by Tor Seidler
“Sorry, boy. You have to stay here.”
Gulliver stared up at the bearded face in bleak bewilderment. Then the steel doors closed.
Yo, man, you okay?” J.C. whispered.
Gulliver was too devastated to answer. He could have been one of those dog statues in a pet cemetery.
Then up he went into the air. Carlos carried him over to his chair and set him down on his Daily News, which he’d spread out on the floor. “I don’t know how the heck you got here, Gully,” he said. “But you’ll just have to stay put till I get off.”
After standing a while, Gulliver curled up on the newspaper and shut his eyes. But he was much too confused and upset to sleep.
“Hey, man, I heard a good one back in the pet store where I started out,” J.C. said. “Okay. This guinea pig and this white rat and this ferret go into a bar, and the white rat says . . .”
But the joke was lost on Gulliver, as was everything else that happened that day. Early in the afternoon Professor Rattigan and Madeline de Crecy emerged from the elevator, and the professor said “Hey, boy” as they approached the doors, but Gulliver just pretended to be asleep. He never moved a muscle all day, never slept, never opened his eyes.
Carlos splurged on a cab for the trip back to Queens. When they got home, he located the hole under the fence and filled it in with rocks, then he went off to catch the last couple of innings of Pedro’s baseball game. Gulliver, meanwhile, was mobbed by the other three dogs, all dying to know where he’d been. Without a word he turned away and went over to the hut. It was shut up. Roberto must have been at the Multiplex. Gulliver dragged himself into the Montoyas’ apartment and crawled under the La-Z-Boy.
It wasn’t as dusty as last time — Consuela had vacuumed — but it was still dark and dismal. J.C. dismounted and nibbled on a kernel of popcorn that had rolled under there. After finishing half, he held up the remaining bit.
“Want some?”
Gulliver shook his head.
A while later Pogo poked her snout under the chair.
“What you doing?” she asked.
Gulliver didn’t answer.
Before long the smell of human food cooking wafted in from the kitchen. After their dinner the Montoyas took over the living room to watch TV. But not even the awful blaring could drive Gulliver from his hiding place.
During a set of commercials, Juanita got down on her hands and knees, reached in under the chair, grabbed Gulliver by the tail, and dragged him out into the light. “What’s the matter with you, Gully?” she said.
“He had quite a day,” Carlos said, peering over the La-Z-Boy’s arm.
“I still don’t believe he got all the way into Manhattan,” Consuela said.
“Why would I make it up?” Carlos asked.
“Look at him!” Juanita said, sticking a red barrette onto Gulliver’s tail.
Pudge and Frankie looked up from their after-dinner naps and snickered.
“You’re not putting that back in your hair now, sweetie,” Consuela said.
“It’s a present for Gully.”
The sitcom came back on, and Juanita hopped onto the sofa. Gulliver dragged himself back under the La-Z-Boy, where J.C. poked his head out through the dog’s mane.
“Let me get that thing off you.”
The gerbil crawled across Gulliver’s back and managed to work the barrette off his tail. But he didn’t get so much as a “Thanks.”
Carlos waited up for Roberto that night, and when he heard the putt-putt of the motorbike, he went to the back door and peered out through the screen.
“How was work?” he asked, watching Roberto cover the bike with the tarp.
In fact, it was Thursday night, so Roberto had been at his acting class in Manhattan. He and a girl named Moira had done a scene from a play called The Glass Menagerie. Afterward the other students had praised Moira to the skies.
“How come you’re still up?” Roberto said.
“I wanted to . . . Hey, where’s your uniform?”
“Oh. Mine was dirty. I borrowed one at work.”
Had Roberto been a better actor, the lie might have sounded more convincing. But Carlos didn’t notice.
Roberto came inside and, more as a joke than anything else, got a beer out of the fridge.
“In a year and a half, when you’re twenty-one,” Carlos said.
Roberto poured himself a glass of apple juice instead and followed his father into the living room.
“You’re not going to believe what Gully did,” Carlos said, settling in the La-Z-Boy. “He dug a hole under the fence, and today he got into Manhattan. Back to where he used to live.”
“No way.”
“He did! I was thinking maybe you could write it up and send it in to the News as a human interest story.”
“Or canine interest,” Roberto said, smiling for the first time since his scene. “But how’d he do it?”
“I guess you’ll have to ask him.”
“Where is he?”
Carlos pointed down. “He’s been under there all night.”
“Has he eaten?”
“I don’t think so.”
Roberto got down on his hands and knees and peered under. “Come on out, boy. I want to interview you.”
Not even Roberto’s voice got through to Gulliver. Roberto reached and gently tugged him out by a forepaw.
“Hey, boy, sounds to me like we ought to call you Wonderdog.”
Roberto carried him into the kitchen and set him down by his red bowl. Gulliver just stood there.
“Not hungry? How about bed, then?”
Roberto said good night to his father and carried Gulliver out to the hut and set him on the foot of the bed. When he climbed into bed himself, Roberto pulled a pad and pen out of the drawer of his bedside table instead of The Complete Shakespeare.
After thinking a minute he wrote:
He considered this a while and then scrawled:
“So how’d you do it, boy?” he said, jiggling a foot under the covers.
Gulliver’s eyes were open. But although Roberto was grinning at him, all he could see was the elevator doors closing.
Afamous poet once wrote that “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” but if this holds true for dogs as well, you wouldn’t have known it from watching Gulliver over the next couple of days. He didn’t eat. He ignored J.C.’s jokes. He ignored Pogo’s attempts to start a conversation. He ignored Frankie’s and Pudge’s wisecracks. He ignored the Ponsons’ cat’s dirty looks. When Juanita grabbed him, he went limp and waited for the ordeal to be over, then dragged himself under the La-Z-Boy.
It was all such a devastating shock. He’d finally rediscovered his beloved professor — and his professor had completely rejected him. Life as he’d always known it was over. He had nothing left to look forward to beyond this cruddy existence in Queens.
Late that Saturday night Roberto stopped at a deli on his way home from the Multiplex and bought two cans of wet dog food: one beef, one chicken. The household was asleep when he got home, so he used the hand can opener in the kitchen instead of the noisy electric one. He took the bowl of dog food out to his hut, then came back into the house and tugged Gulliver out from under the La-Z-Boy.
“You barely weigh a thing, Gully,” he said, carrying the dog across the backyard.
Out in the hut he set Gulliver down in front of the bowl. “I won’t tell the other dogs about this if you don’t,” he said. “Now eat, or I’ll spoon it down your throat.”
For the past two days Gulliver had been hoping he would starve to death. But starving to death isn’t so easy for a healthy dog.
“Smells great,” J.C. whispered in his ear.
It wasn’t Prime Premium, but J.C. was right. The juicy-looking beef smelled delicious. And Gulliver was ravenous. But eatin
g, he knew, would only prolong the agony of life without his professor.
“I’m a sweaty mess, boy,” Roberto said, stripping. “I’m showering before bed.”
When Roberto ducked into the bathroom, J.C. dismounted and went straight for the bowl. “Since you don’t want to chow down,” he said, “mind if I do?”
Here was another defining moment for Gulliver. Was he going to sign off on life and leave the yummy wet food for the gerbil, or was he going to give in and allow himself a little sustenance? What decided him was probably less the smell of the wet food than the fact that someone, even if it wasn’t his professor, had cared enough about him to get him this special treat.
“One nibble,” he muttered. “But the rest is mine.”
And so a new chapter in Gulliver’s life began. He started eating again. He stopped ignoring everything J.C. said. He quit crawling under the La-Z-Boy. He returned the cat’s dirty looks.
This is not to say he forgot the good old days. Now and then Roberto picked up a can of wet food for him, but normally Gulliver was stuck with the same dry food as the other dogs, and J.C. got an earful about the glories of Prime Premium. As bad as the dryness of the food was the unpredictability of Juanita. Some days she hardly noticed him, but other days she would let out a screech and chase him down and nearly squeeze the life out of him. One evening after dinner she squirted whipped cream all over his snout. One Saturday she dressed him up in her bikini.
“Suits you,” Frankie said.
“It’s darling, Gully,” said Pudge.
And, worst of all, Pogo: “You look so cute, I could eat you up!”
Pogo developed a full-blown crush on him. And though being adored is normally considered pleasant, Gulliver couldn’t stand her licking his face and telling him how “adorable” he was. He liked to think of himself as handsome, not adorable. Furthermore, she was twice his size, far too large for a girlfriend.
The more Pogo doted on him, the more he pined for Chloe. Chloe was the perfect size, slightly smaller than he was, and she wouldn’t have dreamed of trying to lick him. To J.C.’s annoyance, Gulliver took to escaping Pogo’s attentions by climbing up to the Ponsons’. In their living room Gulliver perched in an armchair and stared at the photo of the Eiffel Tower, wallowing in sentimental memories of his evenings with Chloe, while the cat, usually sunning herself on the opposite windowsill, hissed menacingly under her breath.
“Ever had snails in garlic butter?” Gulliver mused.
“Yuck,” said J.C.
“They’re a delicacy. At the café I always got delicacies.”
“Well, dude, just in case you missed school that day, cats think gerbils are a delicacy.”
But J.C. couldn’t keep Gulliver from lingering there, basking in the exquisite ache of separation from the Maltese. Mr. Ponson thought it was the drollest thing in the world. The grinning man in the photo was his brother, who owned the small Parisian bakery in front of which he was posing. Mr. Ponson took a snapshot of Gulliver staring at the photo and sent it off to Paris. “Dear Pierre,” he wrote. “You must come for a visit soon and meet your #1 admirer. He stares at your photo every day! Honest, I’m not joking. Je t’embrasse, François.”
Besides the hours spent reminiscing about Paris in the Ponsons’ living room, Gulliver’s favorite times were late nights in the hut when Roberto confided in him.
“Well, boy,” Roberto said one Thursday night, “either the others have it in for me or I stunk up acting class again. I did this famous soliloquy from Macbeth, but afterward the girl in the front row just rolled her eyes . . .”
Or: “Hey, I finished the piece about you traveling to Manhattan and sent it to the News. Wouldn’t it be great if they took it? I could put the money in my Hollywood fund.”
And a few nights later: “The woman at the News gave it the thumbs-down, boy. I guess you weren’t a big enough deal to get in the paper. But at least she said it was well written and, if I ever have another story, to send it along. That’s something, huh?”
After Labor Day, Pedro and Juanita went back to school, and Roberto started classes again at Queens College. But the weather remained summery, and on the third Saturday in September Carlos took the family — except for Roberto, who had to cover a friend’s afternoon shift at the Multiplex — to the beach. Carlos borrowed the Sewinskis’ SUV and drove everybody, dogs included, to Far Rockaway.
The car trip was an ordeal for Gulliver. Packed into the back of the SUV with the three bigger dogs, he couldn’t escape Pudge’s digs or Pogo’s slobbering. But when they got out and walked onto the boardwalk by the beach, his spirits rose. A beach! His professor had never taken him to the beach, and now, if he was lucky enough to see Chloe again, he would be able to rival her tales of chasing seagulls and running through the backwash.
This beach, however, had no fishing nets spread out on the sand, only hundreds of beach towels weighted down by human beings. And at first the blaring of boom boxes made it hard to hear the lap of the waves Chloe had described so poetically. But the Montoyas continued down the boardwalk to a less people-populated, more dog-friendly area where Gulliver could hear the swish of water on sand and smell the salt sea air.
While Carlos set up the umbrella, Pudge and Frankie raced off to investigate a pair of female Irish setters farther down the shore.
“Come on, I’ll show you where I saw the horseshoe crab,” Pogo said, nudging Gulliver.
“That’s okay,” Gulliver said. “I’m fine here.”
“But it’s just past that jetty.”
“You go. You can tell me all about it later.”
Pogo got the hint and trotted off with a sigh, leaving Gulliver free to perch above the high-tide line and stare out at the ocean. It was bluer than the sky and almost as silky as his coat, shimmering off to the far horizon.
“Yo, man, where are we?” J.C. asked.
“I think France is out there somewhere,” Gulliver murmured.
“Oh, jeez. Mooning over that Chloe again?”
While Gulliver lost himself in reveries of his beloved Maltese, Carlos and Consuela set up beach chairs under the umbrella. She opened a magazine, he opened a beer. Meanwhile, Pedro and Juanita started building a sand castle just above the backwash. The hole from which they got their sand grew deeper and deeper, and once the final fortifications had been added, Juanita had one of her inspirations.
“Let’s bury Gully up to his neck! Then Mom can take a picture with just his head poking up!”
Gulliver was salivating over the memory of a piece of coq au vin he’d once shared with Chloe when he was suddenly in Juanita’s arms. Before he could squirm out of her grasp, she dumped him in a hole and started packing sand around him. He scrambled out — but Pedro jammed him back in. Before he knew it, he couldn’t scramble out. All four of his legs were encased in sand.
“Mom, check out Gully!” Juanita said.
“Oh, really, sweetheart,” said Consuela. “That’s mean.”
This didn’t stop Juanita. As she patted sand around Gulliver’s neck, she felt a lump and let out one of her trademark screeches.
“Mom, look!” She held the gerbil up by his tail. “J.C. was on Gully’s neck!”
Gulliver couldn’t so much as wiggle a paw, but he could crane his head back far enough to see J.C. dangling in the air. Was this a bad dream? First they buried him, and now they were torturing his little friend!
“Is that really J.C.?” Consuela said, closing her magazine.
“I don’t believe it,” said Carlos, sticking his beer bottle in the sand.
Pedro tried to grab J.C. away, but Juanita wouldn’t let him go, and poor J.C. was nearly crushed in her fist. Juanita ran to the umbrella.
“Sweet Maria,” said Consuela, “it really is him.”
“You mean he was hiding in Gully’s hair all this time?” said Carlos.
At that moment there was a commotion out in the surf.
“Look!” cried one of the swimmers.
“Rider, rider!” cried another.
“Be careful, kids!” a swimming father yelled. “Dive under it!”
A huge swell was fast approaching the shore. The swimmers who were farther out bobbed over the towering wave like corks. As it turned into a wall of water, the closer-in swimmers dove through it. Then the wall came crashing down, sending a tide of backwash so far up the beach that the Montoyas and others had to grab their towels and books and picnic baskets to keep them from getting soaked.
Till that moment Gulliver’s underwater experience had been confined to gentle baths at Groom-o-rama and his one brief dunking in the Montoyas’ plastic pool. This was entirely different. The water was salty, not fresh, and he was packed in sand, unable to swim up for air. As the seawater rushed over him, it blinded him, and he was seized with a terrible panic. He tried to bark — and choked on briny water. He struggled with all his might. But all his might wasn’t all that much.
Just as his lungs felt the sting of the salt water, the backwash receded, taking with it much of the sand imprisoning him. His front legs were suddenly free. He gagged, coughed, sneezed, then clawed his way onto the soaking sand and tore off as fast as his stubby legs could carry him.
As he raced along, Gulliver soon switched from the crowded beach to the shady strip under the boardwalk, where it was cooler and clearer sailing. But after tripping over a stinky fish carcass, he bolted inland onto the streets of Far Rockaway.
Under a hot-dog vendor’s cart, he stepped in mustard. As he dashed past a truck playing a jingle, he stepped in a sticky pile of melted strawberry ice cream. Under a parked car, he got oil on his sand-caked coat and tail. Then a mean-looking dalmatian caught sight of him and, leaping a fence, started running him down. The chase proceeded through a series of foul mud puddles. As the spotted beast was about to catch up to him, Gulliver leaped through the open door of a FedEx van and dove under the seat.
