Here, Boy
content warning: violence
A lady with a touchscreen tablet makes her way up and down the line. “Are you here for an upgrade?” she asks.
“No, this is my first time.” I show her an ID. The lady disappears through a door, comes back a moment later with a dog on a leash. It’s Dusty, the dog I lost. From his long brown fur right down to the splash of gray on his belly, it’s the same dog. I make a show of being unimpressed, but I’m holding back tears.
“What do you think?”
“He looks good. Not great, but good. What about my grandchildren?”
“How old are they?”
I have to think about it. Their mother just started bringing them by again. Their father said I was a bad influence, but now she and him split and there’s a new guy.
“The oldest is seven,” I say, but I’m not sure. I’m their grandfather and I’m not sure.
“They won’t know the difference,” the lady says. She flashes a smile. “You can always return him if there’s a problem.”
I buy a carrier, a leash, a little fleece bed for him to sleep in. Why they make a flannel vest for a dog like this is beyond me, but I buy one anyway. Dusty used to sleep on the goddamn concrete, it made no difference to him.
The next day, the grandchildren come over. Grandpa this, Grandpa that. They want me to buy them ice cream, drive them to the pool, order pepperoni pizza. I give them everything they ask for. I wasn’t a very good father. I married young and had a bad temper. Even hit a guy with a tire iron at a service station; went to prison. But those grandchildren mean everything to me. We play games at the dinner table. I let them climb up on my lap. After lunch I say Grandpa is tired and start to crack open a beer, but then I remember what their mother said—no drinking.
It’s ninety degrees out. I turn on the sprinkler and the grandchildren run through the water chasing the dog, just like they did with the old one. They play tug-of-war with a pull toy, throw the ball with the stick. “Dusty!” they say, like they always did, and put their arms around him. When they pull on his ears, he doesn’t hide under the table anymore. The dog hops up on their laps, licks their faces. Nobody can tell the difference, not the children anyway. In the afternoon, they fall asleep in a pile on the brown sofa, and when their mother calls to ask when she should pick them up, they beg to stay the night.
“No drinking,” she says, like I’m a goddamn idiot.
I put the kids to sleep on the pullout, turn on the television, eat a drumstick from the fridge. I feed the dog the bone and he eats it right up. In my pajamas, I watch some cop show on TV. The dog lies in my lap, buries his nose under my arm. They say these pets become more lifelike after a few weeks, more like the one you lost. They pick up on cues, scents, and behaviors. But to me, this dog is already alive. This is Dusty, my buddy, the same dog who got run over by a Penske truck. When I get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, he follows me and waits by the door like he always did.
We’re out in my garden, my neighbor Ethel and I, planting radishes. She’s giving me a hard time. “Look at him,” she says. “That’s not a dog. He just sits there in the shade. A real dog lies in the sun.” Like she’s a dog. Like she would know.
Ethel is ninety-four and deaf in one ear, but her mind is still sharp. “What business is it of yours?” I ask. “I don’t go around telling you what to do.” She’s ninety-four, but I don’t cut her no slack. I can tell her where to go.
“I don’t think you should have lied to your grandchildren,” Ethel says. “How will they understand anything if they don’t experience death?”
“They don’t have to go through everything like we did,” I say, pulling a clump of weeds from the soil. A caterpillar crawls across a tomato leaf. I flick it to the earth and chop it in half with my spade.
One night, the dog gets a paperclip stuck deep in his eye, and I have to use a pair of needle-nose pliers to pull it out. The grandkids are quiet, won’t say what happened. I grip the pliers with both hands and put my foot on the dog’s head for leverage. “Grandpa, stop,” the middle one says. The dog neither jerks nor yelps as I tug the piece of steel wire from its eye. Watching, the kids get upset, want me to cut it out, stop it. The youngest one climbs up the brown sofa and begins to cry. For the rest of the night, she can’t be in the same room as the dog. The other two, ages five and seven, get smart. When they think I’m not watching, they chase the dog, kick him, and lock him in the pantry. They hit him with sticks and douse his paws with boiling water from the electric kettle.
The next weekend is the Fourth of July. I go downstairs to discover one of them has burnt the tip of the dog’s tail with a sparkler. That’s it. I whack their bottoms and send them home to their mother. I clip the burnt part off, save it in a plastic bag for when I can take it back to the store. A week later, the dog still smells like sulfur and singed hair. I lock him in the basement, can’t eat in the same room.
“We can shampoo his coat if you want to drop him off for the afternoon,” the lady says. “Or we could put him in the autoclave for twenty minutes. That will get the smell off.”
“Only the tail,” I say.
She disappears through a door with the dog and comes back five minutes later. The tail is restored to its original length. “Anything else I can help you with?” She flashes that smile.
I don’t know what it is, but I get all worked up. I’m thinking about my daughter, how I left when she was young. On her birthday I’d call, make plans to visit, then spend the day drinking. I tell the lady I’m considering getting rid of Dusty. My grandchildren don’t know what to do with him, and I don’t feel a real connection. Something is different from when I first got him. I don’t like him on my lap anymore. He goes through the trash and leaves prints in the kitchen.
The lady is quiet for a moment.
“Pets are like people,” she says. “Sometimes we take them for granted. Have you thought about a surgery? Studies show that when we’re caring for a sick animal, the body produces nearly as much oxytocin as when a mother gives birth. Sometimes going through a surgery can help to establish the type of bond you’re describing, especially for children.”
“What sort of surgery? How much does it cost?” The old Dusty never needed surgery.
“It depends on the type and how long the convalescence period is. A small bowel obstruction costs about $550.”
“I was thinking it would be a lot more,” I say, even though it sounds like a lot.
“We try to provide these services to people of all income levels.”
“Would he feel any pain?” I ask.
The lady laughs. “It sounds worse than it actually is. He’d be back on his feet in no time.”
The morning of the surgery, I pack the dog into a carrier and place him carefully on the front seat of my car. We arrive at the surgical center, and I explain the operation as we sit in the parking lot with the car running. The dog looks up at me, seems to understand. In the waiting room, I release him from the carrier. He runs under one of the orange plastic chairs and has to be coaxed out by a veterinary nurse. I’m sitting there, bawling like a baby.
Three hours later, the dog comes back. The procedure was a success, the nurse says, and for two weeks the dog needs to wear a cone to keep from chewing at the surgical site. My grandchildren come over that night. They make a little bed from a cardboard box, stuff it with soft blankets and toys. They read to him and stroke behind his ears. Even the youngest one isn’t suspicious. She lets him sleep with his head on her lap, draws pictures of him, which I hang up on the refrigerator. I feel like Grandfather of the Year. “Is he going to die?” they ask over bowls of mint chocolate chip ice cream.
“Of course he isn’t,” I say.
A few weeks later and the dog has fully recovered. The grandchildren play fetch with him, let him run off leash in a field by the house. He runs and runs, through the field and past the fence, faster than I’ve ever seen him go. They scratch his belly, teach him tricks. He dashes left, then right, leaping over the wild violets and chickweed. It seems like he’ll just keep running, but then the older boy whistles and the dog turns around, trots back.
“It’s not natural,” my neighbor Ethel says. The grandkids are inside, watching television. We’re in lawn chairs out front, bare feet in the grass. Ethel has on a big red sun hat with a bowknot. Her legs are whiter than feta cheese. Those goddamn legs. I hope to god I don’t live to be ninety-four. “You should tell them the truth,” she says.
“What will that prove?”
Those goddamn legs.
Next day, after the grandkids go home, I take the dog back to the same field with a six-pack. The sun is poking through some trees. I let him off the leash, crack a beer. I throw the ball with a stick. The dog runs out and back and drops it at my feet. I finish the beer, put the empty in the trash can, and crack another. I eat a pickle and cheese sandwich with some chips. Pretty soon I’m four beers in and feeling good. My daughter calls. She’s upset, I can tell right away.
“Where are you? You were supposed to pick up the kids twenty minutes ago.”
I think about it. Maybe I was. Maybe I was supposed to be there.
“I can come,” I say. “Give me a few minutes to get myself together.”
“I have an interview at the casino. Because of you I’m late. What’s that going to look like?”
My daughter didn’t used to work, but I guess since that man left she has no choice. I sure as hell don’t have any money for her. If I did, I’d give it to her. Every penny.
“I can be there,” I say again.
“Goddamn it, Dad. I can tell you’ve been drinking.” She hangs up. I call her back, but no answer. My own daughter. Can you believe it?
Now I don’t know what to do. I feel around for my car keys. Where did the dog go? I whistle, but he doesn’t come. I walk out to the edge of the field, out near the trees, whistle again. Nothing.
I hear a car skid, and a thump. It’s a mail truck. The dog is lying there on the pavement, behind the truck. There are goddamn wires coming out of his leg. Blood too, but the wires are what bothers me. I can’t explain it. It’s like I’m watching a movie, and all of a sudden I’m yanked out of it. This isn’t a dog. It’s something else. I tried to make things right more than anyone ought to, but I can’t change what’s been done.
“Bad boy,” I say. “You are a bad, bad boy.” I drag him across the concrete by his scruff, throw a towel from the trunk over the backseat. The dog’s paw is really mangled, hanging by a thread. I can’t afford another surgery. Poor thing can barely hold its head up. I turn him over with my foot, give him a tap. Wires, gears, and plastic. Synthetic nose, synthetic whiskers.
I hear a voice. It’s a guy walking down the sidewalk. He has a goddamn cat on a leash. “You should be ashamed,” the goofball says, picking up his cat. “Do something.”
“It’s not a living animal,” I say.
“Sure it is. All of these pets are made from living cells. Look at his eyes. He’s suffering.” The guy crouches down on the ground. “Here, boy,” he says, holds out his hand. The dog wobbles to his feet and takes a weak step closer. “If you don’t do something, your dog is going to lose its paw.”
“You’re not a veterinarian,” I say. “You don’t know anything.”
I pin the dog to the ground with my shoe. I’m thinking about my daughter, about the grandkids. How every time I quit drinking, I start up again, like a rat caught in a maze. I’m thinking about the surgery, the fleece bed.
“Get your foot off him,” the goofball says. “You’re hurting him.”
But I’m not. I’m not doing anything to anyone.
James Keith Smith’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in Sierra Nevada Review, A Critical Flame, and Typehouse Literary Magazine. He was born in Detroit, Michigan. He currently lives in the Pacific Northwest.