Dog Story

by Misty Swift

     The day my aunt Cachi (Cah-chee) ran over our dog Phoebe, I was sitting on the front porch of our house, trying to spend some time alone, a thing the family unanimously chastised me for. It had, of course, been an accident. Cachi was a profound lover of animals and one needed only to see our home as proof. We had three dogs, a Viennese pig named Sigmund, and I cannot tell you exactly how many cats. During the day, Cachi worked as a social worker at City Hall and in the evenings she would fulfill her true calling in life, sitting on the ground in our backyard, her long brown legs spread open on the grass, de-fleaing or clipping the nails, or doing something equally as unnerving to some poor victim and Phoebe, Phoebe was her love. Before my mother had left my father, Cachi had come to Hawaii to pay us a visit. I think it was at this point in time that my mother must have known she would be leaving our dad because with little explanation she packed up our much-beloved dog and sent her off with her sister to California.

     Phoebe was highly companionable, her large brown eyes stared up at you whenever you spoke and if you sat near her, she would plop her head on your lap. She welcomed having her head petted and her ears squeezed a little hard, just like my father used to do to her, to which she would growl ever so slightly. She still attacked our feet from under the blankets even though we had to help her onto the bed to do so. And after her baths, she still did a little trot around the kitchen and acting like a lady coming from the beauty parlor.

     By the time we moved to California, two years later, Phoebe had given birth to pups and Cachi, out of a desire to not have to see her separated from her “children,” kept two of the males Spanky and Blitzy who ran like wild horses whenever someone was at the door. (Yes, she humanized Phoebe a great deal but if one really thinks about it, it is quite hard to love an animal without humanizing them to some extent.) In any case, by the time she ran over her own dog, Phoebe was showing signs of age. Half sheepdog, half poodle her eyes had become slightly clouded with age and her formerly lustrous white fur had dulled and yellowed at bit. She didn’t lie on her mat, but flopped, and spent much of the day there resting. She drank for long spells making the most annoying lapping sound and had some condition of the skin which only got worse, much worse, with age and twice a week Cachi would lift her into the tub and give her some kind of eucalyptus bath and treat all the affected areas.

     At this point, it’s true, some people would be saying to “put her to sleep” as they like to say. Maybe her sores made her smell less than pretty but why should that be reason enough? I think one can always tell when something or someone is ready to die, though I cannot say I have ever seen it myself. The death of a pet always leaves me disconcerted. Why is it so different than the death of a person? I had a cat in particular who seemed prescient of the fact that he was sick and I swear he tried to tell me, not by peeing on the carpet or anything like that, he simply looked at me one day and the thought flashed through my head, “You will not be here long” and I expunged it, I remember, thinking myself a little nuts while standing at my back door and smoking and looking at the grass. It had been my cynicism, my arrogance that kept me from understanding, whether a suitable explanation could be had or not.

     At the time of my story, I was still a young teenager, really into doing my own thing which meant dressing like a punk-rock star and insisting on being left alone as much as possible. This was a hard enough feat in-and-of itself because I seemed to be the only one in my large, garrulous family who had any appetite at all for solitude. There were 8 of us, humans, that is. Our house had two bedrooms and one bathroom and thankfully a large backyard. Privacy was hard to come by. I think that desire for space, and to some extent, escape, must have been why I started writing. Sitting on the bench our front porch was where I would daydream about the John McWilliams, a boy at school, paint my fingernails black, and do my studies (always quite meticulously I must say) and when I had exhausted these activities, I began filling pages of my college-ruled loose-leaf with words. There on paper, there was space not only to be had, but to be created. There, I thought there was an infinite amount of space to fill, that everything was possible. There was what seemed an infinite amount of potential in the imagination and it could come to me, sometimes, if I set pen to paper. But to create something is not only to choose what it is, but what it is not. Once the words begin to take shape, the process is almost instantly saddening and everything that was previously there has extracted, subtracted itself and been humbled into simply being what is. Two years later, I would start writing feverish, bad incomprehensible poetry and reading philosophy, four years later I would leave home, shave my head and think myself a self-proclaimed rebel with hopefully important ideas, reading philosophy, hanging out at the coffeehouse and dabbling with drugs and other hungry, self-important people. Ten years later, I would begin to see my own childishness and laugh at myself until it hurt. Five years later, I would find complacency.

     But unlike me and the person I was trying to become, Cachi seemed to live for others. She did not do this with the noble grace of a saint but in the fashion of someone with energy and a fair-dose of ADHD. Cachi was always doing twenty things at once. She would wash the dishes and have a pot boiling on the stove, then decide to vacuum in the living-room, then start to fluff the pillows and that would remind her of our bedroom and she would be in there, straightening things out. The pot would boil over and the water would be running. Time would run out. If someone were coming to visit, the house would be in complete cleaning-disarray and we would all grin and scramble to make things suitable. Trips out were very much this way too. There were always numerous items to be brought to and fro in a collection of plastic shopping bags. This embarrassed me more than anything, my aunt picking me from a friend’s house, my friend walking me to the car and seeing inside of it, the plethora of plastic bags, rarely filled with the contents for which they were intended-groceries. Instead there would be Grandma’s medications, the dogs’ medications, bulging sweaters, clothes to be taken to the dry-cleaners, sewing projects, art projects, books, toothpaste and deodorant, bills to pay. As I said, on this day in particular, I was on the porch and watching as Cachi rushed to finish packing the car. My sister Myra and cousin Mia were already in their seats, off to the mall or something for which I was glad for, and the neighbor Tina, a chubby prepubescent whose mother was a tough auto mechanic, was going too. Phoebe had needed a shot for something or the other, perhaps for the skin-problem. The girls were laughing and carrying on about something. Cachi was carting bag after bag and preparing to put Phoebe in the back of the Toyota hatchback and had secured her by her leash to the back of the car. I don’t know why I looked up precisely when I did, because I’m sure I wasn’t starring at them the whole time but trying to ignore them, each and everyone of them and wish myself a better more esteemed existence, but when I did, I saw Cachi reverse and Phoebe laying just in back of the rear right tire, went completely under it. Thump. I yelled. Cachi looked at me as if to say, “What?” and put the car in drive. It lurched forward. Thump.

     I didn’t come to help. Instead I witnessed as my frantic aunt yelled at the girls who were crying and yelling at her and told them to get out. She picked Phoebe up on her side and laid her carefully in the back seat and secured the seatbelts as best as she could. She got back in the driver’s seat and started to pull away. Her purse fell from the roof of the car. She hit the brakes and retrieved her purse and gathered the contents that had spilled out onto the street, including her contraceptive diaphragm, and then she left.

     Mom and I peered through the window when we heard Cachi park a couple of hours later. Her face was beet-red and she had Phoebe wrapped in a blanket. Mom said we would have to have my uncles bury her in the backyard but she was wrong. Phoebe was fine.

     Cachi relayed the story. There had been no internal bleeding. She was old, but she was okay. It was then that I really felt sorry for my aunt, thinking about how frantic she must have been. I’m sure she swamped the vet with questions while feeling ashamed as she explained exactly how it was that she could do something so seemingly stupid as to run over her own dog, not once, but twice. Or maybe she had lied. I hoped, for her sake, that she had.

     From then on, until she died nearly two years later, Phoebe was crooked. She was not in pain in fact; the crookedness seemed to give her some small amount of fascination, if indeed dogs can be fascinated. She compensated for her crookedness at doorways veering slightly to the left to make sure her right side, the direction her body was bent to, cleared the space. Before plopping down on her mat, she did not circle once, but no, twice as if her crookedness meant she had to calculate a little more than before, before she huffed and plopped herself down. In some way, Phoebe may have been happier after the accident. She had her food brought to her now and Cachi moved her into her bedroom at night, laying her mat next to her in bed saying she did this to make sure she could cover her in the event that she kicked off her blankets. She said she didn’t want Phoebe’s bones to get cold at night.

     It is only now that I think of Phoebe and my aunt and take anything away from it. It is now that I see my life not as trapped but as always perpetually moving away—for there is never anything I have had to get away from. There is love though in trying and still retrying some scratch upon things only to be made humble. For all the time on the porch and all the years that followed, there was always “something next” and as long as it was illusive, unquantifiable, I could continue to be so. But what is all of that if there is not leniency, compassion, and negotiation? There is always the lesson of life, of being fallible, of blunders when your intentions were nothing but noble (inter-spliced yes, with a myriad of feelings of being inconvenienced, of selfish-wants and loathing thoughts). Added to this, there is a quiet acceptance of one’s fallibility and hopefully time do something a little better than before.