My wife, Francine, had been dead six months when I ran into Billy Wilson at the grocery store and he mentioned under his breath that there was a cull going on that night. It all came back to me at once—the musty scent of fur, the feel of warm, writhing muscles under my hands. Billy offered to pick me up that evening and drive me out there for a look. Just a look, I told myself. His souped-up Mustang was a lot faster than my old pickup if the authorities got wind of the cull and we had to make a quick getaway. Even though it had been twenty-five years since my last infraction, I couldn’t quite shake the sense that the cops were still watching, waiting for me to slip up again. After the last incident, I had promised Francine I was done with that life, done with the hiding and sneaking around. But now she was gone, and I knew what I did didn’t matter to anyone. Not anymore.
Billy cut the lights on the Mustang roughly half a mile before we turned onto a narrow dirt road off Old Westside. An occasional ring of redwoods rose like skyscrapers next to us as we drove deeper into the forest. Bay trees and Scotch broom closed in and brushed the sides of the car, making Billy wince. But he was into the dogs as much as I was, and little things like scratches on his precious Mustang weren’t going to stop us. Billy was young and single, more boy than man even though he was in his mid-forties. He wiped at his nose with the back of his hand when he told me his boxer mix had passed on the summer before. That dog had been a real beast, solid as a tank with teeth like a shark. Incredibly gentle despite its size and those terrible teeth. Sweet, affectionate, goofy, and illegal as hell.
As soon as we drew close to the river, I could hear the dogs through the open car window, whining and yipping. The sound made something tighten in my chest, a vise squeezing my lungs, and I leaned forward in my seat. I hadn’t touched a real dog in years. My fingers gripped then released my knees over and over like I already had an animal in my hands.
Francine had owned a dog before the cancer came. Or what passes for a dog nowadays. A “designer dog” bred without vocal cords, hypoallergenic, non-shedding, flea and tick resistant. Predisposed to bond with whoever fed it. Poop that looked like a purple lozenge of lavender soap and smelled like it too. No canine teeth at all and the rest of the bite so dull it couldn’t make a mark in warm butter. The dog had the personality of a Roomba. I couldn’t see the point, but Francine loved that thing. Queenie. What Queenie did best was follow Francine from room to room. She slept most of the time. Or sat staring at the wall. They’d bred any leg strength out of the dog, so she couldn’t run more than a couple of yards without tiring. Bred out the instinct to run even if she had been able. As far as I was concerned, that was not a dog.
A cull was never in the same place more than once. Tonight’s was on a wide sandbar on the bank of the river. On the other side of the water, I could make out in the icy moonlight the neat rows at the back of a vineyard, the bare canes reaching up into the sky like gnarled fingers. In a few months the vines would leaf out and muffle any sound, but now I worried that the dogs’ whining would carry across the vineyard to where someone might be sleeping. I didn’t recognize any of the men down with the dogs. I hoped they knew what they were doing. I couldn’t imagine calling my son, Mr. CPA, from jail asking for bail money.
Half a dozen cars and trucks were parked on the dirt road, a few with their headlights shining down at the cull. There were probably thirty dogs down there, all skinny, short-haired, and skittish. Stray dogs, mutts picked up from the backstreets of Ensenada or Tijuana and smuggled across the border. Some sat scratching at their ears; others cowered with their tails between their legs, the whites of their eyes showing. All of them were beautiful, all of them were the real things, and I knew right then I had made a mistake in coming.
Billy and I got out of the car and walked down to the cull. The men were all dressed the same—jeans, baseball caps pulled down low, cowboy boots, hands deep in jacket pockets against the cold, clouds of breath in front of their faces. My kind of people. Billy said hi to someone he recognized—a burly guy who had brought his son, about twelve years old, I guessed, sticking close to his dad. I marveled at the insanity of bringing a child to a cull, but on the other hand, you had to admire a father for wanting to introduce his son to genuine dogs.
Most of the dogs were Chihuahua mixes—walleyed and snaggletoothed. Easy to hide but almost impossible to keep quiet. You didn’t want a noisy dog unless you lived far out in the country. There were a couple of dogs that looked like they had some kind of heeler in them, way back in their lineage. None of the dogs were over thirty pounds. The sellers seemed knowledgeable enough to avoid anything that involved the breeds that carried real jail time—no Akitas, Dobermans, Rottweilers, or shepherd mixes. You could get ten years for possession of one of those. Possession of a pit bull or even a pit bull mix resulted in a mandatory sentence of twenty years or more even if there was only a drop of pit DNA in the dog.
I squatted down and let the dogs come sniff me. A couple of the bolder Chihuahua mixes trotted over, wiggling like mad when I petted them. I had some chunks of cheese in my jacket pocket, and as I handed them out, more dogs came to me. It had been so long since I had touched a dog that I almost grabbed one of the little guys and held him to my face to inhale him. I let them lick my fingers and put their paws on my knee and stare up at me with their googly eyes. Some of the dogs limped over and shied away when I offered my hand to them as if they thought the cheese was a trick, that I might hurt them. They were all malnourished—ribs showing through their fur, their coats matted and dull. Beaten probably. Kicked, starved, and unloved. I wanted to take them all.
A larger dog approached. She probably weighed about twenty pounds, way too thin for how tall she was. She had a fawn-colored face with dark fur around her eyes like kohl, a black cleft of hair down the middle of her forehead, and tilted eyebrows that made her look worried. She was trailing a puppy behind her, and I could see her teats were still swollen though the pup looked healthy and old enough to be weaned. She walked toward me leading with her nose and sniffing at me from several feet away. I held out the cheese and she inched closer, nudging the puppy to make sure it stayed behind. When she finally reached my hand, she took the piece of cheese delicately, then rested the tip of her muzzle on the ends of my fingers and gazed up into my eyes. I had the same sensation I’d experienced when I first met Francine all those years ago, that feeling of finding something I had needed but never realized I lacked. That sense of “Oh, there she is.”
There was no way I could take the dog and her puppy. I was on the far side of my sixties. My house was tiny, my yard a thirty-by-thirty-foot square. I had neighbors on three sides—good, friendly people, but how willing would they be to ignore not one but two illegal dogs right under their noses? Plus you never knew how big a puppy might get. When the U.S. started outlawing the breeds, big dogs were the first to go, dumped down in Mexico to fend for themselves. The puppy looked fluffy and sweet and small, but there was no way of telling what breed it was, what genes ran through its blood. You never knew what to expect when you got a puppy. It could turn into a ninety-pound liability.
One of the sellers squatted down beside me and scratched the bitch’s ears. “This one is a real sweetheart,” he said. “She won’t give you any trouble. Good dog.” The dog turned and looked at the man.
I stood and perused the rest of the cull. Billy had scooped up some godawful little pug/poodle/Chihuahua/beagle/Heinz 57 mix that nestled under his chin. The dog couldn’t have weighed more than four pounds. Billy’s eyes were full of tears. I looked away so as not to embarrass him, but I knew how he felt. Big grown men blubbering about the dogs we couldn’t live without. That was us. That was all of us down in the cull.
The twelve-year-old took the puppy. I realized that this was one more reason why you didn’t bring a little kid to a cull. There was no reasoning with them once they found a kindred spirit, a fellow child. I never would’ve taken Daniel to a cull, at any age. Francine put her foot down about owning an illegal dog when we adopted Daniel. We had to be upstanding citizens and set a good example and all that. Besides, I could just see the prissy way Daniel would have waded among the animals, hands held up high so nothing could touch him, his face screwed up in fear and distaste. My kid was not a dog person.
The seller who had spoken to me held onto the bitch’s collar, her worried eyes trained on the boy as he walked away with her puppy. Her whole life must have been one loss after another.
On the way home, Billy wouldn’t put his mutt down. He drove us back to town one-handed, the little dog still glued to his neck. My dog sat in the backseat staring straight ahead, concentrating on her future as if it was being revealed to her through the windshield. Next to her were two sacks of Mexican kibble to help with the transition to whatever home-cooked food we would be serving up in the future. There was no going to the grocery store for dog food—designer dogs ate soy and kale pellets laced with chemicals to make their feces smell good.
“What are you going to name that godawful thing?” I asked Billy.
He gave me a side-eyed glare. “Haven’t decided yet.”
“It’s so ugly, it’s kind of cute,” I said, as a sort of apology. Then after he didn’t say anything, I added, “It’s a fine dog,” and he grunted. Apology accepted.
It was after midnight when Billy dropped me off in front of my house. The dog relieved herself on the front lawn, and I brought her in. Her nails clicked on the hardwood floors as she went from room to room, checking out her surroundings. I got her a bowl of water and went outside to hose down the lawn where she had peed. I was no novice—telltale, circular brown spots on your lawn were a red flag. So were piles of dog poop left anywhere or even disposed of in the trash. Everything had to be cleaned up immediately and flushed down the toilet. Owning a real dog was a challenge, but for people like Billy and me, it was well worth it.
The answering machine on my landline was blinking. Four missed calls. All the messages were from my daughter-in-law, sounding increasingly panicked that I wasn’t answering the phone. It was too late to call back. I could only hope that she hadn’t alerted the cavalry, that I wouldn’t find a couple of social workers knocking on my door first thing in the morning for a senior wellness check. Jennifer was from one of those big, close-knit families who were all in each other’s business constantly. Very touchy-feely, always checking in with each other, how’s everyone doing? She didn’t understand Daniel and I weren’t that kind of family.
I grabbed an old blanket from the linen closet and arranged it next to the bed. The dog circled and circled for a minute before lying down and resting her head on her front paws. “You need a name,” I said. A million years ago, before we decided to go the adoption route, Francine had been pregnant for seventeen whole weeks. We had this prenatal guidebook, and every week Francine would check the size of the baby according to the book. Garbanzo bean, lima bean, walnut, turnip. We lost our little girl at turnip. We hadn’t even decided on a name yet. She was just our little turnip when we spoke about the baby after the miscarriage.
Francine had named Queenie. This time the naming would be all up to me. I wondered what I had done getting a dog, an illegal dog, alone, at my age. Maybe my mind was starting to go. How would I know? Who would notice?
I woke in the morning with the sense I was being watched. Sometime in the night the dog had crawled up onto the bed, her head on Francine’s pillow. Her eyes stared into mine, unflinching. Those dark, tilted eyebrows were more pronounced in the daylight. I couldn’t help feeling that the dog had me pegged and was judging this new, though not unheard of, lapse in my character. “Francine?” I said, feeling immediately ridiculous. Francine had been a rule follower. There was no way she would come back as my illegal dog.
The dog stood and stretched and waited until I was out of bed before she jumped down to the floor. She scratched at the back door, and I let her out, reasonably sure that none of my neighbors would notice her at this time of day. She careened out, came up short at the fence, then slowly circled the yard, checking out the situation. I made myself a cup of instant coffee and called my daughter-in-law.
“Dad!” she said. “We were getting so worried. Where were you?”
I flinched at being called Dad. I always did. What was it with people pretending you were instant family just because you were thrown together?
“Here and there,” I said, putting a lot of jolly in my voice. “Out with a friend.”
“Well, Danny and I want to invite you over for dinner tonight.”
Another flinch. Danny. Jennifer was the only one ever to call my kid that. He was Daniel when we adopted him—six years old, reed thin, already a serious old man, black-framed glasses too big for his face. He told us he liked to be called Daniel, not Danny, not Dan. Standoffish kid, awkward as all get-out. It had been love at first sight for Francine. Me, not so much. Daniel and I never really warmed to each other.
Outside, the dog was pacing by the fence, her head up as if she had seen a squirrel walking across the rail. The fence was a good six feet tall, redwood planks, pressurized wood posts set in concrete. I’d made it myself when we first moved in. Sturdy as the trees it came from.
“Tonight’s no good,” I said. “I’ve got stuff to take care of.”
“But we haven’t seen you in months,” Jennifer said. “It’s not good for you to be alone so much.”
“Hey, maybe another time then,” I said. “I’ll let you know.”
After I hung up, I called the dog back into the house. She came reluctantly, stopping several times to look back over her shoulder.
She stood and tolerated me as I rubbed her ears and massaged her shoulders and back.
“We definitely need to get you a name,” I said. I had always been keen on giving my dogs people names. None of this Rover or Fido stuff for me. I scrambled an egg and added it to some kibble in a china bowl. “How about Linda? Or Paula?”
The dog sniffed at the food, then trotted into the living room to stare out the sliding glass door into the backyard.
What can I say about the week that followed? She wouldn’t eat, she accepted my petting stoically, she stared out into the back garden. She never wagged her tail, but when I woke each morning, she was there on Francine’s pillow, staring at me with those hopeful, unblinking eyes. As each day progressed, a weight seemed to fall upon her, heavier and heavier, until by nightfall she could barely lift her head to look at me. I figured it was only a matter of time before she knew how good her life could be. I was patient. I could wait. She was a good dog—no barking, no chewing, no signs of any aggressive behavior, housebroken to a fault. I fussed about in the kitchen trying to find something she would eat. She wasn’t tempted by anything I offered—chicken, liver, steak, bacon. I gave her a bath, wrapped her in a towel, and built a fire in the fireplace to warm her. I told her about Francine and how much they would have liked each other (a bit of a stretch, I know, but nobody was going to call me out on it). I read her the newspaper, discussed the current political situation, let her sit on the couch while we watched television. I couldn’t settle on a name for her. I’d call her something for a couple of hours, then change it to something else. Nothing felt right.
Saturday morning my daughter-in-law called again.
“I’m not taking no for an answer,” Jennifer said. “If you don’t come here tonight, we’re loading everything up and bringing dinner to you.”
I sipped at my coffee. The dog was in the backyard, circling the fence. The circling round and round had become her habit whenever she was outside, head up, looking for something. There had been a hard frost the night before, and the grass was tipped in white. She had lost weight in the week I had her. Her face looked gaunt.
“Can you come around five?” Jennifer said. “Or earlier?” I felt that familiar irritation at being forced into doing something I didn’t want to do or feeling something that I didn’t want to feel. Who were these people to me anyway?
“Now look…” I began, just as I saw the dog use the corner of the fence where it met at a right angle to scrabble up like a monkey and disappear over the top into the front yard.
“Shit!” I spit my mouthful of coffee back into the cup. “I gotta go,” I said, hanging up the phone. I was wearing my bathrobe and a pair of boxers, my skinny legs and knobby knees not something I was prepared to show the world. I raced back to my bedroom and threw on the clothes I’d left on the floor the night before. I was out the door in less than a minute. I scanned the street to see which direction the dog might have run, but she was nowhere in sight.
My next-door neighbor, Phil, was out on his lawn picking up his paper. “Hey, Tom!” he said, waving at me. “What a morning, right?” What did that mean? Had he seen something? Or was he just referring to the cold? Phil was even older than I was. His eyes behind the monstrous lenses of his glasses appeared dark and beady as if viewed from the wrong end of a telescope. If he had seen something dart past him, would he even recognize it as a dog? I couldn’t read his expression and I couldn’t ask.
I dug into my pants pocket for the truck keys. They weren’t there. I ran back into the house. They weren’t in the bowl by the door or on the kitchen table. Why did I never put them where they belonged? I tore up the bedroom, throwing the covers off the bed. I finally found them in the pocket of a jacket that was hanging over a chair in the dining room. At least twenty minutes had passed since the dog disappeared. I had to find her before the cops did. She’d be euthanized for sure. There would be no way to help her.
I sat in my truck for a moment trying to think. I felt that same kind of helplessness I had when Francine died. Then it came to me. I knew where she was.
The dog was there of course, down on the sandbar. She had a good head start, and it took me several passes to find the opening in the woods to that dirt road, but even so the place along the river where the cull had taken place had to be a good four or five miles from my house. She must have run at top speed all the way there. She was lying on her side near the water, panting heavily. She didn’t raise her head when she saw me making my way down the embankment, just flicked her eyes in my direction and then looked away.
I sat down next to her and put my hand on her side. Her fur was frigid. I could feel her heart hammering against her rib cage. The pads of her feet were torn and bleeding. I picked her up like a baby, carried her up the embankment, and put her in the cab of the truck. Then I drove to Billy Wilson’s house.
When I knocked on his door, I heard a sharp yip, then the sound of footsteps and doors slamming shut inside. I probably should have called. After a few minutes the door opened a crack to reveal a fraction of Billy’s wary face. When he saw who it was, he motioned me inside. Back when I used to keep illegal dogs, some of my fellow conspirators had “safe rooms,” a place where they could stash their dog and nobody could hear it. Francine never allowed me to do anything like that at our house, but I’d seen a lot of them. Laundry rooms lined with thick felt padding, egg cartons thumbtacked to the walls, moving blankets hung like curtains. Billy, I knew, had an entire bedroom tricked out for his dog, complete with a hidden door behind a bookshelf. He lived alone; he had no one to answer to. His safe room wasn’t doing much good this morning to muffle the sound of his new mutt. I could hear its humanlike shrieking from where we stood in the foyer.
“That’s the pug in her. Hold on a sec,” he said. He retrieved the dog and I followed him into the kitchen. “She’ll get used to the room at some point.” Billy kissed the dog between her ears. I watched the trusting way the dog turned her head to look up at him and I felt a wrench of jealousy. “This is Gracie,” Billy said, “you know, like George Burns and Gracie Allen? She’s decided she’s the comedian and I’m her straight man.”
“That’s a great name for her,” I said to Billy. “A perfect name.”
I got the address of the guy at the cull, the guy Billy knew with the kid who took my dog’s puppy. My dog—I couldn’t really call her that. She wasn’t my dog. She wasn’t ever going to be my dog, I could see that now.
The guy and his kid lived a few hours out in the country on one of those dusty, rundown ranches in the foothills. A donkey behind a falling-down fence, a half-dozen chickens running around in the muddy driveway. A fallow garden plot overseen by a scarecrow made out of a hazmat suit stuffed with newspaper. Mom coming out of the house with an apron on. A life I might have imagined for myself at one time.
Thank god for that kid. He could instantly see that my dog and her pup had to be together. It took some time and convincing from both of us for his parents to come around—time and money and some vague promises that there would be more money coming if needed. I knew I’d done the right thing when the dogs saw each other as I lifted mine from the truck. If dogs had arms they would have held on to each other and never let go, the way Francine and Daniel used to hug each time they saw each other after being apart for a while. And here I was again, on the outside looking in.
“She needs a name,” I told the kid as I was climbing back into my truck. “What do you think you’re going to call her?”
The kid turned to look at her. She was running in dizzy circles around her puppy like a crazed animal, delirious with happiness despite her torn feet and utter exhaustion.
“Donut,” the kid said.
“That’s a great name,” I said. “That’s perfect.”
“Keep in touch,” the father said tersely, but I could tell he was a man who would do anything for his son. The dog would be fine here. I watched the little ranch recede in my rearview mirror, and when I turned to get on the two-lane highway, it was as if a door slammed shut behind me, another part of my life gone forever. One loss after another.
I didn’t get back home until late afternoon. Daniel’s car was in the driveway with its doors hanging open. I could see the back of Daniel’s head in the driver’s seat and Jennifer’s legs sticking out the passenger side. Jennifer leaped out of the car as I pulled the truck up to the curb.
“Oh my god,” she said, barreling toward me. “We thought something awful had happened. You hung up the phone like the house was on fire.”
Daniel got wearily out of the car.
In that moment, I saw the dogs at the cull, the ones bounding over to me, wiggling with excitement and wagging their tails, the ones hanging back. The ones you could tell had been loved by a human at some point; the ones who knew loss and rejection. Jennifer’s coattails flapping behind her as she ran; Daniel’s tired face looking at me warily. Daniel. He stayed by the car, curled his fingers to study his nails, and adjusted his glasses, studiously nonchalant, guarded. He was the same little boy from all those years ago, still expecting the emotional blow that was sure to come. I might not have created this adult, but I was guilty of contributing to who he became. It suddenly felt like I had squandered something tangible away, could almost feel the watery way it had slipped through my fingers, and I would never be able to claw it back.
Then Jennifer was on me, hugging me, patting my back, squeezing my arms. She was a tiny hummingbird of a woman, quick and blurry, her hands moving over me as if searching for broken bones.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just went for a drive.”
“We were about to call the police,” Jennifer said. “Weren’t we, Danny?”
Daniel ducked his head, seeming embarrassed. “Not really.”
Francine always said I liked dogs more than people. This was mostly true. People were complicated. They took more effort, more time, more patience. Francine also said that loving someone else’s kid wasn’t exactly the same as loving your own, maybe not at first, but you could definitely get there. That took patience too.
“I’m sorry, son,” I said, walking up to him. “I’m really, truly sorry. For everything.” I wanted to say more, but my throat closed up over the words like it was sealing off a terrible abyss. Any more might undo me. It was the best I could do for now.