Howl (6 page)

Lucas

[Haven Kimmel]

A
FEW YEARS
ago I adopted Bosco from a local rescue organization. Bosco was a frightfully attractive dog; he appeared to be some mixture of a Pit Bull and a Great Dane. So while he was lovely to me, to drug dealers he looked like a big pile of narcotics laced with money. How he was stolen and my search for him is another story, but while I was looking for him physically—walking into neighborhoods even the police wouldn’t enter—I posted his picture and name and tag numbers on the Internet and with the local shelters and vets’ offices, and that’s how I came to get an e-mail about Lucas.

Lucas’s original name was Dewey, which sounds almost exactly like Bosco. And while Bosco weighed 75 pounds at seven months, Dewey weighed fifteen, and looked precisely like nonconsensual intercourse between a Pit Bull and a Chihuahua. So an honest mistake was made on the part of the shelter. (Both dogs were black, Dewey all over and Bosco in a few places.) The shelter sent me a photograph of Dewey standing on a concrete floor with his very large ears poised like satellite dishes, and even though the digital picture was blurry, I could see that a more abject look of terror had never been affected by a mammal. The accompanying note said, in terms barely concealed by euphemism, that the shelter was full and Dewey was going to be put down. He was an owner-surrender, and had come in with a Poodle companion who was also scheduled to meet the Reaper.

At this point it might be interesting to pursue what happened to me internally, but it would certainly not be profitable, as all signs point to mental illness. I am moved to rescue animals the way others are moved to gamble, or collect aluminum foil, or take many wives. I just can’t bear it, the thought of an animal in distress and desperate for intervention when I have the power to intervene; to me all stray animals look like little war orphans. (My mother would point out here, perhaps a tad psychoanalytically, that War Orphan was one of my nicknames as a child, because I was scurvy-skinny and my clothes consistently came out of the dirty-laundry pile. Also the lack of shoes.) The older I get and the more resources I have at my disposal, the worse this becomes. Because what does it cost me after all? Some vet bills, a little extra dog food. I already have to vacuum every seventeen minutes, so what’s the big deal? Sure, my family and neighbors and friends fall down prostrate and plead with me to stop before Animal Control gets wind of my behavior and classifies me a “nuisance,” but I consider all of my loved ones to be slightly anal.

I called the shelter at which Dewey was smoking his last cigarette and accepting his blindfold. The woman who answered the phone said Dewey had three hours to live, and the shelter was four hours away from Durham, North Carolina, where I live. I tried to explain the discrepancy to the lovely receptionist, but she was unable to grasp the mathematics. I asked her if he could possibly be kept overnight, and I would leave the following morning. The question brought about extreme consternation on her part. Finally she said she thought he’d be okay in his makeshift crate.

“Can you tell me anything about him?” I asked, realizing that I’d committed myself to driving over the Blue Ridge Mountains and into a town doubtless populated by former Grand Dragons of the Klan, in order to adopt a dog I knew absolutely nothing about.

“Well, lahk I said in the e-mail, his owner brought him and said I don’t want this dog no more, nor the other one neither. He’s a’skeert, I’ll tell you that.”

“Does he bite? Is he injured, neutered?”

“He done bit Kinny.”

“He bit Kinny. Who would that be?”

She coughed for about 45 seconds, apologized. “Kinny works here. He went to take Dewey out of his cage, and Dewey bit him.”

“What’s his disposition like otherwise? Aside from biting Kenny.”

“Well, he’s a’skeert, and he pees.”

“Is he neutered?”

“No. That’s why he bit Kinny, if you ask me.”

Our conversation went around and around like this for a long time, and finally I was assured that Dewey could live one more night (under conditions I couldn’t have actually imagined), and then I had to explain to everyone I knew that I wouldn’t be home the next day because I was driving all the way across the state and over the mountains to rescue a dog I’d never seen and knew nothing about. And why was I doing this? In Bosco’s name. Bosco, who was by that time long, long gone.

The drive was lovely, but the location of the shelter seemed to adhere strictly to Zeno’s Paradox. No matter how close I got, I was still only halfway there. I followed the map carefully, but still had to stop at a “country store” and ask directions. Country stores are ubiquitous in western North Carolina, and are so called for reasons that escape me, as they generally only carry Sno-balls, cigarettes, and malt liquor. There was a time when “country” meant red-eye gravy and excellent jerky, but now it seems to apply exclusively to NASCAR, by which I mean “country” is a $700 gazillion affair. The woman behind the counter, who was smoking a cigarette and mourning the death of Dale Earnhardt (whom, when my daughter told me he was dead, I assumed to be one of her classmates), explained that the shelter was at the “foot” of the mountain. In Indiana, the land from which I hail, we keep our feet in precisely one place. I tried to explain this, then realized I was
on
the foot of the mountain, and had passed the shelter fourteen times. I passed it because it looked like a cinder-block house next to a double-wide trailer.

I pulled up in front of the cinder-block house and went inside, where I was stunned to discover upwards of six or seven women all wearing Carhartt bibbed overalls, the sort I wear on exactly one occasion, which is when I visit my sister’s farm and must deal with her horses. (Dealing with my sister’s horses inevitably involves prodigious mud and a temperature of four. This past winter, while visiting home, I listened to the weather report on the radio as I was getting ready to leave for Melinda’s house, and when the announcer said the temperature was four, I called my mom and asked could it possibly be true. She said, “I know it sounds less like a temperature than the age of a toddler, but alas.”) Wearing Carhartts as a matter of course is a fashion statement not widely understood outside the American South, but I quite respect it. These were women not likely to be afraid of dogs, and who were clearly fine milk-producers for their young. There were hips and upper arms on those women not seen since before the First World War.

I approached the desk and said I was the person who had just driven for many days to rescue the stranger, Dewey. I ended up dealing with the same woman I’d spoken to on the phone, who picked up the phone and called Kenny, the shelter-hand. He was apparently in the double-wide, where the dogs were kept, as opposed to the cinder-block, where the vets were.

“Kinny. That woman is here to pick up the Poodle–Shit Soo mix.”

I shook my head dramatically; no no no, I am not that woman. Anyone looking at me would know I’m not even remotely that woman. “I’m here for Dewey,” I said, pointing to his little picture, which I’d carried with me like a War Orphan looking for her parents.

“Aw wait. She’s here for Dewey.” She paused. “Okay, I’ll tell her.” She hung up the phone and I knew in my bones that he’d been gassed and was on a big corpse pile behind the cinderblock. “Kinny’s a’skeert of that dawg and don’t want to get him out of his cage. He says ever time he gits near him, that dawg tries to bite him. Kinny’s a’skeert.”

“So I hear. Do you want me to go get him?”

“I’ll go get him,” one of the younger Carhartts whispered. Her voice was so quiet I feared she’d been the victim of a rogue tracheotomy. Her hair was long and wavy, her breasts were large, and her cheeks were flushed with high color. She was a child formed by a rapid influx of estrogen, and I didn’t dare look at her too closely or too long, for fear I’d make her pregnant. She moved slowly through the clinic, slowly down the steps, and across the drive to the double-wide. A few minutes later she came in carrying Dewey.

I’ve seen some dogs in my life. I grew up in a town where dogs weren’t restrained, and in fact could run for public office. I saw a rabid dog shot in the street, just like in
To Kill a Mockingbird.
(To be honest, the town marshal shot his own hat off and the dog fell down, scared to death.) I’ve seen dogs limping around barnlots with only a couple of usable limbs, and dogs dying of disease, and dogs hit by cars. But I’ve never seen anything quite like Dewey. His bat ears were lying flat against his head; his whole body was tensed; and he was screaming as if caught in a trap. He was bleeding from both eyes, and the blood had covered the white patch on his chest. The parts of him not sticky with blood were slick with urine and diarrhea. The girl who’d gotten him out of his cage carried him into an examination room and put him on a table, where he stood trembling so hard I thought he might be seizing. She stood close to the table and let him lean up against her.

And then into the room lumbered Kenny, who was roughly the size of a mature walnut tree, bearded, and built like a military vehicle.

“That dawg bit me good,” he said, in a voice that caused the floor to shake. “But he’s not bad in his heart.”

I turned and looked at him and my eyes filled with tears. I wasn’t sure what I was crying about, but the whole situation was so wretched I suddenly couldn’t help myself.

“How’d he get this way?” I asked, still not daring to approach the screaming dog.

“His owner got mad at him and that Poodle, kicked them in their heads. This one’s been bleeding from his eyes all night.”

Anyone who has worked with stray dogs knows that you have to read a myriad of signs before adopting or fostering, and not just the obvious things like how well they do with other dogs and children. What you look for first of all, and most importantly, is
sanity,
simple as that. What I was seeing was the most traumatized dog I’d ever met. Dogs go crazy from lots of things. Pit Bull Terriers, a breed that loves people more, maybe, than any other, can be broken from exile in a backyard, just from the lack of human contact. Abandonment will break the heart of most things, really. This dog had been brought to a ghastly place, separated from the companion dog with whom he’d lived his whole life, been forced to listen to the frantic and desperate barking of all the other dogs who were about to be euthanized. And just as a bonus, his owner had beaten him within an inch of his life before surrendering him.

“The guy who owned him,” Kenny continued, “went all the way through school with me, I’ve known him my whole life. But I’ll never be able to look him in the eye again.”

I approached the table and Dewey wailed even louder, pressing his body as hard against the Milk Maiden as he dared. There was so much blood on his head I couldn’t tell if he was still bleeding, if his skull was fractured, if those enormous ears were actually attached. I put my hand on his back just as the vet walked in, and at the sound of the door shutting he jumped straight up in the air, nearly falling off the table, which caused me to jump, and Kenny to scream like a nine-year-old girl.

The vet, Dr. Morris I’ll call her, was entirely calm and composed and caused all of us to regain our sensibilities, even Kenny, who was trailing a string of gauze wrapped around his left hand and who seemed a tad undone.

“His head seems okay,” Dr. Morris said, feeling around the dog’s eye sockets and looking in Dewey’s ears, even as his screams broke up into yips and hiccups and he shook until his feet were dancing on the metal table. “He’ll be able to see fine once this blood clears up, and he has a broken rib or two, but that will heal. His legs aren’t broken; I don’t think he has internal injuries, but you’ll need to keep an eye on him.” It was consistently difficult to tell if Dewey was going to bite someone. Half the time he seemed right on the verge of snapping, and the other half he seemed about to go into cardiac arrest. “He needs to be neutered, and I’ll give him his vaccinations before you leave today.”