Dancing Dogs (14 page)

How could a strange-looking little pug with bulging black eyes and a grumpy disposition be anyone’s angel?

But he believed it. Gus was watching over him.

Harry called the vet back. “I think we should put Gus down,” he said. “I just don’t have that kind of money. Can we make an appointment for Friday? That will give me some time with him.”

The vet agreed and explained the euthanasia procedure—two shots, one to make him sleepy, one to stop his heart. He would feel no pain.

Harry felt a stab in his heart at the thought of Gus’s eyes closing for the last time.

For just a moment, he felt a flash of rage. This was how it ended up? Unable to pay for a sick dog?

Harry sat with Gus on the patio. He didn’t bark at passing dogs or cars. He didn’t jump up and down. He didn’t boss Harry around like he usually did.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Harry got up early and made some oatmeal for Gus. He was happily surprised when Gus ate most of it. Maybe it was the splash of maple syrup—Gus was crazy about maple syrup. He heard a noise outside and woofed, and Harry wanted to cheer.

“You’re a fighter, aren’t you Gus?” he said.

He walked out onto the patio by himself. Gus followed slowly to the sliding glass door and looked out at him, wanting to come out.

Harry looked back at the dog, staring out at him. “I can’t do it. I just can’t. You’re everything to me.”

He went out to pick up the paper from the front lawn and brought it in. Then he took a pencil out of the desk where Sally had done the bills. Maybe that was the way life was. You were never really done fighting. Sometimes for your country. Sometimes for your family. Sometimes for yourself. Sometimes for your dog.

He called up the local paper. He said he wanted to place a classified ad, and he wanted it in the print as well as the online edition.

He gave the address of his trailer park.

Friday morning, he put Gus on the bed and closed the door and turned on the air conditioner. Normally, Gus
would have raised the dead at strangers coming up to the trailer, but this morning he barely moved.

About a dozen cars pulled in just before ten. Harry sold the boat and engine for $3,000. The flat-screen HDTV went for $800, and the patio set for $500.

He also sold an old rifle his granddaddy had given him, some of Sally’s necklaces, a few books, an old boom box, a dozen Hummel figurines that Sally had collected, and a box of her Tupperware.

The sale was over in less than an hour. Harry collected the checks and drove over to the bank and deposited them. He called the vet to say he and Gus wouldn’t be coming in that afternoon, then went to the hardware store and got a For Sale sign and put it up in his Dodge. He could make do with a smaller car. He didn’t need that much space if it was just him and Gus.

Harry called the specialist in Fort Lauderdale to make an appointment.

On the morning of the surgery, Harry got up at four
A.M.
and drove with Gus to the clinic. It was a big, fancy place with lots of glass and high-class furniture.

The procedure was more complex than expected. The bill was nearly $7,000. He knew full payment was due after surgery. The sign said so.

Harry found a pay phone in the reception area. He called his son, who said, “I thought we’d agreed you wouldn’t do this.” But in the end, he agreed to put $500 on his credit card.

“Thank you, son.” Harry gave him the number for the front desk so he could give the receptionist his information and hung up.

He called his brother back in Ohio, of whom he’d never
asked anything in his life, and his brother put $1,000 of the surgery on his credit card too.

Then he called one of his neighbors and told him he could have that fishing rod he always wanted, but it would cost him $350. He put that amount on his credit card.

Harry could see the receptionist was getting irritated as her phone kept lighting up. She mumbled something about feeling like a Walmart cashier, but Harry didn’t care.

Finally, the receptionist said he had enough.

Harry nodded.
Wow
, he thought.
That was tougher than ’Nam
.

I
T WAS SUMMER
, and Harry spent most of his days indoors. The humidity was unbearable. Six months had passed since Harry had taken Gus to Fort Lauderdale. There were, in fact, two operations, and a later minor one. They had cost $9,000, all told. Harry had ended up selling the minivan for $11,000, so he had some left over for the after-surgery treatments and medications.

The operations were successful and Gus was himself again. Harry was leading a different life. He’d kept his trailer, but had given up his land line and now used a cell phone. The man who bought his big-screen TV heard about Gus and came back and sold the TV back to Harry on a monthly payment plan. Harry learned how to cook, to prowl around farmer’s markets, collect coupons from the papers and at the market. Gus got fewer treats, and so did Harry.

Harry’s arthritis acted up from time to time, and his walks with Gus were shorter and a little less frequent. But they both loved the big-screen TV.

In the afternoons, Harry would close the blinds and sit
down in the soft chair and talk to Sally, and tell her of the day that he and Gus had had.

Late one afternoon, when the brutal sun was losing some of its sting, Gus started barking. He was impatient, sitting by the door.

“Okay, okay,” Harry said. He got up, put his big straw hat on, and opened the patio door. A blast of heat hit both of them dead on, but it didn’t seem to bother Gus any. He raced out the back door, down to the dock, and into the boat.

Harry ambled along, pausing to get a Diet Coke and some crackers and biscuits. The new boat was a plastic dingy with a tiny Evinrude engine. It almost looked like one of those amusement-park boats that little kids rode around in.

Harry adjusted his straw hat and guided the little boat out to the middle of the lake. He looked at Gus’s round belly. The surgical wounds had healed beautifully.

When he got to the center of the lake, he turned off the engine and sat back as the boat drifted. Gus barked at a pelican flying overhead.

“It’s not your world only,” said Harry. “Birds have a right to be here too.”

Harry took out half of his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Gus focused on it, coming right up and sitting next to him with pleading eyes. Harry started eating it, but put a chunk of the other half on the floor of the boat. After a few minutes, both of them were licking peanut butter off the roofs of their mouths, making clicking sounds that drifted across the water. Harry threw a crumb over the side, and watched as a fish surfaced and grabbed it.

Gus looked up at Harry and wagged his tail. Then he barked at something on the shore. Harry smiled. It was the first time he’d smiled in months. Then he laughed out loud.

“Gus, you really are an angel,” said Harry.

The wind died down, and the sun darted behind a cloud. The lake stilled. Harry felt himself dozing, slipping into a dream, as if finally beginning to let go of some of the pain and fear of the last couple of years. He felt as if he were walking through a field, shrouded in mist, and that Gus was looking up at him, the dog’s eyes focused on his, his leash dangling on the ground. All his life he had summoned up his courage, done the right thing, kept his feelings and fears to himself, met his responsibilities. And now, it was as if all of those struggles were rolled into one, and he could see it, admit how hard it had sometimes been. Then he thought of his angel, and some of this was eased.

It’s okay
, Gus was saying.
It’s okay, Harry, you can let go. You don’t have to fight anymore. I have brought you this far. I’ll take you the rest of the way
.

K
ARA WENT TO THE
H
ARRINGTONS
’
HOUSE TWICE A WEEK TO
clean, dust, vacuum, take out the garbage, and brush the two imperious poodles who lived there.

Mrs. Harrington said it made her nervous to have people cleaning when she was home. But since she seldom left the house, there was little that Kara could do about the situation. Mrs. Harrington didn’t like Kara making noise, moving things around, or interrupting her. If Kara had questions for her, she was supposed to leave them in writing on the kitchen table. Mrs. Harrington was especially prickly before her thrice-weekly card games. But Kara was paid well—$30 an hour—worth the hour each way she had to travel to the roomy old Victorian that was the Harrington home.

It was more than she got at Walmart, or at the 7-Eleven, or Target, or on the night shift at the factory in Argyle where she stuffed catheters into boxes and brought them to the shipping bay. It was more than the $10.50 she got at the supermarket,
or the $12 she got driving part-time for the post office. And it was more than the $2.15, plus tips, she got waitressing at the diner on Route 40. The deal was the owner would make up the difference if the tips came to less than the minimum wage. This, she said, was the best joke since Brad told Jennifer they would spend their whole lives together.

Kara was a slight, wiry woman with brown hair cut short to keep it out of the way. Her husband, Greg, thought she worked obsessively, but then Greg had been out of work since the Clinton impeachment. At least he walked her three Welsh corgis every afternoon while she was out working, even though he and the dogs weren’t crazy about one another.

Good jobs were not easy to find, especially for a small-town, upstate–New York girl with no college education, so even though Mrs. Harrington sometimes looked at Kara as though she were dog poop scraped off a shoe, it was regular work and she needed it.

One afternoon, Kara found that she was out of vacuum-cleaner bags. Unable to do her work, she momentarily forgot Mrs. Harrington’s edicts, and walked to the doorway of the parlor, where Mrs. Harrington and her lady friends were finishing their delicate finger sandwiches before settling down to some bridge. Kara cleared her throat. Mrs. Harrington looked up, startled at the sound. The other three ladies hushed and clinked their spoons against their teacups, almost in unison. Mrs. Harrington’s awful old cat, Martha, glowered at Kara and hopped up onto the sofa.

“Mrs. Harrington,” she said. “Sorry to disturb you—”

Mrs. Harrington looked annoyed. She stood up. She didn’t come over to talk to Kara privately or ask her what she
wanted. Instead, she simply hissed across the room: “Kara, I’ve asked you not to disturb us during lunch. This better be an emergency.”

Kara flushed. “There are no bags for the vacuum,” she said, perhaps a bit more sharply than she intended.

Mrs. Harrington stiffened. “There’s nothing I can do about that now, Kara. We’re having lunch, as you perhaps can see. We’ll deal with it later.” And then she sat down. Kara was clearly dismissed.

She felt humiliated, standing there. She felt like a maid.

“Then I quit,” Kara said. “If you can’t deal with me cleaning your house, then I guess I can’t either. I’ll leave you to your lunch. I’ll finish up, and then I’ll be gone.” And she turned, relishing the wide-eyed, open-mouthed stares of Mrs. Harrington’s friends, and walked out.

Mrs. Harrington usually left her $60 in crisp new twenties. Kara took $40 and left $20. A tip, she thought, as she walked out the back door and drove her little Honda home to Greg and the three dogs—Ned, Sasha, and Candi—with their funny wide ears, docked tails, and low-to-the-ground waddles. Kara called them the Dancing Dogs—whenever she came home, all three rushed out to see her, squirming and barking and licking her fingers and legs.

When Greg came out to meet her, she smiled at him. Married nine years, and she loved him as much now as she had the day of the wedding. And the sex was still just as good.

He was holding a can of Bud, wearing his sleeveless sweatshirt and jeans, his feet were bare. The sedentary life was beginning to show in his belly now, which was starting to protrude.

“Hey,” he said. “I found a candy wrapper on the floor of
the car yesterday. Didn’t I ask you not to leave candy wrappers around?”

Kara looked up at the sky, as if imploring God to intervene. “Jeez,” she said, “you get into the car with greasy hands and tools and leave stains all over the place, and you get on me about a candy wrapper?”

He shrugged. They had some version of this conversation at least two or three times a month, and they would probably have it until they died.

Since he’d gotten laid off from his factory job a little over a decade earlier, he hadn’t pursued work too vigorously beyond the occasional glance at the classifieds, after which he uttered his ritual sigh and exclaimed, “Jeez, it’s bad out there.” Greg had been saying it was bad out there since long before the Great Recession, so for him, things really hadn’t changed that much. What was the point of adding to those long lines? he asked.

He had a series of projects around the house—painting, woodwork, door trims—and around February, he always began serious preparations for deer-hunting season, which commenced in November. There was a lot to do, he often told Kara. Cleaning and oiling the guns, taking safety courses, practicing his tracking of the deer, scouting locations with his buddies, studying deer tracks in the mud and snow, and getting his license. And, of course, waiting for some perfect job to come along.

Maybe, Kara thought, a good job really will come along and hit you on the ass one day. But it had never happened to her. Somehow, Greg seemed to have quit on life, and that was harder for her to deal with than the loss of income.

She had also hoped for kids, but for medical reasons, that wasn’t going to happen. And she blamed herself for that,
and sometimes wondered if Greg didn’t blame her too. But she did have her babies—they just had four legs instead of two. And they didn’t whine or complain, think she was stupid, talk on their cell phones, or worse, plan to move out one day and get homes of their own.