Dog War

by Anthony C. Winkler

  “Plus, Riccardo could be wrong! Have you thought of that?”

  “He was right about IBM,” Mannish inserted smoothly.

  The mistress looked sorely oppressed.

  The next day after this conversation, Mannish warned Precious that she was upsetting the mistress with her stubbornness. “You are driving the mistress mad, is what I am trying to say.”

  “She driving me mad, too! Have de nerve to come show me tape ’bout wildebeest migration and Africa! What those things have to do with me, anyway? I am a Jamaican Christian!”

  Mannish sighed and said he understood, and that the mistress missed the point altogether about the wildebeest herd, which was nothing more than a parking lot for souls who wanted to reincarnate on the hoof rather than come back as humans and face such modern dilemmas as drive-by shooting and runaway inflation.

  Precious stared at him. “De wildebeest, a parking lot? What is de matter with you, eh? Where you get dese ideas from? Souls are not cars and draycarts! Souls don’t need a parking. And if dey needed a parking, de Lord will park dem in heavenly garage, not in some big-headed ole African mule.”

  “That is one way to look at life, heaven, and wildebeest. There are others ways, also.”

  “But I have no fear about Mistress Lucy, for my Jesus will subdue her. Empires, monarchs, and kingdoms must bow down, and so will this American millionaire with a jet plane.”

  “Why must you insist that she bow down? If she wishes to remain upright, permit her to remain upright. You are too strict with this business of bowing down.”

  “She must bow because she is human, not God. And all must bow to God.”

  The factotum sighed. “Soon now she will leave and take the beastly dog with her. Then we will have a holiday. We can eat hamburger and steak every night. It is so little to ask for life in a wonderful mansion.”

  Precious admitted that she was fast reaching the stage where beans and cheese and yogurt and salad greens and sprouts were maddening her brain. Last night she had almost taken a bus to buy a hamburger. “I’m at de point where, so help me, even a wildebeest look tasty.”

  Peering over his shoulder with a nervous shudder, Mannish shushed her savagely.

  Chapter 17

  Now that the mistress was in residence the mansion glittered and rang regularly with fêtes and parties, which Precious came to relish. She delighted in the crunch of limousines cruising up the gravel driveway and her ear had become so sensitive that it could distinguish authentic Rolls Royce crunch from the bogus crunch of upstart Mercedes-Benz, frowzy Acura, to say nothing of slum-dwelling Cadillac.

  Many of these fêtes and gala functions were hosted by the mistress in the honor of needy animals. There was a benefit for elephants; a ball for the white rhinoceros; a concert for the California condor; a rock and roll party for the snail darter; a dinner for the monarch butterfly and various formal teas and assorted soirées for alligators, lions, Bengal tigers, cheetahs, and hyenas. Precious learned to cook what the mistress termed “cruelty-free” dishes, vegetarian meals such as melon soup, ravioli stuffed with ratatouille, meatless black bean stew, carrot and asparagus mousse, and tofu ice cream.

  At these functions there was no leather worn, no pigskin, fur, silk, or animal pelt or skin of any kind. Shoes were made of synthetic materials or rubber and guests regularly attended with their pets. Some Rovers and Fidos sported sweaters and vests, and Precious saw at least one Fifiadorned with a diamond choker. Weaving in and out of the assembled guests, serving cocktails and snacks, Precious overheard many highbrow conversations that she remembered long afterwards.

  She overheard arguments over whether animal experimenters deserved to be shot, hanged, or parboiled; and one memorable dispute about whether vintage Rolls Royces should remain cowed or be decowed. Those who clung to the opinion that the Rolls Royce with its leather upholstery should remain cowed argued vehemently that since the cow was already dead and stripped of its hide for the upholstery, it would be a further waste to decow the Rolls by removing the leather and giving it a decent Christian burial as proposed by the decowing side.

  Others just as passionately countered that they simply could not ride around in a Rolls Royce with a clear conscience knowing that the automobile seats had cost innocent cows their lives.

  “I decowed my Rolls the day after I bought it,” Precious overheard an earnest gray-haired gentleman say primly to a matronly lady. “I had the leather stripped off and replaced with synthetic fabric. I could never drive around knowing that my back was touching an animal corpse!”

  “But the cow is already dead!” the matron cried. “At least you give the cow a posthumous reason for dying by not decowing the seats. Otherwise, why did the cow die?”

  “Let’s ask the meat-eater,” the dignified man suggested, using the nickname the company had dubbed Precious, who had been unofficially adopted as a mock mascot of the movement and was winding her way through the crowd carrying a salver of bite-sized raw vegetables.

  Precious rather enjoyed this attention from such an elegant throng and made no attempt to dodge or repudiate her meateating reputation. When asked for her opinion on various ethical questions, she always delivered brisk judgments in a categorical tone. Here and now, for example, she declared that she thought decowing of Rolls Royces a criminal waste. If the cow was already dead and turned into a car seat, she thought it futility itself to try to turn the car seat back into a cow. As far as she could see, the decowing movement had been cooked up by grave-diggers to drum up business by encouraging wholesale burial of Rolls Royce seats. The debaters listened and pursed their lips after she had uttered this opinion and drifted out of sight, and one of them remarked that for a meat-eater whose brain had been corroded by animal fat she was surprisingly sensible.

  During these meetings Precious also got to see some of the videotape commercials made for the animal rights movement to discourage meat-eating, the wearing of hides and pelts, and the upholstering of sofas and car seats with sheepskin and leather. One commercial made with funds provided by the mistress showed a man with mouth agape about to chomp into a hamburger when suddenly the patty was transmogrified into a miniature cow which raised one slice of the bun off his bloody head, begged the diner’s pardon, and said politely, “Excuse me, you may think I’m a Big Mac, but in fact, I’m actually the corpse of a dead animal.”

  The cow then respectfully narrated the story of its short and violent life, beginning with memories of idyllic calfhood on the ranch when he cavorted in the company of his protective bull father and doting heifer mother; romped with his brother and sister cows, all of whom had since been slaughtered; loved to breathe the clean air of the mountain pastures and frolic among blossoming meadows. He told of the day when he was herded into a cramped truck and unceremoniously dumped into a slaughter yard in the company of his two sisters and a brother, all of whom milled around anxiously wondering what fate lay in store for them. With somber music playing in the background, the cow choked up as it related how he saw a man pole-axe his favorite sister and tried desperately to intervene but was himself set upon by butchers and felled by savage clubbing; how his carcass was dismembered and hung on a rotating belt, passing cutting stations where men and women with knives and saws reduced him from a recognizable life form to a bloody miscellany of chops, roasts, steaks, loins, stew meat, and hamburger, until he wound up in his present sorry state, smashed into a hapless patty, charred and grilled, slabbed between bun slices, and crowned with a corona of chopped onions and relish.

  “Go ahead,” the cow gulped with a sob of sorrow and resignation, crawling back between the buns and lowering the lid atop his pole-axed head, “bite me! Enjoy your supper. Have a nice life. Mine is over, because of you.”

  When the lights came back on, the audience applauded wildly and called rapturously for the mistress to come forward and take a bow.

  Mistress Lucy curtsied and made a fiery speech vowing to see that commercial run on television even if she had t
o personally buy a station just for that purpose. Everyone roared approval and many in the audience jumped to their feet and begged her to run for governor. Just then Precious re-entered bearing a tray of cocktails, and a man in the back of the-room cried, in goodnatured raillery, “Boo the Jamaican meat-eater!” and a rush of taunting boos and jeers, more drunken than spiteful, crackled through the room.

  Riccardo, trotting in her wake, snapped at one man who blasted a raucous Bronx-cheer at her temple as Precious walked past serving drinks with stoical dignity in the storm of pagan scoffing.

  “Dog,” Precious scolded over her shoulder, “you is not me husband or me watchman! If face need boxing, I will box it! I-don’t need no dog to bite foot over me!”

  Nevertheless, the heedless dog still lunged at the man and gave him an impertinent and unauthorized nip in Precious’s name.

  A few days after this party Precious accompanied Mistress Lucy on a visit to the animal graveyard where Barbarosa, the mistress’s last dog, was buried. Precious sat in the front seat of the Rolls, wrestling with Riccardo in her lap, who kept trying to spear his nose deep into her crotch. After one particularly ugly spasm, during which she clamped her hand over the dog’s muzzle and aimed its probing nose at Mannish’s batty flattened out against the decowed upholstery, muttering inwardly to herself, You want to smell something, smell a Coolie batty! the mistress asked to have her pet. With a sigh of gratitude, Precious handed over Riccardo, who burrowed into the mistress’s lap, sniffing swinishly.

  The cemetery itself made Precious shudder like she had laid eyes on wicked Babylon, for she saw the hand of grotesque mockery everywhere in the lush and rolling lawns grinning with memorial to Rover, cenotaph to Fido, gravestone to Spot, mausoleum to Spike. Some of the memorials had the statue of a leaping dog on the roof, with the name of the buried dog engraved in marble. Others sported statuary of fawning dog, fetching dog, barking dog, romping dog, all petrified in the death-grip of burial stone. The mistress trotted determinedly down a footpath until she came to the memorial to Barbarosa, an imposing block of rectangular stone with the usual masonry dog romping on its top.

  While the mistress murmured to her deceased dog, Precious and Mannish stood somberly in the shadow of a nearby granite tomb atop of which another stone dog looked up from a marble bone. Precious read the gilded inscription chiselled into monument:

  Monument erected to Ranger, who fell overboard somewhere-in the South Pacific off the motor yacht Laffer, on 24th-September, 1982. Sadly missed by Mommy.

  “De dog drop off de boat,” Precious whispered to the factotum, who was dug into the topsoil against the frenzied struggles of leashed Riccardo, driven berserk at the endless vistas of unstained monuments and tombstones. Mannish nudged her in the ribs as she was about to add that if she owned a motorboat no dog on earth would ever set foot ’pon it so there would be no dog to drop off and feed the fish, and she peered and saw that the mistress was leaning against the stone monument, quietly weeping.

  On their way home, the mistress asked Precious for a Christian opinion of what happened to a dog when it died. Before she had seen the mistress weep over Barbarosa, Precious would have crisply answered, “Evaporation.” But now she did not have the heart to expose the grieving mistress to the brutal truth of scripture. She swallowed and said through her teeth that only the Almighty knew. The mistress opined, after a thoughtful pause, that she felt quite sure in her heart that all flesh was doomed to rot into the nothingness of dust. But she was also convinced that if it were improbably otherwise, Barbarosa would be with her in the afterlife, as would Riccardo, as would her childhood hamster and every other pet she had ever known and loved. Precious told herself grimly that in the heaven to which Jamaican Christians were bound she was certain she would not buck up White Dog and Red Dog, for in the promised land no woman would ever have to worry about fending off Spot, Fido, or Rover who wanted to jump up all over her clean frock and nasty it up with pawprint and dog slobber. Maybe there was an American section, however, where dogs and hamsters were kept in clean cages. She did not know. God moved in mysterious ways. It was not for her to question, only to give praise, obey, and reap salvation.

  The decowed Rolls Royce hummed its way back to the mansion, each of its occupants cocooned in their own thoughts. Curled up atop the mistress’s lap, his nose dug into her crotch and sniffing its vapors, Riccardo fell into a drugged sleep as if he had huffed a pot of glue.

  Mannish, however, when they dissected the visit, saw nothing disgusting about the cemetery, and he revealed this opinion privately to Precious later. He admitted feeling that way the first time. But like everything else, he had gotten over the initial horror and now regarded these trips as comedy.

  “Americans are mad,” Precious kept insisting, while Mannish equivocated against this extreme view. Finally, he allowed, “It is healthy and necessary for them to be mad to permit opportunity for recent immigrants, for between a poor sane immigrant and a rich mad American, there is no true competition. My cousin, for instance, has started a business to freeze-dry dead animals. He is assured of prosperity.”

  “Freeze-dry dead animals? How he do dat?”

  “He has a special chamber into which he puts the dead animal for some weeks. It removes all the moisture and leaves the animal lightweight and lifelike. After freeze-drying, you can carry the animal everywhere you go, on vacation in your suitcase, if you wish. You can place him on display on the bureau of your hotel or motel room. Since he is waterproof, you can also take a bath or a wash with him. He is perfectly preserved, like a statue.”

  “Freeze-drying animals! What next, oh Father Above? What is dis, if not American lunacy? As soon as I have enough money, I am leaving dis place and returning home.”

  Mannish shook his head gloomily. “I will never go home. I-will die here. Beulah will cremate me. I will leave Beulah with two children for American culture to madden. It is a heavy price to pay for stealing five camels. But God is nothing else if not thorough.”

  Precious bristled at upcoming blasphemy. “God is good and kind,” she declared piously. “He loves us all.”

  “Yes, perhaps so, but he is also thorough. For example, there was a soul who was afraid of water. So what does God do to teach him not to be afraid of water? He places him aboard an Eskimo kayak, causes it to capsize, and drowns him. Then he reincarnates him in Russia, and drowns him again, this time in a river. He brings the poor frightened wretch back again, puts him aboard the Titanic, and drowns him a third time. He then puts him aboard a German submarine during World War II, causes it to be depth-charged, and drowns him two hundred feet below the surface. He has drowned this poor man, who is afraid of water, fifty-four times. He has drowned him in rivers, streams, brooks, seas, oceans, bathtubs, and vats. Once he drowned him as an infant in a toilet bowl. Why? Because he wants to teach this soul to be unafraid of water. I think that is too thorough.”

  Precious sat gaping through this heresy. When she finally stirred, it was with a subterranean bellow of indignation from deep inside her diaphragm, the same resonant place out of which “Rock of Ages” unfailingly blasted. “First of all,” she snapped, “tell me how you know all dis about dis man.”

  “This man was my brother. He drowned when we were children swimming in the Krishna River. A holy man told me at the funeral. He says that my brother will be reborn in California for additional drowning in a hot tub. He says the only way God will cease drowning my brother is when my brother’s soul loses its fear of water.”

  “Who created your brother?” Precious bellowed like she was witnessing in church. “Who blow de spark of life into dat worthless soul? You? De Prime Minister of India? It was God! If-He create de soul, He have every right to drown it. Drown me, oh Lord,” Precious howled to the ceiling, arms outstretched wide enough to engulf crystal chandelier. “Drown me not fifty-four times, but three thousand score. Drown me again and again, for when I walk wid de Lord, I have no fear.”

  “He won’t drown you,�
�� Mannish replied coolly. “He only drowns those who are afraid of water. This is altogether too thorough.”

  Later that night Precious asked Jamaican Jesus what he thought of the factotum’s opinion. Jesus scoffed and said she shouldn’t listen to Coolie man, because they were harum-scarum and had no brain. Nevertheless, Precious was not appeased.

  It was a good thing for that Mannish that she was not God, she grumbled as she snuggled down to sleep, for if she had her own way she would drown the blasphemous wretch this very night in his own mouthwater to teach him the difference between Almighty God and an earthbound Coolie.

  Chapter 18

  Precious was under strict orders to bathe the dog three times a week, and the mistress would occasionally comb through his stubby body from head to toe and raise the dickens if she found even a comatose flea clinging half-dead to a tuck of fat. She would stomp into the presence of Precious and fling the flea on a nearby table with a sneering, “Look at what I found on Riccardo!” as if she expected flea deadweight to shatter the glass tabletop and make Precious’s malingering eardrums ring. After two such admonishing incidents, Precious began to carefully bathe the dog.

  During the first days of bathing, Precious tried to maintain a carefree banter with the animal, but was soon exhausted in her search for appropriate topics. Then she had an inspiration: While bathing the dog, she would recite scripture. Since dog couldn’t tell scripture from a jingle, if she used a conversational rather than a homiletic tone, dog soothing was bound to result while giving her upliftment from the recitation. So the next time Precious knelt down to scrub the dog, she began reciting the Old Testament book of Leviticus, which she knew by heart. The dog whimpered and stood stock still, hypnotized by prophecy.