Luck Of The Paw

I took off yesterday from work so that I could take care of some things on which I’ve been procrastinating. It was Friday the 13th, so it seemed an appropriate day to venture out and seek accomplishments.

The main objective was to take care of some business with the Veteran’s Administration. The closest VA center is located a few towns over, and we got an early start. My wife and I found our way to the sprawling campus and were surprised at how busy it was. Friendly guides were everywhere, helping the incoming veterans to park and to find which building they needed to transact their business. We watched silver-haired men in Buicks hobble over to the shuttle bus, and we watched weathered Duck Dynasty types lowering their motorized wheelchairs from mounts on the rear of pickup trucks. Young staffers with handheld radios roamed the area, courteous and respectful. We were impressed.

An interesting exchange when we located and entered the building we needed, though. In the lobby, a young woman stopped us and waited for six or eight more people to enter, then asked us to please listen up.

“Good morning, folks. I need to ask — are any of you experiencing any symptoms such as cough, fever, sneezing, or general flu-like symptoms?” We all answered “no” as a group, and the young woman continued.

“Have any of you traveled outside of the tri-cities area within the last month?” Again, a group “no.”

“Have any of you been in contact with anyone who has been experiencing any of the symptoms I mentioned, or with anyone who has traveled outside of the tri-cities area within the last month?” A final group “no,” and she waved us on and wished us all a good day.

We found the office we needed, and my business was conducted in a surprisingly short time. Every person we encountered was cheerful, helpful, respectful, and professional. But the little incident in the lobby bothered me all day. My wife and I talked about it, and we decided that it was bothersome because it was so brutally bureaucratic.

Any one of those of us in the lobby could simply have lied to the young woman. I could have been masking the symptoms, or lying about my travel habits, or about my social interactions, and how would she have known? How could she have known? There no way. So what was she accomplishing? Why was she there?

Because she was dammit-to-hell doing something. Measures were being taken. Precautions were being observed. Her bosses can tell their bosses that they have been proactive, that they’ve been Taking Measures to ensure the health and well-being and safety of the veterans and their family members who use the facility. Never mind that these measures are empty gestures, time-wasting pantomimes, predictable busywork. The main thing is that someone is doing something to combat the spread of the corona virus.

***

Later, we went shopping for some things we needed. We’d heard the stories about how items like hand sanitizer and toilet paper and cough syrup have disappeared from the shelves, but we got to see this firsthand, and the stories were not exaggerated.

The shortages, though, were not particularly bothersome, mostly because we are always pretty well-supplied with necessary items. What was unsettling was the general mood of the people in the stores…the expressions on the faces, the set of the eyes, the mood in the air. My wife remarked several times that she felt as if she were in one of those disaster movies where some Big Bad Event happens and then a band of survivors have to discover and test their own mettle. The feeling in the air was one of….well, there’s no other way to say it….it was a feeling of impending doom.

Mind you, I am not any more worried about the corona virus than I am about the regular flu. I don’t want it, because I hate being sick. But my wife and I are both tough and resilient, and unless there have been new developments of which I am unaware, developments like “people who catch corona virus will experience a loss of skin, bleeding from the eyeballs, and an overwhelming compulsion to walk with their arms stretched forward while seeking human brains upon which to dine,” then I’m simply not that worried about it. But the very air is infected with fear and low-grade panic and a sense of people being cut loose from their moorings. My wife was right. It’s like being in a bad movie. I wonder how it will end?

***

We also stopped off in an antique market we’d never visited, just to browse for old books and assorted useless geegaws. We’ve often talked about just why it is that we enjoy picking through old things, and my wife’s theory is a good one. She believes that we, as a compatible pair, are looking for small reminders of comfort and quiet joy from our childhoods. That some of the little items we see, like potato mashers with red handles or heavy brown crockery or Mellmac plates or certain old books, that some of these things are exactly like ones that we saw in our families’ homes when we were children, and that the link is soothing and yet mysterious.

We hadn’t been in the store for more than a couple of minutes when a thirtysomething girl entered. She was wearing a flannel shirt and yoga pants over distended hips imported direct from the Land O’ Cellulite. Her lank hair was gathered up on top of her head with one of those things that looks like a fabric-covered calamari, and the overall effect was that she was gracing us with her presence exactly two-point-five minutes after she rolled out of her futon in her tastefully minimalist apartment above an organic bakery. She had a cellphone jammed against her ear, and she was declaiming in a loud voice that started somewhere waaaay up in her nose to her unseen friend about a news item, a local toddler who had gone missing and whose remains had been found. She blatted all her feelings and emotions about this sad case into the air at volume eleven, and then abruptly switched to the wonders of milk glass and down comforters. She stalked the long aisles of the store, giving her conversation partner and everyone within two counties her clear and unabashed opinion on the state of the world and the nuanced workings of the delicate wet machinery of her brooding and complex mind as it groped about in the existential darkness of the vast beating heart of the metropolis that is Johnson City, Tennessee. I wanted to transcribe all her words so that I could preserve them for the world. I wanted to ask her the questions that torment me during my hours of solitude. I wanted to grab her by her scrunched-up tresses, whirl her around my head like a hand towel, and throw her through the plate glass window at the front of the store.

But I did not. Because she might have been carrying the corona virus.

***

A couple more stops, and then an abortive trip to the gas station (abortive because the lines of cars were longer than I’ve seen since post-9/11) and then home. Down the winding gravel stripe between the pastures, tranquil breeze bringing the good, honest scent of cow and manure and silage and pent-up rain and decomposing leaves and new green shoots into the car, until finally the mailbox up ahead, and the mail hadn’t come yet, and then Mrs. Orr spoke.

“Wonder whose dog that is?”

I saw a light-colored shape trotting on the road, just ahead of us. I didn’t recognize it, either, and I didn’t pay much attention to it until I started down our driveway and noticed that the dog was escorting me.

At the door, we got out. The dog was right there at the side of the car, and I reached for him, to pet it. The dog jumped and shied away, and I remarked to my wife that it was skittish. But when I knelt down, the dog ran to me and plowed into me, knocking me backwards, trying to climb into my lap. Head against my chest, belly to the gray sky, the dog showed himself to be a he, and I rubbed his stiff fur and talked to him a bit. He was wearing a black nylon collar with no tag. His body was lean and taut, his whitish fur spotted with brown dime-sized dots. His head was brown, with a diamond-shaped blaze with an “o” in the center of his forehead. This blaze was distorted by a deep wrinkle. The wrinkle and the high, furled ears gave him the look of a sharpei, while his body suggested either a pointer or a variety of heeler. His eyes were lively and intelligent, and they bored into me with a look that gave me the feeling that the dog was asking me a question.

He looked to be about six to eight months old, dressing out at perhaps forty pounds, and seemed in good health. My wife examined him and noted that his teeth were strong and immaculately white, but that his gums were pale, indicating anemia or perhaps heavy flea infestation.

When we went inside, the dog paced in front of the door for just a moment, then found his way somewhere else. Or so I thought.

An hour or so later, I saw the mail truck on our road, and I pulled on my boots. When I stepped out, the dog appeared at my side and play-bowed. Looking up at me, the wrinkle between his eyes seemed more pronounced, and gave him a quizzical/comical/sad look that made me laugh. Without speaking to me, I started walking up the driveway to fetch the mail. The dog fell into step next to me on my left, looking up at me as we walked. After I got the mail and chatted with a passing neighbor (who didn’t recognize the dog, either), I returned to the house, the dog matching me step for step.

In a while, an electrician arrived to look at a problem about which my wife had called him. While he was at the house, I tried to pawn the dog off on him or his apprentice. Both laughed politely; both declined. When they left, the dog stayed at our door. I tried telling him to git, tried shooing him, tried raising my voice. Each time, I got the play-bow, the wrinkled brow, the steady gaze.

My wife reminded me that we needed to take some trash to the county dump, so we loaded up and prepared to leave. Once again, the dog was right there. He trotted up the driveway behind us, and when I sped up, he loped along, never slowing, never stopping. Not in the mood to adopt some stray, I said, “Maybe I can lose him.” My wife agreed, and I drove even faster, not the best idea on our rollercoaster road of hardpan and stone. By the time we reached the county road, I could no longer see the dog. By the time we hit the state highway, we had almost forgotten about him.

We made it to the county dump, unloaded our trash, then headed back across the river. My wife mentioned that the strawberries would soon be coming into season, and that the farm nearby would be selling the red treasures in their roadside stands and grocery store displays. The warm taste of spring, the little berries with their vital grass scent and scrubby skin and the single bite that brings all the promise, all the fulfillment.

On the way home, inspiration. “I’m going to go the back way, around where the old high school was. See if I can fool that dog.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Mrs. Orr. “We’ll come in from the other direction, far away from where we last saw him.”

So we drove and talked and remarked on how green everything was getting, and how spruce was the little house on the western curl of the holler, with its pristine fence and shutters and ornamental gravel beds and garage as immaculate as the house itself. We looped on down, looking across the valley and we could see our wood thicket up on the high slope, and we remarked on the elderly couple who had built the massive flagstone house atop one of the hills bordering the road, and I thought of Kristofferson’s Darby’s Castle, and we descended through the gradual verdant draw, and at the road’s junction at the bottom, there was the dog, brown dots standing in mellow relief against his light fur. He was looking right at us, with expectation. And his tail was wagging in slow circles.

“Hoist by mine own petard,” I muttered.

“What did you say?” asked my wife. Then she followed my gaze and saw. “How did he…how did he know…how did…?”

The dog linked up with us as I passed him. I sped up again, just as I had done when we’d left for the county dump, and I lost him in a plume of road dust. Reaching our turnoff, I rocketed down the driveway, parked at the door, and we hurried inside. My wife watched from the door.

“Is he coming down the road?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “as a matter of fact, he’s not.”

“Good,” I said.

“Actually, he’s cutting across the pasture. Heading right this way.”

He came trotting up to the door, panting. And are any of you surprised that my next move was to take him a dish of water? Are any of you surprised that in a short while, I fed him? I sat cross-legged in the grass, and he crawled all over me, shivering with the delight that comes from human contact.

The night was warm and mild, and he slept on the grass with his back against the tire of my truck. Every time I went outside…when I fed the barn cat…when I let Dixee out to do her business…when I went to check the air and the clouds…he was there. Not jumping, not hyper, not yipping. Just there. Patient and quiet.

This morning, the dog was still here. He came to me when I opened the door and emptied a can of Bonnie’s food — saved out of sentimental reasons — into a plastic dish. After my wife and I had our breakfast, I told her that I was going to take a walk up into the cemetery to see if he would follow me, to see how he was with things.

He walked with me, sometimes roving a bit ahead and to the side, as if blazing a trail for me. He must have stored up a lot of urine from last night, because he stopped and peed — and I mean peed, not some little trifling tinklesprinkle — a half dozen times before we reached the low green rise where the gravestones begin their march up the hill.

We roved together all over the cemetery, and he turned to look at me once and lifted a paw like a pointer, his head cocked and querulous, watching the old man in the hat. I led him to the spot where I used to sit with Bonnie and watch her as she looked at the far humps of the Clinch mountains. He sat with me and scratched his fleas. And he looked into my face with questions, with suggestions, with theories of at least four things. And once, he ran into the midst of the stone markers and barked. It was a good bark, deep and masculine and just staccato enough to send the message, and dogs always send a message. No real reason for it…just a bark.

On the walk back home, I noticed that he scanned left and right, especially in the high places of the road where we could see the horizon. I knew that he was looking for someone. And it was then that I knew him entire.

He didn’t just turn up at our farm. He was dumped. He was abandoned. He was looking for whoever tossed him out, but he was beginning to accept that the one who abandoned him was not coming back.

He walked with me, and his walk was easy. He curled up outside the door and went immediately into a deep, rib-heaving sleep. He stayed where he was.

And now, at this hour, he stays where he is.

A steady rain has been falling most of the afternoon. I made the dog a bed from an old blanket and one of my old flannel shirts on the front porch, under the L-overhang of the adjoining eaves. I fed him his supper and considered feeding him some more because of the speed with which he ate it. Right now, he is resting on the blanket and shirt. I hope he is warm.

I hope he is here in the morning.

If he is here tomorrow, we will take him to the girls at the vet’s office, the girls who love stray dogs and rescue dogs, and they will bathe him and give him flea treatments and heart worm treatments and a thorough going-over.

If he is here tomorrow, I will tell him his new name. He came to us on Friday the 13th, and so he will be Jinx the dog if he agrees. Friday the 13th is an unlucky thing, and jinxes are unlucky things, and so these two unlucky things will cancel each other out like matter and antimatter, and he will be a good dog. He doesn’t look like a Lucky. He looks like a Jinx.  If he’s here in the morning, I will greet him with food and with “Hi, Jinx.”

We didn’t pick him. For some reason, he picked us. Perhaps he was sent to us.

And tomorrow will bring us the Ides of March.

~ S.K. Orr