A Dog’s Journey (21 page)

“Sneakers?” she called. She carried me into a bedroom, Duke following us, and there was a young cat lying on the bed. Her eyes widened when she saw me. “Sneakers, this is Max. He’s a Chorkie.”

CJ dropped me on the bed. I figured I knew how to handle cats—you just have to let them know you won’t hurt them as long as they stay in line. I trotted right up to this Sneakers, but before I had a chance to lay a paw on her the cat spat at me and raked me in the face with her tiny sharp claws. They hurt! I scrambled back, too shocked to do anything but yelp, and fell off the bed. Duke lowered his massive head and licked me, his tongue the size of my face.

That was my introduction to these creatures, neither of whom seemed to recognize the significance of my arrival or my importance to CJ.

That night CJ cooked some wonderful things, the smell of meat filling the apartment. Duke followed her around, sticking his head on the counter to see what she was doing. “No, Duke,” CJ said, shoving him away. I was reduced to standing on my hind legs and scrabbling at CJ’s calves for attention. “Okay, Max, you’re a good dog,” she said to me.

I was a good dog, and Duke was “no, Duke.” That’s what I got out of the exchange. Unfortunately, Sneakers was in the bedroom and missed this indication that I was the favored pet.

While she was cooking, CJ also played with her hair and her clothes, though not in a game in which a dog could participate. She put on shoes that smelled like they’d taste good, and after that her footsteps rang with sharp percussion in the kitchen.

Soon there was a noise at the door and CJ picked me up and opened it. “Hi, honey,” she said to the man standing there. He was stocky and had no hair on his head and he smelled like something burned and peanuts and a pungent spice of some kind.

“Whoa, what’s this?” he said. He stuck his fingers right in my face and I growled at him, showing my teeth.

“Max!” CJ said. “Come in. It’s Max; he’s sort of my new dog.”

“Wait, sort of?” He edged inside and CJ shut the door.

“He was on death row for tomorrow. I couldn’t let them put the little guy down. He’s so cuddly.”

The man was leaning in too close to CJ. I showed him my teeth again.

“Yeah, cuddly. What’s Barry going to say when he gets back and you’ve got a new dog in his apartment?”

“He’s already letting me keep Sneakers. Max isn’t really any bigger.”

Duke was trying to shove his big stupid head under the man’s hand, and the man pushed him away. CJ set me down and I glared at the man—I didn’t yet know if he posed any sort of threat and at my size I couldn’t afford to let down my guard until I was sure.

“I’m cooking broccoli beef,” CJ said. “Want to open the wine, Gregg?”

“Hey, come here,” the man said.

CJ and the man held each other very close and then went down the hall. I followed but was too short to get on the bed with them. Duke might have jumped up with ease, but Sneakers streaked out the door when CJ and the man went in and Duke was more interested in following the cat. Sneakers went under the couch. I could have crawled under there after her pretty easily but elected to forgo the opportunity to let the cat slash at me again. Duke, on the other hand, was apparently dumb enough to think he could get under there if he just worked hard enough. Snorting and groaning, he shoved his head under the couch until he actually moved the thing on the rug. I wondered how long Sneakers would tolerate this before she demonstrated to Duke why she had claws.

After a while, CJ and the man came back out. “Well!” CJ said with a laugh. “Good thing I turned off the burners. Hi, Max, did you have fun with Duke?” Duke and I both looked at her, hearing our names and a question. “You want to open that wine?”

The man was standing by the table, his hands in his pockets. CJ came back out of the kitchen, which was still alive with tantalizing smells. “What is it?”

“I can’t stay, baby.”

“What? You said—”

“I know, but something’s come up.”

“Something’s come up. And what exactly is that, Gregg?”

“Hey. I’ve never lied to you about my situation.”

“Your situation that you said was ending, is that the situation you mean?”

“It’s complicated,” he said.

“Well, yeah, I guess it is. Why don’t you give me an update on the ‘situation’ as it currently stands? Because I thought that in the process of ‘never lying to me’ you were pretty clear that the situation was all but over.”

CJ was angry. Duke lowered his head, frightened, but I was rigid and alert. The man’s name was Gregg and he was making my girl angry.

“I gotta go.”

“So this was what, a pit stop? Bootie call?”

“Baby.”

“Stop! I’m not a baby!”

Now Gregg was getting angry, too. The situation was spinning out of control. I darted over and snapped at Gregg’s pant leg. “Hey!” he shouted. He swung his foot, narrowly missing me.

“No!” CJ yelled. She reached down and picked me up. “Don’t you ever try to kick my dog.”

“Dog tried to bite me,” Gregg said.

“He’s just protective. He was raised in a shelter.”

“Well, you need to train him or something.”

“Okay, let’s completely change the subject, then, and talk about the dog.”

“I don’t know what you want!” Gregg shouted. “I’m late to a thing.” He strode rapidly to the door and yanked it open, turning on the threshold. “This isn’t easy for me, either. You could at least show some appreciation for that fact.”

“It certainly is one of the more appreciable facts, I’ll give you that.”

“I don’t need this,” the man said. He shut the door forcefully.

CJ sat down on the couch and buried her head in her hands. I couldn’t get up on the couch to comfort her. Duke came over and rested his gigantic head in her lap, as if that were any help.

She sobbed as she took her shoes off and threw them on the floor. They were, I decided, bad shoes.

After a few minutes, CJ went into the kitchen and brought out two pans and set them on the table and ate right out of the pans. She ate and ate and ate, while Duke watched attentively.

I felt pretty sure I knew what was going to happen next. And it did—within half an hour, she was in the bathroom, vomiting. She shut the door on me, so I sat on the floor, whimpering, wishing I could help her with her pain. It was my purpose to take care of CJ, and at that moment I felt that I was not doing a good job.

TWENTY-ONE

The next day we all went for a walk except Sneakers. I’ve seen cats outside and they don’t walk with people; they mostly just walk with themselves. Nearly always when a dog walks he walks next to a person. This is just one of many ways that dogs are better pets than cats.

Duke and I were on leashes. I was feeling more kindly disposed toward him than when we first regarded each other, because he had never been anything but submissive—when we played, he would fall to his back and let me climb on his neck and chew on his face. But walking with him was constantly irritating. He pulled left and right at the end of his leash, distracted by one smell or another, yanking CJ off balance and getting in my way. “Duke … Duke…,” CJ would say. She never once had to say, “Max … Max…,” because I trotted by her feet like a good dog. Occasionally I barked, though, because otherwise I wasn’t sure people could see me—they tended to stare at Duke, probably astounded that he was so bad at walking.

I was glad that my girl had found herself another dog after I, as Molly, left her, but clearly now that we were reunited I was going to be in charge, because Duke just didn’t know what he was doing.

Everywhere there were food smells and garbage cans and papers to sniff, but I had to work my little legs so hard to keep up that these delights passed by too quickly for me to enjoy them. We mounted some brick stairs and CJ knocked on the door. It opened and the smell of people and a dog and food came wafting out. A woman was on the other side of the door. “Oh,” she said, “is it that time already?”

I could sense an uneasiness in CJ. “Um, yeah, I’m right on time,” CJ said.

I could smell a strange dog’s scent on the flowerpot next to me and I squatted to mark over it. “My plants!” the woman cried.

“Oh!” CJ reached down and picked me up. “I’m sorry; he’s just a puppy.”

CJ was upset and it was the woman’s fault. When the woman leaned forward to peer at me, I growled at her and she jerked back. “He’s all bark and no bite,” CJ said.

“I’ll get Pepper,” the woman said. She left us standing on the doorstep for a few moments and then returned with a rust-colored female dog, much bigger than me but still way smaller than Duke, on a leash that the woman handed to CJ. The dog sniffed me and I growled at her to let her know I was there to protect CJ.

The rust-colored dog was named Pepper, I soon gathered, and as we walked we stopped at more places and soon had a brown female dog named Sally and a hairy, stocky male dog named Beevis, all on leashes in a most unnatural dog family.

This wasn’t like being with Rocky or being with Annie and Abby; this was a mix of dogs who were very tense with each other, held too closely together by the leashes that kept us from straying. For the most part we all tried to ignore each other, though Duke tried to play with Sally a little even though we were going for a walk.

More strange than the unnatural nature of the dog pack was CJ’s obsession with collecting our poops. On the Farm I’d taken to doing my business in the surrounding woods, and as Molly I generally used a corner of the backyard—a man came on a regular basis to run machines and clean up after me. Occasionally, CJ had picked up after me, usually when we were on someone else’s property, but never had it been like her behavior now. CJ methodically scooped up after all the dogs in our pack and even kept Duke’s deposits, which were huge. She would carry them with her for a time in little bags and then would leave them in containers on the street, which was even more baffling—why go through all the work of picking them up and carrying them if she wasn’t going to keep them?

There are some things people do that dogs just will never understand. Most of the time I assumed that humans, with their complex lives, were serving some greater purpose, but in this instance I wasn’t so sure.

Though I was the dog in charge, I tried to be civil to all the other canines, but Beevis did not like me and I did not like Beevis. When he sniffed me his fur went up and he thrust his chest at me. He was bigger than I, but not by a lot—if it weren’t for me he would have been the smallest dog there. CJ pulled on his leash so that his face was brought aggressively toward mine, so I snapped at him and he bit the air next to my ear.

“Stop it! Max! Beevis!”

CJ was angry. I wagged my tail at her, hoping she understood none of it was my fault.

CJ took us to a dog park. What a great place! It felt so good to be off leash that I headed off at a flat run, and Duke and Sally followed, though I could turn more quickly than they could and soon was running alone. Other dogs were in the park with their owners, some chasing balls, others wrestling, and a white dog with floppy ears joyfully joined the chase with Duke and Sally—it was so fun to race around with the dogs in pursuit!

I saw Beevis slinking down low and then he launched himself at me. I dodged and he ran after me, growling. I turned a tight circle, but he cut me off. It looked as if I would have no choice but to snap at him, except that Duke galloped up and sort of crashed into the both of us. With Duke towering over him, Beevis was less hostile. I dashed over to CJ, who was sitting on a bench, tried to jump up next to her, but fell short. Laughing, she picked me up, and I proudly sat in her lap, watching the dogs, smelling the exotic smells, feeling her hands, loving all of it.

When we left the dog park, we retraced our route, dropping off the dogs we’d picked up along the way until it was just Duke and myself, back at CJ’s place. I was exhausted, so after a quick snack I fell asleep at CJ’s feet.

Over the course of that summer, Beevis and I learned to ignore each other, though he still growled at me when I ran. He couldn’t keep up with me, but he was pretty good at cutting me off, so I’d be in the middle of a joyous gallop with a whole pack and then he’d charge into the middle of us to challenge me and the whole procession of running dogs would pull up into a halt and mill around. I couldn’t tell if everyone found it as irritating as I did.

At home, I took on the responsibility of guiding Duke toward more polite behavior. He didn’t understand that my food bowl was off-limits, so I was forced to nip at him a few times before realization dawned in his eyes. He never really ate my dinner or even all of his own meal most of the time, but I didn’t like that huge nose descending from its height and sniffing where I ate. He was also lazy: when someone knocked, Duke didn’t think to bark until I did, even though we were the only protection CJ had in the world. I therefore had to be extravigilant and would bark at the slightest sound coming from the direction of the hallway.

I knew we were supposed to bark because CJ was always angry when someone knocked. “Hey! Stop! Quiet! Enough!” she would yell. I didn’t understand the words, but the meaning was clear: she was upset with the knocking and we should keep barking.

When Duke barked, Sneakers usually darted across the floor and scampered under the bed. Otherwise, the cat was much less fearful as the days wore on and, after several incidents of close sniffing, even began to play with me. We’d wrestle and it wasn’t exactly the same as wrestling with a dog, because Sneakers would wrap her legs around me, but it was easier than trying to play with Duke, who was ridiculously large and had to crawl on the floor so I could pin him.

The only time there was peace between Sneakers and Duke was when CJ would run a machine on the floor that made a loud noise. It terrified Duke and Sneakers cowered from it as well, though I wasn’t worried because I’d encountered similar machines in my time. After CJ put the machine away she would cuddle with us—Duke, Sneakers, and me pressed up against her on the couch, recovering from the trauma of it all.

I knew I was the favorite pet, though, and CJ proved it one evening by snapping a leash onto my collar and walking with me and only me outside in the warm, humid air. Duke followed us to the door, but CJ told him he was a good dog and to stay and then it was just the two of us.