Mothers of Sparta

by Dawn Davies

  “What?” I would say.

  “The music. Just look at it. It’s perfect, man.” And it would be there, bending in our field of vision, yielding to the sandstone, these sound-bent colors of Joni’s guitar, and lines and textures that were our shared, private language.

  “It is,” I would say.

  “Things are going great, in case you’re wondering. I’m up to some serious shit. No one in the world can do what I’m doing right now. You have to believe you’re the best if you’re going to be the best. You can’t pay attention to what anyone else is doing. You can’t worry about what people think. You have to just do your thing, man.”

  “Okay.”

  “Listen: I’ll be writing a solo album in a couple of years.”

  “I should be telling you that,” I would say.

  “No need, man. I’ve already been there. I time travel, too. I understand everything. But there’s a song called ‘Three Views of a Secret’ on there and it’ll be crazy. You’re gonna love it. It’s gonna blow your mind.”

  “I know,” I’d say. “It already did.”

  FOSTER DOG

  We once thought we were all that when it came to behavioral training. My husband and I had successfully trained our five children and our two dogs using many of the same methods, so it made sense that, when our egos inflated to an overstuffed and inappropriate level of pomp, we thought we were good enough to make a difference in someone else’s life. However well intended that kind of thinking is, there is usually a measure of conceit and danger that comes with it. Keep in mind that most of the time when I say “we” here, I mean “me.” My husband was not necessarily on board. Our dogs had settled down into adulthood, our children were on autopilot, and things were relatively quiet for the first time in a long time, and my husband liked it that way. I, however, felt a little restless and thought we should take in a foster dog. It would be a collaborative family effort, I declared, though my husband put his hands up in the air and walked out of the room when he heard this. Our job would be to train a surrendered dog to behave in the house, teach it some manners, and give it the social skills it needed to be attractive to potential owners. Because I loved terriers and had success in training other members of the breed, we got involved with a regional Bull Terrier Rescue League.

  Our dogs were not particularly complex. We had a thick, clumsy, loose-lipped black Labrador who liked to nap, and a grubby cairn terrier who ran around looking like he had just licked a light socket. Both were happy dogs who knew their place in our family.

  In my naïve mind, a bull terrier would be no harder to work with than any other kind of dog, though they had a reputation of being difficult to train. It is true: Bull terriers have a rare countenance. They mostly look like they’ve aspirated a huge snort of nitrous oxide and are commencing to ponder, while high, one of life’s unanswerable questions, while at the same time planning a nasty prank. They are a helix of both yin and yang—purity and wickedness cohabiting in a fur furnace.

  Soon the organization had a dog for us. He was called Moose, a snow-white bull terrier with a string of former homes. We were told he was owned by a busy veterinarian who needed a behavioral intervention so she could rehome him to a family that had more time to devote to him. Aside from being neglected, Moose also had a neurological problem common to that breed that caused him to compulsively spin in circles, and he was also completely deaf—a double whammy. We thought we might be able to teach him a few simple sign commands that would help his behavior. What the rescue organization neglected to tell us, but should have, was that our attempt at training him was a last-ditch effort to keep the dog from being euthanized.

  When his owner dropped him off at our house, she brought a crate, a food and water bowl, a choke collar, a prong collar, a barking shock collar, a dog seat belt for rides in the car, and two hundred dollars’ worth of drugs that a body could be stabbed for in certain social circles, including phenobarbital, Valium, and Xanax.

  She also provided a list of instructions on how to drug the dog, when to drug him, and under what conditions we were to add more drugs or lessen his dosages, and oh yeah, she told us, he was an uncontrollable barker. It was here that I had my first wobble of doubt. In fact, I considered backing down from the deal and asking the owner to take her hairy little addict back, but I watched him frolicking with the children in the living room, and in my naïveté, simply couldn’t do it. He looked okay. He sure was cute. Perhaps he wasn’t as bad as his meds made him out to be. Perhaps it was, as it so often is, a problem with the dog’s human leadership and this situation would be something we could fix.

  “He’s cute,” I told my husband. The dog nosed my son so hard in the crotch that it launched him into the air.

  “He looks like a demon,” my husband said. “Are you sure this is a dog?”

  The owner drove off shouting, “I’ll mail more meds if you start to run out!” And, “He’s not picky! He eats anything!” And, “Oh yeah! He can’t swim!”

  “What?” we shouted.

  “Bye!” And she left us with a fistful of barbiturates and a panting, pink and white anvil.

  Five minutes later he was at the bottom of the pool. We had taken him to the back patio to show him the lay of the land and also to let him relieve himself before he went inside. We watched him sniff around and explore our yard. He circled the pool, looked sideways at something that caught his eye, and stepped over the edge. My teenage daughter, fresh from the shower, leaped in after him and dragged him out. He snarfed water and shook his head and immediately started to circle the pool again. He appeared to have the balance of a drunkard, or a big-headed baby. He bent over the edge to bite a flower that had blown in and went in, face-first this time. We all leaped up again.

  “Wait!” I shouted. “Let’s see if he can swim at all.” We watched the dog sink to the bottom, spine first. He righted himself and then began to walk on the bottom of the pool toward the deep end.

  “Kids,” I said later, “this dog has the molecular density of bohrium. He cannot be alone outside, and must always be leashed.” The dog trotted over to the yard and squatted. He looked at us out of the corner of his eye and birthed a flaxen-haired Barbie head inside a large soft-serve pile of stool.

  Moose was a beautiful dog, if you like the look of a pink-tinged goblin with a head shaped like a football and a body shaped like a hot, steroid-injected potato. The heat that came off him made him feel as if he’d just popped out of a toaster. My daughters fell in love with him within twenty-four hours, and it wasn’t because of his good looks. It was because his nose was heart-shaped, and because his belly was bald hot and naked and he groaned when you rubbed it, and because when he couldn’t communicate, he would stare at your face and deaf bark at you, “Wark! Wark! Wark!” as if he were trying to impart something critical, and because when he put his twenty-pound head in your lap and you scratched gently under his chin, he would close his tiny, pea-sized eyes and smile. Plus we felt a little sorry for him, something you should never do with a dog, or with children.

  Moose quickly became engrossed by the swimming pool. He circled it with enthusiasm, tiptoeing around the six-inch coping as if he were on a tightrope, often biting floating flowers or bubbles. He would submerge his nose up to the lower rim of his eyelids, and bark underwater. He fell in fourteen times per day. When we pulled him out by his leash, he wagged his tail, and started another lap around the edge of the pool, scraping the pads of his feet pink, until he fell in and we had to haul him out by his leash, as if we were yanking up a lobster trap. We rubbed his pink nose and legs with SPF 50 sunscreen before he went outside. We played ball with him to develop a relationship with him. We walked him to discharge his energy. We played training games to build his trust, and it appeared, once in a while, to work. When my daughters took him out at night, he stood protectively between them and any unknown threats, such as the sweaty, shirtless, almost handsome teenage boys playing basketball up the street.

  Because he
had no awareness of the pool’s boundaries, and had the buoyancy of a Neanderthal, and seemingly no balance whatsoever, Moose was in danger of drowning on a daily basis. His owner mailed us a canine life vest, which we strapped on him whenever he was outside. He wore the vest with pride, like a superhero cape, launching himself over the edge of the deep end at a full sprint and swimming to the shallow-end steps, over and over. With the vest on he was able to fulfill his dream of swimming like a buoyant piglet.

  Moose was the pinkest dog we ever saw. Outside, he was happy, and when he was happy, or at least when he was cardiovascularly active, he turned pinker, a rose blush starting at the tip of his triangular nose and traveling up his Roman snout, and from the bottoms of his toes up his thick, muscled legs. He radiated heat. When he jumped in the pool, steam floated above him. After a few laps, his berry-colored belly cooled briefly, but his jowls still blushed like the cheeks of a German milkmaid. We threw the ball to him in the pool and he swam and swam. He showed little interest in any training or sign language. In order to get his attention, we stomped on the patio deck or the floor so he could feel the vibrations. Then we gave him a sign. After four weeks of signing “sit” and reinforcing it with treats or a toss of the ball, or a dip in the pool, he sat sporadically, when he remembered. If he felt like it.

  Inside the house, it was a different story. Moose followed my husband around constantly. He appeared to love men, but it was an anxious love, an annoying love with furtive glances and boundary issues, the love of a stalker. He galloped across all terrain, including the dining table, beds, and the other dogs’ backs. He spun compulsively in the kitchen, knocking into the backs of our knees until they buckled, causing us to spill plates of food, mugs of coffee. We kept him leashed in the house, and he was attached to one of us whenever he was outside of his crate, but this did not seem to matter. A few days into his visit with us, I was cooking dinner with Moose leashed to my belt loop. He stopped tangling himself in my feet and turned toward the patio, then gazed out with a look on his face I had never seen before, like he was scratching a deep itch. It took a moment to realize that he was filling our Labrador’s food bowl with urine.

  “Help me, here,” I said to my husband. The fish was beginning to burn in the pan.

  “This is not my project,” he said, but he unhooked Moose from my waist and led him outside, where the dog leaped into the pool, skin hissing, leash still attached, the fire inside him dampened for a few moments.

  Several times a day, possibly when medication doses were waning, Moose would begin to shark around the house and yard, looking for something to destroy. He enjoyed ripping apart whole coconuts, eviscerating “indestructible” dog toys, and plucking the laundry off the clothesline with an exuberant, slightly nasty, glee-filled smirk. He purposefully waited until we were watching to defecate on beach towels the kids dropped on the patio.

  One evening we were sitting at the outside table enjoying dinner. We speculated that Moose might be settling down.

  “He sure is cute,” we said. “Look how he enjoys being around us when we do things together.” The dog trotted jauntily around the pool wearing his life vest, nearly lost his balance, then recovered. He stood for a moment facing the canal, taking in the evening air. Then he looked over his left shoulder at us with a glint in his eye, hunched forward, and shot a hot horizontal stream of diarrhea five feet across the deck into the pool.

  “Nice!” said my husband.

  “Give him time,” we said.

  Moose loved his toys so much that he killed them and consumed them. Then whatever of the toy was not in his colon, he left in a pile, and turned a cold nose to. Occasionally he would revisit the pile of old toys and upset himself. He would bark at it, possibly regretting his decision. No matter, there was always something else to do—knock down a garbage can, vomit in my shoe, eat a worm. Our own dogs looked on in horror, but the girls thought he was on the verge of a breakthrough. If he could just realize that we loved him, they said, that our sign language had meaning that would help orient him to the world, Moose would turn a corner, like Helen Keller had. The girls held this hope tight to their hearts, faithful that love would be enough, though I was beginning to worry.

  “I feel so bad for him,” my daughter said one day, as we watched her sister trying to teach him a simple sign.

  “Don’t,” I said. “It isn’t good for him.”

  “Isn’t he cute?”

  “Sure is, but I don’t think we’re the right people for this job.”

  “You always tell us never to give up, Mom.”

  “I understand this, but I think it’s time to consider that he might be a psycho,” I said. My younger daughter signed “sit,” and pushed Moose’s bottom down for the fifteenth time that session, then he broke away and leaped to the patio sliding glass door, and threw his shoulder into it until the glass shook. He barked his crooked, stifled, slightly shrill bark: “Wark! Wark! Wark!”

  It became clear that the training was going poorly. After six or seven weeks, Moose still did not sit regularly, or show a glimmer of interest in obeying the simplest command. He had no desire to please us and did not care what any of us were doing. Apparently, the phrase “he eats anything” applied to anything that wasn’t food. Moose could swallow a pair of panties or a Beanie Baby and out it would come a day later, encased in fully formed stool the shape of his large intestine, but adding a dot-sized squirt of fish oil to his kibble caused a two-day bout of diarrhea and midnight crate crapping that exhausted me, and caused me to fantasize about swiping the canine Xanax for my personal use. In fact, it was constant work to make sure Moose was okay hour by hour, and we were tired. Maybe he was crazy, I thought, as I put him in his crate one night, and watched him gnaw on his bed until his night dose of meds put him to sleep. If Moose was like this on phenobarbital, and Xanax, and antidepressants, what kind of dog was he au naturel? I was afraid to find out.

  The owner, who promised us every day for two weeks that refills of his meds were in the mail, stopped taking my calls, and I knew something was wrong. I began to talk to the children about giving him back, an idea that my husband applauded. I suggested that the dog might be too neurologically damaged to be rehabilitated, at least by us. The girls cried and presented arguments. They begged me to give him more time. All he needed was love, they said, and I wanted this to be true, both for my big-hearted girls and for the dog. We had read Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover’s Soul, as well as five or six dog training books, and we tried to love him as much as we could, while giving him our attention, our time, regular training, firm boundaries, exercise, and every bit of effort we had. It wasn’t working.

  I began to halve Moose’s pills in order to conserve them, calling both the rescue organization and the vet daily. No one returned my calls. As soon as his medication blood levels dropped, his energy level doubled and he became obsessed with the pool in an unhealthy way. He no longer wanted to come inside at all, but instead ran circles around the deck until his skin showed pink and sunburned under his thin white fur, and he scraped his paws so raw that he left bloody footprints on the pavers. We slathered his hot body with more sunscreen, and tried to keep him inside, but when we didn’t let him out, he wark wark warked until we opened the back door. His only pleasure seemed to be swimming.

  Finally, we ran out of meds, and the dog turned. The first night without them, he chased his tail uncontrollably, which looked adorable and clownish for about five seconds, until he began to hurl himself into the front of the stove and the lower kitchen cabinets. The hot energy coming off him was sickening, desperate, and frantic. We could feel it in the air. He attacked our cairn terrier, who had been minding his business in the corner, then, a few minutes later, went for my son, who had gotten up off the couch to walk across the living room, and sunk his teeth into the boy’s narrow butt.

  “Hey!” my son said.

  “It’s a dermal piercing,” my daughter told him.

  “It hurts,” my son said. “I hate
Moose.” We lunged for the dog, and wrestled him into his crate, where he spent the evening chewing a hole in his own abdomen while I left voicemails for his owner every fifteen minutes.

  “He’s got to go back,” my husband said. “He’s chaos. He’s going to get someone in the face.” I agreed. When I put his floatation vest on him to protect the wound, he bit me in the forearm, and later, in the middle of the night, he ate through the vest and bloodied his gums chewing the metal sides of the crate. The unfocused, desperate look he gave me while I sat by his crate helped me to realize he was suffering beyond what should be allowed, and beyond what we, or anyone, could fix. I hated this.

  At around two in the morning, once Moose had finally fallen asleep, I got online and tracked down the owner’s work address.

  The next morning, while the girls alternately wept and gave me the stank eye, I packed Moose into his crate.

  “Where are you taking him?”

  “To his owner.”

  “The vet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she going to help him?”

  “I don’t know. I hope so.”

  “Are you giving up on him?”

  “I don’t know. I hope not.”

  “Can we come?”

  “No.”

  I didn’t look at the girls’ faces in the living room window as I drove off with the dog, locked in his crate and shoved into the cargo area of my SUV. I cried myself an hour and forty-five minutes through rush-hour Miami traffic to his owner’s vet clinic in Kendall, Florida, a flat, overcrowded sprawl pocked with “apartment homes” and leased Japanese sedans that is so far south, you lose meaningful chunks of your life just driving there and back.