Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him

by Luis Carlos Montalvan

  “I would have skipped it,” Lu told me, laughing while Tuesday tried to maul her with his great pink tongue, “if I knew then what I know now.”

  I understand what she means, but given how the story turns out, I’m not sure I agree.

  CHAPTER 2

  PUPPY

  BEHIND BARS

  Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth

  until the hour of separation.

  —KAHLIL GIBRAN

  Tuesday wasn’t the first service dog to be trained by Puppies Behind Bars. Not even close. The program had been around for ten years when Tuesday joined in 2006. It had its own wing in several New York State prisons, where prisoners trained in its intensive twelve-week program, then lived and worked with a dog for up to sixteen months at a time. It had hundreds of graduates—both canine and human—who had gone on to purposeful lives on the outside.

  Tuesday was, however, in the first group of ECAD dogs to be trained by Puppies Behind Bars. The program had recently expanded to providing service dogs for wounded veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and Lu Picard reluctantly agreed to help the cause. It wasn’t that she was against giving prisoners meaningful work, life skills, and the kind of loving relationship that can open their hearts and revive their humanity after decades in the dehumanizing modern American prison system. Those were, of course, worthy goals. And she wasn’t against helping wounded veterans. Who but the most hardened soul would be against that?

  Lu simply used a different training method than the prison program, and she wasn’t sure the two were compatible. For Lu, the elimination of premature, trainer-specific bonding was a key ingredient in creating the best client–service dog bond. With Puppies Behind Bars, a professional instructor was only at the prison for a few hours each week. The rest of the time, the dogs trained with one specific prisoner and lived in his or her cell. It was impossible, Lu figured, for longtime prisoners, offered an adoring and affectionate twelve-week-old puppy, to not fall on their knees and give that dog a hug just for being there.

  She was right, of course. I saw that firsthand when I visited a Puppies Behind Bars program with Tuesday during the second week of our training together at ECAD. I hadn’t expected to be moved, at least not in my heart, but when I looked around the large concrete prison room where Tuesday had received some of his training, I felt a surprising kinship with the men sitting around me. They were mostly shaven bald, and many had neck tattoos, but they weren’t broken or hard. They were a lot like me and the young soldiers I had known in the U.S. Army.

  It’s not that hard to imagine myself in jail, because it’s just one mistake. One night of drunk driving. A descent into drug addiction. Standing with the wrong person at the wrong time. A bar fight goes wrong, someone gets killed, and that’s it. It’s over. I mean, I’ve killed people in my life. I was probably the biggest killer in the room; they just never called it murder. In Iraq, a rifle went off while being cleaned and killed a twenty-one-year-old specialist in our small outpost at Al-Waleed. The shooter, a sergeant, isn’t in jail. Nor should he be. Exhaustion was an official cause, so in my opinion that death is on the generals for having too many objectives and too few men in the field. And accidents happen. Terrible decisions are made. But there are no wasted lives. There remains potential. Everybody deserves a second chance.

  These men were taking advantage of the opportunity. They were cast-offs who decided to give back to society, rough men softened by their companionship with dogs. They had helped train Tuesday and a hundred others like him. How many lives had they changed? How much hope and happiness had they given to the world? Did it outweigh the damage they had done?

  Puppies Behind Bars, which was sponsoring the event, asked each of the wounded veterans to say something to the prisoners. There were four of us; I went last. By then, it felt intimate. Very intimate. It was just a small gathering in a concrete block prison room, but it felt like my words mattered.

  “You are doing God’s work,” I said simply. “It is incredibly meaningful. From one brother to another, I am proud of your service. If circumstances were different, I’d take any of you to be one of my sergeants.”

  I noticed a few tears when I sat down. I hadn’t expected that, not from prisoners. Then I felt moisture on my own cheeks. I had expected that even less. Maybe, I rationalized, it was the presence of the dogs. It is hard to be angry or cold with a puppy at your feet. During the question-and-answer session after the thank-yous, I even found myself talking freely with strangers for the first time in years. In fact, we talked so long that most of the dogs, including Tuesday, eventually fell asleep.

  “So how do you maintain a young puppy’s attention,” I asked, “when it’s tired like this?”

  The men looked at each other. Then a few of them started to laugh. “Show him, Joe,” someone said.

  A giant of a man stood up from his chair. He looked like Curly from the Three Stooges, if Curly had been three feet taller and eighty pounds heavier and had spent twenty years lifting weights, repressing his anger, and getting tattoos on his neck.

  Then he smiled. “We call this jollying,” Joe said.

  Next thing I knew, Tattooed Curly was on the floor, rolling and wrestling in front of his puppy while making a nonstop string of noises that, I swear, included Curly’s classic “nyuk-nyuk-nyuk” and a breakdancing-inspired backspin. Every dog in the place was immediately at attention, staring at Curly Joe, because the big man could dance, or at least he could move on the floor continuously for a surprisingly long time. When Curly Joe finally stopped, every single dog was alert and ready to go.

  “That’s how we do it,” one of the inmates said.

  Jollying. I think of that crazy Curly dance every time I wrestle with Tuesday. At night, I love to lie in the bed and grab the sides of his face, rustling his fur and telling him what a good boy he is. Tuesday always gets excited and starts jumping on me, scrambling for leverage to fight back while I bite his ears like a mother dog and shake his neck, his sides, even his tail.

  Jollying. That seems like exactly the right word.

  But what a change it must have been for Tuesday. He was three months old when he went to prison, having lived his whole life in a place where discipline was strict. Where his life had been carefully planned since he was three days old. Where he was juggled between trainers so that he wouldn’t bond with any single one of them. Where the love was abundant, but only if you worked for it.

  In prison, he was in a place where the strict professional trainer was only present three hours a week. Where he spent all day with one “raiser” and even slept in his cell. Where he could be jollied not for doing something right but for being distracted and inattentive. I love Lu, but no one on staff at ECAD would ever give a dog-in-training spontaneous, unearned love. It would upset the whole course of their development. And they would never do a Curly dance on the floor to jolly their dogs. Prison was a completely different world.

  Tuesday loved it. I can’t imagine that he didn’t. He’s a very emotionally intelligent dog, or what some people might call needy, and he loved attention. No matter what Lu says, I think Tuesday felt the loss of a strong bond in his life, even if he didn’t know what was missing. When he found a person who was always there with him, he immediately grew attached. By all accounts, he was a good dog, maybe even a great one. He learned his commands quickly. He always walked by his raiser’s side. He was smart. He behaved. He was inseparable from his cellmate, but nobody worried much about that. They were a team; wasn’t that how it was supposed to be?

  Then, after three months, his cellmate was transferred to another prison.

  It must have been a difficult parting. It’s hard to disappoint Tuesday, especially when he looks at you with those sad intelligent eyes. There must have been tears shed as his raiser hugged him for the last time. As Tuesday stood at the door of the cell and watched him go, the poor dog’s heart was breaking. You can see sadness in Tuesday; it settles all over his body. It’s alm
ost as if he’s collapsing, the pain starting in his eyes and then moving inward, untying everything. Three months with someone might not seem like a long time, but a dog’s life is short. Three months to a dog is like two years to a human being. Tuesday’s experience was like giving a sensitive three-year-old a doting father, then taking that father away when the child turns five, never to be seen again.

  He was devastated. I know him; he took the separation personally. What had he done? Why was he being rejected? I can almost see him standing at the cell door, staring down the cell block long after his raiser was gone, so long that his new raiser lost patience and started pulling on his leash, begging him to move. When he finally did, Tuesday walked away from his old life without complaint. He went into his new cell. Then he curled up under the man’s bunk, put his head down, and pined.

  That’s the moment that makes Tuesday unique. I think of a young golden retriever heartbroken under a cot, refusing even to eat, and I think: only Tuesday. Only Tuesday would take separation so hard after just three months. Only Tuesday would feel the loss so profoundly. It was a rare and unfortunately confluence of events, a perfect storm of unintended consequences. Tuesday had been conditioned to leap enthusiastically into a human-dog bond. He had been trained through rewards to believe that all his master’s actions were a response to his behavior. And he was a deeply, deeply sensitive dog. His moping wasn’t an act. It was genuine pain and loneliness and regret. Dozens of other dogs went through similar experiences with only minor adjustments. Only Tuesday spiritually collapsed. Only Tuesday made you want to drop everything and throw your arms around him and say, Come away with me, boy. I will give you what you need.

  The new raiser was high-strung. He wasn’t prepared for this outward display of emotion, and he quickly grew frustrated with Tuesday’s moping. I imagine him as a whiny Steve Buscemi type, tugging at the leash and saying, “C’mon, Tuesday, c’mon,” then throwing up his hands and saying, “It’s not my fault, man. Not my fault. It’s the dog, man.”

  That wasn’t going to work. Tuesday, more so than other dogs, sizes people up. He studies them, and he understands. He responds, as I have come to learn, to people he respects. As the begging from his new raiser turned to excuses, then complaining, I can imagine Tuesday sighing and wondering how he had fallen so far in the world. He went through his training, because that’s what he was conditioned to do. But the moment it was over, he went back under the cot and didn’t move. For almost a week, he lived with his head down and his spirit flagging, missing his friend.

  Eventually, an inmate named Tom intervened. Tom was the oldest prisoner in the group, having served more than thirty years of a twenty-five-to-life sentence for second-degree murder. As a young man, he had read almost every book in the prison library. He had lifted weights and worked mess hall jobs and earned several college degrees. But when his first parole passed, he stopped trying so hard to improve himself and started to accept his fate. By the time Puppies Behind Bars came along, he was spending most of his time in his cell or watching television.

  “In the prison system, you shut down your feelings,” he said. “You gotta do that to survive, because it’s hard. But the dogs brought me back, you know, to the human side.”

  By the time Tuesday came along, Tom had trained six dogs, all Labrador retrievers, and every single one of them had graduated to additional training. They were all out there in the world, making it a better place. This was rare. Lu Picard and East Coast Assistance Dogs had an 80 percent success rate, but many service dog training facilities graduate less than half their dogs. That’s not a negative statement on them; it’s just a reflection of the difficulty of the training. Service dogs must be elite in every aspect of their lives. So Tom was, understandably, proud of his perfect 6-0 record. There wasn’t anyone else in his facility with that kind of record. In the closed prison world, success was his social currency, the reason other prisoners looked up to him and listened to him and, perhaps best of all, left him alone.

  The other prisoners couldn’t believe it when he offered to take Tuesday. “What do you want to risk your record for on that crazy dog?” they teased him. “That dog’s no good.” Tuesday was a washout. A bum. A broken-down six-month-old. None of the prisoners thought he was going to make it except Tom. And even he wasn’t sure.

  “It was more about timing than anything,” he admitted. Tom’s previous Labrador retriever had recently graduated to become an explosives-detection dog for Homeland Security, and he hated being without a dog.

  The dogs brought it all back to, you know, to the human side.

  Tom didn’t cajole Tuesday. He didn’t leash him. Instead, he climbed under Steve Buscemi’s bunk and lay down beside him. Tuesday was about fifty pounds at the time, not the eighty he is today, so there was just enough room. Tom touched his paws and occasionally petted him behind the ears, but mostly he lay quietly, not saying a word. When he got up three hours later, Tuesday got up too and followed him back to their new home. He put his front paws on Tom’s bunk, accepted a pat on the head and a “that’s a good boy,” then lay down in the kennel in the corner of the cell.

  From then on, Tuesday was always at Tom’s side. He leaned on him as they walked together, and he sat with his head drooped on Tom’s lap in the television room. At night, he nuzzled Tom as he got into his bunk, then curled in the kennel to sleep. In the courtyard, when he was supposed to be training, he jumped on the bench and scrunched as close as he could to Tom’s side. Nobody, not even Tom, had ever seen anything like it. Tuesday has such sad eyes, especially when he’s wounded, that at seven months old he probably looked like exactly what he was: a lost kid. When I think of him then, I see a perfect picture of longing, of innocence at the moment it discovers there is pain in the world.

  The other inmates started calling Tuesday soft. “What are you doing with that pansy, Tom?” they’d joke as they walked their hulking Labrador retrievers at their heel. “Get a real dog.” They bet him the only things available, cigarettes and chocolate bars, that Tuesday would never make it.

  Tom didn’t mind. He believed in Tuesday. The dog was sensitive, sure, but he was also smart and intuitive. Tom was sixty years old, with thirty years in the joint, so he knew there was no need to rush. Heartbreak and crime are instantaneous. Transformation takes time, especially a transformation of the heart, so he was willing to shamble with Tuesday at his side, taking good-hearted abuse from the young guys and knowing from experience that the old dog always knows the best way to come out on top, even when his muscles are growing slack and his step isn’t what it used to be.

  Of course, Tuesday’s obstinance could only go on for so long before he flunked out, so Tom drilled Tuesday on his commands. He didn’t overwork him. He had seen guys in prison burn out dogs by working them too hard, and he’d seen them burn themselves out, too. He took it slow but steady, trying to make the training fun, but after a month there was still no progress. Tuesday watched, his eyebrows bobbing as he listened to the words, but his sad eyes stared up at Tom as if to ask, Why? Why bother?

  “He knew everything,” Tom said, “but would not respond. He just did not want to do it.”

  Any kind of training, whether to be a service dog, an accountant, or a soldier in the U.S. Army, takes desire. To learn a job well, you must want to succeed. This is the basis of Lu Picard’s training methods: to make the task the connection to happiness. This work-reward relationship is inherent in dogs. As pack animals, they are conditioned to being judged on their contribution to a group.

  Tuesday lost the connection. In his mind, he had followed commands for six months. He had been a good dog, and what had it gotten him? He had been passed from pack to pack, and when he finally found someone to accept him, he was kicked aside.

  After a few weeks, Tom realized he wasn’t going to be able to train Tuesday the traditional way. He was mulling this over, and possibly mourning all those lost cigarette bets, when he noticed the inflatable swimming pool in the prison yard.
The pool had been brought in by Puppies Behind Bars as a training reward. The water was four feet deep and full of dogs, but Tom thought, Why not? What’s to lose?

  He rolled out of bed early the next morning, before any of the other dogs and trainers were out. As always, Tuesday jumped up immediately and followed him to the yard, where he watched intently as Tom lowered the water in the swimming pool to a few inches deep. It was already hot in the concrete prison yard, and Tuesday didn’t hesitate. When Tom said, “In,” he stepped into the pool.

  “Out.”

  He stepped out.

  “In.”

  He ran across the pool.

  “Come back, Tuesday,” Tom laughed.

  Tuesday ran back across the pool. Tom’s intention was to relax Tuesday, to take his mind off work and let him be a dog, but Tuesday was looking at him so enthusiastically from the water that Tom said, “Sit.”

  Tuesday did. Then he smiled that big doggy smile, with his tongue out and his lips curling into his eyes.

  “Down.”

  Tuesday flattened himself in the water.

  “Side.”

  Tuesday jumped up and loped to the side of the pool. Tom burst out laughing. “You sly dog,” he said, bringing the hose over to the edge of the pool. “Do you want more water?”

  Tuesday started to walk toward the hose.

  “Stay,” Tom said. Tuesday did.

  “Side,” Tom said, when the water was a foot deep. Tuesday stood to Tom’s right, facing the same direction, with his collar beside his leg, exactly as he was supposed to.

  “Let’s go.”

  Tuesday didn’t hesitate. He walked around the edge of the pool at Tom’s side. By the time the other dogs arrived, Tuesday was rampaging through three feet of water to fetch his rattle ball, the tool Tom used to train his dogs to retrieve.