by Peter Howe
The woman returned home from work shortly after midnight. She put the key in the lock, turned it, opened the door, and was surprised to find the apartment in complete darkness. She switched on the light, and as she did so Waggit woke up. He started to run toward her, and then looked around. The room was covered in white fluff, the stuffing from his bed, the filling that gave it the deliciously squishy feeling Waggit loved so much. Worse still, in the middle of all this debris was the woman’s shoe, or at least what remained of it. It was chewed beyond recognition. In a flash Waggit remembered that in his fear he had torn frantically at the bedcover and pulled out its contents, and then he had attacked the shoe. Why he had done these things he didn’t know.
As if all this weren’t bad enough, it also brought back a long forgotten memory of a similar incident that happened while he was living with his first family, the one that had abandoned him in the park. On that occasion he had been beaten for his wrongdoing, and he had no reason to think that he would avoid punishment this time. He cringed against the kitchen wall, trying to make himself as small a target as possible.
When the woman saw the chaos she put her hand to her mouth and gave a little cry. Slowly she turned to Waggit.
“What happened? Why did you do this?” she said.
Waggit blinked at her. His eyes were still adjusting to the brightness.
“Of course, I forgot to leave the light on. You were frightened of being alone in the dark. Oh, you poor boy,” she said. “I’m so sorry. How stupid and unthinking of me. How could I leave without turning on the light? You must have been terrified. Please forgive me. I will never do it again.”
Waggit was still pressed up against the wall awaiting his punishment, but to his surprise she simply put down the bag in which she carried her music and started to clean up the mess.
The following night she went out to work again, only this time she left all the lights on and soft music playing from the machine on the bookshelf. She also left Waggit on a brand-new bed with a pair of her old socks that she used to wear around the house, and a squeaky, plastic high-heeled shoe. He spent a pleasant evening alone.
If there was one thing that mad Jack was right about, it was the number of dogs who lived in the building. It often seemed to Waggit that they outnumbered the humans. Of all of them it was Jack and a golden retriever named Polly who became his closest friends. One of the disadvantages of living with a human was that you couldn’t choose your hanging-out companions but got to be with whichever dogs your owner chose. Fortunately Jack and Polly’s owners were good friends of the woman, and they would often visit one another’s apartments and let the dogs play while they talked and drank coffee. Polly’s owner lived at street level, and when the gathering was there Jack spent most of his time on the back of a couch furiously barking at passersby on the other side of the window.
“There’s another one. Look at him. Too many meals there, my friend. Got to cut back. Oh no, here comes a runner! You call that running. I can walk faster than that. Hey, hey, you, I don’t like the look of you. Move on or I’ll come after you. It’s the mailman; here comes the mailman. I love the mailman. He’s so frightened of me. Hey, mailman, I’m in here. Don’t worry, I’ll get you tomorrow.”
This monologue would continue until Jack’s owner told him to shut up and swatted him off the couch. Then he would pounce upon Polly’s toys (his own were nearly all destroyed) and shake them furiously. It amused Waggit to see this play-acting, because it was what he had really done to kill the animals that he had caught in the park, and he wondered if Jack would be able to do it if his life depended upon it. He suspected he would, for the little dog seemed like a survivor.
The opposite of Jack, Polly was calm, and a good listener. She loved to hear Waggit describe his adventures and was thrilled when he told her about close calls with Ruzelas and confrontations with Tashi. For Polly these stories were fables from a different planet, not somewhere that was just a short distance from where the three of them lived. Even the language Waggit used to tell his tales was foreign. Polly and Jack had never heard of scurries, or longlegs pulling luggers, or flutters, or loners.
The feeling that they were different worlds was greatest when Waggit left the apartment and went to the park with the woman, often in the company of Polly and Jack and their owners. It seemed to him that there were two parks, the one that the team lived in and the one that other people and dogs visited. They both shared the same location, but they were very different. If your life didn’t depend on it, the park was a much more welcoming place, and of course, if you were with a human, you had nothing to fear from the Ruzelas.
The greatest excitement that Waggit had now was playing with Polly when they were both off the leash. The woman took him for walks in the park at least once a day, usually up the path that the horses used, but two or three times each week they would go to an area of open lawn not far from where Lowdown had fooled him into attacking the metal statue. Early in the morning people would take their dogs to this place and let them off their leashes. There would be as many as fifteen or twenty dogs, and they would chase the balls that their owners threw, or sticks that they found in the bushes, or simply cavort and wrestle with one another.
For all her gentle nature Polly played hard, rushing constantly for balls and wrestling with Waggit, often knocking him to the ground in her enthusiasm. He didn’t mind this, for she seldom hurt him, and indeed he was quite flattered that she chose to play with him over all the other dogs there. One day they were both taking a necessary break, their tongues wagging up and down as they gasped for air. Suddenly and breathlessly, she said to Waggit, “Aren’t you glad you don’t live here all the time?”
He had to stop and think about this. In the same way that he had been slow to admit he had been abandoned when Tazar first found him, he was equally reluctant now to believe that he would never rejoin the team. In fact the first time that he came to this place and the woman took off his leash his immediate thought had been that he could easily run back to the tunnel. He was faster than any of the humans and knew back routes and secret paths through the thickest bushes, so there was no way that he would be caught. Why he didn’t do it he wasn’t quite sure.
“Well,” said Polly, “are you or aren’t you?”
“To be honest, I don’t know,” he replied. “I don’t feel that I live like you and Jack. My life now seems sort of temporary. On the other hand,” he continued, “I suppose I always thought living with the team was temporary too.”
“But you’re one of us now,” she said with concern. “You’ve been rescued. There’s lots of rescued dogs here. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Don’t you feel like one of us?”
Before he could answer, Jack arrived, panting from the exertion of “killing” a plastic drink cup that someone had carelessly left on the ground.
“Lots of dogs here today. Lots of dogs. I like it when there’s lots of dogs. I don’t know why. Somehow I feel more at home. Safer maybe. How about you? What’ve you two been doing? I’ve been hunting. Caught a cup, two soda cans, and half a pretzel.”
Waggit remembered when half of a pretzel would have been dinner for two dogs, and was somewhat sorry that the overfed terrier had got there first, much as he liked him.
“Jack,” said Polly, “I was just saying to Parker that he was one of us now. Don’t you think?”
“Of course he’s one of us. Never been more sure of anything in my life. Well, for one thing he’s a dog, so that makes him one of us, and for another thing we like him. And he’s certainly not one of me, because I’m short and brown and white, and while he’s white, so parts of him could be one of me, he hasn’t got any brown, and furthermore he’s tall. And he couldn’t be one of you because you’re a sort of reddish brown, and he’s white, as I said before, and what’s more he’s a boy and you’re not, so if he’s not one of you and not one of me he must be one of us. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?”
Once again Waggit had the feeling that
the oxygen was being sucked out of the air when he listened to Jack’s monologue.
“Do you ever,” he asked when the terrier finally finished, “answer a question with a simple yes or no?”
“Well, it depends on what you mean by yes or no. If your intention when you ask a question is to get as much…”
“Jack!” yelled Polly. “Stop!”
One good thing about Jack was that he would shut up when told to.
“Ah, yeah, okay, fine, whatever,” he said. Even agreeing to stop talking took him more words than most animals.
The three women were ready to go home, and they gathered up their dogs, attached the leashes, and walked toward the park exit. The dogs trotted along happily together, and as they did Waggit thought more about Polly’s question. He liked both her and Jack, and most of the dogs who they played with in the morning, but he wasn’t sure that he felt like one of them, as Polly had put it. However, as more time passed he wasn’t sure that he felt like one of the team anymore either, and he certainly had quickly become used to the comforts of life with the woman. As he looked back on his short life it seemed to have had nothing permanent about it, but to have been a series of temporary situations. His fear was that he wouldn’t ever feel like “one of us,” whoever the “us” was.
When they got back to the apartment the woman took off Waggit’s leash.
“Okay, Parker my boy, what would you say to a little breakfast?” she said.
At first Waggit had been quite confused when the woman called him Parker. He thought it was just another of the words that she used to get his attention, in the same way that she called him “good boy,” “kid,” or “buddy,” and even “sunshine.” Polly had to explain to him that it was his new name. Of course he knew that he was really Waggit, and as far as he was concerned always would be, but he really didn’t mind what the woman called him as long as she put his bowl of kibble and meat on the floor every day.
That afternoon Waggit took another step along the path of becoming a pet. The woman put on his leash and said, “You’re probably not going to like this, Parker, but we need to see if you picked up any nasty diseases before I got you.”
And so they left the building and walked for several blocks until they arrived at a storefront with the words UPTOWN ANIMAL HOSPITAL painted on the window. The first thing Waggit noticed was the smell—a mixture of disinfectant and fear. He tensed his body as they entered the building.
“It’s okay,” said the woman. “Nothing bad’s going to happen to you.”
They checked in with the woman behind the counter, and then went to one of the seats that ringed the wall. In one corner of the room was a small, fluffy, white dog in a canvas carrier. It whined all the time.
“Don’t let them take you to her,” it yapped. “That woman should be locked up. Calls herself a doctor. She’s a devil, a torturer. Let me out of here. I’d sooner be sick; I’d sooner die!”
“Take no notice of him,” said a mutt sitting next to Waggit. “He’s an overbred, neurotic fool. As doctors go she’s perfectly fine. She’ll have you back to normal in no time.”
“But I’m already at normal now,” said Waggit. “I feel just fine.”
“Oh, what’s she doing, a checkup on you?” asked the mutt. “Did you just get rescued?”
“I guess so,” said Waggit, who hadn’t heard the term until Polly used it earlier that day.
“Yeah,” said the other dog, “I was rescued too. Nice people. Can’t complain. Don’t worry, all they do is look you all over, stick a couple of things in you, and then tell your owner what you already know—that there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s no big deal.”
And indeed that was the way it turned out. A few minutes later they were taken into a small room where he was weighed. Waggit wasn’t terribly happy about this, but everyone kept on telling him what a good boy he was, so he put up with it. Then in swept the doctor, who had the wonderfully appropriate name DR. CARING embroidered on her white lab coat.
“Hello, Laura,” said Waggit’s woman. “Nice to see you again.”
“Nice to see you too, although I must say I didn’t think it would be this soon,” said the doctor. “How long is it since Digby went to the great kennel in the sky?”
“It’s just over a month.”
“Where did this one come from?” asked the doctor.
“Well, I got him from the pound,” said the woman, “but I first met him in the park. He’d obviously been abandoned.”
“He’s cute,” said the doctor, turning toward Waggit. “Let me tell you, young man,” she said to him, “you have just won the dog equivalent of the lottery. This woman will spoil you to death if you’re not careful, and if I’m not careful.”
“I’m not that bad,” said the woman.
The doctor gave her a look that said “Yeah, right!” and then bent over Waggit. The sudden movement startled him and he snarled in fear.
“Hey,” said the doctor, “we’ll have none of that, but since you want to show me your teeth we’ll start the examination there.” She lifted up his jowls to expose two lines of very white incisors.
As the mutt in the waiting room had said, the doctor prodded him, listened to his heart, and stuck needles in him, some of which took blood out, others of which put stuff in. At the end of the examination she turned to the woman.
“Well, you’re in luck,” she said. “He’s as fit as a flea, none of which he has, by the way, which for a stray living in the park is remarkable.”
Little did she know how fanatical Tazar was about hygiene and the need for team members to take regular baths in the Deepwater.
Easy though the examination was, Waggit was glad to be out of there and rushed toward the door as they turned to leave. Without having to be told, he headed back in the direction of the apartment. The woman hurried to keep up with him.
“You have a clean bill of health,” she said, “so I suppose we’re stuck with each other.”
Waggit wasn’t listening. He had only one thing on his mind—supper! He was, after all, a three-meals-a-day dog now.
17
Waggit’s Good-bye
The first time that Waggit realized he was happy, he was lying on his back having his stomach scratched. The sun was streaming through the windows, warming his fur; the bed upon which he was lying was soft and squishy; the stomach that the woman was scratching was full. Life was good; he felt safe for the first time. Of course his life was different from the one he led in the park. One of the biggest changes was the way he was now dependent upon the woman for everything. If he wanted to go out he had to wait until she took him out; she decided which dogs he would play with; he ate when she gave him food, although he had discovered that if he stared at her hard enough she usually got the message. Gone were the days when he and Lowdown would suddenly decide to wander off to the Bigwater, or when dinner depended upon what you could hunt or scavenge. Life was much more structured now, and this was the price that he paid for the happiness he was feeling.
He could only live this way because he had begun to trust the woman. He relied upon her for everything, and she had not let him down, and although he didn’t fit into the life of a house dog the way that Polly and Jack did, the fit was good enough. He felt that he could finally relax and let down his defenses. The only cloud that cast a shadow on his happiness was that the team didn’t know what had happened to him. He felt a responsibility as the only dog who had ever come back from the Great Unknown to tell them about his experience. And he missed them. Every time he and the woman walked along the horse path he would scour the bushes looking for one of them. There were times when he thought he saw a pair of eyes or a flash of fur, but nothing more. It worried him that his decision to stay with the woman would mean that he would never again see his friends.
The woman had been working a lot recently, and this meant that Waggit was alone at night. Although he didn’t like it he was used to it now. It was during one of his nights alone that he came
up with a plan. The next evening the woman got ready to leave for work, settled him on his bed, checked to see that he had an adequate amount of water in his bowl, patted him on his head, and left through the front door. It was now the middle of the summer and the day had been hot, so the air-conditioning was working in the apartment. This meant that all the windows were shut tight to keep the cool air in. However, Waggit knew that there was one window in the bathroom that she kept open a few inches. He waited for a while after she left, since it was not unusual for her to leave behind her music or cell phone and come rushing back in to retrieve the forgotten object. Sure enough, she came back in a few minutes.
“Stupid cell phone,” she said, as if it were the cell phone’s fault that it had been left in the kitchen. She picked it up, said good-bye to Waggit again, and rushed through the front door. When he decided that she had really gone, he went to the bathroom and, sure enough, there was an opening big enough for him to get his head through.
He climbed up onto the toilet that was under the window, after knocking the lid down with his nose. He then stuck his head through the window. The gap was too small for him to crawl through, so he went as far as he could and pushed up with all his might. At first the window didn’t budge, and he thought he might have to forget the idea, but on the second heave he felt it give a little. The third time was a charm, and it went up so quickly he fell out. He landed on the metal staircase outside the window with a thump that knocked the wind out of his body for a while. He got up, caught his breath, and quickly ran down the stairs. He had a limited amount of time before the woman returned, but he also had to make sure that none of the building’s residents saw him as he made his way down to street level. Or almost street level, as it turned out, for the staircase stopped at the second floor. It ended with a ladder that didn’t reach the ground.
He wasn’t sure what to do next. Looking down, he saw that it was obviously too far for him to jump. A cat might have made it, but Waggit had never wanted to be a cat, a species he viewed with a certain amount of contempt. He leaned against the ladder to get a better view, and suddenly to his surprise it started to slide down under his weight. He leapt back, and then realized what he had to do. Very carefully he hooked one paw around the outside of one of the rungs, and swung himself out and grabbed on to the ladder with his other three paws as best he could. With him stuck in this precarious position the ladder started to go down. He could feel himself slipping, and clung on desperately until, just a short distance from the ground, he fell. As he landed on the sidewalk below, the ladder began to go up again. It was obvious that however he was going to get back into the apartment, it wouldn’t be this way.
