Feeding time was an everyday choreography of  balancing and rotating three disagreeable dogs in a tense macho fest. I didn’t really have a home as such; I was the operator of a small fight club where I happened to sleep.

I was successful for the better part of a year when things got out of hand. It was on a hot summer day in 2008  that I made the near- fatal mistake of holding the back door open a little too long. Girl and Lacy immediately launched head-to-head in mortal combat. The many months of pent-up frustration resulted in several minutes of fray in the kitchen. Lacy was at the mercy of Girl, who was determined to reduce the

number of the three-pack to a two-pack. Before Girl could get in the final neck-breaking lunge, I dove in between them and somehow managed to shove Lacy into the utility room and close the door. I stayed inside for a few minutes to catch my breath while Lacy licked her wounds, and I checked her over for any major cuts.

My hand really hurt, and I needed to get it dressed. Girl, positioned on the other side of the door, had only one thing on her mind, and that was an opportunity to finish the kill. I squeezed the door open and saw that the kitchen was a bloody mess. I managed to slip out of the closet and get Girl out the back door. I needed to nurse Lacy, still in the utility room; she had lost her right upper canine. I knew because it was dug into my right hand. I wondered if it could be put back in her jaw. Probably not.

That night, when it was Girl’s turn to sleep inside, Lacy and Ranger disappeared from the backyard. For days, weeks, I followed up with every shelter around and put fliers on telephone poles. No luck. To this day, I do not know what happened to them. It was heartbreaking for all of us. That is, all of us except for Girl. She was real ok with it.

Over the years, Girl became close to me and mellowed with age. No longer interested in breaking out of the yard, she became very protective of it and guarded the fence 24/7. I was finally able to dismantle the Stalag, much to the relief of the neighbors, and she stuck by my side like Velcro.

When the boys were with me, we all piled on the couch where Girl was happiest only if she were within arm’s reach of me by a bit of tail or paw. I think that people are complicated and hard to figure — not so with dogs. Being a mixed-breed rescue, Girl had fought her whole life for dominance and acceptance. Now that she had it, she had finally won, was finally ‘home.’ The boys and I were her ultimate prize, won by her in a death match, owned by her by default. We were her family, and she, the sentinel, the defender, the watchdog head honcho.

When Girl got older, I was finally able to take her to dog parks. That would’ve been impossible in her younger fighting years. Never straying more than a few feet away, she would lay erect now sporting a grey face that dared any other dog to cross the line.

In time she became frail. Her ‘shopping’ trips to the local pet stores to buy treats occurred less and less. When she turned fifteen, it became difficult for her to walk. She would collapse on the ground, and where she lay is where I would lay beside her until she recovered. I finally resorted to carrying her sixty-pound frame over my shoulder like a pelt. She lived on a blanket by the fireplace in the den, and often we would take joyrides and trips to the park; never leaving the car, we would watch the passersby like proper senior citizens.

When she started losing her appetite,  I would  grill  her salmon sprinkled with almonds. Her last meals — freshly grilled chicken brought every day from Subway  — her favorite.

On December 14, 2014, right after Anthony’s 21st birthday party, she ‘asked’ me to pick her up one last time. I placed her in my lap. I had been petting her for thirty minutes or so when I realized she was no longer breathing. Girl had died looking out the front door, eyes open, still guarding her little piece of real estate, still protecting its occupants, without waivering.

I continued petting her for a while and finally whispered to her, “Well done,” and called the family.

My ex-wife showed up in twenty minutes, and together we buried Girl in the backyard with the rest of the bones. My epitaph that day on Facebook reads:

“Girl Dog”

??/??/1998 – 12/14/2014

R.I.P.

Today our family said goodbye to an expensive, people- bitin’, trip-stealin’, fence-bustin’ fleabag, and probably the best friend I’ll ever have in my lifetime.

We will miss her every day.

And that was it. I became a dog-less, normal, nine-to-fiver divorcee with  grown  kids, curious to  know  what  life  was like  with  minimal responsibilities and maximum ‘me’ time.

That year my boys were twenty-one and twenty-two, fresh out of school and living nearby. They were entering their respective careers, and I had landed a job at a bank that allowed four weeks of paid vacation a year, and for the next two years, I was on it. Alex and I got deep into remote backpacking. I spent my first vacation with him, hiking over forty miles around Shoshone Lake in West Yellowstone. We may have bitten off too much to chew on that father-son trip; I lost my way back to our camp one night after having to move the cooking operation far from the tent to avoid attracting the grizzly bear whose scat we passed earlier in the day, but then promptly lost my way back in the dense dark. The circle of my flashlight illuminated massive wolf tracks, and fear shot through me; I had to press on, the only other option was screaming Alex’s name, but that would have likely brought me face to face with that grizzly. A harrowing while later, I saw a beam of light from our tent and breathed a sigh of relief. I arrived back at the tent and found Alex feverishly sick from the swarms of mosquito bites, concurrent with almost being trampled by a full-grown moose after he stumbled out of the tent looking for me while I was over yonder preparing stew.

I spent my next vacation with one of my best friends, Bill, on a motorcycle cruising the Natchez Trace, a scenic state park drive that runs over 400 miles from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee, a biker’s dream road trip. At six foot four, Bill was solid as a tree trunk with a striking mustache; he had about him the look of a barber-shop quartet singer, a talented musician that late in life became a quality control nuclear engineer, exactly the wrong way around. We talked ski trips and cruises.

I had learned to fly at eighteen and had skydived a few times by twenty-three. I had motorcycled in the Alps of Germany.

I had plans that included long stays away from home. I absolutely needed that freedom. I had plans for more big adventures. Big plans. Life was good without a dog.

Until now. Until this Christmas where I stood slightly tipsy and still in shock in my bachelor pad living room looking into two faces. One was Alex’s hopeful face; the other belonged to a mongrel who was not about to return me the favor.

HE WAS SKINNY and lanky and if stretched out from nose to tail just shy of six feet long. According to his history, he was one year old, had been adopted only to be returned to a kill shelter where they euthanized close to half their dogs.

They said he was supposed to be a Catahoula. Well, if he is a Catahoula, then I am an Irish Wolfhound. He looked more like a cross between a Saint Bernard and a Black Bear. You’ve heard of a Chocolate Lab? Zeke looked more like a meth lab and probably had a rap sheet to go with him. Who returns a dog to a kill shelter? I figured if I sent in his DNA, I would get back a scroll as long as he was.

The boys left. It was getting late. Still standing in the living room, I asked Zeke, “What am I gonna do with you?” He answered by casually picking up a butane lighter from the coffee table. Then he glared at me with two brown eyes and slowly crushed it with his powerful jaws; it made a startlingly loud hissing sound.

I wondered if his shots were up to date. I also wondered if we were going to make it through the night.

Without any alternative, I put him in my bedroom to keep him away from any ideas he may have after casing the house. He tromped around in the dark and finally laid down with a flump on the floor.

My mind was racing on what tomorrow would be like since my whole life’s agenda had been erased. I finally went to sleep after convincing myself I would figure it out tomorrow. Sometime in the night, I woke up to Zeke on the bed with his front paws on my chest staring at me. I slowly pulled the covers over my face wondering if murder had also been left off of his rap sheet and possibly the real reason he was returned to the shelter.

First thing in the morning, I got on the phone to see if the Invisible Fence people were open this late in December. They were, but they could not send anybody out for a week. I reluctantly agreed on a date and time. Alex came by regularly to help. We tried to walk him, which was like flying a kite in a hurricane but not as much fun. We needed a longer leash.

The next night I had planned a holiday dinner party for twenty or so friends. I shut Zeke up in the utility room off the kitchen, and he provided the music for most of the party. When we let him out, I found out in seconds which of my friends were dog people and which were not because it took him about that long to dog sniff every one of them. I could thin out my guest list now and concentrate on the future of this house.

My house is a two-story bungalow built around 1906. The furniture inside is largely antique, with most of the credit going to my mother, who was a collector. Everything is special to me in that it either has a story behind it or it was a gift from someone. I am a minimalist, so there is not much fluff, but the house is full.

Zeke had already brought me a few gifts in his short stay, like the chess pieces I had wagged all the way from Leipzig, Germany, the

heads now bit off. As well as chunks of fireplace wood he had chewed that were not actually wood but non-replaceable ceramic logs from the ventless fireplace system and pieces left of the remote control that accompanied the pricey Onkyo sound system that was installed during my last renovation.

I rearranged then removed the ‘good’ furniture and put all of Mom’s glassware in the only safe place I knew on short notice — behind my bed next to the wall in my master bedroom.

Each time Zeke got out of the yard and terrorized the neighborhood, we called it a ‘tour,’ and each time he was contained, a ‘recovery.’

Zeke had two ‘tours’ and two ‘recoveries’ his first week before the Invisible Fence people showed up.

We kept two permanent posts up with his mug shot on the humane shelter’s Facebook site:

ZEKE wants everyone to know … He got a Home for The Holidays!!  #Adopted

If anybody has seen this dog, please DM us as he was last seen in the Sylvan Park neighborhood area. Thank you.

When the Invisible Fence folks finally arrived, they estimated the job to be around 1,400 dollars. It would involve running an underground cable around my front and backyard and include two weeks of training with the dog. I got out my credit card, and they started that day. Zeke was the gift that kept on giving. This four-legged behemoth was a round- the-clock, full-time job that had to be taken in shifts. The boys helped out, and that allowed me to do things like run errands, but they were not always able to be there. On one of those days, I had to leave Zeke home alone to make a grocery run. I quickly made two trips from the car with bags and later estimated that those trips took under one minute […]

[END OF EXTRACT]