Dog Years

by Mark Doty

  I say we have one small dog. This results, invariably, in our being assigned a room in the back of the motel, out of harm’s way, where the barking of the alleged miniature creature won’t disturb anyone. We pray for a room on the first floor. Perfect. Then, under cover of darkness, the dogs go in first, followed by the not-to-be-narrated cats, water and food bowls, portable cat box, a couple of suitcases, voilà—we’re in! Everyone collapses under the air-conditioning. The surprising thing about these evenings is that the dogs seem to love them—each sprawled on a motel bed, after dinner, the AC riffling their coats, they’re the image of contented rest. The cats are far less pleased, but our single attempt at sedation produces an awful scene: barbiturate staggering across the motel furniture, grim caterwauling, like some nightmare of drugged starlets on the skids. Now we just try to reassure them and then let them hide under the furniture. Of course, we can’t leave, not with this menagerie, so we either have to send out for pizza, or else one of us drives out to see what can be found—which, unsurprisingly, ranges from the merely acceptable to the reprehensible. It’s a debased form of travel, no doubt about it. Every morning, we hustle out early, before anybody sees quite how many sentient beings have shared the room for the night. We can’t really stop anywhere for long and leave all those creatures in the car. We have many short walks, but we can’t stay out long, because the cats must be left behind. So, we wind up just focusing on getting there, the long, unrolling highway, the tires chewing up the miles.

  Odd, then, that there’s something delightful in the memory, all of us in our icebox of a dumpy motel room, sprawled out on the teal-and-raspberry bedspreads, Paul and I reading or, if we’re too tired, letting CNN just scroll by, the dogs so happy to be still they don’t move a muscle.

  Our first year in Iowa City, we rent a big old house, unfussy, relaxed, with idiosyncratic plumbing and a strikingly long bathtub. It comes with an immensely heavy butcher-block table in the kitchen, to which, we’re told, another visiting poet used to tie his unregenerate Rottweiler. One day, a huge maple tree falls in the backyard, victim of one of those ferocious Midwestern thunderstorms; we’re lucky it doesn’t take our entire household with it. We walk in the afternoons in an extraordinary park—the Hampstead Heath of Iowa City, a poet friend calls it—where mowed grass gives way to woods, and woods to yellow slopes hayed a while ago and now turned to prairie meadows where flocks of deer graze, or do till we draw near. We can lie on our backs in the fields, and watch the huge, white clouds pile up and pass, great tectonic plates of aerial continents.

  Our second year in Iowa City, we have a major animal conflict. The school’s found us a place to live by following our “one small dog” strategy, and so we wind up way out in Flatview Acres, a dull cul-de-sac of split-levels the color of cream-of-mushroom soup. We rent the home of a professor on sabbatical and his fussy wife. I am not at all comfortable with this deception, but the administrator who takes care of such things at school insists that this is the only way two guys with four pets will ever rent a house anywhere near here, so there seems nothing to do but go along with the ruse.

  The landlady leaves pages of instructions and prohibitions, mostly concerning said diminutive pet. Her concerns might be more understandable were the house a trove of, say, delicate antiques, but it’s far from it. The furniture’s from the local equivalent of IKEA, and the interior—all beige and cream, as though any bit of color would be an unwelcome outburst—is distinguished only by gloomy etchings and a large, spiky wire sculpture of a rat caught on a treadmill. The professor’s wife, it seems, did her dissertation on some form of brain research. An entire area of the basement is forbidden to us; we enjoy speculating about what gothic terrors it might contain. A particularly sullen teenage boy, shoulders curved around his narrow chest, appears and mows the lawn. When I go to pay him, he looks like he’s not sure he really wants to touch anything that’s come from my wallet.

  We are totally paranoid, of course, about damaging the vile house, and probably the dogs can sense this, because they seem to become extra destructive, as if our efforts to contain their effects made everyone more nervous and doomed any such plans. One night, a raccoon perches in a tree outside the bedroom window, like an evil sprite sent by the wicked landlady, and the boys go nuts at the window frame. The neighborhood is full of poor, displaced deer, who hang out all night on the trimmed, fertilized lawns; when one wanders by the screen door one afternoon, Beau attempts to go right through it, and more or less does.

  Soon we receive word that the suspicious landlady is on her way back to Iowa City from whatever far-flung city she’s spending the semester in; she’s “forgotten her computer” and plans to drive a dozen hours or so to come get it. We go into action. All evidence of animals is squirreled away, mostly into the car. Cats go into crates, dogs into the back of the wagon, and we’re off for the day. Just to escape, we drive to Wisconsin, which turns out to be rather pleasant, and, to my delight, we discover the Dickeyville Grotto, a monument of outsider art built in the early years of the century by an exiled Alsatian priest who longed for the baroque architecture of home, and so decided to make some out of whatever was at hand. It’s a temple of idiosyncrasy, just the kind of art I like, and we’d never have found it if we weren’t on the lam.

  We are, however, caught. One day, when we’re not home, the owners’ daughter appears, and promptly reports to her mother that all four of our animals were perched together, napping on the white living-room couch. This is plainly an untruth; the cats wouldn’t go anywhere near those dogs, much less sleep with them, and the wobbly modular couch would slide around hopelessly anyway, if any pet tried to jump up on it. But it does make for a dramatic vision to strike horror into a mother’s heart.

  Recriminations, accusations. We come clean. I have a terrific fight at work with the woman who made the housing arrangements, a shouting match of startling proportions, in which she cries out, “Mark, I don’t care if you sleep on the fucking street!” She is having a very bad day, but so much for the vaunted privilege of academe. The owners of the house do not sue us or send us any startling bills, but I suspect it’s for a sad and disturbing reason. Just before we go, we get a death threat on our answering machine, clearly left by one of the neighbor boys—that same sour boy who’d come to mow the lawn? “Queer I’m gonna kill you,” he says. Which seems to be enough, for the owners of the house, to put things in a bit of perspective. We are delighted to leave their neighborhood behind, and, of course, the dogs are happy to get in the car to go anywhere.

  Even in the awful suburbs, there were long walks in the forest nearby, while the leaves turned every imaginable shade of yellow, and deer stirred in the oak groves near twilight, stepping high on their weirdly delicate legs. Beau would disappear on one of his vast, looping runs, and, in a while, come bounding up the railroad ties that shaped the rustic steps, tongue askew, radiating pleasure in his own speed. Then we’d walk the grassy shoulder of the road to the CreeMee stand, with its painted, wooden ice-cream cone towering into the bluing air, and both dogs would wait patiently to finish my cone.

  In a borrowed house in the woods in Vermont, one summer, Paul plays the piano especially for Beau, who comes and lies down on the braided rug beside the bench, stretches out to his full length, and lets the music vibrate down the length of him. Liturgical music, Joni Mitchell, bits of show tunes, Laura Nyro—Beau goes straight to the piano whenever Paul begins to play, and takes in any genre equal delight.

  Our first year in Salt Lake, we discover the Benches, the scrubby foothills of the mountains that ring two sides of the town. We live in a high, Victorian neighborhood near the university (the only place in town where the cars sport bumper stickers like LOVE YOUR MOTHER or THANK GODDESS), so the Benches are minutes away, by car, and startlingly wild. Mule deer trot above us on rocky bluffs; we mount a crest, and a coyote lopes off, looking back over his shoulder. Beau tries to follow, running full tilt on the scratch of a hiking path that winds up the side of
the mountain, but he’s no match for his wild cousin who runs those slopes every day of his life.

  One day, the four of us are high up on the bench-side—the foothills of the Wasatch Range—when we are stopped in our tracks by something large, dark, stirring in a small thicket up ahead. We move a little closer, and it dawns on Paul and me at once that this ungainly-looking thing, taller than a refrigerator, as wide as four refrigerators lined up, is a moose. A female, antlerless moose, contentedly consuming a small tree. She tears a branch from the trunk, she chews, seems to consider, chooses another; she doesn’t move from the neck down.

  I don’t have to do a thing to control the dogs; they both sit down as if commanded to do so, lean their heads forward, and watch as if this particular spectacle is one not to be missed.

  The Beau I first encountered would have run right up to that moose, immensity or no; his reserved, appropriate contemplation of the beast is evidence of the way he’s changed. In Provincetown, he used to swim after seals, who seemed very curious about their terrestrial cousins but also quite willing to keep swimming out farther and farther as Beau followed them along, till eventually he’d be just a dark speck in the distance, out in the winter sea. We’d be horrified, and more than once we were sure we’d lost him—and then he’d come running down the beach from wherever the current had pulled him, shivering, practically blue in the cold. The child, we used to say, is without limits.

  But now our joke is that he’s grown a neocortex, his brain evolved through a combination of love, exercise, fresh air, and an excellent brand of canned food called Triumph. He and Paul have connected during some times I’ve been away, in a way they couldn’t conjoin before, back when Beau was just wiggly attention to whatever bright stimulus appeared at the moment. There’s something thoughtful about him now; new qualities have emerged that we’d never really have expected: a dignity and poise, even an aspect of nobility. When he swims in the Great Salt Lake, water so thick with salinity it’s weirdly buoying, he rides up high on the small waves, his mouth closed, his dignified head sailing above the surface.

  Physically, he’s at his most strapping, big and bright. One day, a photographer comes to the house, to take some pictures for a literary publication; she snaps a shot of me at my desk, my eyebrows raised in the middle of making a joke. I’m never especially photogenic, but Beau looks like a radiant flare of solar well-being, standing at the foot of my desk, occupying a good half of my tiny study. The picture’s published in a book of postcard photos of poets. It’s a completely reassuring joy, six months later, when I’m far from home, in Ireland, missing the steady domestic supports of my life, and I walk into a bookstore in Galway and there, pinned to the wall, is that postcard of me and my shining friend.

  Being away, of course, necessitates that we find dog-sitters. There is no better profession than mine for one who seeks people interested in such work: graduate students are often far from home and from beloved animals, and often living in spartan conditions. Thus, asked if they’d like to spend a week in a comfortable house, with lots of good books, cable TV, and a stereo—and oh, four pets—they’re often delighted. When I have a class over to the house, I confess, I keep an eye out for a student who especially gravitates to the dogs.

  In this way, Arden and Beau made particularly splendid friends, and engraved themselves upon the imaginations of a number of young writers. Nuar took the dogs jogging along the beach, even managing to wear them out in the salty tide flats. Karen walked the deep trails by the Coralville Reservoir, down to the muddy red water, and cooked dinner for young poets while the dogs delighted in the company. Jenn read in bed in Provincetown, one dog sprawled on either side of the covers beside her, one head on each of her thighs. Julie, a former Alaskan dog-musher who once nearly froze to death on the back of a sled—and who reported that the rumor about freezing being pleasurable, even transcendent, seems to be entirely true—took them hiking in fields of sunflowers deep in the Wasatch.

  From time to time, though it’s no one’s preference, a kennel is a necessity. The strangest of these, on Stock Island, near Key West, was run by an old woman named Mae, who sat in her front room in a flowered housedress and said in a voice shredded by decades of Chesterfields, “They’ll be fine,” with absolutely no affect, as though she’d said it a thousand times. I look doubtful. She says, “What’s a matter? A night away from home won’t hurt ’em none.” Her services are alarmingly inexpensive. Her little stucco house is painted a peeling tropical green that might once have been lime, and there are stucco kennel-houses beside it, and, frankly, it seems like some kind of strange Haitian voodoo catacomb—but we don’t know anyone here, and must both be in Miami overnight, and there are other dogs around, so somebody trusts her. A little gravel yard is marked by a withering, defeated elephant’s ear. Am I just being a snob? This is the funkiest outpost of Florida life I’ve ever seen, but there’s no actual sign of trouble; it’s just that everything, Mae included, feels right on the edge of ruin, as if it’ll tumble into a swamp without a trace of its ever having been. The place smells of cold concrete and vegetation and, what? Cantaloupe?

  We are completely nervous about Mae’s kennel all our twenty-four hours in the sleek, couldn’t-be-farther-from-Mae world of South Beach. We go straight from the Key West airport to Mae’s, where we’re greeted with the same response we get any time we return: both dogs leap in the air in a way that seems unlikely if not impossible: standing up on their hind legs, they lift off, make exuberant twisting shapes in the air, land on all fours, then do it again. Completely none the worse for wear.

  It’s so hot in Houston when we arrive in August, so ferociously humid, that walking under the big live oak trees—with their thick arms that curve out low over the sidewalk and the street, and their roots that buckle the pavement into steep angles and declivities—is only possible in the early morning and evening, but even then we’re slapping at tiny mosquitoes that deliver a wickedly pointed sting. Soon we’re told about the dog park, a green belt beside Buffalo Bayou (in which, it’s rumored, urban alligators lie in wait, down there with discarded box springs and trash and Lord knows what. It’s said that a disgruntled letter-carrier has been tossing mail in there for years). There, in a wide, safe bowl of grass, dogs get off leash to play.

  Best of all, there’s a fountain—one of those splashy models that resembles, when the jets are on, a dandelion head gone to seed. It’s a marvel—in the air is a great, cool spray of water, the wind, when there is any, blowing a delicate spray of mist all over everyone, and below it a pond full of dogs of all shapes and colors, cooling. Arden, who’s nearly ten, is just arthritic enough now that he can’t quite make it over the rim on his own, most of the time, but once he’s in the water, he stands there, under a spray of liquid cool, letting himself get soaked all the way to the skin. Beau prefers walking in a circle around the fountain, or chasing a ball, though after a spate of running and leaping into the fountain, he also just likes to stand, immobile, while the more restless leapers and wrestlers flash all around him.

  There’s an overpass beside the park, and when we walk on the footpath beneath it, there’s an odd, acrid scent—the urine of generations of bats, who cleave to the concrete beams above. At a particular twilight hour, they wake and rise, in a steady, flittering stream, moving past the fountain, along the perimeter of the trees, down toward the bayou. We’ve run, Arden and Beau and I, on the path beneath them, that stream of small, twittering life above our heads, their motion making a kind of music in the dusk. They make me think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon’s legions, the spirits of the woodland wending their braided, airy path into the night—in the middle of the office towers of Houston.

  In this way, while we’re considering where to live, how to find or make a home for ourselves, five years pass.

  Entr’acte

  Ordinary Happiness

  We’re pulling up to a drive-in bank teller’s window. Mr. Beau’s in the backseat, head out the driver’s-side w
indow, and the weary teller lights up as soon as she sees him, for as soon as Beau spies a human face, he lets loose a radiant flurry of greeting—grinning, tongue lolling, tail wagging so intensely that the rear half of his body switches from side to side. It’s as if he’s known the woman all his life, though he’s never laid eyes on her. She produces a small biscuit, which is passed through the metal drawer that extends mechanically from her containing space into my containing space. She watches him gulp it down, then she says, “Their work is just to bring joy into this world.”

  Chapter Nine

  I’m worried about the fatty lump under Arden’s left leg, right where it joins his torso. Labs get these all the time, and while they’re unappealing, they aren’t dangerous. But this one’s awkwardly positioned, maybe contributing to his trouble with his hips. He seems to be perfectly cheerful and in a resoundingly good mood, but it doesn’t seem like a good idea to sport a lump the size of an orange. So, we’re looking for a new vet in Houston, and how we find Tandy Tupper (this is Texas, after all, and names have a different music than they do in the north) I cannot recall. She has an outrageously busy office, where it is very difficult to get her or anyone else’s attention, and once you do get five minutes of her time, her preferred method of operation is to fill you with alarm. Tandy Tupper has hair piled high and loose, lots of Native American–looking bangles, and a pleasant manner that shifts quickly into a heightened state of alarm when she senses a crisis to be met. Yes, Arden’s lump is so large that it could grow into the muscle under his haunch, yes, it must go. He’ll need first to fast, and then have some tests, to make sure he’s a good candidate for surgery.