The dog loped to my Austin-Healy as the tires grazed the elm-lined curb in front of my Maybeck redwood house.
“Howya doin’, boy,” I said.
He was a friendly animal, but he didn’t follow me. He hung back and watched me go in the front door. There he was again the next day. And the day after that, just roaming in the street. He always came up to me as I parked the Healy. The same car I used to move all my stuff. How do you move everything in a sports car? Easy, get a divorce. In the evening I walked down to the trickle of a stream running through the towering redwoods in my backyard and sat at a picnic table thinking things over. When I went back to the house there was this golden lump on my backdoor mat. The dog. He stood up, but his head hung low. He was a little shaky on his feet, swaying some.
It dawned on me. No collar. A stray. He hadn’t eaten for--how many days now? But he was too polite to come right out and beg. I zipped down to the co-op market and came back with a pound of hamburger, lean. Put half of it in a bowl in front of him and said, “Here you go, boy.” He looked up at me. “It’s alright,” I said.
He ate.
In the morning the dog was still there.
And that’s where he was when I came home that night. So thin he looked taller than he really was. Ultra-thin, as if he could pass through the eye of a needle, with white and gold markings.
I fed him the rest of the hamburger inside the house and placed a throw rug at the foot of my bed. He watched me. “This is your spot,” I told him. “You don’t go on the bed.”
Sure, that’s cool.
When I went to bed, the animal lay on the rug and stuck his nose up on the handmade quilt. That’s all, just his nose.
The next night it was a nose and one paw.
“Don’t get any ideas,” I said. “I know what you’re up to.”
He put the paw down. Nose stayed up, brown eyes peering at me.
This went on for a week and a half, almost two weeks. Every night. One nose and one paw on the bed. Two paws on the bed. No paws on the bed. One nose, one paw. I got the message. He was telling me to invite him up on the bed, just for a little while.
Okay. But then back to the rug.
The next thing I knew he had his side of the bed staked out. He was slick, the skinny little con artist. But, after all, it was the biggest bed I could find. Round, seven feet in any direction. Plenty of room for a middleweight man and a medium-sized dog.
The day broke bright and clear with lots of bay area sunshine. Not too hot, not too cold. I said to the dog, “You want to come in the car today, boy?”
Okay, why not?
He hopped in and sat in the bucket seat. Didn’t jump around or make a big deal out of it. Ready when you are.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” I told him. “I’m not putting a leash on you because I don’t have one. But when we get out in the world, it’s your job to stay with me. Got it?”
From then on he could be seen waiting for me outside the local coffeehouse. Or the grocery store or the art gallery or the fish ‘n’ chips place, any place I went into. He’d hang around greeting students and professors and businessmen and prostitutes and junkies and street freaks walking by, treating them all as equals.
If we got separated on the street, I didn’t have to look for him. He’d trot back to the car and jump in the window. When I got back he’d be sitting up in the passenger seat, surveying the passing scene.
I took him to Thanksgiving Day dinner at the home of my girl friend’s parents. We walked in the multimillion-dollar house and her flustered mother said, Oh, we can’t have a dog in the house. And I said I thought it was all right since they had a dog, the one standing right at her feet.
Oh, yes, but, um - well, my dog might pee on the carpets. So let’s just put him on the patio, shall we?
It wasn’t a minute later, minute and a half at most, when Boy, watching through the glass doors, with me and the mother only two steps away, witnessed her lavish Lhasa apso take a prolonged pee on the corner of her Persian carpet.
One sunny day a feisty freckle-faced little blond girl in pigtails--couldn’t have been more than four or five-- stopped me on the street, saying, “Hey, Mister, is that your dog?”
“Yep,” says I.
“What’s his name?”
I thought about it.
“Boy. I call him Boy.”
She wrinkled up her freckles, glared at me and said, “That’s no name for a dog.”
She had me there. I had to think fast.
“Yeah, but, uh--he comes when I call him.”
She squinted at me. Then she nodded and strolled off to mull that one over.
That’s not all Boy attracted. How about a cop? Oh, yeah. I was stirring up a batch of yogurt when I heard his bark at the door. I swung the door open and stood face-to-face with a man in a blue uniform wearing a badge. Boy grinning up at me. Guess he liked the uniform. The cop was panting like he’d just taken a bronze in the hundred meters.
“Is (pant) this (pant) your dog?”
“I feed him.”
Leaning on the doorjamb he said, “Leash law (pant) citation. Ninety dollars. Goes up for each offense.”
“Would you like a glass of water, officer?”
Ninety bucks. That’s what it cost. Still no leash.
Boy attracted college girls, too. One afternoon he came prancing down the sidewalk with an energetic auburn-haired, green-eyed phys-ed major. Just snagged her while we were out walking, boy roaming free. She said he was a beautiful dog, and let’s take him to the U.C. Berkeley football field for a run. Turned out to be a great idea. I never saw so many dogs zipping around, sizing each other up, yapping.
And two men.
They laughed at my dog.
One guy says, “Is that a male? He better not be here when Max gets back. Max will run him off.”
“Yeah,” the other guy pipes up. “You better get him outta here real fast. Hah, hah.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
Sure enough, in a flash here comes Max tearing across the gridiron heading straight for Boy, making lots of snarling noises. Max built like a Mack truck. Boy was delighted to meet Max. He bobbed to the right, he danced to the left, and then jumped over Max’s back. Came up from behind nipping at his heels. Ran around Max in circles, a friendly nip here, a quick bite there. Constantly darting in, but just outside the reach of Max’s snapping jaws.
Last we saw of the guys they were running after Max as fast as they could—Max whimpering and heading for the Berkeley hills—screaming, “Max, Max. Come back, Max.”
A straight-arm in my spine woke me in the middle of a dream that night. More like a straight-paw. I was racing through a craggy, dense dark forest, wild and reckless. Me and Boy on the trail of a vicious and elusive quarry. The thrill of the chase left me in a cold sweat. We were on the hunt for wolves. I glanced over at Boy. All four of his feet were twitching.
Borzoi.
Or Russian wolfhound, what some people call them.
One night Boy didn’t come home. I felt abandoned. He showed up at the door about three in the morning with this goofy look on his face. I’m in love, Dad.
You should have seen us together. Like a demonstration of mental telepathy. I never trained him. Didn’t need to. I told him what to do and he did it. Every time.
You don’t believe me?
I got a call from a man who knew I spoke Spanish. He wanted me to go to Mexico and open up an old Spanish gold mine. “We think gold’s going to $2000,” he said.
Mexico. Señoritas. I couldn’t resist. I said yes. But what to do with Boy? Huge hassle to take a dog to Mexico. Paperwork. Shots. And he could end up in a taco.
My twelve-year-old son didn’t have a dog, so I made arrangements to fly Borzoi Boy to him in Los Angeles. That night I picked up some scraps at a steak house. I was a regular and they loaded me up with filet mignon, rib-eye, sirloin, t-bone. Amazing the food people leave on their plates. What a feast we had, a bon voyage party. I told Boy he was going to visit my boy.
Then Boy did something I’d never seen. He raised up on his back legs and came down fast with his front paws stretched way out. He stayed down, his butt up in the air, looking up at me from the floor as if to say, Really?
I’m getting to the telepathy part.
We’re at the airport now, through the terminal and out onto the tarmac. Jumbo jets blasting off, trucks rolling back and forth, smell of jet exhaust, and two beefy baggage handlers standing beside a plywood animal transport box on a baggage cart.
One of the men shook his head when he saw Boy ranging around the area, inhaling new odors. He said, “How you think you’re gonna get that dog in there?”
“I’ll tell him to get in,” I said, yawning a little, bored with the question. These two gorillas glanced at each other and sneered. They guffawed and started jerking around, giggling like girls. Like that was the funniest thing they ever heard.
“Just open the box,” I said.
The bigger baggage guy smirked, flipped the metal bars up, looked at the other guy and sniggered.
I slid Boy’s bowl into the crate and turned to him. “Get in.”
Boy came over and gave me a look. You sure about this?
I made a gesture with my hand, not pointing, just the merest flick of the wrist. Boy leaped into the crate in one bound, turned around and stood looking out.
After a few frozen seconds the baggage handlers came to life, closed the barred door, and locked it. They didn’t say a word.
I reached through the bars and gave Borzoi Boy a rub on the lips.