A Small Furry Prayer (3 page)

5

I bought the house two days later, but by the time the banks were dealt with and the papers signed and the long hours driven back to Los Angeles, we had less than two weeks to spare. Ten days to dismantle our lives and pack up our house and bid our farewells and nobody was getting much sleep, not even the dogs. The phone rang constantly. Whenever anyone asked, Joy said we were leaving California to go run a “real rescue” in New Mexico. A lot of people asked. Eventually I asked as well.

“We've got eight dogs, two humans, and a shoe box for a house—but this isn't a real rescue?”

“Fancy a road trip?” she said.

This was about five days before we were supposed to leave and I didn't really fancy a road trip, but what if I didn't fancy a real rescue either? I had been to Chimayo already and knew that whatever we might find there, it was going to take a while to find it. Our new home had been chosen because of its distance from, not proximity to, civilization. I was about to be up close and personal with this woman and her dreams and not much else. I got dressed. I decided to see what a “real rescue” entailed.

There are a half dozen real rescues spread across the California's Central Valley, with actress Tippi Hedren's Shambala Preserve being the most famous. Shambala is Sanskrit for “peace” and “harmony,” which in Hedren's case meant “lions” and “tigers.” I have some fond memories of the Ringling Bros. Circus, so a big-cat sanctuary sounded great to me. Joy thought circuses cruel and, since we were moving to save dogs, figured we should see something in the canid family.

“Plus,” she said, “Tippi's rich.”

“So?”

“We're not.”

Joy chose the Wolf Mountain Sanctuary because it was one of the few where you could actually “interact” with the wolves. I didn't know what interact meant, but the sanctuary turned out to be a small house and some large pens on the dusty edge of the Mojave Desert. This was California's Lucerne Valley, a hinterland so hot that in 1912 the town council voted unanimously to hold Fourth of July celebrations every year—just in the safer, cooler months of autumn. Even in the autumn, safer is a matter of perspective. When we turned off the freeway and I got my first look, I knew immediately what Joy had meant by “we're not.”

Rich rescuers can afford lots of space in lots of upmarket locations. Real rescuers cannot. The Lucerne Valley is the kind of place they end up instead. And it's the kind of place things go wrong. This was pioneer country, the West those young men once went. These days that tradition is mainly upheld by chemists pioneering new ways to cook meth. The desert is full of their detritus, the bars thick with their customers. Even the rattlesnakes are nervous. Anyway, the sanctuary wasn't much to see, save the wolves.

The wolves, though, they were something else. Describing animal encounters is often tricky because animals are frequently the basis for our descriptions. If I say a German shepherd is as big as a wolf, you know exactly what I'm talking about. But standing in a pen with a real wolf for the first time, my reaction was: “Holy shit, that thing's as big as a wolf.” So what, exactly, was I talking about?

The thing I was talking about weighed in at ninety pounds and stood a few inches away from me. Another was right behind it. When Joy and I entered the pen for our “interaction,” the wolves were out of sight in a far corner. We'd been told to belly up to a raised wooden platform in a different corner so the animals could come over and introduce themselves. What anyone failed to mention was that because of the height of the platform and the size of the wolves that meeting was going to take place face-to-face.

Large dogs have never bothered me. I'm happy to wade into a pack of pit bulls or Rottweilers or whatever. I thought the same would hold true with wolves. It didn't hold. When the wolves walked across the pen and jumped up on the platform I was again reminded that mortal dread is not a comfortable feeling. Occasionally, we'd been warned, a wolf may attempt to adopt a visitor into the pack. In this auspicious ceremony, the animal will rub his muzzle along the human's neck, transferring pheromones, marking us as friend, not foe. After the wolf in front of me decided I was worthy of adoption and closed the gap between his jaws and my neck to start that process, mortal dread is really what I felt.

When Stephen Jay Gould said, “Consider the earth's history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King's nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history,” he was trying to offer some insight into what scientists call
deep time
. This is both the concept of geological history and the incredible shrinking sensation that occurs when confronting geological history. I've had this feeling only once before, hiking a 200-million-year-old canyon in southern Utah, but that was deep time at some remove, not wrapped around my neck. The second the wolf made contact, primordial lightning struck. At least it felt like lightning. Suffice it to say a large quantity of electricity shot up from the bottom of my ass and out through the top of my head. I wanted to gasp, was terrified to move. The only reason I didn't wet my pants was because the sensation zapped the piss right out of me. If this was what a real rescue was like—hell, I should have started one years ago.

We left the pen and walked over to the gift shop, not really a gift shop, actually an old card table covered in cheap cloth and tribal jewelry and parked against a corner of an overcrowded back porch. There was one young Indian girl sitting behind the table, with an older white woman standing beside her. I studied the jewelry, Joy struck up the conversation. The woman was the sanctuary's owner, the girl her daughter. The owner told us about business—good during the summer months, not so good other times. Occasionally the wolves found pickup work in Hollywood, dancing with Kevin Costner among other jobs.

“Mostly, though …”

Joy waited for the woman to finish that thought. I waited for her to finish that thought. The woman picked up a small silver bracelet and spun it around her finger.

“Mostly it takes a lot of jewelry to feed sixteen wolves.”

Joy asked if it was only the two of them doing all the work. Both mother and daughter started laughing.

“I've got help,” said the woman.

“Yeah,” said her daughter, “she's got thirty-six children.”

Turned out wayward wolves weren't all this woman had been adopting.

“There's not many options around here,” the woman said, “but there's a lot of meth. Same old story: Dad's in jail or dead or on his way, Mom's not far behind. Not many of the kids they leave behind are right in the head. Either I adopt them or they go feral.”

I looked up at her house. It wasn't much bigger than our house. We were living on top of each other with our eight dogs. This woman had sixteen wolves and thirty-six kids. This was about the time I realized that a “real rescue” might require real sacrifice, and this seemed different from the kind I was familiar with—the kind that gets you laid when you talk about it in bars.

6

The thermometer started to climb on our drive home from Wolf Mountain and kept climbing throughout the night. By the following afternoon, the canines were agitated, the humans were agitated, the temperature was in the low hundreds and rising fast. In a few days, the resulting combination of dry timber and blistering heat would burn one-quarter of Griffith Park to the ground, but before that happened we had to maneuver two old cars and eight old dogs across Death Valley on our way to New Mexico. The cars were prone to heatstroke. The dogs were prone to heatstroke. We were trying to outrun the front end of a massive heat wave by driving across the hottest desert in America—there may be a moral here, either for my decision to give dog rescue a try or for decisions in general. Like many things, it was too soon to tell.

Elise was Joy's good friend, occasional dog rescue partner, and something of a speed demon. Elise was driving. Joy rode shotgun. There were six small dogs in their car. I had the bigger dogs and more boxes than one should ever pack into a truck. Otis, the bull terrier, was one of the bigger dogs. One of the other things that distinguishes bull terriers is their need for human company. If he had his way, Otis liked to be touching a human, and because he was a bull terrier, he often had his way. When Joy wasn't around, he liked to sleep under my desk, beneath my feet, no matter what he had to destroy to get there.

There is a learning curve with dogs, and on the drive to New Mexico I learned that Otis had some difficulty distinguishing between my office and a moving vehicle. In the moving vehicle, he was supposed to sleep in a makeshift bed in the back of the truck. Somewhere outside of Needles, California, Otis decided things were not to his liking, smashed a box into my chest, a stereo into my head, and a cactus onto my lap, then dove for his favorite spot, directly beneath my feet. We were doing around seventy-five at the time. When I finally got him off the gas pedal we were sliding off the shoulder at a blurry one hundred and ten.

“Love me, love my dogs,” Joy had said not long after we met. I didn't love her dogs, or not at first. As a rule, small dogs are yappy and pesky, and after five years in Los Angeles—where the well-heeled set like to treat pets as fashion accessories—difficult to abide merely on principle. But if I wanted to do something completely different with the second half of my life than I'd done with the first, than I wanted to make different mistakes. One dog is a pet, eight is a pack. I'd never been part of a pack before, so decided this might be a different mistake.

There were some drawbacks. Take Gidget. Dog rescuers often specialize in both types of dogs and types of dog problems. Joy started out with bull terriers but soon realized she was better at working with small dogs and best at small dogs with serious immunological problems. Gidget was one of those problems. She arrived one winter morning, about three months before our move to New Mexico. The smallest dog I'd ever seen, she was not much more than two pounds, and looked as if someone had dipped those pounds into a vat of boiling oil. Gidget had demodectic mange. Her coat was destroyed, her eyes bulging out, her brain not quite right. Maybe it was the mange, maybe she was a few spoons shy of a place setting, maybe she just felt the funk—whatever the reason—this dog had to dance. Her dance involved standing in one place and moving her paws straight up and straight down, not unlike a marionette on mescaline. Trying to have sex with Gidget doing the last tango in Paris on my head, that was one of the drawbacks.

The Buddha taught four noble truths: life is suffering, suffering has a cause, the end of suffering is the goal of life, thus the removal of the cause of suffering is how we should pass our days. These facts are meant to be understood not as pessimism but rather as practicality. While Joy isn't a Buddhist, no other notion so captures both her worldview and her way of being—especially when it came to dogs. A little while back, Joy made some money off her first book. She took that money and moved to Mexico and opened a no-kill dog shelter. It was an idea better in principle than in practice. Mexico is a Catholic country, and Catholic doctrine teaches that dogs have no soul. In Mexico, anything without a soul isn't worth the effort. The Church also teaches that prophylactics are a sin against God and it also strikes me as significantly harder to care for animals when one has so many children that there's not enough money to feed them all.

The locals shunned her work, stole her medicines, threatened her person. After five years of trying, the money was gone. Joy moved her operation from the safer center of town to the dangerous outskirts of the barrio. Her nights were spent sleeping on the floor of the shelter, cuddling an axe for protection. She did this for three months straight, then filed for bankruptcy. This may not have been what the Buddha had in mind, but when Joy talks about ending suffering, this is exactly the kind of commitment she intends.

Along similar lines, we stopped for the night in the town of Kingman, Arizona. It was Saturday night and nearly every hotel in town was booked solid. The Laughlin River Run was going on. The Laughlin River Run is a motorcycle rally of some renown, and since 2007 marked their greatest turnout ever, some seventy-five thousand enthusiasts had shown up. The streets, sidewalks, parking lots, and damn near every other inch of available real estate were packed with bikes and bikers, and our motel was no exception.

Kingman is a mountain town and thus was impervious to the heat wave baking the rest of the West. Early the next morning, temperatures were in the low thirties. Chihuahuas are desert mammals and aren't adapted for serious cold. It takes almost no time for a small dog to freeze to death in the mountains. Ever since we'd decided to move to Chimayo—which sits around six thousand feet—Joy had been trying to figure out how to keep our animals alive under these conditions. Then she solved the dilemma by raiding the going-out-of-business sale of a typical LA pet store. It was a brilliant solution up until that cold Kingman morning when Joy asked me to walk the dogs.

Our room was tucked in an out-of-the-way corner of the motel. I walked the dogs out of that room, down a staircase, around a corner, and around another, trying for a small grassy area behind the parking lot. As I rounded that last corner, I found twenty-five black-leather-clad motorcycle enthusiasts of the Hell's Angel variety lining the parking lot. During the 2003 Laughlin River Run, these same Angels had started a riot that claimed three lives and led to forty-two arrests. In her favor, when Joy first said “Love me, love my dogs,” perhaps she hadn't known that would eventually include parading three sweater-clad Chihuahuas and one Gidget—decked out in her pink rhinestone Playboy Bunny special—past twenty-five Hell's Angels.

7

In his book
Finite and Infinite Games
, the New York University professor of religion James Carse distinguishes between the two kinds of games played here on earth, with finite games being activities such as politics, sport, and war, where rules are followed, boundaries exist, and a consensus winner is declared. Infinite games are those where rules are fluid, outcomes unreachable, and a participant's only goal is the continuation of play. All relationships are a finite game when treated as items on a checklist. Carse believes they become infinite when “it can only be said that these persons played with each other and in such a way that what they began cannot be finished.”

Which brings us to my dog Ahab.

Ahab and I met in the middle of the third year of this new millennium and the middle of my third year fighting Lyme disease. Back then, I was a seriously abused human. Ahab was a seriously abused dog. I had spent the better part of those years in bed; Ahab arrived by a rougher road. By the time we got together, his back had been broken, his tail snapped, and most of his teeth knocked out. There were cigarette burns running down his spine. I nursed him back to health and he nursed me back to health and the end result felt a lot like what Carse considered an infinite game.

Before moving in with Joy, Ahab and I shared a small apartment about a block off Hollywood Boulevard, less than a hundred feet from the spot where I once watched a woman get her throat slit in a lover's quarrel and just up the street from the site of a contract killing. The contract killing occurred inside an old dive, the kind of nondescript bar that friends of mine from the Ohio of my childhood would have called a “stop-and-fight.” The gunman executed his victim with a double tap to the chest and a coup de grâce to the forehead, which, as one witness later remarked, is the kind of precision not often found in this neighborhood.

One night back then, after a well-spent evening seeing the Pogues play the Wiltern, I turned my truck down my street and found a crowd of people standing in front of my apartment building. While there's nothing unusual about crowded sidewalks in Los Angeles, finding a crowd in my neighborhood often meant nothing good. As I drove past, I noticed that all of these people were pointing, shouting, and staring straight at the sky. I followed their gaze up three stories to a small window ledge, not much more than five inches wide, tucked near the corner of the building, where a large dog was standing—apparently contemplating a life-ending leap of some kind.

It took me about ten seconds to realize the ledge in question was the one directly outside my living room window, and ten more to conclude that the dog in question was Ahab. I don't quite know what happened next—somehow my car got parked—but I have no memory of such things. What I recall is banging through that assembled crowd, thinking Don't look up, don't look up, as people shouted, “Is that your dog?” There was a suggestion about using a taut blanket as a crash pad and a question about my fitness for pet ownership—but I didn't have time for either discussion.

The hubbub continued as I shoulder-bashed some gentleman out of the way, but faded as I tore up three flights of steps. When I got to my floor, I found a security guard—who knows where he'd come from—standing in the hallway outside my door. My guess was that he was unwilling to break inside for fear of startling Ahab, but again, I didn't stick around long enough to ask. When I got the door open I noticed a number of things at once. Before I'd left for the concert, there had been a
New Zealand Herald
article sitting on my desk, atop a stack of other curiosities. While the rest of those items were still on the desk, the article was now lying in the middle of my floor. It told the strange story of a historic bridge on the west coast of Scotland that had lately become the site of an unprecedented series of canine suicides. In the months preceding the article, so many dogs had leaped over the railing and plunged to their deaths that locals started calling the spot “Rover's Leap.”

A second after I saw the
Herald
article in the middle of my floor, I noticed my front window—which had been closed and locked before I left for the concert—now halfway open. Ahab was perched on the other side of that window. Indecision came next. After the sweaty palms and the stutter steps and the growing realization that I didn't have a plan came the heart pounding and the almost puking and the decision to just try to grab the beast. The beast had other ideas. Before I could reach him, Ahab lifted his head to meet my gaze, then casually nudged his snout beneath the bottom of the window, grunted once, and lifted the pane a few more inches so he could drop neatly to the floor. Down on the street I heard cheering. Back in the apartment, Ahab went over to his water bowl, had a couple of gulps, and lay down for a nap. This too might be some kind of infinite game. Then again, it might not. There was no one around to ask, and even if there had been, how exactly do you frame that question?