X please don’t send my sweet dog to jail
ON OUR FIRST Christmas together as a married couple, six weeks after the wedding, Gerda and I had too little money to decorate our tree as grandly as we would have liked. Two sets of colored lights, two boxes of cheap ornaments, and a package of aluminum-foil icicles stretched our budget to the breaking point.
We had furnished our entire rented house for a hundred fifty dollars by seeking bargains at country auctions. This proved to be an effective strategy, but only after we realized we were both raising our hands, bidding against each other, and stopped competing for items we wanted. A sofa bought for three bucks looked handsome after we restrung the springs and reupholstered it with a cheap, attractive material. We attached short legs to an old door, painted it black, and employed it as a Japanese-style dining table. Instead of chairs at the table, we had plump pillows that Gerda stitched together with her sewing machine. They were stuffed with shredded plastic bags-mostly bread bags of soft plastic, so they wouldn’t crackle-that our families and their neighbors saved for us, and when we dined, we sat cross-legged on them. We slept on a bizarre combination sofa bed and trundle bed, no more than a foot off the floor.
When she visited us, my mother wept at our poverty. “You’re eating on the floor,” she said with great distress, emphasizing the last word of each sentence, as though reciting an official litany of misery. “You’re sleeping on the floor. You don’t have an oven. You don’t have a TV. You’re eating on the FLOOR.” She loved us. She wanted the best for us. My mother had lived her entire married life not knowing if she would have a roof over her head tomorrow, yet she reacted to our humble but happy home as if we were festering in a cardboard shanty in the slums of Calcutta.
Our first Christmas tree did not dazzle. There were not piles of gifts stacked beneath it. But we were together, we no longer stood separate and alone in the world, we owned a nice electric hot plate, we didn’t waste time watching TV because we didn’t have one to watch, and if we fell out of bed in the night, we couldn’t drop far enough to hurt ourselves. At twilight on Christmas Eve, snow began to spiral down in silver-dollar flakes, and we went for a walk in an evening as magical as any in Narnia.
Thirty-two years later, as our first Christmas with Trixie approached, we anticipated the holiday with as much pleasure as we felt in that distant December. With the success of my books, Gerda and I had long been purchasing art and antiques that we both admired; we thought of those things as gifts to ourselves, and years earlier, we stopped exchanging Christmas presents with each other because they seemed superfluous. Now we had a special dog to spoil. Although we might not be able to explain Santa Claus to her, we were eager to play the role.
We bought plush toys, tug toys, toss toys, more plush toys, plush toys that were also tug toys, balls that squeaked, balls that did not squeak, and a ball with an inner light that flashed when it rolled. We wrapped these gifts in boxes to disguise their size and shape, as though Trixie would be more surprised and delighted by a Frisbee that came out of a big rectangular box than by one that came out of a flat, square, Frisbee-shaped package.
We intended to open her gifts on Christmas Eve, after dinner, which is the time Gerda and I had exchanged presents in the days when we still shopped for each other. Half an hour before, I took Trixie upstairs for a play session that, with my usual athletic grace, I managed to transform into a medical emergency.
As you may recall, early in her life with us, in a strangely destructive mood not characteristic of her, Trixie found where we kept the stepstool, dragged it upstairs, positioned it below an oil painting that Gerda particularly liked, climbed the stool, and hit the painting with a Kong toy. Subsequently, we were not allowed to have a stepstool in the long upstairs hallway, and I couldn’t throw a tennis ball for Short Stuff to chase; I could only roll the ball with a velocity-generating snap of the wrist.
We had always engaged in this game with me on my knees, down at Trixie’s level, largely because goldens are soooooo much cuter seen from their perspective than from above. Over time, the play evolved until it was as much about me trying to fake her out as it was about me rolling the ball and her chasing it. Exceedingly quick, she could sometimes snatch the ball as it zoomed by her, eliminating the need to sprint after it for the length of the hall. But with a young dog, as with children, one purpose of play is to tire the pup enough so you’ll be able to do something you want to do for at least part of the evening. And at three, our girl was still in some ways a pup.
I developed a repertoire of fake-out moves to keep Trixie unsure of whether I would roll the ball past her port side or her starboard side. I would lean toward her port and tense my rolling arm, so she would lean toward port, all of this very quick, and then I would lean toward her starboard, so she would lean toward starboard, and then I would start to lean toward her port again, but as she shifted her weight to that side, I would snap the ball past her starboard after all. Eventually, I had a million variations of this. Now and then, I was able to roll the ball between her forepaws and between her back legs, which always freaked her out, so that she sprang off the floor and executed an airborne turn.
In addition, I distracted Trixie from watching my ball hand by making funny noises, by throwing a wadded Kleenex at her just before rolling the ball, by a variety of spastic movements that simulated the effects of electrocution, by revealing a piece of kibble and dropping it on the carpet, and by casting my voice as best I could to meow like a seductive cat. Face wrenched by fear, I pointed overhead at nonexistent pterodactyls, which often worked because, in spite of her intelligence and her CCI education, Trixie did not pay attention in her paleontology classes and did not have a clear understanding of what forms of life existed in previous geologic periods but not in our own.
Sometimes, she was so wired that as the ball went past her, she pounced on it again and again, as lightning-quick as a starving gecko on a tasty cricket. On those occasions, to be able to fake her out, I needed to come closer to her than three feet, so that when I snapped the ball, my hand was already past her front legs. Perhaps you, dear reader, are perspicacious enough to understand the risk of this move and the inevitable bloody consequences. I am only a writer of novels, however, and do not possess a sufficient knowledge of physics and hand/eye-coordination dynamics to be able to foresee the consequences of every dumb move I make.
Executing this particular dumb move, I faked to Trixie’s port, to starboard, to port, to port, to port, then actually snapped it past her port side as she mistakenly anticipated a last switch to starboard. As the ball left my right hand, Trixie at once realized her mistake and whipped her head around. My open hand was rising off the floor, her open mouth was coming around in the hope of snatching the ball, which was off and rolling, and one of her long upper canines tore through the meaty part of my palm.
The radial artery crosses the palm of the human hand. At that point of its transit of the arm, it’s not one of those deliciously large arteries that would interest Dracula, but it keeps a lot of capillaries generously supplied. Trixie might have nicked the artery, but she definitely tore through a bunch of capillaries. Blood flew in a bright spray, and my golden girl raced after the ball, unaware of what had happened.
Using my left hand to pinch the laceration shut, trying to spill as little blood as possible, both because the carpet was off-white and because I am philosophically opposed to allowing my blood to leave my body, I hurried to the nearest bathroom, which was off Gerda’s office, snatched the hand towel from the rack, and bound up my right hand.