Stay Keeper's Story

Stay Keeper's Story Page 9

The sky darkened and a lightning bolt outlined a jagged streak at the horizon. The hired crowd, feeling heavier raindrops, headed for the cover of the trees.

I sat and looked as I had been instructed: alert, interested. In truth, I was becoming more and more interested as I saw that everyone was dispersing and that they were forgetting The Dog.

The photographer was packing his equipment very hastily into cases. The two actors who were playing the roles of the golfers ran to a car.

"Get away from the trees!" someone yelled. "It's dangerous under the trees!"

Someone else yelled, "It's dangerous out in the open!"

Another crack of thunder, much louder, and a streak of lightning, much closer, sent everyone scattering chaotically. I heard shouts, rain, thunder, and cars starting. But I did not hear anyone say "Come!" in the sort of commanding voice that alerts you to the fact that they are calling a dog.

So I simply walked away. My walk was casual at first, for I expected at any second to hear the familiar "Come!" But after a moment I began to trot. Then, gradually sensing my freedom, I stretched my legs into a liberating lope. In a moment I had traversed the fourteenth fairway, jumped a fence, and found myself completely alone, running with blissful abandon down a country road through a rainstorm.

Stay!: Keeper's Story

I was thoroughly wet and exquisitely happy. My magnificent tail, profuse even when dripping, flowed behind me.

I'm free I'm free I'm free I'm free!

To which there was only one obvious second line:

I'm me I'm me I'm me I'm me!

Poetry had returned.

Stay!: Keeper's Story

Stay!: Keeper's Story

Chapter 10

"CAN I KEEP HIM?"

There. That was what a child was supposed to say when a dog followed him home.

Or her. This child was a girl, actually.

I had found her (she thought she had found me, but the reverse was actually true) after roaming the countryside for two days and nights. At first I had wandered joyfully, feeling myself to be a truly free and untamed creature, sharing my world with deer, raccoons, hawks, and countless other inhabitants of the outdoors.

But after two days I realized I was having difficulty with the food. My first cuisine had been French, as I was weaned from mother's milk to the world of pâtés and terrines and gâteaux. I knew a béchamel sauce from a Hollandaise, and the difference mattered to me. My early poetry had had a Gallic influence; remember " Adieu to Jack..."? Not a mature work, of course, but one that played with bilingualism.

My stay with Jack, though never in the least luxurious, had nonetheless had a certain standard as far as food was concerned. Sorting through discarded garbage after the market had closed, Jack had carefully carved away spoilage from apples and pears with his penknife. He had examined each morsel carefully before slicing it into portions for himself and me. Jack was a fastidious man, though hard times had caused him to be less selective than he might once have been.

It was while sharing discarded pizza remains that Jack had first alerted me to the delights of Italian cuisine.

"This isn't bad, Lucky," he had said (for I was still Lucky then), "but wait till you taste a real good pasta. Maybe a linguini with clam sauce, or a fettucini Alfredo. Then you'll know what Italian cooking's all about."

And so I had, through the photographer, before our life was ruined by fame and fortune. Oh, the puttanesca sauce! The funghi and the carbonara!

Dogs don't weep, but the memory of those sauces, French and Italian both, almost brought tears to my canine eyes during those two days in the woods. I thought of tender asparagus—perhaps a crème d'asperges vertes —when I found myself, ravenous, nibbling at slimy swamp cabbage; and when I shared a rotting rabbit carcass with a roaming possum, I remembered lapin au saupiquet with ineffable sadness.

It was, in fact, while gnawing at rabbit that I remembered watching Scar devour rat remains, and the disgust I had felt at the time. Suddenly I felt with horror that I had been reduced to a creature as primitive as my enemy, and I resolved to turn my life around once again.

Those two days had taught me that I was not cut out for a survivalist existence. The romance of it was false. Carefully I found my way back to a road. I shook myself to rid my fur of the reek of rotting lapin, took a deep breath, and set out at a trot to seek a more amenable life somewhere.

It was not very long before I saw the little girl, who was carrying schoolbooks and just turning into a curving dirt driveway that led to a small brick farmhouse covered with ivy. Obviously well brought up, she spoke softly in greeting and held her hand out politely for me to sniff. Then, gently, she stroked my head and neck. I moved my lovely tail back and forth for her to admire.

She had a similar tail of hair at the back of her head, and she swung hers back and forth in reply. I looked at it carefully, assessing it as a rival tail. But human tails do not compare with those of dogs. Hers was tied rather messily with a band of ribbon, and there was something that looked like a wad of chewing gum near the end. I do have to deal with burrs and other intrusions from time to time, so I understood the problem. Still, it did not appear that she had even tried to gnaw it loose.

When she smiled at me, I saw that her front teeth were missing, which obviously accounted for her failure in adequate grooming. Perhaps she had been in a terrible fight.

Thinking of battles reminded me of Scar, my enemy, and I glanced apprehensively around. But I was far from the city now. Scar was in my past, both geographically and chronologically. Alas, I thought sadly, so was Wispy.

The little girl invited me to walk beside her, and I stayed obediently at her heels as she continued the length of the driveway and opened the back door of the house. By her side I entered the kitchen.

"He followed me home," she told her mother.

"Really?" her mother replied skeptically, and looked down at me. I sat very still, using my best posture: cocked head, arched neck, attentive look. I flicked my tail to the side, hoping it was in a flowing, silky state. I tried to arrange it into a question-mark shape, but as you know, we dogs do not have as much control as we would like over our tails.

"Can I keep him?"

Her mother chuckled. "I'm sure he belongs to someone."

"He doesn't have a collar."

"Well, he must have lost it. We'll have to try to find his owner. Actually," she said, leaning down to look at me more closely, "he looks familiar." She patted my head and peered into my face. I liked her pat and her smell—she was without perfume but had a little cake batter on her fingers—but I feared her perceptions. I knew why she found me familiar. She had seen me sneering on magazine covers, billboards, and TV commercials. It would only be a matter of time before she remembered that.

I arranged my lips in something of a smile, wanting no hint of the famous expression to betray my identity. Fragments of a desperate little poem began in my mind.

Smile, lips! Hide, sneer!

I was running through the possible rhymes (there were some spectacular ones— souvenir, pioneer, chandelier— but in truth I thought using fear would reflect my feelings more accurately) but had not yet completed the couplet to my poetic satisfaction when my creativity was interrupted by the placement of a glass bowl near my feet. Then, beside it, a second. One was a bowl of water, and the other appeared, to my amazement, to be boeuf bourguignon. I touched my tongue to it in rapture.

"Leftover stew," the girls mother explained to me in a soft voice. Turning to the girl, she said, laughing, "Hope he likes mushrooms, Emily!"

Ah, if she only knew my history. Champignons! They had been among my first and favorite solid foods. My brothers had disdained the delicate little morsels, but Wispy and I had tasted them with delight, and Mother had been pleased at our discernment.

Daintily I nudged the mushrooms out of the stew with my tongue and nibbled them one by one with appreciation. Then I consumed the remaining beef and gravy, even eating the carrots—not my favorite vegetables—with enthusiasm. I followed lunch with a long drink of water from the companion bowl. Surely a good boeuf bourguignon is second only to a fine spaghetti bolognese; at least, that is my opinion.

I tried to remember the polite way to inquire about the location of the facilities. Living in the woods, it had not been a matter of importance. Living with the photographer, I had been taken outdoors, to curbside, twice a day. And in my days with Jack, we had each morning shared companionably the amenities of the river and its banks.

I walked with dignity to the door and stood beside it with a questioning look. Avoid the sneer, I repeated to myself. At any cost, do not sneer.

"He wants to go out, Emily. Open the door for him." The mother was mixing her cake batter again.

"But what if he runs away?" the little girl asked in a tremulous voice.

I laughed inwardly, but the mother echoed my laughter aloud. "Why on earth would he run away, Emily, when he has just been fed a bowl of beef stew?" Ah, a woman who understood me completely. My heart leapt.

Emily let me out and I investigated the bushes with their various smells. No dogs lived here. That was good. I wasn't ready for a territorial battle.

However, I perceived that there were cats. I sniffed Cat—that distinctive, oily, pungent odor, quite disagreeable to a dog—everywhere. That could be a bore, dealing with cats. But I decided on the basis of the stew, the child, the kind voice of the woman, and the fact that I was exhausted after two days and nights of wilderness adventure that I could compromise on the cat issue. Carefully I lifted my leg against the thick leaves of an evergreen Raphiolepsis, relieved myself, and marked this place as mine.

Then I went back and scratched politely on the door of the house where my new family was waiting.

Stay!: Keeper's Story

Stay!: Keeper's Story

Chapter 11

THERE DIDN'T SEEM TO BE A FATHER. My new family resembled, in that way, a dog's family: the mother, caring attentively for the young, and the father long gone. I did not want to reflect too deeply on the failure of my own beloved mother to stay with her offspring, the way Emily's mother obviously had. It was simply the way of dogs. I had to remember that.

Unlike a dog's family, there was no litter. The little girl, Emily, seemed to be the only child. Charmingly, she showed me around the house, pointing out the most comfortable places. There was a corner in the hall where sunlight from the window warmed the wood floor to just the right temperature. I lay there for a moment, curled in a semicircle, testing the spot, and almost drifted off to sleep, still exhausted from my time in the woods. But Emily urged me up to look around some more.

"See, here's a fireplace!" she said, leading me into the living room. "In the winter we have a fire here, and it smells wonderful. You could—"

She was pointing to the hooked rug in front of the hearth, indicating that I could doze there before the fire. It created a very inviting picture in my mind, something worthy of a calendar: "By the Fireside," or some such domestic title. The image was less sophisticated than my previous calendar work, for which I had mustered a sneer for each month (December had me sneering at Santa's Workshop—imagine), and I found the quiet domestic scene infinitely more appealing.