Comet's Tale

by Steven Wolf

  Comet’s Tale

  How the Dog I Rescued Saved My Life

  STEVEN D. WOLF

  with Lynette Padwa

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2013

  FOR FREDERIQUE,

  a wonderfully rare woman who brought exceptional meaning to what is often considered a passé promise—In sickness and in health.

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  PART II

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  PART III

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Acknowledgments

  READER’S GUIDE

  An Interview with the Author

  Questions for Discussion

  About the Author

  Prologue

  MARCH 2000—ARIZONA

  It was just past 8:00 a.m. and the road winding through the foothills north of Flagstaff was deserted. The spring air was chilly, but I rolled down the window anyway, letting the fragrant scent of Ponderosa pine rush through the car. Every so often a vista would open up and the snowy peaks of Mount Elden would appear, etched and highlighted in the sharp morning sun like a woodblock print. Then the road would curve away, the view would close, and I’d lean forward, searching for the turnoff to the foster family’s ranch.

  Finally I saw it—a weather-beaten two-story house with a high-pitched roof and covered porch. It sat on a parcel of flat, grassy land the size of a football field, entirely surrounded by a high post-and-wire fence. I parked outside the gate and slowly got out, gripping my canes and bracing for the pain in my spine. Breathing hard, I leaned against the car. The air was still. At the far end of the field I glimpsed a spot of movement. In the same instant I noticed a faint rhythmic beat, like distant drumming. The spot moved closer, my eyes adjusted, and a pack of greyhounds materialized, jetting around the inside perimeter of the fence. The drumbeat deepened to thunder. A few seconds later they streaked past me, thigh muscles bunched, hind paws stretching toward shoulders, mud flying in their wake, individual dogs blurring into a mass of muscle that flowed like mercury.

  Thrilled, I watched them rocket away, racing for the sheer exhilaration of it. Just like children, I thought. Kids set loose on the first spring day after a long winter. I could almost detect laughter.

  “We never grow tired of watching,” a woman’s voice called from across the muddy field. I had been so focused on the greyhounds that I hadn’t noticed the young foster mom ambling toward me, her hands shoved in the pockets of faded blue jeans. “So glad you decided to drive up after all,” she said when she reached me. “I’m Kathy. Come on, I’ll introduce you to the pack.”

  As soon as we turned back to the house, the dogs veered in our direction. Within seconds I was surrounded by panting, jostling greyhounds. The group seemed to contain every shade in the animal kingdom—soft fawns, striking brindles, deep reds, bold black-and-whites, and the famous steel gray, often referred to as blue. Their only common marking was the white patch on each dog’s chest. The hounds nudged and bumped each other as they vied for my attention, but the competition was friendly, no growling or biting. It reminded me of my yearly reunion with my own pack of cousins.

  After weeks of hemming and hawing about it, I had come here prepared to adopt, but I hadn’t realized what a pack of greyhounds really meant—the number and variety, each dog an individual with its own full-grown personality. It wasn’t like choosing a puppy. Kathy and I stood in the yard watching them for a half hour, but no single animal stood out as “mine.” At last, with some hesitation, I pointed out a fawn-colored hound who flitted on the fringe of the group. “What about that one?” I asked. The dog’s caramel eyes were lively, and she struck me as a feisty yet refined lady who might be easy to live with and also play well with others. It was just me here in Arizona, in exile from my family back in Nebraska, where the winters were too cold for my degenerative back condition. Still, any dog would have to interact with our rowdy pair of golden retrievers when I returned home for the summers.

  “Let’s see how she does indoors,” said Kathy.

  It was warm and snug inside the house. A sofa and a few comfortable chairs were pushed back against the living room walls, leaving plenty of space for the greyhounds to romp. In a far corner stood a black wood-burning stove, heat shimmering around it. I made my way to the sofa and awkwardly settled in, letting my canes drop to the floor in front of me.

  The fawn-colored racer pranced over to me, ready to play. She executed a short jump, landed directly in front of me, and lowered her head, inviting me to pet her. I stroked her gently, surprised at the wiriness of her sleek fur. She wagged her tail and I scratched between her ears.

  “What would I need to do if I were going to take a dog home today?” I asked. While Kathy talked about adoption fees and vet care, I wondered what treats I could buy for my new pet. Did greyhounds like liver or did they prefer lamb?

  “Then you just write a check and the hound is yours,” Kathy finished.

  I hesitated again. A little voice inside my head—my wife Freddie’s voice, to be exact—protested, Are you out of your mind? You cannot seriously be considering adopting a greyhound. You can barely walk. How are you going to walk a dog? A racing dog?

  As I struggled to bury Freddie’s questions, a flicker of movement behind the woodstove caught my eye. I turned for a more direct look and saw a lanky figure tucked on top of a thick blanket. The shape was partly camouflaged, blending in with the black stove, but I could make out a slender head resting on two front paws. The glint of reflected light in the dog’s eyes let me know she was watching me.

  “Is that greyhound yours?” I asked.

  “No, she’s part of the rescued group,” Kathy replied. “But she doesn’t want to socialize with the others. She’s sort of withdrawn. It’s like she’s depressed. We haven’t been able to coax her out of her shell.”

  “Is she ill?”

  “Not ill, but she was abandoned and left in a crate with her muzzle still on. She tried to scrape it off to get food and water, so her mouth got infected. Her teeth were in terrible shape. We had to have several of them removed.”

  I felt a genuine ache. While the other dogs celebrated their new freedom, this poor animal sat alone, unwilling to join in. What a shame.

  With a shake of my head, I returned to the task at hand. “I have one question before I announce a coming-home party,” I said, stroking the neck of the fawn-colored girl in front of me. “What’s her name?”

  Before Kathy could respond, a weight plopped into my lap. My eyes snapped down in surprise. A greyhound had leaped onto the couch beside me and laid her head on my thighs, focusing her gaze on my face. The cinnamon and black striped markings on her sculpted, muscular form made her look like half tiger, half dog.

  “I can’t believe she just did that!” whispered Kathy.

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  Kathy stepped toward us but stopped a couple of paces away and softly said, “We call her Comet. This is the one from over by the fire.”

  My skin popped with goose bumps. A buzzing tickled my ears, and my fingers tingled as I stroked the dog’s head. She nestled deeper into my lap but otherwise didn’t move.

  I was not a novice to the world of dogs. I grew up spending summers on a farm where I worked and played with all sorts of dogs, from shepherds to terriers to the typical Heinz 57 farm mix. Most of my adult life I had kept dogs as pets, and I knew that unless canines were angry or scared, they approached humans in various stage
s of doggy excitement—sniffing, wagging, smiling, curious and eager to please, always alert to the possibility of a treat. Dog body language was a cinch to read.

  Except this time. This dog simply lay still, her eyes focused on mine. She alone knew her reasons. She had analyzed the variables, drawn her own conclusions, and decided to cross the room and quietly place her head in my lap. But in that quiet, a message reverberated: Hello. I am Comet. I choose you.

  Part I

  1

  FALL 1998 WINTER 2000—NEBRASKA TO ARIZONA

  “You think I should retire,” I said, slowly repeating Tim’s bombshell. “You think I should leave the firm. Is this some kind of joke?” My partners sat stiffly in their high-backed chairs, their faces impassive. With enormous effort, I kept my voice low and controlled. “You might be frustrated with my unorthodox work schedule, but all my files are up-to-date and my cases and revenue are in line with those of every person in this room.”

  “It’s not about any of that,” Tim said evenly. “We’re tired of wondering if you’re okay. We can’t plan for the future. We can’t anticipate. And because you’re squeezing a week’s worth of work into the three days you might make it into the office, we’re frantic about you missing deadlines and committing malpractice. How are we supposed to deal with your cases if suddenly you don’t show up anymore?”

  “Who said I’m not going to show up?”

  “Look, Steve, we don’t know what’s going on with you. But one thing’s certain: you’re a physical mess. You can’t keep doing what you’re doing. You’re killing yourself, and we’re not willing to risk everything while we wait for the funeral.” He glanced around the table and each of my partners nodded.

  The office was deserted by the time I left. I rode the elevator down to the parking garage and tottered to my car, still trying to process the news. They can’t fire me from my own firm! Can they? I clambered into my SUV and merged uncertainly into the traffic on Dodge Street.

  The western edge of Omaha quickly faded in my rearview mirror as I headed toward the rural lakeside village where I lived with Freddie and our daughters. The area hadn’t changed much since it had been Pawnee hunting ground a hundred years earlier. Majestic eighty-foot cottonwoods, with trunks as big around as a pickup truck, populated the banks of the nearby Platte River. To the west, rolling hills of corn unfurled to the horizon. The drive home had always felt like real-life time travel, and it was my favorite part of the day.

  But lately the half-hour commute had become an hour-long grind, not because of traffic but because my back would spasm if I sat for too long. Each journey was my own private Lewis and Clark expedition—frequent stops with a lot of walking around looking at the ground. Today was no different. After one such break, I slowly straightened and found myself locking eyes with a red-tailed hawk perched high in an ancient hackberry tree across the road. His dark stare looked hungry. Predatory.

  “I’m not roadkill yet,” I said out loud, returning to the car.

  At home, I opened the garage door with the remote. Two blond balls of fur raced to greet me, leaping in circles and yelping, their tails thumping against the car as they spun.

  “Sit!” I yelled out the window, desperate to exit. Cody, the golden retriever I had rescued from a puppy mill for the price of a broken shotgun, immediately slammed his haunches flat onto the cool concrete. His daughter, Sandoz, continued her whining, whirling dance and promptly stomped Cody’s paw. His low, pointed growl convinced her to sit down next to him. Then both dogs turned to me. Cody’s lolling, dripping tongue couldn’t hide his smile. In his pale face, whitened by age, his black eyes and nose stood out like coals on a snowman. Sandoz squirmed and wiggled next to him like a schoolkid who urgently needed permission to use the restroom. “Careful,” I warned, and they managed to stay put until I was safely inside the house. But despite myself I, too, was smiling, once again warmed to my core by these friends.

  As I sank onto the couch, the dogs lay on the carpet in front of me. As usual, they strategically placed themselves in the exact spot I needed in order to stand and walk away. Escape was impossible without some type of physical contact, which I knew was the point. But today, instead of sighing contentedly and shutting his eyes, Cody studied my face closely, ears perked. No doubt he detected the disgraceful stench of failure.

  “What’s wrong?” My wife stood in the doorway, her face pinched with concern.

  “They kicked me out.”

  “Oh, Wolfie. Je suis désolé,” she said, reverting to her native French. “But you saw this coming. Didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  She sat down next to me, taking my hand and lifting it to her cheek. “What choice have you given them? They don’t have a clue about how bad you really are, because you won’t tell them. And the doctors have been warning you to slow down, anyway.” I patted her knee but I couldn’t look at her.

  In the next few days, I learned that in spite of my denial and avoidance during the past year, Freddie had done some thinking about the inevitable. “The doctors say that you’re dramatically worse during the winter months because the cold won’t let your body relax. And the nonstop stress of your job doesn’t allow your mind to cope. The only way we’re going to get through this is if you get away from here during the winter, which will also allow us time to emotionally deal with everything.” I was puzzled by the emphasis on the words we’re and us. This spinal condition was my problem, not Freddie’s. The whole point of my relentless work schedule had been to shield my wife and daughters from the consequences of my illness.

  “We could sell that lot in Arizona,” Freddie was saying. A few years back we had bought a parcel of land in Sedona. “We could use the cash to buy a small house there, where you could live for the cold months. You always said you felt a healthy energy flowing through all those red rocks.”

  I know we discussed money—how could we not have, given the drastic slash in income that was to come? And I hazily recall the paralyzing anxiety we both felt about splitting up. Freddie could not leave her job managing the hospital cardiology unit she had helped establish years earlier. For one thing, she loved it, and for another, she was now the sole breadwinner of our household. She and the girls were my last life preservers, and if I moved to Arizona they’d be twelve hundred miles away. There were tears, lots of tears. But there are two things about that week that remain vividly etched in my mind: the totally overwhelming sense of shame, and the reassuring wetness of my dogs’ noses pressed against my palm.

  ONE WARM NOVEMBER day, about six weeks after I had been deposited in Sedona, I pulled into the parking lot of Weber’s IGA supermarket. I kept these excursions to once a week, since it was getting harder to reach for food and push the shopping cart around. Leaning heavily on my canes, I slowly waddled across the lot. My tortured progress took me in a crooked line toward a small commotion on the nearby sidewalk. I toddled to a stop and straightened to see what all the fuss was about.

  A group of people were crowded around a slim blond woman. Edging closer, I saw that she was holding the leash to a dog, and it was the dog that had captured the crowd’s attention. Not that the animal seemed to notice. His pose was proud and indifferent—if he wasn’t exactly bored by the admiration, he was certainly accustomed to it. He stood about forty inches tall, his head level with the woman’s hip. His skull was elongated, tapering to a delicate muzzle. Both ears were perked in the same sideways direction above a small forehead. Outsized almond-shaped eyes serenely surveyed the group. The dog’s sleek fur was black with a stippled reddish hue, and his deep chest rose steeply toward a thin, almost dainty abdomen. He was extremely narrow and lean, his ribs visible beneath the fur. Sharply defined muscles popped from his haunches, but his front legs were slender. All four legs ended in large, finely boned paws that sported long toes with thick black nails. The paws were slightly suspended above black pads, creating a distinct athletic appearance, like a basketball player bouncing on the balls of his feet. A slim tail
sloped straight down from the dog’s rear and ended in a small U slightly above the sidewalk.

  “What kind of dog is that?” I asked the woman.

  Smiling, she said, “This is Lance. He’s a greyhound. I’m Maggie McCurry.”

  “Sorry,” I stammered, feeling like a recluse who’d forgotten how civilized folk behave. “I’m Steve Wolf. But I go by Wolf. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “You, too,” Maggie replied. “Wolf. I’ll remember that. Almost everyone around here knows Lance, but very few of them remember my name. I guess Lance is pretty distracting.”

  Entranced, I extended my hand toward the dog and allowed him to investigate my scent. “Is he always this quiet and laid-back?”

  I had never met a greyhound in person. My only knowledge of them came from snippets of television footage I had glanced at while channel surfing. I assumed the breed was a bunch of skinny, hyper racing dogs. And I don’t know why, but I was sure they were placed on the intelligence scale next to a bucket of hair. My mental image certainly had not included the amazing specimen standing in front of me.

  “In general, greyhounds are calm to the extreme and very sweet. In fact, they’re known as the couch potatoes of the dog world,” said Maggie. As she talked, Lance leaned into her legs.

  “Couch potatoes?” I started to ask another question but realized that Maggie probably preferred to get on with her day. “I must be holding you up.”

  “No, no. That’s all right. I’m involved in greyhound rescue, so I like to tell people about the dogs. These racers have a rough life. At about four months of age, they’re placed in a crate. After that, they rarely get any attention except to train or race.” Maggie’s voice softened and she patted Lance between his ears. “As a result, the racers only know how to act around other greyhounds or their trainers. Most don’t know how to play or defend themselves. They don’t even know how to climb stairs. They’re strangers to the world outside their cages and the track.”