Seek!: Selected Nonfiction

by Rudy Rucker

  As well as his special stair-step and his doghouse, Arf liked to spend a lot of time under our front porch. This was a four-foot-high space about forty feet long, with bare red dirt on the ground. Arf

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  liked it in there because it was cool and shady in the summer, and he could dig up the ground as much as he liked without getting scolded. The children liked it under there too, for about the same reasons. Arf dug himself several large crater-like depressions to lie in, and Tom liked to fill these pits up with water from the hose so that there would be a really good supply of mud. Later we had a discarded mattress that made its way under the porch, and Ida would sometimes try to camp out down there with her friend Lalla - until they would get scared and mosquito-bitten and come inside.

  One problem with Arf being outside a lot was that he would roam all over the neighborhood, and into neighborhoods further and further beyond. He liked to explore, sniff other dogs' old peemarks, and make his own pee-marks. And of course if there was a female dog in heat, he wanted to go there. "Arfie ran away 'cause a girl dog had heat," as Ida would put it.

  And run away he did, hundreds of times. Not that he was ever lost - if we waited a few hours, or at most a day, he would always come home, sometimes looking a bit exhausted and wrung-out. We never found out for sure if he successfully fathered any puppies, although some Lynchburg friends claim they see Arf lookalikes to this day. I hope so.

  Once we saw Arf doing it with a poodle in front of our garage. It was surprising how little time it took, maybe forty seconds. But those interludes were of key importance to Arf, and it was more or less impossible to keep him from roaming. Especially in the springtime, he'd sniff at the air in a certain way, and you knew that he was going to make a break for it.

  The problem with Arf's roaming was that Lynchburg had dogcatchers who rounded up stray dogs. Sometimes they would phone us up, and sometimes they would bring him home to us and give us a ticket. Sometimes they would just take him in to the pound. I actually had to go to court over Arf's tickets one time. A dogcatcher came and testified. I had my new short punk haircut and the judge had long blow-dried '70s hair. It was like the hair had reversed from the '60s.

  Arf didn't just roam because he was looking for dogs in heat, he also roamed because he liked to follow the kids to school. Tom and Ida used to walk five blocks to Garland-Rhodes Elementary School,

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  and Arf liked to follow them every day. The kids would die of embarrassment when Arf would manage to get inside the school and go tearing down the halls looking for them, with his feet skidding and kids running after him and teachers yelling. Tom and Ida said they would sit stiffly at their desks, pretending they didn't know Arf at all. We had a friend with a fenced yard right by the school, and sometimes he would get Arf and keep him out of trouble until the kids got out of school.

  When Tom started taking the bus to middle school, about three miles away, Arf figured out how to follow the school bus. It's hard to see how he could have done it, but he did. This opened up a whole new spectrum of neighborhoods for Arf to explore.

  One joyful time Arf tricked the dogcatcher in one of those new neighborhoods. The dogcatcher phoned Audrey to say that he had Arf and that she should come get the dog and accept a ticket, but when Audrey got there the dogcatcher was holding a collar and no dog. Because of habeas corpus, he couldn't give Audrey a ticket! Audrey brought the collar home, and there was Arf on the porch.

  This seemed like a good development. I spent some time trying to teach Arf that he should always run away from the dogcatcher. We sat down together in the driveway, and I moved two little rocks around on the ground to stand for Arf and the dogcatcher. "Dogcatcher come. Arf run away! Dogcatcher bad. Arf run away!" Arf almost looked like he understood, but then he started sniffing at my hands to see if there was food in them.

  In general, Arf failed all official IQ tests with flying colors. We had a hall separated from our living room by a glass door. If the glass door was closed, you could get to the hall by going out the other end of the living room and around the back of the stairs. So one night after eating roast chicken for dinner, the kids took Arf into the living room and I put the platter with the chicken carcass on the floor in the hall right behind the closed glass door. Arf could see and smell the chicken, and he wanted it very much. He scratched and scratched at the glass door. "Come on, Arf," the kids told him, running out of the living room and around the stairs to appear in the hall with the chicken. "Come on around!" Arf stayed right at the glass door whining. Eventually Audrey and Sorrel said we were

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  Arf on the James River.

  (Photo by R. Rucker.)

  being too mean to Arf, and he ended up getting the chicken in his dish on the back porch. So, in a way, he won.

  Arf never succeeded at things by acting human, he succeeded by keeping on being Arf. He would insist on his way of doing things, and eventually we and the rest of the world would give in.

  The children loved to spend time petting Arf. "I like confiding with Arf when the world seems against me," as Tom put it. "He's always soft," said Sorrel, "He's fluffy!" "If you're ever sitting on the ground, Arf comes up and sticks his nose in your face to see what you're doing," observed Ida. ''The nerve!" Audrey liked taking him for walks, she was proud of what a cute puppy he was, and of how everyone would comment on him. She particularly admired his high-held feathery tail; she liked to call him "Plume." And she relied on him to defend the house when I wasn't around.

  I could always count on Arf to come on hikes with me, even if nobody else in the family wanted to come. One day in particular I remember, everyone was mad at me, and I floated down the James River alone with Arf in a rubber raft. That day, for some reason he spent a lot of time sitting like a person, with his butt down, and with his back leaning against the fat ring of the raft. I guess the thin rub-

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  ber bottom of the raft was too unsettling. I took my favorite photograph of Arf that day, a profile shot of him staring off across the water, with his ears cocked and his eyes alert. He had a long, handsome muzzle with a beautiful black nose.

  That little day-trip I took with Arf was part of the inspiration for my novel The Hollow Earth, which is about a much longer journey, set in the 1840s. Arf played a supporting character under his own name. I want to copy out some of my Arf descriptions from The Hollow Earth, as they're a good store of things I wrote about him.

  At the beginning of the book, Mason Reynolds is about to leave his farm near Lynchburg, Virginia, along with his slave Otha.

  Arf got excited and started barking. He had the noble profile and the feathery legs of a retriever. His legs and ruff where white, but his head and body had the tawny coloring of a collie. I'd grown up talking to him like a person. He had a way of moving his eyebrows and his feathery tail so expressively that I often felt he understood me. Now in the farmyard, his tail and eyes were merry as he pumped his barks skyward.

  Later I came to always refer to Arf as orange, rather than tan or tawny. I in fact got quite obsessive about this, and started telling people, "I defy you to say that Arf is not orange." Finally someone did defy me: when I picked up Arf's body this week, they said he was a red and white collie-mix, while we'd always called him an orange and white collie/beagle. Picked up his body? Yes, this is an elegy.

  Speaking of Arf's orangeness, there was a phrase I always meant to build up into a children's story: "And there in the middle of the Christmas parade was a confused little collie-beagle dog with an orange saddle on his back." In The Hollow Earth, Mason tries to leave Arf behind, but "Arf slipped out the gate after us, his tail held demurely down. I scolded him, and he cringed, but he kept right on coming." Which is completely typical of Arf. He follows Mason with a vengeance: to the center of the Earth and back. A few scenes later, Mason and Otha get in trouble and are running from the sheriff. They hide in a boat at the wharf.

  Arf stood up on the wharf staring do
wn at us. "Come on," I hissed. "Come on down here, Arf." He snuffed and backed

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  off. I lunged and got hold of the loose skin of his neck. Man's best friend had to let out a yelp, of course, which set off hallos from the sheriff's torch gang.

  Arf had a knack for refusing to cooperate when you needed it the most. Like when we were moving to California and he was howling in the parking lot outside the motel and we tried to sneak him up the stairs to our motel room of course he had to get his toe stepped on and yelp at the top of his lungs. In The Hollow Earth, Mason and Otha get to Richmond where they split up. Arf follows Otha, but soon he ends up back with Mason.

  At the sound of my voice, a dog came rushing out of the alley by the Whig building and jumped on me. He was whitelegged with a tan head and body. He pushed his feet into my stomach and stretched his head up toward my face. His feathery tail was beating a mile a minute. It took me a minute to understand that it was my dear old Arf. "Arfie! What are you doing here, Arfie boy?" Arf licked and whined and rolled on his back. I knelt down and petted him for a long time. He lay there squirming, with his front paws folded over like a dead rabbit's. When I stopped petting him, he sprang up and shook his head vigorously. The way he shook his head was to stick it far forward and then to rotate it back and forth so fast that his ears slapped like the wings of a pigeon taking flight. The head shake was Arf's way of punctuating his changes of moods. Now that we were through greeting, it was time for something else. He stood there next to me with his tongue lolling out.

  There were so many enjoyable things about Arf. The noise he made when drinking water was a particular wonder. He made the water sound so liquid and delicious. Ida and I used to like to get near the water dish and gloat over the noise of his drinking.

  I had a favorite line I liked to use about Arf's name: "He's so smart he can say his own name, and he's so famous all the other dogs talk about him."

  I used this line on hundreds of people over the years. I'd dole the two jokes out cautiously; if the person didn't get the first one, I wouldn't try the second one. Almost anyone will come up and talk

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  to you if you have a dog, particularly a noble handsome hound like Arf, orange-and-white old Arfie perhaps at ease on his back, his black lip line looking particularly winsome. I'd often see that winsome lip line when Arf would lie on his side and let me brush and curry him, perhaps cleaning his ears. He calmly soaked up any attention we'd give him.

  When we moved to California from Lynchburg in 1986, Arf came with us. I thought a little of leaving Arf behind, but by then he was a member of the family. He, for one, wanted to make absolutely sure he wasn't left behind, and the whole time we were packing the Ryder van he was jumping in and out of it. On the drive out, Arf rode with me in the van every day plus each day one of the kids; they took turns. Audrey rode in our purple whale station wagon with the other two kids. One thing Ida and I noticed was that Arf would stand up whenever we passed a pasture with cows. He was effectively imitating a cow. He was so bright it was frightening. We started calling him the cow-detector.

  Arf did something memorable after the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. The hardest-hit buildings in our town of Los Perros were only two blocks from our house; two of them were restaurants. A few days after the earthquake I was walking Arf on a leash downtown and a city worker said, "There's that dog!" to his partner, who chimed in, "That's some dog." They went on to tell me that the day of the quake, while they had been cutting off the gas and electricity in one of the ruined restaurants, they'd seen Arf come trotting in, take - get this - a bucket of bacon out of the gaping 'fridge, bite the bucket's handle in his mouth, carry the bucket out behind the ruined building, and there wolf down as much of the bacon as he could hold, i.e. all of it. Art was, in other words, a looter. This wasn't the only time that people would recognize Arf downtown; it wasn't unusual to hear people say, not always in a friendly fashion, "There's that dog."

  Arf's habit of running away got more and more troublesome in California. Although there were no dogcatchers patrolling the streets, the area we lived in was much more urban, with many more people, and they would often assume that Arf was lost, and phone us up about him. Busybodies. In the California years I must have gone to pick up Arf fifty or even a hundred times. Arf never looked apologetic, he simply took my taxi-service as his due. Some of the people

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  would be real priss-pots, trying to lecture me - as if I had any control over this godlike avatar of a dog.

  Only once, back in Lynchburg, did I try smacking Arf when picking him up - that time it was a dogcatcher who had him, and he told me not to smack Arf or he'd give me two tickets. "He can't help it, sir. That's the way he's made." It was useless to reason with Arf. He was so bright it was frightening. But, again, he was only bright about things that he wanted to do. If you threw a stick or a ball, he would just look at you. If you tried again, holding the stick out to him, he'd sniff at it to make sure it wasn't food, then watch you throw it again. And then look away.

  Eventually I had to start keeping Arf penned up on our deck all day, or leashed in the driveway. In order to exercise him without having to get calls from busybodies, I took to jogging with him every day. It was great for my fitness; I started calling Arf my personal trainer. One thing he liked to do a lot when we were jogging was to npak (pronounced en-pack). "Npak" was a Sorrel-invented expression for Nose, Pivot, Arfie Kick. The origin of this was a Sorreldrawn three frame broadside she put on our fridge in about 1982 in Lynchburg:

  HOW TO SHOW PEOPLE YOU'RE WAY WAYTOO GOOD FOR 'EM. (1) Nose. Point your nose up in the air. (2) Pivot. Turn on your heel. (3) Arfie Kick. Scrape your feet backwards, one at a time, trying to toss up dirt or gravel towards the victim.

  The older he got, the more Arfie loved to npak. I think it would release musk from glands by his dewlaps. Arf and I often jogged up the hill to a local winery with a fountain in front of it. Arf would always stop at the fountain and lap up some of the water. He was a complete creature of habit; he always had to drink for a while, step down, step back up, and drink some more. It was such a beautiful spot with Arf there; I always meant to bring my camera and take a picture: a redwood trunk on the left and a palm growing out of the ground on the right; the fountain in the middle, a pool of water lovely green with algae and a plashing trickle of water being forever pumped out of a wine-barrel. I'd think of a woodland animal at a

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  spring, my animal drinking his water, and in the background would be a meadow lit with the California sun and overhead the bright blue California sky.

  In the last few months of his life, Arf went deaf. He got more and more like an old person, everything always had to be the same. Grazing new-grown grass-blades, peeing at special places, drinking from the vile water-dish outside Gwen's Hair Salon, crapping on the bridge to Los Perros, shaking his head over and over and over, chewing himself endlessly, and if he sensed a car might slow down for him, he always made a point of getting in front of it. I would get kind of tired of him. But going out in nature with him was always good.

  One sunny day in December, 1994, Tom and I went up into some hilly wilderness behind our house and sat in the middle of manzanita chaparral for a long time with happy lolling-tongue Arf hanging around in the vicinity, and then we pushed on over the hill to some entirely new terrain, a steep near-cliff that dropped down the back, covered with native plants; we three worked our way down it like - we imagined - divers dropping down off the continental shelf, we went down a few hundred feet and sat there with Arf, we three boys, perfectly dog-happy, me watching for ages a cloud of gnats over a manzanita bush, marveling at how the strange attractor of the gnat swarm would form over and over in the heat plume over the manzanita. When the wind would blow the gnats out of the attractor, they'd hang down off to the side of the bush in the windshadow, and then when the breeze died down, they'd work their way back up into the plume to where they knew the others would me
et, Tom and I discussing this a little bit. At our side, ArCs relaxed Nature face was inhumanly beautiful. Dear Arf.