Tango: The Tale of an Island Dog (2 page)

“But of course,” replied Marcellina.

Almost three years later, on a drizzly afternoon, Tango strained against a pearl-studded leather leash, gripped by his personal dog walker. Tango had finished his daily walk through Central Park and was eager to get home to Marcellina’s apartment building, where the dark-suited doorman would give him a treat. After that, Tango planned to take a delicious nap on a willow green silk chaise lounge, custom-made to his size.

Once inside, Marcellina removed Tango’s yellow hooded raincoat and four candy apple red boots.

She was bubbling with excitement.

“Squiggle-butt, I have fabulous news! Diego’s birthday is two weeks from tomorrow. We—you and I—are going to give him the best birthday party ever. And when I say the best, I mean THE BEST.”

Marcellina tapped Tango’s snout. “But don’t you tell him. It’s a surprise.”

With one exception—the sound of Marcellina unzipping an empty suitcase to pack for a trip—Tango loved surprises. And today, his mistress had a second surprise: Marcellina
herself
was going to give him his bath.

“The people from Suds ’n’ Scissors can’t make it today, Poochie-pie,” she explained.

Soon Tango was soaking in bubbles that smelled like exotic calla lilies in bloom. His mistress massaged him with gentle fingers, rinsed him with lukewarm water, and toweled him dry. After she blow-dried his coat, Marcellina curled the steel blue strands into fluffy waves.

Even before Tango was dry behind his ears, Conrad—designer of couture fashions for Manhattan’s most discriminating dogs—arrived.

Conrad ran a tape measure from neck to tail along Tango’s spine. “Twelve inches,” he murmured, marking his notepad.

He wound the tape around Tango’s neck, chest, and midsection. “Nine, eleven, twelve—perfect!”

With a ruler, he measured Tango’s legs. “Seven inches.” He smiled. “Simply perfect!”

By seven o’clock on the night of Diego’s birthday, Marcellina’s penthouse was ablaze with black candles. Outside the glass walls, the cityscape glowed
and glittered. Every time Marcellina opened the door, Tango ran in circles, barking with delight and wagging his stump of a tail—as much as a tail stump can waggle.

The champagne-sipping guests declared that the seafood buffet was
amazing.
The mermaid ice sculpture was
exquisite.
And Tango? Tango was
so-o-o-o precious
in his black tuxedo that he soon had a headache from all the ladies with long red fingernails patting him on the head, marveling, “Precious … simply precious.”

Later, when a Latin dance combo played the first sultry notes of a tango, Marcellina lifted Tango up in her arms.

“They’re playing our song,” she whispered.

Marcellina’s violet blue eyes sparkled like the sea on a sunny day as she rocked Tango around the room. Inside his heart, the love Tango felt for his mistress did its own kind of dance. Later, and for a long, long time to come, Tango would remember this moment and long for it.

The music stopped. Applause erupted. Breathless and beaming, Marcellina lowered Tango to the floor.

Without Marcellina’s attention, Tango soon tired of Diego’s birthday party. With each passing minute, the laughing, chattering guests seemed taller, bigger, louder. The gigantic, partying people bounced above Tango like the balloons he once saw in the Macy’s
Thanksgiving Day parade. Tango wished they’d pop and go home.

Bored and hungry, Tango wiggled through a maze of pointy-toed pumps with spike heels, consuming every cracker crumb, crab lump, and cube of cheese he could find. He even devoured two olives out of an empty martini glass, but then felt woozy.

Somehow, he made his way to the top of the circular staircase. Pressing his muzzle between his paws, he peered through the railing and watched the spectacle below. Sometimes, Tango had to admit, he felt alone in this human world, where humans said, and did, things he didn’t understand.

Tango was just drifting into an uneasy sleep when Diego exclaimed in a booming voice, “A sailboat! You bought me a sailboat? Marcellina, my sweet, my dear—my very own sloop! You’re amazing!”

A few days later, Tango sat primly on a brocade dining room chair, awaiting a slice of beef tenderloin. Around his neck, he wore his shiny silver link collar and a heart-shaped identification tag.

Soon, Tango realized, Marcellina and Diego were arguing. “I hate to disagree, DEAR,” Marcellina said, “but I think it’s too early to sail that far north. It’s only April. I remember Father saying …”

“Nonsense, my dear,” Diego countered. “Your
father lacks a spirit of adventure. What I need—what we need—is a challenge. Man against the sea and all that: Erik the Red, Christopher Columbus, Ahab—Ulysses!”

Adventure? Maybe Diego was onto something…. Maybe what Tango needed in his life was some adventure! Dog against the sea, and all that.

As fate would have it, Marcellina lost the argument.

Early on a warm, sun-filled April morning, Tango, Marcellina, and Diego traveled north to Maine where they made preparations for the maiden voyage of Diego’s new sailboat. They would be sailing up the coast of Maine to Nova Scotia, around Cape Breton, and through the Cabot Strait into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

At the marina, Tango pirouetted with pleasure, eager to set sail. That is, until—
whoops!
—he stepped dangerously close to the edge of the pier. In the dark, menacing water below, a whiskered fish stared up at Tango with a sinister grin.

Tango’s heart went
ker-plunk.
What was he getting himself into?

Sporting a gold-braided captain’s hat, Diego handed Marcellina a towel-wrapped bottle of champagne.

Into the gusty winds Marcellina shouted, “In the
name of all who have sailed the seas in the past, and all who will sail aboard this vessel in the future …” Then in one swift blow, she smashed the bottle on the ship’s bow. “… I christen this ship
Marcellina’s Mystique
.”

“May Neptune, mighty king of the sea, favor us with his blessing today!” Diego called.

“Hear! Hear!” Marcellina cheered.

“May King Neptune bring fair winds and good fortune!” Diego continued.

Marcellina cried, “Hear! Hear!”

Suddenly Tango’s tail dropped and his ears flattened. Something didn’t feel right. A low growl rose in his throat.

Grrr-rrr… ruff! Grrr-ruff-ruff-ruff!

“Shush, Tango,” Marcellina scolded.

Toasting his shipmates, Diego boldly concluded: “May King Neptune nurture and care for us through perilous seas!”

Alas, after days of good sailing on fair seas in the North Atlantic, the fickle King Neptune sent our sailors a midnight storm with perilous waves, mighty foul winds, and extremely bad fortune. Fighting giant sea swells,
Marcellina’s Mystique
lost its way in the Gulf of St. Lawrence as it approached the south shore of Prince Edward Island.

There, in the first light of dawn, in the village of Victoria-by-the-Sea, a handful of people huddled around a white-haired man in a wheat-colored robe. The man wore a wooden cross around his neck and a rope belt tight around his waist.

On that first day of May, the air on the island was cool and moist. Pastor MacDougal shivered, eager to begin his Blessing of the Boats on the opening day of lobster fishing season.

Lobstermen—anxious to load dozens of lobster traps into the big bellies of their boats—scurried back and forth across the planks of the wharf to brightly painted fishing sheds on the shore.

Just a few hours earlier, a violent thunderstorm had cleansed the white wooden crafts tied to the wharf, but now the waters in Victoria Bay were steel gray and still.

Outside the villagers’ circle, a tall, slender girl stirred the sand with her boot. Nearby, in a thicket of wild rose bushes, an elderly fox watched her every move.

Pastor MacDougal raised his arms and began his blessing.

The fishermen paused in their places, but did not gather.

“May God bless you and keep you,” invoked Pastor MacDougal.

“Amen,” Augusta Smith, a fisherman’s widow, whispered.

“May God bless your boats,” the pastor continued, his voice lofting like a gull soaring on the breeze.

The somber villagers nodded in unison.

“May God bless your labors and bring you safely—”

Suddenly, a high-pitched voice pierced the tail end of Pastor MacDougal’s benediction.

“By George! There’s a rat in that trap!”

Little Art Cody wiggled his finger at a lobster trap underneath the wharf.

His brother, Big Bart Cody, walked bow-legged in his rubber boots to Little Art’s side. “There’s a rat in a trap?”

The two brothers hopped off the pier and onto the beach, where a corner of the trap was mired in the sand.

Indeed, the arms and legs of a small mammal were entangled in the mesh that lined the trap. The trap’s weathered wood slats were split.

Big Bart squinted at the animal’s rump. “That’s not the tail of a rat.”

“That’s not the tail of a rat?” asked his brother.

Augusta Smith, five feet ten in her stocking feet, pushed her way through the crowd, wedged her ample frame between Big Bart and Little Art, and dropped to her knees in front of the trap.

With a grunt, Augusta tugged at the trap. A strand of rope webbing snapped, and the trap broke free.

Augusta—or Miss Gustie, as the villagers called the retired schoolteacher—examined the trapped animal. Not only was the tail too short to be a rat’s, but its fur was too long and multicolored, its ears too big, and its snout too pointy.

“It’s a pup,” Miss Gustie declared.

“It’s a pup?” Little Art echoed.

Miss Gustie, a prolific knitter, used her deft fingers to untangle the chilled, wet body from the trap’s webbing. “It’s a pup.”

From the pier, old Ben Rafferty snapped the braces on his yellow overtrousers. “Give ’im here!” he shouted in a gruff, gravely voice. “I’ll use it for bait.”

Miss Gustie noticed the dog’s ears twitching ever so slightly. “Not on your life, Ben Rafferty!” she roared.

Miss Gustie’s knees cracked as she rose. She laid two fingers on the canine’s chest and felt the weak pulsing of his heart.

“He’s alive,” Miss Gustie told the onlookers, who stood in reverent silence behind her.

“He’s alive,” Priscilla, the postmistress, repeated.

“It’s a miracle!” Pastor MacDougal pronounced.

Rat. Bait.

Tango had tried to wiggle out of the lobster trap’s webbing, but he was too weak and stiff from the cold. Icicles of hair pinched his skin. His eyelids were frozen shut, his lungs tiny punching bags without air.

Rat. Bait.

Where was he?

Was he dreaming?

He couldn’t be dead. He was in too much pain.

When two warm human hands untangled his limbs, Tango opened his mouth, but no sound came out. His tongue tasted like salt and dead fish. His nose was plugged.

Suddenly, his aching body sunk into a different net: soft, warm, and woolly. Hope mixed with delirium. It was Marcellina! His beloved mistress was
not lost at sea in the terrible storm—Marcellina was here, holding him in her arms.

“It’s okay, pup. We’re almost home,” he heard a woman’s voice say.

Home? He was back in Manhattan?

When the woman shifted her weight, it seemed as if Tango’s body might shatter.

“Who am I kidding, the darn dog’s probably dead by now anyway.”

Tango’s body jerked. His toenails snagged on something. A searing strand of pain traveled up his leg.

Now the woman was climbing stairs—one, two, three … “Oh, well,” she said a little more cheerfully. “The little guy deserves a decent burial, eh?”

If Tango could have, he would have moaned—a low, slow moan
so
melancholy that, no matter where she was, Marcellina would hear. Marcellina would come and carry him home.

“Hmm… I wonder what your name was.”

IS … My name is…

A door creaked. Tango smelled cinnamon and burning wood. Glowing balls of light exploded behind his eyes.