My lecture finished, I discover that I’m out of breath, my stomach aching and throat parched.
For a long moment, the others say nothing. Then the CPA in our group points out, “Ten times out of eleven, Shelby misses us.”
That is a fair point.
“And the odds can get better,” says an optimistic voice. My voice, as it happens. I don’t want everyone left as miserable as I feel, which is why I promise, “One-in-eleven isn’t the final word.”
My dog isn’t comfortable. That afternoon, I’m sitting at my computer and reading about orbital dynamics, and Roxie lies nearby, licking at her paws and feet. I can’t stand the sound of it, and when she finally quits, I breathe easier. But she only quits because she is exhausted, and after half an hour nap, she wakes and begins the process over again.
My vet’s office is closed until Monday. I call the emergency clinic, and the assistant says that it sounds like allergies, which isn’t too unexpected with the warm spring weather. She suggests Benadryl, though I don’t have any in the house. Or, if I want, I could bring my dog over for an examination.
I lead Roxie outside and open the back of my CRV, and she leaps in, but with nothing to spare. It’s a five-minute drive to the clinic. I’m the only customer. The veterinarian is a heavy middle-aged fellow with big hands and a matching voice. He asks if my dog has arthritis. “No,” I say, and immediately I’m remembering every slow trip up the stairs. Yet she managed to jump into my car, which is impressive for a thirteen-year-old lady. He tells me that her heart is strong. It shows that she gets plenty of exercise. Then he points out the redness in her eyes—a telltale sign of allergies. He recommends a cortisone shot and pills. The hypodermic needle is only a little smaller than a pool cue, and he injects a bucket of oily goo into her back and both hind legs, leaving her whining, trembling from the stress.
Returning to the waiting room, we find a patient in genuine trouble—a little mutt who got into a one-sided fight with a pit bull. Seeing that dog’s misery, I feel better. Roxie suddenly looks to be in pretty good shape. The prescription is for twenty tabs of prednisone, and the total bill is nearly one hundred and fifty dollars. But the licking stops immediately, and she sleeps hard until nearly seven that next morning, waking refreshed and ready to walk.
Her pee comes in rivers, but I was warned about that side effect.
The watery diarrhea that arrives later is a big surprise. By Monday morning, I call my own vet to ask questions and complain. The pred dosage is quite high, I learn. But I have to wean Roxie off the medication slowly or risk the catastrophic failure of her adrenal gland.
For the rest of the week, my sleep is broken, full of dreams and abrupt moments of wakefulness. Someone in the house groans, and I find myself alert and exhausted. And if I can’t hear my dog, I start to wonder if she has died. It astonishes me how I seem to want that to happen. In the middle of the night, when she whines and demands to go outside, I feel trapped. Nobody else is going to take care of this dog. Leslie claims that Roxie is just getting old, slowing down but generally happy, and I worry about her too much. But at three in the morning, shaking with fatigue, it isn’t worry that I’m feeling. I am angry. I feel trapped. With nothing else to do, I can’t help but imagine the days to come when I won’t have to get up at all hours, when I won’t have to tend to this animal; and it scares me when I realize just how much I am looking forward to this one inevitable end.
When Leslie became pregnant, certain people in both of our families worried. We were sharing the house with a wolfish dog, and did we appreciate the risks? That summer, we went out of town on short notice and couldn’t get Roxie into her usual kennel. But my mother-in-law offered to take her, promising us that our sled dog would live in air conditioning, safe from the July heat.
When we returned to the farm, we discovered Roxie in the yard, chained to a tree and looking miserable. My father-in-law had us sit down in the kitchen, and with urgency, he asked if we knew that our dog was vicious. It seemed that everything had been fine until this morning, and then for no reason, Roxie attacked one of his dogs and killed a cat.
This was ominous news, yes.
We asked questions, both of us trying to put these incidents into context. What I kept thinking was that Roxie had decided we weren’t coming home, and she was trying to establish dominance. Leslie asked if the other dog was hurt.
“Not too bad,” my father-in-law conceded. “She’s a little stiff, is all.”
“Which cat?” I wanted to know.
He described this sweet little calico that I’d noticed before.
“Where’s the body?”
“Oh, she ran off to die,” he reported. Then in the next breath, he added, “I don’t care about the cats. That’s not the point. But they’re little animals, and your baby is going to be a little animal too. Who knows what that dog might do?”
Leslie and I were shaken. But when I went outside to rescue the forlorn, thoroughly pissed-off dog, I saw a familiar calico walking beside our car. Going back inside, I pointed out the window and asked, “Is that the dead cat?”
“Huh,” he responded. “I guess she didn’t die.”
And at that point my best defense was to say, “If my dog wanted that cat dead, believe me, she would have killed it.”
Roxie goes off the pred early, and for the next couple days, she seems fine. She seems perfect. But then the licking resumes. I give her Benadryl, and not just a little taste. Six tablets go inside her—three times the usual dosage—but she continues moving from place to place, licking at her miserable legs. Late on Sunday night, I call the emergency clinic, explaining symptoms and mentioning that I still have half of the original prescription. Ten tabs. Their advice is to feed her one pred to help her through the night. But the effects aren’t immediate. I can’t sleep with Roxie in this mood, which is why I take refuge in the basement. If she follows me, I decide, at least the white noise of the aquariums will help mask any chaos.
But thank goodness, my dog leaves me alone. This little vacation lasts until six—an exceptionally late hour—and then she pees rivers while we slowly, contentedly make our usual one-mile walk.
When Jessie was a newborn, we would set her on the floor, on her back, and Roxie would come close to investigate, never quite allowing the tiny hands to grab hold of her. Sometimes she brought our daughter gifts—tennis balls or one of the plastic snowmen with its head chewed off—and she would put the toys at Jessie’s feet, waiting for the kick that would start their little game.
The violence came later. Teeth and nails inflicted pain, and there were some hard body blows delivered in weak moments. But as I explained to others, I couldn’t euthanize the guilty party. She was my daughter, after all, and not even two years old.
When we return from day care, Roxie always makes a point of greeting Jessie. I rarely get such treatment, which is another way huskies aren’t anything like Labradors. She is smart enough and secure enough to take me for granted. And if my dog decides to come when I call her—a huge crapshoot as it is—she usually stops short, forcing me take the final few steps.
“You’re describing a cat,” one lady exclaimed upon hearing our stories.
A fifty-pound cat, yes. With blue eyes and a curled tail, a graying coat, and a predator’s fierce instincts.
My haphazard research into huskies gave me one explanation into their nature: Come summer, the Siberian humans would let their dogs run free. With no work for the animals to do, they could feed themselves on the three-month bounty. Then with the first snows, the happy survivors would return to camp, ready to pull sleds in exchange for easy food.
I can’t count all of the rabbits Roxie has killed. She has also butchered mice and at least one nest of shrews, and there have been a few birds snapped out of the air. But rabbits are prizes above all others. When she was young, she nabbed a half-grown bunny and happily brought it home. But I refused to let her prize come indoors, and after giving me a long baleful stare, she ate it wh
ole. And for the rest of the day, there was an extra bounce to her always-bouncy step.
Over the years, Roxie developed a taste for breadsticks and pizza. Sloppy people and my nephews often found their hands suddenly empty. But when Jessie was in the house, I tried to put an end to everybody’s misbehavior. One night, Roxie snatched the bread from my wife’s grip, missing her fingers by nothing. My response was abrupt and passionate. I asserted my dominance, and my dog responded by baring her teeth, telling me quite clearly to back off. But I tried to grab her collar anyway, wanting to drag her outside, and when she snapped, a long sharp canine punctured the meat between my thumb and index finger.
After that, both of us were exceptionally careful with one another.
More than once, tension would erupt and I would see my dog willfully holding back. I would do the same, or at least I tried to. One morning when Roxie picked up a road-killed squirrel—a putrid, half-grown marvel—she looked at me with a wishful expression. I didn’t reach for her mouth, but with a calm voice, I warned her that as soon as we were home, I was going to stick a hose in her mouth and flush that ugliness out of there.
Maybe she understood. More likely, she remembered when I had done that trick with another edible treasure. Either way, she stopped in front of our driveway and crunched on the carcass, and then she gave me a long smile, letting me smell the rancid wonders riding on her breath.
A week later, she was living at the vet’s.
When I finally retrieved her, I found her lying on her side inside a wire cage, looking depressed and painfully skinny. But when the cage door opened, she sprang out, evading every reaching hand and trying to leap up on a table where a squawking parrot sat inside its cage.
That illness was followed by several months of acting happy and comfortable. Roxie would follow me around the house until I settled, and then she would sleep nearby. She ate well, and she pooped quite a lot, and there were a few bouts of diarrhea, but things always resolved themselves within a day or two.
Roxie often slept in the exact place where she had bitten me. And sometimes when she dreamed, her legs would run fast, little woofs leaking out as she chased the most delicious prey.
Then one day, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her running in her sleep in some time.
My dog sleeps almost constantly now, but with very few dreams.
While for me, sleep comes in brief snatches that are filled with the most lucid and awful nightmares.
In less than two years, Shelby will reach the Earth. The most likely scenario has the black body dipping below the geosynchronous satellites and then plunging even closer. The space station is in a relatively high orbit, and if it happens to be in the proper position, its crew will be able to watch an irregularly shaped body streaking between them and their home world. From a distance, Shelby won’t look particularly large or ominous. But the sun will light it up its black crust, even when North America still lies in darkness. And then after kissing the atmosphere’s upper reaches, it will head back out into space, its orbit nudged slightly by our gravity’s sturdy tug.
Just as I once predicted, the odds of the worst are continuing to evolve.
One-in-eleven has become a rather worse one-in-nine. But unless there is a major outgassing event, these numbers won’t move much further, at least for the next year or so. Shelby exists in a strange territory where it is mostly harmless. More often than not, astronomers will decide in the final weeks that it won’t hit, and everybody will get up in the wee hours and step outside to watch a dull little star passing overhead. The asteroid will miss us by miles and miles before continuing on its mindless way, following a new orbit that is our big old world’s little gift to it.
My wife and I discuss what to do if the odds worsen. My mother lives in Yuma during the winter. We could pay a visit then, bringing her granddaughter as well as a few tons of canned goods as gifts.
Our four-year-old hears us talking and sees pictures on the news, and she repeats little fragments of what she hears, in a mangled form. Yet she is an unapologetic optimist, assuring me, “It will be pretty, this meteor thing. We’ll go out and watch it. You and me. And Roxie too.”
“What about Mommy?” I ask.
“She’ll be sleeping,” Jessie confides, obviously having given this issue some thought. “She has go to work tomorrow, Daddy. Remember?”
One day, coming home from day care, NPR is giving details about a Mars probe that’s being quickly reconfigured. With less than perfect equipment, it is going to be launched early and sent on a near-collision course with Shelby, skimming low over its surface while snapping a few thousand pictures that will help us aim a nuke mission that may or may not launch in August. Or September. We need milk tonight, and pulling up in front of the local grocery store, I turn off the car and listen to the rest of the story before getting out and unbuckling my daughter.
A man is walking past, his German shepherd striding beside him.
I don’t often see Tony during the day, and rarely up close. Watching Jessie more than him, I say, “We don’t cross paths much anymore.”
The man holds his dog leash with both hands. I sense his eyes even as I hold my daughter’s hand. This isn’t easy, but I thought I should tell him my news. A few years ago, when Tony’s original German shepherd was failing, he would share updates while working through the usual emotions.
I explain, “Roxie’s walking earlier and earlier. And she’s starting to lose strength, I’m afraid.” That’s when I look up, staring directly at the man’s face, and I honestly don’t recognize him.
The man says, “That’s too bad,” with a voice that I don’t know. Tony’s voice is thick and hearty—an FM radio voice—while this man has a faint, almost girlish tenor. He is also quite skinny and overly dressed for what isn’t a terribly cool afternoon.
“Are you Tony?” I have to ask.
He smiles and nods, saying, “Yes.”
He says, “It’s the chemo. It does this to me.”
I feel silly and lost, and I am quite sad.
“But I’m still vertical,” he adds with a ramshackled pride.
I wish him all the luck in the world, and then I take my daughter into the store for milk and a little tube of M&M’s.
A few mornings later, well before five, Roxie stops a few feet short of our usual turnaround point. She gives me one of her meaningful stares, and when she has my undivided attention, she glances at the big white stairs. She isn’t tired, at least no more tired than usual. But she tells me that she isn’t in the mood to climb those stairs, which is why we turn and start back home again.
It is a starry chill morning, with Venus and the remnants of the moon.
I don’t know why I’m crying while I walk. But I am, blubbering myself sick, hoping to hell no other dog walkers come by and see me this way.
My hope was to someday invite Roxie to a road race. A small town five-miler seemed like the perfect candidate—held in February and named, appropriately, the Animal Run. But one year proved too warm, while the next winter left me in the mood to run a serious, undistracted race. But eventually a timely Arctic front arrived, ending any thought of racing, and before bed, I told my dog to sleep hard because we had a very busy morning coming.
But the cold was even worse than predicted. Digging out from under my blankets, I discovered it was ten below, with a brutal wind sure to cut through any exposed flesh. Being rather fond of my nose, I didn’t want to lose it for fifteenth place in some little survival run. That’s why I stayed home, telling myself and my dog that maybe next year would be our year.
Except soon after that, Roxie quit running long miles.
She told me her wishes by various means: She wouldn’t come when I called. She would feign sleep or a limp. Or, if another runner visited the house, she would greet him joyfully and then make a show of diving into the window well, hunkering down in the delicious shade.
My wife says it’s crazy how much I talk to my dog.
Lesl
ie hears my end of the conversation, and with a palpable tension, she’ll ask, “How do you know that’s what she wants?”
“The eyes. The body. Everything about this dog is talking. Can’t you see?”
Not at all, no.
For more than a year, Roxie would run nothing but little, lazy-day runs. Then on an autumn afternoon, while I was dressing in the basement, she suddenly came to the side door and gave me a long look. When I returned the stare, she glanced up at the leashes hanging from the hook on the wall.
“No, hun,” I said. “I’m going long today.”
She knows the difference between “long” and “little.”
Yet those blue eyes danced, and again she stared up at the salt-crusted six-foot running leash.
I told her the course I wanted to run.
She knows our routes by name.
“You’re sure?” I asked.
She stepped back into the kitchen and stretched, front paws out ahead while the body extended, teasing out the kinks.
“Okay then. Let’s go.”
Until the following spring, she ran twenty miles every week. And then the weather got warm, and she quit again. For good.
But in that final youth, one run stands out: A different Arctic front was pushing through. We began by heading toward the southeast, letting the bitter wind push us along. But then we had no choice but to turn and head for home. For some reason, I was using her twenty-foot leash—probably to let her cavort in the snowdrifts. Roxie was as far ahead as possible, nose to the wind and her leash pulled taut. We eventually reached that place where the path split two ways. To the left was home and warmth, while straight on meant adding miles in a numbing cold. When Roxie reached the intersection, she looked back at me, making a request with her eyes. I said, “No, girl.” I told her it was time to finish. But she trotted ahead anyway, stopping only when I stopped. And then she turned and stared stubbornly back at me, making absolutely certain that I understood what she wanted.
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 99
