Stay Keeper's Story

Stay Keeper's Story Page 6

So "Get lost" came as a surprise. In addition, since I already felt myself to be somewhat lost, I did not see how I could possibly "get" more so. I stared at the boy curiously. In addition to the very large shoes and the hat that looked like an unsuccessful cupcake, he was wearing enormously baggy trousers and a bright-colored shirt with writing on it.

"Beat it!" he whispered to me, appearing more frustrated than ill-tempered. "You're ruining my shot!"

Shot? He had no gun. He didn't even look like someone who wanted to have a gun. He was a boy. A kid.

I hesitated, looking around to see what was going on.

Farther down the street I saw a number of people grouped around a large camera. A tall woman with a notebook was writing things down as if they were important. A man was adjusting some tall lights with pale umbrellas behind them.

"What's with the dog?" the woman asked, looking up from her notebook. "Whose is he? Is that your dog, Willy?"

"Moi?" A thin man wearing a denim jacket asked. "No way. I'm a cat person."

Whose is he was a phrase that raised my hackles. Why is it that humans feel dogs belong to them? How can that be? Jack never felt that way, or treated me like property. We had chosen each other, Jack and I.

If I were ready to choose another human—and I was not—it would not be this thin man who had already announced his preference for cats, a dubious species at best.

Even as I was thinking about it, the man named Willy jogged toward me, carrying a leather case. "I'm just going to touch up your hair," he said cheerfully, and took a comb from the case. I winced. I didn't want my fur tampered with, and especially not by a man whose clearly professed commitment was to cats.

But he was talking, it appeared, to the boy. He removed the hat, combed and arranged the boy's hair so that it appeared windblown and casual, and then replaced the unattractive hat so that the freshly groomed hair was hidden.

"I can't get the dog to go away," the boy complained to him.

"What about the dog?" the hair person called to the camera people. "I don't want to be the one to drag him away. He looks like a biter to me!"

The dog: a phrase I loathe. A biter indeed. I wished Jack were alive. Jack would tell them where to go. There had been times in our past, Jack's and mine, when people had been apprehensive about "the dog" and Jack had been very firm with them, explaining that the dog had feelings and intelligence, that the dog had more integrity than most humans, and that, most important, the dog had a name and should be addressed accordingly. Sometimes people would drop money into Jack's outstretched hand and hurry away quickly, just to flee the lecture about mans best friend.

"I love the dog," the woman with the notebook called. "Keep the dog. The dog works."

I wasn't entirely certain what she meant by that. Of course I worked. I worked at staying alive, finding food, guarding against rats, and tending Jack when things turned bad.

"I'd like the dog's hair a little more disheveled, Willy," she called. "Think you can do that for me?"

Willy was the man with the comb, the one who had called me a biter. He glanced down at me now, and I raised my lip a little. I murmured a warning. It wasn't a growl, really, but Willy didn't know that.

"I only do humans," Willy announced. "Absolutely no canines. For canines you get a groomer."

I lay down as they argued. By now I wished I had simply moved on and left these humans to their unfathomable tasks. But I was beginning to sense that there could be some rewards in this for me.

"All right, places! Take your places!" The man behind the camera called, after the arguments seemed to die down a bit. "Let's get this done while we still have the light!"

"Andrew, hit that pose again!" he called, and the boy went back to the stance I had seen at first, the grinning, self-confident pose that had attracted me from across the street.

I stood back up, alert now. My ears went taut. My tail was a fringed banner behind me. Beside the boy I stand! I pose!

Erect, my ears! Shine, my nose!

"Great!" the photographer called. "Good dog! Stay!"

So I stayed. It was a new beginning for me.

Stay!: Keeper's Story

Stay!: Keeper's Story

Chapter 7

WHEN THEY FINALLY FINISHED taking photographs, everyone seemed to disperse quickly. Willy, the man with the comb, snapped his makeup case closed and got into a waiting car. The woman with the notebook snapped it shut and got into the car with Willy.

Several other, minor people hailed passing cabs and disappeared into the traffic.

The boy, the one I had thought so briefly would become the child I had wanted, snapped his smile off as soon as the camera closed down. His face became a frown, and he walked briskly off to a car with two adults who seemed to be his attendants. He never looked back at me. So much for my "boy and his dog" fantasy.

I had been told "Stay" and so I stayed, partly out of curiosity and partly because I did not know what else to do.

Then only the photographer was left. It had taken him a while to fold his complicated lights, replace his equipment in cases, and load everything into a Jeep that was parked nearby. I was impressed by his meticulousness.

Finally he looked around to see if he had forgotten anything. He picked up an empty film canister and tossed it into a trash can. Then his eyes fell on me.

I was still in my "stay" position: alert, waiting, head high.

The photographer smiled. He came over, squatted beside me, and scratched behind my ear, completely bypassing the uncomfortable head pats that dogs ordinarily have to endure on short acquaintance. Clearly he was a man accustomed to dogs. My heart beat faster.

"What's up, pal?" he asked. I noted the name change. So I was Lucky no longer. It required a quick adjustment in my thinking.

Lucky I was, now I'll be Pal!

I was still pondering the second line (possibly something referring to morale, I thought) when he rose, stretched, grinned, and said the word that I most longed to hear.

"Come," the photographer said.

I followed him eagerly to the Jeep and hopped onto the back seat when he opened the door. I sat politely, avoiding making pawmarks on the seat, and tried not to lean too close to the window, though I was wild with curiosity and excitement. I had never been in a vehicle before. But there is some primal inborn awareness in dogs, and I knew instinctively that it would not serve my future well if today I got drool and dog breath on the windows.

Stay!: Keeper's Story

If he learned to love me now, I could slobber all over soon. The combination of timing, self-restraint, and discretion is the art that separates the successful dog from those foolish canines who find themselves at the ends of leashes and on the floor of school gyms having obedience lessons.

Watching carefully through the windows of the Jeep, I could see that we were making our way through the same streets that I had walked with Jack. I saw the same corner, in fact, where I had met Jack while fleeing the scar-faced dog who had beaten me out for the McDonalds breakfast and become my mortal enemy. I felt as if there should be some memorial there, a marker for Jack, whose life had been lived on that corner; but it was simply an unacknowledged place with a trash can, a mailbox, and a lamppost: nothing physical to mark a spot where the groundstone of a relationship had been laid.

As we slowed for a light, I saw suddenly the carved wooden door, with the menu attached to its window, that was the familiar entrance to Toujours Cuisine. I realized that we were passing the alley where I had been born. Eagerly I rose to the full length of my legs, unsteady on the slick surface of the car seat. I leaned toward the window, forgetting the dangers of spit on the pane, and found myself whimpering.

Stay!: Keeper's Story

The photographer slowed the Jeep and turned to me with a concerned look. "You okay?" he asked. "Not carsick?"

I gave him what I thought was an imploring look. If only, the look said, if only we could stop for a moment? Please? And perhaps I might find my beloved mother still on these familiar sidewalks. Or my siblings—well, really only the one, my favorite, my sister, little Wispy?

He smiled at me. His smile was warm, intelligent, and compassionate. But he had not understood my look, or my yearning; when the light changed, he propelled the Jeep ahead. "Almost home, pal," he said consolingly.

So I lay back down on the seat and composed a mournful poem—I believe it could rightly be called an elegy—in my head. For the first time, the rhyme came easily, naturally. For the first time I felt what true poets must feel when the words fall into place. Be brave, my heart; be still, be calm!

Adieu to Jack. To Wisp. To Mom...

My life seemed an unending series of leavetakings. Unaware of my grief and loneliness, the photographer drove around a corner, and behind us the familiar neighborhood slid away with whatever it still contained of my past.

To my surprise (and, I confess, to my chagrin, since I had just composed such a complex ballad of goodbye), we stopped in front of a brownstone building that was no more than two blocks from my old haunts.

"This is it, pal," the photographer said as he began to unload his equipment from the Jeep. "Your new home, if you feel like it. I don't have a leash, and you're free to take off if you want. Or you can come on in and make yourself comfortable. You look hungry. Could you handle some leftover pasta? If you decide to stay, I'll buy some dogfood in the morning."

I might have been tempted to trot off around the corner, back to the old neighborhood. But like Jack, he had announced himself as a leash-free human. There would be no choke collar, no rhinestone-studded lead such as I had seen on a passing Bedlington terrier (the sight had made me avert my eyes in embarrassment). It would just be me—once Lucky, now Pal—unrestrained, with what looked like a warm and pleasant roof over my head.

And pasta. To tell the truth, it was the mention of pasta that did it.

Legs, be steady! Mouth, get ready!

I trotted behind the photographer up the stairs. From hunger and anticipation I simply dismissed the high art of poetry from my mind and turned to primitive rhyming chant instead. I murmured it under my breath up three flights of stairs:

spaghetti spaghetti spaghetti spaghetti.

Quickly and happily I settled into my new digs. There was a bit of a power struggle over sleeping places until finally, grudgingly, I agreed to sleep on a blanket folded in the corner. In return, the photographer agreed to refrain from kibbles and nourish me with pasta whenever possible.

These decisions were reached, of course, without conversation. Life would be easier for dogs if humans could comprehend our speech as we do theirs. Instead, we have to resort to pantomime and subterfuge.

I won't even bother to describe the on-or-off-the-bed struggle we endured before we came to an understanding. The ultimate compromise was this: during the night, he slept on the bed and I slept on the floor. During the day, if he was at home, I slept on the floor. If he was out of the apartment or closed away in his darkroom, as he often was, I curled up on the bed. When he returned, I got down with a great show of languid boredom, leaving pawprints which he pretended not to notice.

We postponed dealing with the issue of the couch.

It was early afternoon on the third day. "Pal?" The photographer spoke gleefully to me as he emerged from the darkroom in his apartment. "You're not gonna believe this!"