My Dog Skip

by Willie Morris

  I often suspected that Skip had a natural compulsion toward repulsive smells, though not those as heightened as the skunk's, which had so debilitated him previously. The truth is, however, that he enjoyed wallowing in various peculiar substances and unusual elements and would come home with these vile odors on him—please do not ask me what. My mother refused to allow him in the house until these odors of their own accord wore off. It suggests something about the sweep of those war days, however, that my mother, who occasionally bought Evening in Paris perfume at the drugstore, would in such instances greet Skip at the door: “He's got Evening in Berlin on him again!” or: “Now, dread it, he's wearin’ some Evening in Tokyo!”

  As vivid as yesterday I remember the springtime Friday nights of school, my friends and Skip and I strolling along the broad boulevard in our blue-and-yellow Cub Scout caps on the way to a war movie downtown: First Yank into Tokyo, perhaps, or The Fighting Seahees, or The Purple Heart. The radios from the imposing houses blared the war news from London or the Pacific, or the words of Roosevelt or Churchill echoing out into the supple darkness, while Skip roamed among the wisteria or rhododendrons or tulips along the way. There was something in this I sensed, just a shred of boyhood emotion and memory: that in the echoes of the radios in the boulevard domiciles lay the fragile, beleaguered fate of us. How to know this then? It was there somehow in the trees and lawns, the birds and the wind chimes, the clouds and stars, and even in Old Skip's roam-ings in the dew-touched shadows. It was along this very boulevard, on another night, D-Day, 1944, that Henjie and Muttonhead and I tied tin cans to the end of a long string and pulled them along the middle of the street in a noisy commemorative parade, with Skip moving along right behind the cans.

  The day the Japanese surrendered and the war was over, Skip and I were in the house with the old handyman, Tol-bert, who was hanging some wallpaper. We waited all day for the announcement the radio said was coming. Tolbert was unable to get much work done because of the excitement, so we threw a baseball in the yard for a while, and shelled pecans, and shot a few baskets, and tossed sticks for Skip, and got him to climb the elm tree for squirrels, while the radio roared out at us from the bedroom window. Then Truman, the new president, came on and said the Japanese had given up, and Tolbert and I shouted and leapt and danced around and hugged each other, and Skip, catching the mood, leapt and danced around too. And we whacked each other on the back and leapt some more, and then I sent Skip to Bozo's for some bologna to celebrate.

  ••••••• 5 •••••••

  Chinaberry Fights, a Girl, and a Little Kitten

  SKIP AND I were young then, and pretty much inseparable, and took life on together, sometimes mindlessly, I guess, as youth usually does, with all the absorbing recklessness of being young. But we had quiet moments too, mysterious and tender, and usually these were when we were all tired out. Lying in the bed before sleep, hearing the lambent whispers of the pecan trees in the breeze or the haunting nocturnal call of the Memphis to New Orleans train, I would put my hand on him and feel the beating of his heart. He always loved to be rubbed on the back of his neck, and when I did this he would yawn and stretch and reach out to me with his paws, as if trying to embrace me. What was he thinking about, I wondered. The day's adventures? The mischief-making next to come? My father had built a tree house for us in our elm tree in back, a solid plank floor nailed across two sturdy limbs, with a roof overhead of tin and fading branches. Often in the languid nights Skip and I would climb up to this private place and absorb the sounds of nature all around and look up at the moon. I would whisper to him about things of growing up.

  One of those subjects was Rivers Applewhite. I had known her since we were two years old. We were in the fifth grade now, and she was the prettiest girl in our class, but she was not a demure kind of beauty. She wore her dark brown hair short, sometimes the way the models did in the library's copies of Harpers Bazaar, to offset her willowy grace. She had deep green eyes, and in spring and summer she was always brown as a berry from all the time she spent in the sun. She smelled of trees and clover and sunshine and grass. Since we had been around each other so long, I think she knew me almost as well as Skip did. I am also pleased to say she was not a tomboy; who in his proper senses would want a girl to kick a football farther than he could, or outrun him in the fifty-yard dash?

  She was also very partial to Old Skip, and would bring him parched peanuts, and cotton candy when the county fair was on, and Skip was a regular fool about Rivers Applewhite, sidling up to her with his tail wagging, putting his wet black nose against the palm of her hand, jumping and gyrating in her presence like the craziest creature alive. Unlike some of the other girls, she would never so much as consider telling the teachers on anybody, and to this day I cannot recall a single traitorous or deceitful act on her part. Kind, beautiful, full of good fun and cheer, she was the best of feminine symbols to all the unregenerate boys. All of us, dogs and boys alike, were a little bit in love with Rivers Applewhite. I remember her in a white summer dress, one day shortly before Christmas, walking up a sidewalk of Main Street under the bright holiday tinsel. Skip and I were driving in our green DeSoto and saw her from half a block away, recognizing her from behind by the way she walked. As we got up close behind her near Kuhn's Nickel and Dime Store, I noticed that she rippled along that sidewalk, and that when she passed by people coming her way, just smiling calmly and being her jaunty self, they got a smile on their faces too. And when Skip saw her that day, he did something he never did before or since: he jumped out the passenger window of the car, landed impeccably on all four feet, and ran to her in affectionate salutation. So Skip knew Rivers, and the sound of her name, and when I whispered about her under the moon in the backyard, his eyes turned bright and he rummaged a little closer to me.

  On his fourth birthday, she even gave a party for him in her backyard, inviting a dozen or so of the neighborhood dogs and their owners. The trees and shrubs were festooned with colorful balloons and ribbons, and from her kitchen she brought out a birthday cake consisting of separate layers of ground meat and bologna in the approximate shape of Skip himself, with four candles on top and the inscription Happy Birthday, Old Skip¡ written meticulously in salted peanuts. We all sang “Happy Birthday” to him, and then Rivers put the cake on the ground for the honoree and the other dogs. That cake was gone in about forty-five seconds.

  I have myriad other memories of Rivers and Skip together, and here are just two of them:

  It was about six weeks after the end of the war, an early evening of halcyon October. It was a Friday and we did not have school the next day—a chilling evening with gusting winds, which made you feel good, and happy to be alive. We shouldve felt lucky to be alive, what with all the dead children and people all over the world, the starving neglected children wandering around sad, destroyed Europe that we had read and heard about, but I guess we did not know how really fortunate we were: I mean, just to have a chinaberry fight, and to be in America under a big moon with food enough to eat and friends all around, and a trusted dog like Skip, even if they did want to slay you with chinaberries. The harvest moon was perched like a huge orb at the horizon, orange and glimmering and bigger, it seemed, than the world itself. We had planned the chinaberry fight around my house on the boulevard, Rivers, Henjie, Bubba, Peewee, Big Boy, Skip, and the others. In a chinaberry fight you need a slingshot, with a tight long rubber band attached to the wooden Y-shaped base. Our next-door neighbor had the largest chinaberry tree in town. We picked the chinaberries from the tree and put them in a cardboard box before dividing them up. These chinaberries were hard and round as marbles, and when they hit you on the skin from a proper slingshot they really hurt. They stung almost as bad as a bee, and made puffy little blisters on the skin. In a china-berry fight, when a berry from an opponent struck you, according to the rules and regulations of that long-ago day, you were dead, and presumably exempt from the fray.

  Skip could do many things, but s
ince he could not shoot a slingshot he was deemed a neutral in this combat, much, say, like the Swiss Red Cross. But this did not prevent him from his fervid relish of the developing scene, and he especially delighted in moving swiftly from one opponent to another in a vociferous dance, particularly when a direct shootout was imminent. With him as the sole noncombat-ant, we chose sides (I picked Rivers first), dug our individual supply of chinaberries from the box, and in the invigorating moonglow went our separate ways. In less than ten minutes I crept up on Henjie in the back alley and killed him with a chinaberry to the left nostril. He moaned and died. A few minutes later, as he lay cravenly shrouded in the tomato vines of our Victory garden, I dispatched Muttonhead with a shot to the abdomen. Then I began crawling on hands and knees toward my neighbors house. Without warning Skip leapt out of the darkness onto my back and started barking. I pleaded with him to go away and not betray my whereabouts, and he forthwith did so. When I reached the house, I snuck into the thick shrubs at the side, lay silently on my back, and waited to ambush another adversary. I held my breath in anticipation.

  I had been in my secret spot not very long when I looked up. I saw something that curdled my deepest blood. Just above me, only two or three feet away, was a gigantic spider-web. Even in the shrubbery it glistened in the ghostly moonlight. The web was thick and tangled, and in the middle of it was the biggest, meanest spider I ever saw. It was about the size of my clenched fist, with evil yellow stripes and tangerine coronets and a fiery green crown and menacing black dots on a pulsating body the color of that nights harvest moon. It was weaving back and forth in its great sinewy web. It seemed to be writing something in its own web¡ Was this the “writing spider” of the breed the old people had told us about since earliest childhood, which wove the name of its sorry victim before hypnotizing and then assaulting him with its deadly Delta poison? Even at that moment, the spider, with its skinny ebony legs and quivering green antennae and thousand surreptitious eyes, had seen me supine on the earth beneath it and was slowly descending toward me. Its venomous descent mesmerized me. I could not move or speak. I was paralyzed.

  All around me I heard the shouts and yelps of my comrades being killed by chinaberries. I heard Skip barking in the distance, and prayed that he would come to me right now. I lay there breathless and suspended. The gigantic, hideous spider moved downward in its silken web. I lost all track of time. Long moments must have passed. A half hour? An hour? Both sides in the fight were surely long since dead; the game was over. I heard voices from far away: “Where's Willie?”

  The spider was at the base of its web, examining me. I could smell its evil odor. My throat was choked with thick, cottony saliva, the saliva of abject fear. Then, from just outside the shrubs, I heard a friendly whisper, followed by another bark. It was Rivers—and Skip.

  “He's around here somewhere,” Rivers said. “Oh¡ There he is, Skip!” She later said she saw my feet protruding in the fallen leaves. “A writing spider!” she shrieked.

  I felt her hands on my desperate ankles. She pulled me right out of there, just as the spider was about to leap onto my face. A long strand of web dangled from my nose, and I sneezed. Rivers laughed. “A close call!” she said. She bent down and hugged me. She had never done that before. “You even get in trouble with spiders.”

  But it was not over. As Rivers and I stood there, Skip thrust his nose into the shrubs and saw the spider. He began growling. “Skip¡ No!” Rivers and I shouted in unison. Before we could restrain him, he leapt wildly toward the spider. I was terrified, envisioning the characters S-K-I-P appearing any moment on the web. He tripped and fell, and now the spider began moving down toward him. Wordlessly I grabbed one back paw and Rivers the other, and we pulled him out of the bushes by his legs just as Rivers had pulled me.

  One afternoon when Skip was three, a homeless starving kitten, three months old, perhaps, showed up at our back steps. Skip was lying in the shade of our elm tree when the poor little creature arrived. She was white and black like Skip, with translucent blue eyes, and she had been so neglected that her ribs were like ridges under her fur, and there was a raw jagged cut on her stomach. I was sitting on the steps and watched as the kitten walked right up to Skip.

  I never saw such a transformation in him. Up till now he had been wholeheartedly indifferent to cats of all sizes and species, ignoring them to the point of regally walking away from them when they appeared fortuitously in our neighborhood, but when that little kitten hobbled up to him he rose and looked at her, then began licking her on the face, and when she lay down in the shade of the elm, he lay next to her. He felt sorry for her, I suppose, but he was also smitten by her, and his response to her struck something in me, too. The little kitten tugged at my heart.

  Like Skip, I had had no experience with cats, and had been as apathetic to them as he ever was, but it took no genius with cats to see that this little one had just about given up. No one in my household knew about cats either—we were all dog people, and always had been—but Rivers had two cats, whom she doted on. I went inside and telephoned her, and she was there on her bicycle in five minutes. She examined the kitten, then held her closely in her arms. “Take care of her/’ she said. Til be back in a jiffy.” She returned with an infant's milk bottle with a nipple on top, a can labeled “Milk for Motherless Kittens,” and a tablespoon of medicinal ointment. In the next two or three days, I was touched by the sight of Rivers and Skip trying to nurse the diminutive visitor back to life. As Rivers fed her, Skip hovered about like an accomplished pediatrie intern; that kitten could not have received better attention at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The kitten began to purr, and to move around with a little more spirit, and when she slept, it was in the crook of Skip's legs, not unlike the way he slept with me. Often the little kitten would gaze at Skip, and hug him with her paws. Rivers came every day for a week to check up on her. She named her Baby.

  Suddenly one day, the kitten began to cough and retch, and then to tremble all over. As Skip gazed down at her lying on the grass, he nuzzled her with his nose, glancing up at me questioningly. Once more I telephoned Rivers. When she arrived, she held the kitten close to her. She died in Rivers's arms. Rivers started crying, the tears dropping down her cheeks in tiny rivulets, then put the kitten on the ground, and she, Skip, and I just stood there looking at her. I got a shovel from the Victory garden, and Rivers and I recited the Lord's Prayer before we buried her under the elm tree in the backyard. For weeks Skip acted sad and strange, and a very long while after that, in another city far away, Rivers Applewhite, whom I had not seen in twenty years, confessed to me she had never gotten over that kitten, and wondered if Old Skip ever had either.

  When my mother eventually found out about Skip's and my confrontation with the writing spider, she banished all chinaberry fights in our neighborhood for two years. Even worse, along about then she took on eight more piano students, to the dismay of Old Skip and me.

  My mother was of an old, aristocratic family that had been dispossessed after the Civil War. She was the best piano player in the state. Although we never suffered hardship, we were by no means rich, and she supplemented the family income by teaching piano. There was a Steinway baby grand in our parlor that occupied more than half the room. On late afternoons when it began to grow dark, Skip and I would listen to the music from up front. It was not the music the pupils repeated over and over that we heard, but the songs my mother played when she told the children, “Now I'll play your piece all the way through like Mr. Mozart would want it played.” I can somehow hear her music now, after all the years, and remember the leaves falling on some smoky autumn afternoon with Skip there with me, the air crisp and the sounds of dogs barking and the train whistles far away.

  It was the keyboard racket made by her students, however, that drove Skip and me to distraction. Rivers Applewhite was about the only one of them any good at the piano, and when she came to take her lessons, Skip and I would sit out of sight in the adjoining room a
nd listen as she sweetly played her etudes and sonatas. The others were the most noisy and off-key creatures I have ever heard, and as they played their cacophonous exercises over and over, Skip's ears would twitch almost as agonizingly as they had during Hitler's radio monologues, and he would beg me to take him outside or anywhere else, for which I needed only scant excuse. One of the pupils, a tattletale in our school class named Edith Stillwater who had a small off-color wart on her nose, was playing so fiendishly one day that I thought the baby grand might go up in smoke; I cannot begin to describe those profane chords. Skip himself had had quite enough. His ears were making circular movements like miniature windmills. He rose from where he had been lounging on the carpet, slipped into the parlor, climbed onto the top of the piano, and in one of his famous leaps nosedived onto the keyboard in front of which my mother and her tone-deaf protegee sat, accidentally making a chord with his paws and posterior that had more harmony to it than any ever contrived by Edith Stillwater. For this, supplementing the ban on chinaberry wars, he was made to sleep under the house at night for an entire week.

  My mother also played the pipe organ in the First Methodist Church. Sometimes, early on Sunday mornings before anyone else arrived, Skip and I would walk down to the church and sit in a back pew in the empty sanctuary while she practiced under a beautiful stained-glass window. She played “Abide with Me/’ ”Rock of Ages/’ “In the Garden.” The music drifted through the tranquil chamber and made Skip and me drowsy, and we would stretch out on the bench and fall fast asleep.

  In ecclesiastical circles, Skip was best remembered for a singular occurrence that elderly Methodists in the town, I am told, still to this day discuss. It happened during the regular eleven A.M. Sunday church service—in the summertime, before air-conditioning, a broiling forenoon of August, with all the church doors open. On the organ my mother was accompanying Mrs. Stella Birdsong, who had the most inappropriate surname in all the annals of music—a heavy-set matron with an askew left eye, half-glass, half-real, it seemed to us, although that may not have been possible from the ophthalmological perspective—who was known in our area for her shrill, disharmonious high soprano notes, which caused chandeliers to rattle in her all-too-frequent performances. Henjie and I were seated on the aisle in a middle pew when he nudged me and pointed toward his ear as a signal for me to listen to something. Through the open door came the unmistakable sound from down the street of several dogs barking individually, and then in chorus, and getting closer by the minute. One of these barks, I perceived, belonged to Old Skip. Mrs. Birdsong had now begun her song, a sonorous religious composition with which I was vaguely familiar, which would be capped by a shrill, metallic high C at its apex. As she was approaching this culmination, suddenly Skip and five or six other dogs of our acquaintance, of all colors, shapes, and sizes, burst through the open door, all bunched together and sniffing at each other as they proceeded down the aisle. At that precise instant, as the dogs had progressed halfway down the aisle, Mrs. Stella Birdsong hit her lengthy high C, the most ear-splitting quaver I ever heard in my entire existence. And as she held on to it with the tenacity of an iron riveter, Skip and the other dogs stopped in their tracks, caught there in evanescent frieze, each of them turning his head in the direction of the singer. Then Skip, with a ferocity I had seldom acknowledged in him, lifted his snout and began to howl, and then the others joined in with him, howls of such devilish volume, and amplified by Mrs. Birdsongs continuing high C warble, that Henjie and I and others in the congregation put our hands to our ears. Just as swiftly as Skip and the other dogs had begun their wails, they turned about in concert and dashed out the door, and I could hear them still howling half a block away. From the pew behind us an elderly character not particularly known for his piety nudged my shoulder and said, “Them dogs got the old-time religion”