Stay!: Keeper's Story (4 page)

Chapter 4

I
NEEDED A CHILD.

My mother had taught me that all puppies need children.

Adults are strict with their dogs, insisting that they eat designated food—usually not very tasty—from a particular bowl, often heavy and unattractive. Adults make their dogs sleep in not very cozy places: basements, garages, or wire cages (and they tell their human friends: "He loves his cage," which is not true, not one bit true), or sometimes on a flea-retardant dog bed stuffed with cedar shavings.

Dogs would much rather eat dog-sized portions of human meals; pasta is a particular favorite. They would like it served on a dinner plate placed on the floor near the human table.

Instead of a cage as a refuge, dogs like a nice little cedar house with a pointed roof and a small entrance with the dogs name painted in big letters over it.

Dogs prefer to sleep snuggled right up beside a human, their head on a feather pillow, with ears nicely spread out, and the rest of the body curled on an innerspring mattress covered by percale sheets smelling of human breath and sweat.

Children understand all of that. I wanted a child. But there were none in sight.

Back on the main street, I watched the brisk crowd of humans going about their day. It made no sense to attach myself to the side of a human with a briefcase, though there were many such, both male and female. They entered the doors of large buildings and pushed buttons summoning noisy mechanical cages, into which they disappeared.

Suddenly I spotted one man who did appeal to me. He was dressed in a multi-aromaed collection of clothing, and his beard—for he had a long, uncombed one—smelled of several past meals. He was not hurrying. He seemed, in fact, to have no destination at all. He simply stood beside the wall of a building, talking to himself. His hand was cupped in front of him, and occasionally someone dropped a coin into it. "Money for coffee? Money for coffee?" he was saying to the passersby. "Bless you, bless you," he murmured when a coin was dropped into his hand.

I liked his smells. No soap, no shampoo, no toothpaste, no aftershave. Just coffee and tobacco and dirt: a wonderfully earthy combination, layered over by a whiff of old doughnut and some stale hamburger.

I went and arranged myself unobtrusively by his side. When he reached down and scratched me behind one ear, I knew that he was the next best thing to a child.

"Good boy, good boy," he said to me. He seemed to say everything twice, but I didn't mind. At least he had not called me "Good girl," a lapse I didn't think I would tolerate as cordially as my brothers had.

Tentatively I licked his hand. Aside from the repellent infant, Max, whose hand had been gluey with mashed cookie, this was my first taste of human flesh. The man's hand tasted of many things, some of them edible.

O hand of man! My first to lick!
O dirt! O beer! O licorice stick!

In truth, I was not positive that it was licorice stick I tasted. I think it might have been cough syrup. But I was learning, even at this earliest stage in my literary career, that a poet may take some license, may stray lightly from absolute truth, if the verse seems to demand it.

The man reached into the pocket of the outermost coat that he was wearing (there seemed to be at least two others underneath) and held a morsel of something mysterious under my mouth. I was too hungry to investigate it carefully. I gulped it down and looked longingly at him, wondering if his other pockets held more.

"Sorry boy, sorry boy," he told me. I sighed.

"Feed a hungry puppy? Feed a hungry puppy?" he began to say in his singsong voice. To my surprise, people stopped, looked at me, smiled, and dropped money into his hand. Now and then someone patted my head.

Pasta? I thought. Stew? I remembered all the things Mother had described: the human foods that best suited a dog. Vegetable soup? I wondered where we would go shopping for my meal. My new friend was dropping coins into his pocket, then holding his empty hand out again and repeating his phrase, entreating the passing humans to donate to my welfare.

He shook his jingling pocket and patted my head happily. "Sit," he murmured to me. "Sit."

I decided to do exactly as he said. We were still quite close to the fast-food place from which I had fled so ignominiously, and I felt that I needed a protector in case Scar should come looking for me, since I had, after all, defaced his territory.

In addition, it was clear that the man planned to feed me. I decided to walk politely by his heel when we went to the grocery store. Judging by the number of coins in his pocket now, it wouldn't be long. We had enough money for a substantial amount of grocery shopping.

"What's his name?" a woman asked, searching in her purse for some change.

My new friend looked down at me. I sat with my best posture, tilted my head, and waited to hear his answer. A name is an important thing, and except for little endearments from my mother and sister, I had not had one until now.

"Lucky," he told the woman. "Lucky."

Creativity overwhelmed me, and I began to compose.

Lucky I am, and Lucky I'll be!
O lucky lucky lucky me!

It was not one of my finest poems. But it was the first to incorporate my name, and I had composed it quickly in my surge of tender appreciation that I had a human of my own. I wondered if he had soft sheets on his bed, and perhaps a thick quilt that smelled of spilled leftovers. I felt immensely happy and poetic, and resolved that my next ode would be better than
Lucky I am,
which I knew to be inadequate.

I was to be disappointed, at the end of the day, in most of my expectations. In the evening he led me to his home, and it was barely superior to the one I had left. My last resting place had been under a piece of corrugated cardboard in a dirty alley. This man's home was on a riverbank, below a bridge, under a large piece of flattened tin.

"Here we are, Lucky," he said as he lifted a corner of the tin and indicated that I should enter, with a somewhat courtly gesture of his hand. Then he made a small fire and heated some of the cans of food that he had bought with the coins from his day's collection.

Together we dined.

"My name's Jack," he told me, and I was touched by the introduction, since most humans do not bother with such courtesies toward dogs. Even in my short and unsophisticated life to date, I had observed that there is a brusqueness toward dogs. "Hey, boy!" is often used as a greeting, for example; and food, even the finest French food, is simply tossed on the ground toward its recipient. My mother, a fastidious female, commented on that. "You'd think," she said to me once while cleaning her paws and chin after a visit to Toujours Cuisine, "that they'd serve something as elegant as
saucisson en brioche
on a
plate,
at least."

I didn't, of course, compare my first dinner with Jack to fine cuisine. It was shared stew from a can, with river water to wash it down for me and a beer for Jack, who burped afterward without apology. But there was a sweetness to the camaraderie, and I felt a sense of safety which made up for the lack of elegance. I curled beside him under the tin, and we slept soundly together, covered by an old army overcoat, frayed at the seams, which he tucked around us both.

O lucky lucky lucky me,
I murmured to myself before I fell asleep.

Chapter 5

I
SETTLED IN AND
stayed with Jack, the man who called me Lucky. He was not always as honest as one would like a human to be, and he was not particularly clean, a thing that matters to dogs.

But he was kind. From his collected coins, he always purchased a can of dogfood first. (I preferred, actually, the beef stew intended for humans, but Jack thought that he was doing me a favor by purchasing food designated for dogs. It is a mistake that humans often make.) Then he stocked up on his own favorite treats, California jug wine and a bag of bacon curls. We dined together each evening, under the bridge. He always dipped a plastic bowl of water for me, from the river. could easily have stood at the edge and lapped, but he seemed to like the niceties and the togetherness, so I drank from a bowl as he refreshed himself from the jug.

Sometimes he toasted me. "Here's to you, Lucky!" he would say affectionately, raising his jug toward the sky. Then he would scratch my ears, and I would lick his hand in acknowledgment.

At night I slept curled by his side, the two of us under the sheet of tin that he called home.

"I had a bed once, Lucky," he told me one evening as we arranged ourselves for sleep. "And a house. But things turned bad."

Having never lived in a house myself at that time, I probably did not fully appreciate the downward turn his life had taken. The tin roof over us, the plastic bowl, and the dependable can of food, though not a name brand and certainly nothing like the entrées from Toujours Cuisine, seemed home enough for me.

"Yessir," he said mournfully, "I had a home once. And a family."

I lamented with him the loss of family, having suffered through it myself. So I looked up at him mournfully, encouraging him to talk more.

"Yessir," Jack went on. "Had a wife once, Lucky. But just look what happens. You make a dumb mistake or two. Then it all falls apart."

He pulled the ragged overcoat around his shoulders and shifted on the hard ground, trying to get comfortable. I snuggled closer, to warm him. We dogs do not suffer much from the elements, furred and sturdy as we are. But the weather was turning colder now, and Jack seemed frail and easily chilled.

I wondered what his dumb mistake might have been. It could not have been worse than my own. I was haunted by the fact that, like a coward, I had concealed myself on that fateful day when my own family had disappeared. Every day I remembered and mourned my small sister, Wispy. I could still see the look in her brown eyes as she peered down uncomprehending from the arms of the man who had said he would arrange for her to be put to sleep.

I hoped her sleep, wherever it was, was comfortable and that she had someone who cared for her with the same tender concern I felt from the man who called me Lucky.

My own sleep was often interrupted. The place that Jack had chosen for a home, though scenic, with the river nearby, and convenient to the busy streets where he made his uncertain living, was not at all safe.

Among the persistent and irritating dangers were the rats. I knew about rats from the alley that had been my first home. They had been a constant source of concern for Mother when we were small, for the rats that had frequented the alley were actually larger than new puppies and might even have viewed us as food. Mother always growled and lunged ferociously into the dark corners before she settled us for sleep. Sometimes we would see one flee, its thin naked tail scuttling away in response to Mothers threat.

Once when Mother was away, I had actually rescued Wispy from a confrontation with a rat. The creature had advanced with stealth and taken my sister by surprise, cornering her. By the time I noticed the event unfolding, Wispy was paralyzed with fear and it appeared that the rat was about to pounce upon her and bite. I was still young, but I simply mimicked my mother, growling as ferociously as I could and lunging toward the yellow-eyed rodent. Fortunately, he was

taken by surprise and fled, for I do not know if I could, at that young age, have beaten him in a fight.

Now, of course, I was much larger. But the waterfront rats were larger, too. Jack laughed at them and shook the tin roof to make a rattling, thunderous noise, which startled them away. But they always waited, there in the distance immediately past the light of our evening fire, which reflected their eyes in the darkness. The empty unwashed cans from our dinners attracted them with the smell of food. Sometimes, while Jack slept, I would hear the clink of the metal containers as rodent life licked and bit at what few rotting morsels were left.

I stayed vigilant, even while sleeping, and the slightest noise startled me awake. Again and again, without his knowledge, I protected Jack as the rats approached in the dark. A menacing growl, I found, kept them at bay. But they were always there, waiting, and nighttime became an ongoing battleground.

Though my growth to adulthood enabled me to protect Jack from the rats, it meant that I was no longer as reliable a source of income for him. My puppy fluff coarsened into thick adult fur which was not as soft to touch, though it was handsome fur in its own right, I felt, much like my mothers. My legs, once stubby, grew long, and rather than stumbling cutely over my large feet, I had grown to fit them and taken on the stance and gait of a mature dog. My repertoire of cute puppy mannerisms, like the small frightened yip and the tiny playful growl, no longer attracted passersby to smile at me and drop quarters into the hat.

But Jack was clever. One morning he carefully straightened the bent earpiece of a pair of sunglasses he found in a trash can. He added a cane to his costume, and when we took our place on the street, he changed his chant. No longer "Food for a hungry puppy," now his appeal was "Feed my guide dog, feed my guide dog," and the coins flew again into the receptacle.

In a way it was not completely dishonest. More and more, as time passed, I did become his guide, even though he could see. He was not well at all. He coughed uncontrollably in the night and seemed to lose his appetite for food. His bacon curls went unconsumed, at least by him; for me, they became an extra helping of dinner, and I believe the grease gave an added sheen to my adult coat.

One cold night as Jack slept, shivering, and I lay beside him, watchful and worried, I heard a new sound out beyond the dark perimeter of our space. My ears came to an upright position and I listened alertly. There was the constant scuttle, hiss, and chatter of the rats. But a new sound had been added. I heard furtive, heavy movements in the dark.

I sniffed cautiously. The abundance of smells—garbage, rats, the heavy pungence of a discarded oil drum, and the ongoing reek of the scummy river water—made it difficult to isolate and identify a new scent. But I lay very still, concentrating, using the full capacity of my ears and nose.

I knew suddenly that it was Scar. Since our initial encounter on the day I left home, almost a year had passed. But I had been imprinted then by an awareness of his power and potential for evil, and had encountered nothing since that had surpassed it.

What was he doing here?

Stealthily I wriggled out from under Jack's clasp, for he was sleeping heavily with his arm over my back and one hand draped across my neck. He didn't wake, though he stirred and coughed.

Then, with my body lowered close to the ground, I inched forward in the dark, away from the cover of the tin sheet that formed our roof. The smell of my enemy became intense in the frosty night air, overpowering the stench of the rats, who seemed to have backed away, retreating to their home in the sewer pipe at the edge of the river. Very slowly I crept forward. I could see him now, his thick ungainly body outlined against the dark sky. I could hear the snap of his jaws as he tore at some edible object. In the frenzy of his eating, he was unaware of me.

So he had not come looking for me; he was not here to settle an old score, but simply because he had found some sort of meal that happened to be on my turf. I had a chance to take him by surprise.

I gathered myself, both courage and muscles, then sprang at Scar, landing on his broad back. Surprised, he dropped his meal and wrestled us both to the ground, his heavy jaws snapping as he tried again and again to grab my throat. He was still larger than I. But I was agile and quick and managed to keep clear of his grip. We fought silently in the night, the only sounds our panting breath and the occasional low growls from both of our throats. I felt blood flow when he bit my back, but I think that I injured him as well, with a quick snap to his ear that left me with bloodied fur in my mouth.

No one won. We both paused at last, exhausted, and he took advantage of the intermission in the battle. While I rested briefly, Scar grabbed the carcass on which he'd been feeding; I could see now that it was the body of a large rat. With the remains dangling from his mouth, Scar turned and loped away without looking back.

I limped back to our lean-to and huddled beside Jack in the dim light of early dawn. I assessed my wounds and licked my stained and spattered fur clean. The sky was pale gray, and it looked as if it might rain. The river surged relentlessly on, carrying with it all manner of filth. I watched the rats emerge nervously from the sewer, eyes aglitter and tails darting. Scar had disappeared, but there was a splotch of gore where he had been feasting on rodent.

The world seemed utterly miserable to me on that grim dawn, and I am not ashamed to say that I whimpered like a puppy in my despair. Gradually Jack woke. He stroked my neck and said "Lucky" in an affectionate tone, and I was glad that he had not seen what I had of the cruelty and foulness that surrounded us in the night.

I nudged Jack awake each morning and urged him up, but as time passed he seemed less eager to be out and about. His
joie de vivre
seemed to have been depleted. I trotted ahead of him, turning back again and again to spur him forward, in the manner of a legitimate guide, encouraging him toward the coffee shop where traditionally we began each day.

His hands shook all the time now, and his coffee spilled frequently. His trousers and outer coat were stained beyond hope or repair.

"You ought take care of that cough," the coffee shop proprietor told him. "Go over to the clinic, they'll give you something for it. Maybe you need a shot of penicillin."

But he paid no attention. And though I could guide him capably to his usual haunts and back to our riverbank home each evening, I did not know where the clinic was or how to get him there.

I could only stay by his side, huddle close to him at night to provide him with warmth, lick his hands free of grime, and protect him from nighttime predators.

"Good boy, good boy," he would murmur to me often, the same words he had used when we met. He scratched behind my ears with his shaking fingers.

One morning—another cold day, windy and damp—he wouldn't get up, no matter how I nudged and whimpered.

"I think I'll sleep in today," he told me.

I wandered down to the river for a drink and then marked a few spots where I smelled interlopers, to remind them that this space was taken. I sat alone in the wind, feeling invigorated by it after the night in our stuffy hovel, and thought about poetry again. In my concern for Jack, I had done no composing for a long time. I began to write a poem in my mind.