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The Art of Racing in the Rain
Garth Stein
Soon to be a major motion picture, this heart-warming and inspirational tale follows Enzo, a loyal family dog, tells the story of his human family, how they nearly fell apart, and what he did to bring them back together.Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: he thinks and feels in nearly human ways. He has educated himself by watching extensive television, and by listening very closely to the words of his master, Denny Swift, an up-and-coming race car driver. Through Denny, Enzo realizes that racing is a metaphor: that by applying the techniques a driver would apply on the race track, one can successfully navigate the ordeals and travails one encounters in life.Enzo relates the story of his human family, sharing their tragedies and triumphs. In the end, despite what he sees as his own limitations as a dog, Enzo comes through heroically to preserve the Swift family.The Art of Racing in the Rain is a testament to a man's life, given by his dog. But it is also a testament to the dog, himself. Though Enzo cannot speak, he understands everything that happens around him as he bears witness to his master's problems. His enforced muteness only refines his listening ability, and allows him to understand many of life's nuances that are lost on most humans. With humour, sharp observation, and a courageous heart, Enzo guides the reader to the bittersweet yet ultimately satisfying conclusion: there are no limitations to what we can achieve, if we truly know where we want to be.



the art of racing in the rain
A NOVEL
GARTH STEIN



Copyright (#ub767ece2-1567-58f3-b2ff-8b22efe182b5)
This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity, and are used fi ctitiously. All other names, characters, and places, and all dialogue and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author’s imagination.
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in the USA in 2008 by HarperCollinsPublishers This edition 2009
© Bright White Light, LLC
Garth Stein asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
Designed by Sarah Maya Gubkin
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007281190
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2009 ISBN: 9780007321056
Version: 2018-09-14
For Muggs
“With your mind power,

your determination,

your instinct,

and the experience as well,

you can fly very high.”

—AYRTON SENNA

Contents
Title Page (#uc06ec7f3-550b-54bc-9b07-76d1f9d19f9d)Copyright (#ua0deac9c-323b-51e9-8531-d7bcfff3c5a2)Dedication (#u720f8316-c570-541a-a703-8551bd7e0a67)Epigraph (#u995c4a10-48b7-5741-90dc-3f62c977272b)The Art of Racing in the Rain (#ubb020499-d461-5f96-97ed-21d3b181d21c)Chapter One (#u53c1f2a3-3e61-5e97-8a83-c479a0858611)Chapter Two (#u1b665b17-d6db-5756-905b-0b4fcfc5ea2f)Chapter Three (#u998d2e0b-babc-52fb-9341-a1754e0ff507)Chapter Four (#uf3e3bf6e-e8c9-5d78-b537-1a4583f97f3a)Chapter Five (#u13ebc7b7-15c1-52ae-aa7b-10649c483e54)Chapter Six (#u5cdf77b5-554b-577b-9e3f-95574fc4832c)Chapter Seven (#ub291a518-d850-5617-942e-8c50d4052895)Chapter Eight (#u5fc319a6-1c5f-58e1-b039-cf4943c1dfc8)Chapter Nine (#ua93251f1-4763-531d-b4c5-c18e183f2f37)Chapter Ten (#u6874015a-24f2-504f-a2ea-c967d123366c)Chapter Eleven (#ue3f5845a-2d1e-550b-8ce4-49715ed0d3ac)Chapter Twelve (#ua9cac1cf-4e46-5ab6-a32e-52f33f970ea4)Chapter Thirteen (#uadd9acef-8ed4-5b06-ac8a-c28944dcbda9)Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thitry Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifty Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Imola, Italy (#litres_trial_promo)Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)Also By Garth Stein (#litres_trial_promo)Praise (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

the art of racing in the rain (#ub767ece2-1567-58f3-b2ff-8b22efe182b5)
1 (#ub767ece2-1567-58f3-b2ff-8b22efe182b5)
Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature. And while I occasionally step over the line and into the world of the melodramatic, it is what I must do in order to communicate clearly and effectively. In order to make my point understood without question. I have no words I can rely on because, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and flat and loose, and therefore, is a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food around my mouth while chewing, and an even less effective tool for making clever and complicated polysyllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences. And that’s why I’m here now waiting for Denny to come home—he should be here soon—lying on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor in a puddle of my own urine.
I’m old. And while I’m very capable of getting older, that’s not the way I want to go out. Shot full of pain medication and steroids to reduce the swelling of my joints. Vision fogged with cataracts. Puffy, plasticky packages of Doggie Depends stocked in the pantry. I’m sure Denny would get me one of those little wagons I’ve seen on the streets, the ones that cradle the hindquarters so a dog can drag his ass behind him when things start to fail. That’s humiliating and degrading. I’m not sure if it’s worse than dressing up a dog for Halloween, but it’s close. He would do it out of love, of course. I’m sure he would keep me alive as long as he possibly could, my body deteriorating, disintegrating around me, dissolving until there’s nothing left but my brain floating in a glass jar filled with clear liquid, my eyeballs drifting at the surface and all sorts of cables and tubes feeding what remains. But I don’t want to be kept alive. Because I know what’s next. I’ve seen it on TV. A documentary I saw about Mongolia, of all places. It was the best thing I’ve ever seen on television, other than the 1993 Grand Prix of Europe, of course, the greatest automobile race of all time in which Ayrton Senna proved himself to be a genius in the rain. After the 1993 Grand Prix, the best thing I’ve ever seen on TV is a documentary that explained everything to me, made it all clear, told the whole truth: when a dog is finished living his lifetimes as a dog, his next incarnation will be as a man.
I’ve always felt almost human. I’ve always known that there’s something about me that’s different than other dogs. Sure, I’m stuffed into a dog’s body, but that’s just the shell. It’s what’s inside that’s important. The soul. And my soul is very human.
I am ready to become a man now, though I realize I will lose all that I have been. All of my memories, all of my experiences. I would like to take them with me into my next life—there is so much I have gone through with the Swift family—but I have little say in the matter. What can I do but force myself to remember? Try to imprint what I know on my soul, a thing that has no surface, no sides, no pages, no form of any kind. Carry it so deeply in the pockets of my existence that when I open my eyes and look down at my new hands with their thumbs that are able to close tightly around their fingers, I will already know. I will already see.
The door opens, and I hear him with his familiar cry, “Yo, Zo!” Usually, I can’t help but put aside my pain and hoist myself to my feet, wag my tail, sling my tongue around, and shove my face into his crotch. It takes humanlike willpower to hold back on this particular occasion, but I do. I hold back. I don’t get up. I’m acting.
“Enzo?”
I hear his footsteps, the concern in his voice. He finds me and looks down. I lift my head, wag my tail feebly so it taps against the floor. I play the part.
He shakes his head and runs his hand through his hair, sets down the plastic bag from the grocery that has his dinner in it. I can smell roast chicken through the plastic. Tonight he’s having roast chicken and an iceberg lettuce salad.
“Oh, Enz,” he says.
He reaches down to me, crouches, touches my head like he does, along the crease behind the ear, and I lift my head and lick at his forearm.
“What happened, kid?” he asks.
Gestures can’t explain.
“Can you get up?”
I try, and I scramble. My heart takes off, lunges ahead because no, I can’t. I panic. I thought I was just acting, but I really can’t get up. Shit. Life imitating art.
“Take it easy, kid,” he says, pressing down on my chest to calm me. “I’ve got you.”
He lifts me easily, he cradles me, and I can smell the day on him. I can smell everything he’s done. His work, the auto shop where he’s behind the counter all day, standing, making nice with the customers who yell at him because their BMWs don’t work right and it costs too much to fix them and that makes them mad so they have to yell at someone. I can smell his lunch. He went to the Indian buffet he likes. All you can eat. It’s cheap, and sometimes he takes a container with him and steals extra portions of the tandoori chicken and yellow rice and has it for dinner, too. I can smell beer. He stopped somewhere. The Mexican restaurant up the hill. I can smell the tortilla chips on his breath. Now it makes sense. Usually, I’m excellent with elapsed time, but I wasn’t paying attention because of my emoting.
He places me gently in the tub and turns on the handheld shower thing and says, “Easy, Enz.”
He says, “Sorry I was late. I should have come straight home, but the guys from work insisted. I told Craig I was quitting, and …”
He trails off, and I realize that he thinks that my accident was because he was late. Oh, no. That’s not how it was meant. It’s so hard to communicate because there are so many moving parts. There’s presentation and there’s interpretation and they’re so dependent on each other it makes things very difficult. I didn’t want him to feel bad about this. I wanted him to see the obvious, that it’s okay for him to let me go. He’s been going through so much, and he’s finally through it. He needs to not have me around to worry about anymore. He needs me to free him to be brilliant.
He is so brilliant. He shines. He’s beautiful with his hands that grab things and his tongue that says things and the way he stands and chews his food for so long, mashing it into a paste before he swallows. I will miss him and little Zoë, and I know they will miss me. But I can’t let sentimentality cloud my grand plan. After this happens, Denny will be free to live his life, and I will return to earth in a new form, as a man, and I will find him and shake his hand and comment on how talented he is, and then I will wink at him and say, “Enzo says hello,” and turn and walk quickly away as he calls after me, “Do I know you?” He will call, “Have we met before?”
After the bath he cleans the kitchen floor while I watch; he gives me my food, which I eat too quickly again, and sets me up in front of the TV while he prepares his dinner.
“How about a tape,” he says.
“Yes, a tape,” I reply, but of course, he doesn’t hear me.
He puts in a video from one of his races and he turns it on and we watch. It’s one of my favorites. The racetrack is dry for the pace lap, and then just after the green flag is waved, indicating the start of the race, there is a wall of rain, a torrential downpour that engulfs the track, and all the cars around him spin out of control into the fields and he drives through them as if the rain didn’t fall on him, like he had a magic spell that cleared water from his path. Just like the 1993 Grand Prix of Europe, when Senna passed four cars on the opening lap, four of the best championship drivers in their championship cars—Schumacher, Wendlinger, Hill, Prost—and he passed them all. Like he had a magic spell.
Denny is as good as Ayrton Senna. But no one sees him because he has responsibilities. He has his daughter, Zoë, and he had his wife, Eve, who was sick until she died, and he has me. And he lives in Seattle when he should live somewhere else. And he has a job. But sometimes when he goes away he comes back with a trophy and he shows it to me and tells me all about his races and how he shone on the track and taught those other drivers in Sonoma or Texas or Mid-Ohio what driving in wet weather is really about.
When the tape is over he says, “Let’s go out,” and I struggle to get up.
He lifts my butt into the air and centers my weight over my legs and then I’m okay. To show him, I rub my muzzle against his thigh.
“There’s my Enzo.”
We leave our apartment; the night is sharp, cool and breezy and clear. We only go down the block and back because my hips hurt so much, and Denny sees. Denny knows. When we get back, he gives me my bedtime cookies and I curl into my bed on the floor next to his. He picks up the phone and dials.
“Mike,” he says. Mike is Denny’s friend from the shop where they both work behind the counter. Customer relations, they call it. Mike’s a little guy with friendly hands that are pink and always washed clean of smell. “Mike, can you cover for me tomorrow? I have to take Enzo to the vet again.”
We’ve been going to the vet a lot recently to get different medicines that are supposed to help make me more comfortable, but they don’t, really. And since they don’t, and considering all that went on yesterday, I’ve set the Master Plan in motion.
Denny stops talking for a minute, and when he starts again, his voice doesn’t sound like his voice. It’s rough, like when he has a cold or allergies.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m not sure it’s a round trip visit.”
I may not be able to form words, but I understand them. And I’m surprised by what he said, even though I set it up. For a moment, I’m surprised my plan is working. It is the best thing for all involved, I know. It’s the right thing for Denny to do. He’s done so much for me, my whole life. I owe him the gift of setting him free. Letting him ascend. We had a good run, and now it’s over; what’s wrong with that?
I close my eyes and listen vaguely in a half sleep as he does the things he does before he sleeps each night. Brushing and squirting and splashing. So many things. People and their rituals. They cling to things so hard sometimes.
2 (#ub767ece2-1567-58f3-b2ff-8b22efe182b5)
He picked me out of a pile of puppies, a tangled, rolling mass of paws and ears and tails, behind a barn in a smelly field near a town in eastern Washington called Spangle. I don’t remember much about where I came from, but I remember my mother, a heavy bitch of a lab with pendulous teats that swung to and fro as my littermates and I chased them down from across the yard. Honestly, our mother didn’t seem to like us much, and she was fairly indifferent to whether we ate or starved. She seemed relieved whenever one of us left. One fewer yipping mammal tracking her down to bleed her of her milk.
I never knew my father. The people on the farm told Denny that he was a shepherd-poodle mix, but I don’t believe it. I never saw a dog that looked like that on the farm, and while the lady was nice, the alpha man was a mean bastard who would look you in the eyes and lie even if telling the truth would serve him better. He expounded at length on the relative intelligence of dog breeds, and he firmly believed that shepherds and poodles were the smart ones, and therefore would be more desirable—and more valuable—when “bred back to a lab for temperament.” All a bunch of junk. Everyone knows that shepherds and poodles aren’t especially smart. They’re responders and reactors, not independent thinkers. Especially the blue-eyed sheep dogs from Down Under that people make such a fuss over when they catch a Frisbee. Sure, they’re clever and quick, but they don’t think outside the box; they’re all about convention.
I’m sure my father was a terrier. Because terriers are problem solvers. They’ll do what you tell them, but only if it happens to be in line with what they wanted to do anyway. There was a terrier like that on the farm. An Airedale. Big and brown-black and tough. No one messed with him. He didn’t stay with us in the gated field behind the house. He stayed in the barn down the hill by the creek where the men went to fix their tractors. But sometimes he would come up the hill, and when he did, everyone steered clear. Word in the field was he was a fighting dog the alpha man kept separate because he’d kill a dog for sniffing in his direction. He’d rip the fur from a nape because of a lazy glance. And when a bitch was in heat, he’d mount her good and go about his business without a thought about who was watching or who cared. I’ve often wondered if he sired me. I have his brown-black coloring and my coat is slightly wiry, and people frequently comment that I must be part terrier. I like to think I came from a determined gene pool.
I remember the heat on the day I left the farm. Every day was hot in Spangle, and I thought the world was just a hot place because I never knew what cold was about. I had never seen rain, didn’t know much about water. Water was the stuff in the buckets that the older dogs drank, and it was the stuff the alpha man sprayed out of the hose and into the faces of dogs who might want to pick a fight. But the day Denny arrived was exceptionally hot. My littermates and I were tussling around like we always did, and a hand reached into the pile and found my scruff and suddenly I was dangling high in the air.
“This one,” a man said.
It was my first glimpse of the rest of my life. He was slender, with long and lean muscles. Not a large man, but assertive. He had keen, icy blue eyes. His choppy hair and short, scruffy beard were dark and wiry, like an Irish terrier.
“The pick of the litter,” the lady said. She was nice; I always liked it when she cuddled us in her soft lap. “The sweetest. The best.”
“We were thinkin’ a keepin’ ’im,” the alpha man said, stepping up with his big boots caked with mud from the creek where he was patching a fence. That was the line he always used. Hell, I was a pup only a dozen weeks old, and I’d already heard that line a bunch of times. He used it to get more money.
“Will you let him go?”
“Fur a price,” the alpha man said, squinting at the sky, bleached a pale blue by the sun. “Fur a price.”
3 (#ub767ece2-1567-58f3-b2ff-8b22efe182b5)
“Very gently. Like there are eggshells on your pedals,” Denny always says, “and you don’t want to break them. That’s how you drive in the rain.”
When we watch videos together—which we’ve done ever since the very first day I met him—he explains these things to me. (To me!) Balance, anticipation, patience. These are all vital. Peripheral vision, seeing things you’ve never seen before. Kinesthetic sensation, driving by the seat of the pants. But what I’ve always liked best is when he talks about having no memory. No memory of things he’d done just a second before. Good or bad. Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present. In order to reach any kind of success in automobile racing, a driver must never remember.
Which is why drivers compulsively record their every move, their every race, with cockpit cameras, in-car video, data mapping; a driver cannot be a witness to his own greatness. This is what Denny says. He says racing is doing. It is being a part of a moment and being aware of nothing else but that moment. Reflection must come at a later time. The great champion Julian SabellaRosa has said, “When I am racing, my mind and my body are working so quickly and so well together, I must be sure not to think, or else I will definitely make a mistake.”
4 (#ub767ece2-1567-58f3-b2ff-8b22efe182b5)
Denny moved me far from the farm in Spangle, to a Seattle neighborhood called Leschi where he lived in a little apartment he rented on Lake Washington. I didn’t enjoy apartment living much, as I was used to wide-open spaces and I was very much a puppy; still, we had a balcony that overlooked the lake, which gave me pleasure since I am part water dog, on my mother’s side
I grew quickly, and during that first year, Denny and I forged a deep fondness for each other as well as a feeling of trust. Which is why I was surprised when he fell in love with Eve so quickly.
He brought her home and she was sweet smelling, like him. Full of fermented drinks that made them both act funny, they were hanging on each other like they had too many clothes between them, and they were pulling at each other, tugging, biting lips and jabbing fingers and yanking at hair, all elbows and toes and saliva. They fell onto the bed and he mounted her and she said, “The field is fertile—beware!” And he said, “I embrace the fertility.” And he plowed the field until it grasped the sheets in its fists, arched its back, and cried out with joy.
When he got up to splash in the bathroom, she patted my head, which hovered low to the floor, me still being immature at just over a year old, and a little bit intimidated by all the screaming. She said, “You don’t mind if I love him, too, do you? I won’t come between you.”
I respected her for asking, but I knew that she would come between us, and I found her preemptive denial to be disingenuous.
I tried not to act off-putting because I knew how infatuated Denny was with her. But I admit I was less than embracing of her presence. And because of that, she was less than embracing of me. We were both satellites orbiting Denny’s sun, struggling for gravitational supremacy. Of course, she had the advantage of her tongue and her thumbs, and when I watched her kiss and fondle him sometimes she would glance at me and wink as if to gloat: Look at my thumbs! Seewhat they can do!

5 (#ub767ece2-1567-58f3-b2ff-8b22efe182b5)
Monkeys have thumbs.
Practically the dumbest species on the planet, next to the duck-billed platypus, who make their dens underwater even though they breathe the air. The platypus is horribly stupid, but is only slightly dumber than a monkey. Yet monkeys have thumbs. Those monkey-thumbs were meant for dogs. Give me my thumbs, you fucking monkeys! (I love the Al Pacino remake of Scarface, very much, though it doesn’t compare to the Godfather movies, which are excellent.)
I watch too much TV. When Denny goes away in the mornings, he turns it on for me, and it’s become a habit. He warned me not to watch all day, but I do. Fortunately, he knows I love cars, so he lets me watch a lot of Speed Channel. The classic races are the best, and I especially like Formula One. I like NASCAR, too, but I prefer it when they race on the road circuits. While racing is my favorite, Denny told me it was good for me to have variety in my life, so he often puts on other channels, which I enjoy very much as well.
Sometimes if I’m watching the History Channel or the Discovery Channel or PBS or even one of the kids’ channels—when Zoë was little I’d end up spending half the day trying to pry goofy jingles out of my brain—I learn about other cultures and other ways of life, and then I start thinking about my own place in the world and what makes sense and what doesn’t.
They talk a lot about Darwin; pretty much every educational channel has some kind of show about evolution at some point, and it’s usually really well thought out and researched. However, I don’t understand why people insist on pitting the concepts of evolution and creation against each other. Why can’t they see that spiritualism and science are one? That bodies evolve and souls evolve and the universe is a fluid place that marries them both in a wonderful package called a human being. What’s wrong with that idea?
The scientific theorists go on and on about how monkeys are the closest evolutionary relative of people. But that’s speculation. Based on what? Based on the fact that certain ancient craniums have been found to be similar to modern man’s? What does that prove? Based on the fact that some primates walk on two feet? Being bipedal isn’t even an advantage. Look at the human foot, full of bent toes and calcium deposits and pus draining from ingrown claws that aren’t even hard enough to scratch at the earth. (And yet, how I yearn for the moment my soul inhabits one of these poorly designed bipedal bodies and I, too, assume the health concerns of a man!) So what if man’s body evolved from the monkeys? Whether he came from monkeys or fish is unimportant. The important idea is that when the body became “human” enough, the first human soul slipped into it.
I’ll give you a theory: Man’s closest relative is not the chimpanzee, as the TV people believe, but is, in fact, the dog.
Witness my logic:

Case-in-Point #1: The Dew Claw
It is my opinion that the so-called dew claw, which is often snipped off a dog’s foreleg at an early age, is actually evidence of a preemergent thumb. Further, I believe that men have systematically bred the thumb out of certain lines of dog through an elaborate process called “selective breeding,” simply in order to prevent dogs from evolving into dexterous,and therefore “dangerous,” mammals.
I also believe that man’s continued domestication (if you care to use that silly euphemism) of dogs is motivated by fear: fear that dogs, left to evolve on their own, would, in fact, develop thumbs and smaller tongues, and therefore would be superior to men, who are slow and cumbersome, standing erect as they do. This is why dogs must live under the constant supervision of people, and are immediately put to death when found living on their own.
From what Denny has told me about the government and its inner workings, it is my belief that this despicable plan was hatched in a back room of none other than the White House, probably by an evil adviser to a president of questionable moral and intellectual fortitude, and probably with the correct assessment—unfortunately, made from a position of paranoia rather than of spiritual insight—that alldogs are progressively inclined regarding social issues.

Case-in-Point #2: The Werewolf
The full moon rises. The fog clings to the lowest branches of the spruce trees. The man steps out of the darkest corner of the forest and finds himself transformed into …
A monkey?
I think not.
6 (#ub767ece2-1567-58f3-b2ff-8b22efe182b5)
Her name was Eve, and at first I resented how she changed our lives. I resented the attention Denny paid to her small hands, her plump, round buttocks, her modest hips. The way he gazed into her soft green eyes, which peered out from under stylish strands of straight blond hair. Did I envy her engaging smile that eclipsed anything about her that might have been considered less than special? Perhaps I did. For she was a person, unlike me. She was well groomed. Unlike me. She was everything I wasn’t. I went for extended periods without a haircut or a bath, for instance; she bathed every day and had a special person do nothing else but color her hair to Denny’s liking. My nails grew too long and scratched the wood floor; she frequently attended to her nails with sticks and clippers and polishes to make sure they were the proper shape and size.
Her attention to every detail of her appearance was reflected in her personality as well: she was an incredible organizer, fastidious in nature, constantly making lists and jotting down notes of things to be done or gotten or assembled, frequently creating what she called “Honey-Do” lists for Denny and me, so that our weekends were filled with trips to the Home Depot or waiting in line at the Disposal and Recycling Transfer Station in Georgetown. I didn’t like painting rooms and fixing doorknobs and washing screens. But Denny liked it, apparently, because the more she gave him to do, the more quickly he completed his tasks so he could collect his reward, which usually included a lot of nuzzling and stroking.
Soon after she moved into our apartment, they were married in a small wedding ceremony, which I attended along with a group of their closest friends and Eve’s immediate family. Denny didn’t have any brothers or sisters to invite, and he explained his parents’ absence simply by saying that they didn’t travel well.
Eve’s parents made it clear to all involved that the house in which the wedding took place, a charming little beach cottage on Whidbey Island, was owned by close friends of theirs who were not in attendance. I was allowed to participate only under strict rules: I was not to roam freely on the beach or swim in the bay, as I might track sand onto the expensive mahogany floors. And I was forced to urinate and defecate in a very specific location next to the recycling containers.
Upon our return from Whidbey, I noticed that Eve moved through our apartment with a greater sense of authorship, and was much bolder in her actions to move or replace things: towels, linens, and even furniture. She had entered our lives and changed everything around. And yet, while I was unhappy with her intrusion, there was something about her that prevented me from mustering any real anger. I believe that thing was her swollen belly.
There was something about the effort it took for her to lie down on her side to rest, having removed her shirt and undergarments, the way her breasts fell just so across her chest as she lay on the bed. It reminded me of my own mother at mealtime when she sighed and shrugged herself to the ground, lifting her leg to expose her nipples to us. These arethe devices I use to feed you. Now eat! And while I greatly resented the attention Eve lavished on her unborn baby, in retrospect, I realize I had never given her a reason to lavish that same attention on me. Perhaps that is my regret: I loved how she was when she was pregnant, and yet I knew I could never be the source of her affection in that way because I could never be her child.
She devoted herself to the baby before it was even born. She touched it regularly through her tightly stretched skin. She sang to it and danced with it to music she played on the stereo. She learned to make it move around by drinking orange juice, which she did frequently, explaining to me that the health magazines demanded she drink the juice for the folic acid, but she and I both knew she was doing it for the kick. She once asked if I wanted to know what it felt like, and I did, so she held my face against her belly after she had drunk the acid, and I felt it move. An elbow, I think, pushing out perversely, like something reaching out from the grave. It was hard for me to imagine exactly what was going on behind the curtain, inside Eve’s magic sack where the little rabbit was being assembled. But I knew that what was inside of her was separate from her, and had a will of its own and moved when it wanted to—or when prodded by the acid—and was beyond her control.
I admire the female sex. The life makers. It must be amazing to have a body that can carry an entire creature inside. (I mean, other than a tapeworm, which I’ve had. That doesn’t count as another life, really. That’s a parasite and should never have been there in the first place.) The life that Eve had inside her was something she had made. She and Denny had made it together. I wished, at the time, that the baby would look like me.
I remember the day the baby arrived. I had just reached adulthood—two years by calendar count. Denny was in Daytona, Florida, for the drive of his career. He had spent the entire year soliciting sponsors, begging, pleading, hustling, until he got lucky and found the right person in the right hotel lobby to say, “You’ve got balls, son. Call me tomorrow.” Thus, he found his long-sought sponsor dollars and was able to buy a seat in a Porsche 993 Cup Car for the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona.
Endurance racing is not for the meek. Four drivers each spending six hours behind the wheel of a loud, powerful, challenging, and expensive race car is an exercise in coordination and determination. The 24 Hours of Daytona, which is broadcast on television, is as unpredictable as it is exciting. That Denny was presented with a chance to drive it in the same year that his daughter would be born was one of those coincidences that turn on interpretation: Eve was dismayed by the unfortunate timing of the events; Denny celebrated the bounty of opportunity and the feeling that he had everything he could possibly ask for.
Still, the timing was off. On the day of the race, even though it was more than a week before schedule, Eve felt the contractions and called the midwives, who invaded our home and quickly took charge. Later that evening, as Denny was, no doubt, driving the circuit in Daytona and winning the race, Eve stood bent over the bed with two round ladies who helped her by holding her arms, and with a monstrous bellow that seemed to last an hour, squirted out a little bloody blob of human tissue that wriggled spastically and then cried out. The ladies helped Eve into her bed and rested the tiny purple thing on her torso until the baby’s searching mouth found Eve’s nipple and began to suck.
“Could I have a minute alone—?” Eve started.
“Of course,” one of the ladies said, moving to the door.
“Come with us, puppy,” the other lady said to me on her way out.
“No—” Eve stopped them. “He can stay.”
I could stay? Despite myself, I felt proud to be included in Eve’s inner circle. The two ladies bustled off to take care of whatever they needed to take care of, and I watched in fascination as Eve suckled her new babe. After a few minutes, my attention drifted from the baby’s first meal to Eve’s face, and I saw that she was crying and I wondered why.
She let her free hand dangle to the bedside, her fingers near my muzzle. I hesitated. I didn’t want to presume she was beckoning me. But then her fingers wiggled and her eyes caught mine, and I knew she was calling me. I bumped her hand with my nose. She lifted her fingers to the crown of my head and scratched, still crying, her baby still nursing.
“I know I told him to go,” she said to me. “I know that I insisted he go, I know.” Tears ran down her cheeks. “But I so wish he were here!”
I had no idea what to do, but I knew not to move. She needed me there.
“Will you promise to always protect her?” she asked.
She wasn’t asking me. She was asking Denny, and I was merely Denny’s surrogate. Still, I felt the obligation. I understood that, as a dog, I could never be as interactive with humanity as I truly desired. Yet, I realized at that moment, I could be something else. I could provide something of need to the people around me. I could comfort Eve when Denny was away. I could protect Eve’s baby. And while I would always crave more, in a sense, I had found a place to begin.
The next day, Denny came home from Daytona, Florida, unhappy. His mood immediately changed when he held his little girl, whom they named Zoë, not after me, but after Eve’s grandmother.
“Do you see my little angel, Enz?” he asked me.
Did I see her? I practically birthed her!
Denny skated carefully through the kitchen after he returned, sensing that the ice was very thin. Eve’s parents, Maxwell and Trish, had been in the house since Zoë was born, taking care of their daughter and their new baby granddaughter. I began calling them the Twins because they looked very much alike with the same shade of artificially colored hair, and because they always wore matching outfits: khaki pants or polyester slacks partnered with sweaters or polo shirts. When one of them wore sunglasses, the other did, too. The same with Bermuda shorts and tall socks pulled up to their knees. And because they both smelled of chemicals: plastics and petroleum-based hair products.
From the moment they arrived, the Twins had been admonishing Eve for having her baby at home. They told her she was endangering her baby’s welfare and that in these modern times, it was irresponsible to give birth anywhere but in the most prestigious of all hospitals with the most expensive of all doctors. Eve tried to explain to them that statistics showed exactly the opposite was true for a healthy mother, and that any signs of distress would have been recognized early by her experienced team of licensed midwives, but they refused to yield. Fortunately for Eve, Denny’s arrival home meant the Twins could turn their attention away from her shortcomings and focus on his.
“That’s a lot of bad luck,” Maxwell said to Denny as they stood in the kitchen. Maxwell was gloating; I could hear it in his voice.
“Do you get any of your money back?” Trish asked.
Denny was distraught, and I wasn’t sure why until Mike came over later that night and he and Denny opened their beers together. It turned out that Denny was going to take the third stint in the car. The car had been running well, everything going great. They were second in class and Denny would easily assume the lead as the sunlight faded and the night driving began. Until the driver who had the second stint stuffed the car into the wall on turn 6.
He stuffed it when a Daytona Prototype—a much faster car—was overtaking. First rule of racing: Never move aside to let someone pass; make him pass you. But the driver on Denny’s team moved over, and he hit the marbles, which is what they call the bits of rubber that shed off the tires and that accumulate on the track next to the established racing line. He hit the marbles and the rear end snapped around; he plowed into the wall at pretty close to top speed, and the car shattered into a million little pieces.
The driver was unhurt, but the race was over for the team. And Denny, who had spent a year working for his moment to shine, found himself standing in the infield wearing the fancy race suit they had given him for the race with the sponsor patches all over it and his own special helmet that he had fitted with all sorts of radio gear and vent adaptors and the special carbon fiber HANS device for protection, watching the opportunity of his lifetime get dragged off the track by the wrecker, strapped onto a flatbed, and driven off to salvage without his having sat in it for a single racing lap.
“And you don’t get any of your money back,” Mike said.
“I don’t care about any of that,” Denny said. “I should have been here.”
“She came early. You can’t know what’s going to happen before it happens.”
“Yes, I can,” Denny said. “If I’m any good, I can.”
“Anyway,” Mike said, lifting his beer bottle, “to Zoë.”
“To Zoë,” Denny echoed.
To Zoë, I said to myself. Whom I will always protect.
7 (#ub767ece2-1567-58f3-b2ff-8b22efe182b5)
When it was just Denny and me, he used to make up to ten thousand dollars a month in his spare time by calling people on the telephone, like the commercial said. But after Eve became pregnant, Denny took his job behind the counter at the fancy auto shop that serviced only expensive German cars. Denny liked his real job, but it ate up all of his free time, and he and I didn’t get to spend our days together anymore.
Sometimes on weekends, Denny taught at a high-performance driver’s education program run by one of the many car clubs in the area—BMW, Porsche, Alfa Romeo—and he often took me to the track with him, which I enjoyed very much. He didn’t really like teaching at these events because he didn’t get to drive; he just had to sit in the passenger seat and tell other people how to drive. And it hardly paid for the gas it cost him to get down to the track, he said. He fantasized about moving somewhere—to Sonoma or Phoenix or Connecticut or Las Vegas, or even Europe—and catching on with one of the big schools so he could drive more, but Eve said she didn’t think she could ever leave Seattle.
Eve worked for some big retail clothing company because it provided us with money and health insurance, and also because she could buy clothes for the family at the employee discount. She went back to work a few months after Zoë was born, even though she really wanted to stay home with her baby. Denny offered to give up his own job to care for Zoë, but Eve said that wasn’t practical; instead, she dropped Zoë off at the day-care center every morning and picked her up every night on her way home from work.
With Denny and Eve working and Zoë off at day care, I was left to my own devices. For most of the dreary days I was alone in the apartment, wandering from room to room, from nap spot to nap spot, sometimes spending my hours doing nothing more than staring out the window and timing the Metro buses that drove by on the street outside to see if I could decipher their schedule. I hadn’t realized how much I enjoyed having everyone bustling around the house for those first few months of Zoë’s life. I had felt so much a part of something. I was an integral figure in Zoë’s entertainment: sometimes after a feeding, when she was awake and alert and strapped safely into her bouncy seat, Eve and Denny would play Monkey in the Middle, throwing a ball of socks back and forth across the living room; I got to be the monkey. I leapt after the socks and then scrambled back to catch them, and then danced like a four-legged clown to catch them again. And when, against all odds, I reached the sock ball and batted it into the air with my snout, Zoë would squeal and laugh; she would shake her legs with such force, the bouncy chair would scoot along the floor. And Eve, Denny, and I would collapse in a pile of laughter.
But then everyone moved on and left me behind.
I wallowed in the emptiness of my lonely days. I would stare out the window and try to picture Zoë and me playing Enno-Fetch, a game I had invented but she later named, in which Denny or Eve would help her roll a sock ball or fling one of her toys across the room, and I would push it back to her with my nose, and she would laugh and I would wag my tail, and then we would do it again. Until one day when a fortunate accident happened that changed my life. Denny turned on the TV in the morning to check the weather report, and he forgot to turn the TV off.
Let me tell you this: The Weather Channel is not about weather; it is about the world! It is about how weather affects us all, our entire global economy, health, happiness, spirit. The channel delves with great detail into weather phenomena of all different kinds—hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, monsoons, hail, rain, lightning storms—and they especially delight in the confluence of multiple phenomena. Absolutely fascinating. So much so that when Denny returned from work that evening, I was still glued to the television.
“What are you watching?” he asked when he came in, asked it as if I were Eve or Zoë, as if it couldn’t have been more natural to see me there or address me like that. But Eve was in the kitchen cooking dinner and Zoë was with her; it was just me. I looked at him and then back to the TV, which was reviewing the day’s major event: flooding due to heavy rainstorms on the East Coast.
“The Weather Channel?” he scoffed, snatching up the remote and changing the channel. “Here.”
He changed it to Speed Channel.
I had watched plenty of TV as I grew up, but only when a person was already watching: Denny and I enjoyed racing and the movie channels; Eve and I watched music videos and Hollywood gossip; Zoë and I watched children’s shows. (I tried to teach myself to read by studying Sesame Street, but it didn’t work. I achieved a degree of literacy, and I can still tell the difference between “pull” and “push” on a door, but after I figured out the shapes of the letters, I couldn’t grasp which sounds each letter made and why.) But, suddenly, the idea of watching television by myself entered my life! If I had been a cartoon, the lightbulb over my head would have illuminated. I barked excitedly when I saw cars racing on the screen. Denny laughed.
“Better, right?”
Yes! Better! I stretched deeply, joyously, doing my best downward-facing dog and wagging my tail—both gestures of happiness and approval. And Denny got it.
“I didn’t know you were a television dog,” he said. “I can leave it on for you during the day, if you want.”
I want! I want!
“But you have to limit yourself,” he said. “I don’t want to catch you watching TV all day long. I’m counting on you to be responsible.”
I am responsible!
While I had learned a great deal up until that point in my life—I was three years old already—once Denny began leaving the TV on for me, my education really took off. With the tedium gone, time started moving quickly again. The weekends, when we were all together, seemed short and filled with activity, and while Sunday nights were bittersweet, I took great comfort in knowing I had a week of television ahead.
I was so immersed in my education, I suppose I lost count of the weeks, so I was surprised by the arrival of Zoë’s second birthday. Suddenly I was engulfed by a party in the apartment with a bunch of little kids she had met in the park and at her day-care center. It was loud and crazy and all the children let me play with them and wrestle on the rug, and I let them dress me up with a hat and a sweat jacket and Zoë called me her big brother. They got lemon cake all over the floor, and I got to be Eve’s helper cleaning it up while Denny opened presents with the kids. I thought it nice that Eve seemed so happy cleaning up this mess, when she sometimes complained about cleaning the apartment when one of us made a mess. She even teased me about my crumb-cleaning skills and we raced, she with her Dustbuster and me with my tongue. After everyone had left and we had all completed our cleaning assignments, Denny had a surprise birthday present for Zoë. He showed her a photograph that she looked at briefly and with little interest. But then he showed the same photograph to Eve, and it made Eve cry. And then it made her laugh and she hugged him and looked at the photo again and cried some more. Denny picked up the photograph and showed it to me, and it was a photo of a house.
“Look at this, Enzo,” he said. “This is your new yard. Aren’t you excited?”
I guess I was excited. Actually, I was kind of confused. I didn’t understand the implications. And then everyone started shoving things in boxes and scrambling around, and the next thing I knew, my bed was somewhere else entirely.
The house was nice. It was a stylish little Craftsman like I’d seen on This Old House, with two bedrooms and only one bathroom but with plenty of living space, situated very close to its neighbors on a hillside in the Central District. Many electrical wires draped from poles along the sidewalk outside, and while our house looked neat and trim, a few doors down stood other houses with unkempt lawns and peeling paint and mossy roofs.
Eve and Denny were in love with the place. They spent almost the entire first night there rolling around naked in every room except Zoë’s. When Denny came home from work, he would first say hello to the girls, then he would take me outside to the yard and throw the ball, which I happily retrieved. And then Zoë got big enough that she would run around and squeal while I pretended to chase her. And Eve would admonish her: “Don’t run like that; Enzo will bite you.” She did that frequently in the early years, doubt me like that. But one time, Denny turned on her quickly and said: “Enzo would never hurt her—ever!” And he was right. I knew I was different from other dogs. I had a certain willpower that was strong enough to overcome my more primal instincts. What Eve said was not out of line, as most dogs cannot help themselves; they see an animal running and they track it and they go after it. But that sort of thing doesn’t apply to me.
Still, Eve didn’t know that, and I had no way of explaining it to her, so I never played rough with Zoë. I didn’t want Eve to start worrying unnecessarily. Because I had already smelled it. When Denny was away and Eve fed me and she leaned down to give me my bowl of food and my nose was near her head, I had detected a bad odor, like rotting wood, mushrooms, decay. Wet, soggy decay. It came from her ears and her sinuses. There was something inside Eve’s head that didn’t belong.
Given a facile tongue, I could have warned them. I could have alerted them to her condition long before they discovered it with their machines, their computers and super-vision scopes that can see inside the human head. They may think those machines are sophisticated, but in fact they are clunky and clumsy, totally reactive, based on a philosophy of symptom-driven medicine that is always a step late. My nose—yes, my little black nose that is leathery and cute—could smell the disease in Eve’s brain long before even she knew it was there.
But I hadn’t a facile tongue. So all I could do was watch and feel empty inside; Eve had assigned me to protect Zoë no matter what, but no one had been assigned to protect Eve. And there was nothing I could do to help her.
8 (#ub767ece2-1567-58f3-b2ff-8b22efe182b5)
One summer Saturday afternoon, after we had spent the morning at the beach at Alki swimming and eating fish and chips from Spud’s, we returned to the house red and tired from the sun. Eve put Zoë down for a nap; Denny and I sat in front of the TV to study.
He put on a tape of an enduro he had been asked to co-drive in Portland a few weeks earlier. It was an exciting race, eight hours long, in which Denny and his two co-drivers took turns behind the wheel in two-hour shifts, ultimately finishing first in class after Denny’s eleventh-hour heroics, which included recovering from a near spin to overtake two class competitors.
Watching a race entirely from in-car video is a tremendous experience. It creates a wonderful sense of perspective that is often lost in a television broadcast with its many cameras and cars to follow. Seeing a race from the cockpit of a single car gives a true feeling of what it’s like to be a driver: the grip on the steering wheel, the dash, the track, and the glimpse through the rearview mirror of other cars overtaking or being overtaken, the sense of isolation, the focus and determination that are necessary to win.
Denny started the tape at the beginning of his final stint, with the track wet and the sky heavy with dark clouds that threatened more rain. We watched several laps in silence. Denny drove smoothly and almost alone, as his team had fallen behind after making the crucial decision to pull into the pits and switch to rain tires; other racing teams had predicted the rain would pass and dry track conditions would return, and so had gained more than two laps on Denny’s team. Yet the rain began again, which gave Denny a tremendous advantage.
Denny quickly and easily passed cars from other classes: underpowered Miatas that darted through the turns with their excellent balance; big-engine Vipers with their atrocious handling. Denny, in his quick and muscular Porsche Cup Car, slicing through the rain.
“How come you go through the turns so much faster than the other cars?” Eve asked.
I looked up. She stood in the doorway, watching with us.
“Most of them aren’t running rain tires,” Denny said.
Eve took a seat on the sofa next to Denny.
“But some of them are.”
“Yes, some,” he said.
We watched. Denny got up behind a yellow Camaro at the end of the back straight, and though it looked as if he could have taken the other car in turn 12, he held back. Eve noticed.
“Why didn’t you pass him?” she asked.
“I know him. He’s got too much power and would just pass me back on the straight. I think I take him in the next series of turns.”
Yes. At the next turn-in, Denny was inches from the Camaro’s rear bumper. He rode tight through the double-apex right-hand turn and then popped out at the exit to take the inside line for the next turn, a quick left, and he zipped right by.
“This part of the track is really slick in the rain,” he said. “He has to back way off. By the time he gets his grip back, I’m out of his reach.”
On the back straight again, the headlights illuminating the turn markers against a sky that was still not completely dark, the Camaro could be seen in Denny’s panoramic racing rearview mirror, fading into the background.
“Did he have rain tires?” Eve asked.
“I think so. But his car wasn’t set up right.”
“Still. You’re driving like the track isn’t wet, and everyone else is driving like it is.”
Turn 12 and blasting down the straight, we could see brake lights of the competition flicker ahead; Denny’s next victims.
“That which you manifest is before you,” Denny said softly.
“What?” Eve asked.
“When I was nineteen,” Denny said after a moment, “at my first driving school down at Sears Point, it was raining and they were trying to teach us how to drive in the rain. After the instructors were finished explaining all their secrets, all the students were totally confused. We had no idea what they were talking about. I looked over at the guy next to me—I remember him, he was from France and he was very fast. Gabriel Flouret. He smiled and he said: ‘That which you manifest is before you.’”
Eve stuck out her lower lip and squinted at Denny.
“And then everything made sense,” she said jokingly.
“That’s right,” Denny said seriously.
On the TV, the rain didn’t stop; it kept coming. Denny’s team had made the right choice; other teams were pulling off into the hot pits to change to rain tires.
“Drivers are afraid of the rain,” Denny told us. “Rain amplifies your mistakes, and water on the track can make your car handle unpredictably. When something unpredictable happens you have to react to it; if you’re reacting at speed, you’re reacting too late. And so you should be afraid.”
“I’m afraid just watching it,” Eve said.
“If I intentionally make the car do something, then I can predict what it’s going to do. In other words, it’s only unpredictable if I’m not … possessing … it.”
“So you spin the car before the car spins itself?” she asked.
“That’s it! If I initiate the action—if I get the car a little loose—then I know it’s going to happen before it happens. Then I can react to it before even the car knows it’s happening.”
“And you can do that?”
Dashing past other cars on the TV screen, his rear end suddenly stepped out, his car got sideways but his hands were already turning to correct, and instead of his car snapping around into a full spin, he was off again, leaving the others behind. Eve sighed in relief, held her hand to her forehead.
“Sometimes,” Denny said. “But all drivers spin. It comes from pushing the limits. But I’m working on it. Always working on it. And I had a good day.”
She sat with us another minute, and then she smiled at Denny almost reluctantly and stood up.
“I love you,” she said. “I love all of you, even your racing. And I know on some level that you are completely right about all this. I just don’t think I could ever do it myself.”
She went off into the kitchen; Denny and I continued watching the cars on the video as they drove around and around the circuit drenched in darkness.
I will never tire of watching tapes with Denny. He knows so much, and I have learned so much from him. He said nothing more to me; he continued watching his tapes. But my thoughts turned to what he had just taught me. Such a simple concept, yet so true: that which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves.
I considered how that idea applied to my relationship with Eve. It was true that I carried some resentment toward her for her involvement in our lives, and I know that she sensed that fact and protected herself by remaining aloof. And even though our relationship had changed greatly since Zoë’s arrival, there was still a distance between us.
I left Denny at the TV and walked into the kitchen. Eve was preparing dinner, and she looked at me when I entered.
“Bored with the race?” she asked casually.
I wasn’t bored. I could have watched the race all that day and all the next. I was manifesting something. I lay down near the refrigerator, in a favorite spot of mine, and rested.
I could tell she felt self-conscious with me there. Usually, if Denny was in the house, I spent my time by his side; that I had chosen to be with her now seemed to confuse her. She didn’t understand my intentions. But then she got rolling with dinner, and she forgot about me.
First she started some hamburger frying, which smelled good. Then she washed some lettuce and spun it dry. She sliced apples. She added onions and garlic to a pot and then a can of tomatoes. And the kitchen was rich with the smell of food. The smell of it and the heat of the day made me feel quite drowsy, so I must have nodded off until I felt her hands on me, until I felt her stroking my side, then scratching my belly, and I rolled over on my back to acknowledge her dominance; my reward was more of her comforting scratches.
“Sweet dog,” she said to me. “Sweet dog.”
She returned to her preparations, pausing only occasionally to rub my neck with her bare foot as she passed, which wasn’t all that much, but meant a lot to me nonetheless.
I had always wanted to love Eve as Denny loved her, but I never had because I was afraid. She was my rain. She was my unpredictable element. She was my fear. But a racer should not be afraid of rain; a racer should embrace the rain. I, alone, could manifest a change in that which was around me. By changing my mood, my energy, I allowed Eve to regard me differently. And while I cannot say that I am a master of my own destiny, I can say that I have experienced a glimpse of mastery, and I know what I have to work toward.
9 (#ub767ece2-1567-58f3-b2ff-8b22efe182b5)
A couple of years after we moved into the new house, something very frightening happened.
Denny got a seat for a race at Watkins Glen. It was another enduro, but it was with a well-established team, and he didn’t have to find all the sponsorship money for his seat. Earlier that spring he had gone to France for a Formula Renault testing program. It was an expensive program he couldn’t afford; he told Mike his parents paid for it as a gift, but I had my doubts. His parents lived very far away in a small town, and they had never visited in all the time I had been there. Not for the wedding, Zoë’s birth, or anything. No matter. Wherever the funding came from, Denny had attended this program, and he had kicked ass because it was in France in the spring when it rains. When he told Eve about it, he said that one of the scouts who attend these things approached him in the paddock after a session and said, “Can you drive as fast in the dry as you can in the wet?” And Denny looked him straight in the eyes and replied, simply, “Try me.”
That which you manifest is before you.
The scout offered Denny a tryout, and Denny went away for two weeks. Testing and tuning and practicing. It was a big deal. He did so well, they offered him a seat in the enduro race at Watkins Glen.
When he first left for New York, we all grinned at each other because we couldn’t wait to watch the race on Speed Channel.
“It’s so exciting.” Eve would giggle. “Daddy’s a professional race car driver!”
And Zoë, whom I love very much and would not hesitate to sacrifice my own life to protect, would cheer and hop into her little race car they kept in the living room and drive around in circles until we were all dizzy and then throw her hands into the air and proclaim, “I am the champion!”
I got so caught up in the excitement, I was doing idiotic dog things like digging up the lawn. Balling myself up and then stretching out long and thin on the floor with my legs straight and my back arched and letting them scratch my belly. And chasing things. I chased!
It was the best of times. Really.
And then it was the worst of times.
Race day came, and Eve woke up with a darkness upon her. A pain so insufferable she stood in the kitchen in the early hours, before Zoë was awake, and vomited with great intensity into the sink. She vomited as if she were turning herself inside out.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Enzo,” she said. And she rarely spoke to me candidly like that. Like how Denny talks to me, as if I’m his true friend, his soul mate. The last time she had talked to me like that was when Zoë was born.
But this time she did talk to me like I was her soul mate. She asked, “What’s wrong with me?”
She knew I couldn’t answer. Her question was totally rhetorical. That’s what I found so frustrating about it: I had an answer.
I knew what was wrong, but I had no way to tell her, so I pushed at her thigh with my muzzle. I nosed in and buried my face between her legs. And I waited there, afraid.
“I feel like someone’s crushing my skull,” she said.
I couldn’t respond. I had no words. There was nothing I could do.
“Someone’s crushing my skull,” she repeated.
And quickly she gathered some things while I watched. She shoved Zoë’s clothes in a bag and some of her own and toothbrushes. All so fast. And she roused Zoë and stuffed her little kid-feet into her little-kid sneakers and—bang—the door slammed shut and—snick, snick—the deadbolt was thrown and they were gone.
And I wasn’t gone. I was there. I was still there.
10 (#ub767ece2-1567-58f3-b2ff-8b22efe182b5)
Ideally, a driver is a master of all that is around him, Denny says. Ideally, a driver controls the car so completely that he corrects a spin before it happens, he anticipates all possibilities. But we don’t live in an ideal world. In our world, surprises sometimes happen, mistakes happen, incidents with other drivers happen, and a driver must react.
When a driver reacts, Denny says, it’s important to remember that a car is only as good as its tires. If the tires lose traction, nothing else matters. Horsepower, torque, braking. All is moot when a skid is initiated. Until speed is scrubbed by good, old-fashioned friction and the tires regain traction, the driver is at the mercy of momentum. And momentum is a powerful force of nature.
It is important for the driver to understand this idea and override his natural inclinations. When the rear of a car “steps out,” the driver may panic and lift his foot off the accelerator. If he does, he will throw the weight of the car toward the front wheels, the rear end will snap around, and the car will spin.
A good driver will try to catch the spin by turning wheels in the direction the car is moving; he may succeed. However, at a critical point, the skid has completed its mission, which was to scrub speed from a car going too fast. Suddenly the tires find grip, and the driver has traction—unfortunately for him, with his front wheels turned sharply in the wrong direction. This induces a counterspin, as there is no balance to the car whatsoever. Thus, the spin in one direction, when overcorrected, becomes a spin in the other direction, and the secondary spin is much faster and more dangerous.
If, however, at the very first moment his tires began to break free, our driver had been experienced enough to resist his instinctive reaction to lift, he might have been able to apply his knowledge of vehicle behavior and, instead, increase the pressure on the accelerator, and at the same time ease out on the steering wheel ever so slightly. The increase in acceleration would have pushed his rear tires onto the track and settled his car. Relaxing the steering would have lessened the lateral g-forces at work. The spin would therefore have been corrected, but our driver would then have to deal with the secondary problem his correction has created: by increasing the radius of the turn, he has put himself at risk of running off the track.
Alas! Our driver is not where he had hoped to be! Yet he is still in control of his car. He is still able to act in a positive manner. He still can create an ending to his story in which he completes the race without incident. And, perhaps, if his manifesting is good, he will win.
11 (#ub767ece2-1567-58f3-b2ff-8b22efe182b5)
When I was locked in the house suddenly and firmly, I did not panic. I did not overcorrect or freeze. I quickly and carefully took stock of the situation and understood these things: Eve was ill, and the illness was possibly affecting her judgment, and she likely would not return for me; Denny would be home on the third day, after two nights.
I am a dog, and I know how to fast. It’s a part of the genetic background for which I have such contempt. When God gave men big brains, he took away the pads on their feet and made them susceptible to salmonella. When he denied dogs the use of thumbs, he gave them the ability to survive without food for extended periods. While a thumb—onethumb!—would have been very helpful at that time, allowing me to turn a stupid doorknob and escape, the second best tool, and the one at my disposal, was my ability to go without nourishment.
For three days I took care to ration the toilet water. I wandered around the house sniffing at the crack beneath the pantry door and fantasizing about a big bowl of my kibble, scooping up the occasional errant dust-covered Cheerio Zoë had dropped in a corner somewhere. And I urinated and defecated on the mat by the back door, next to the laundry machines. I did not panic.
During the second night, approximately forty hours into my solitude, I think I began to hallucinate. Licking at the legs of Zoë’s high chair where I had discovered some remnants of yogurt spilled long ago, I inadvertently sparked my stomach’s digestive juices to life with an unpleasant groan, and I heard a sound coming from her bedroom. When I investigated, I saw something terrible and frightening. One of her stuffed animal toys was moving about on its own.
It was the zebra. The stuffed zebra that had been sent to her by her paternal grandparents, who may have been stuffed animals themselves for all that we saw them in Seattle. I never cared for that zebra, as it was something of my rival for Zoë’s affection. Frankly, I was surprised to see it in the house, since it was one of Zoë’s favorites and she carted it around at length and even slept with it, wearing little grooves in its coat just below the animal’s velveteen head. I found it hard to believe Eve hadn’t grabbed it when she threw together their bag, but I guess she was so freaked out or in such pain that she overlooked the zebra.
The now-living zebra said nothing to me at all, but when it saw me it began a dance, a twisting, jerky ballet, which culminated with the zebra repeatedly thrusting its gelded groin into the face of an innocent Barbie doll. That made me quite angry, and I growled at the molester zebra, but it simply smiled and continued its assault, this time picking on a stuffed frog, which it mounted from behind and rode bareback, its hoof in the air like a bronco rider, yelling out, “Yee-haw! Yee-haw!”
I stalked the bastard as it abused and humiliated each of Zoë’s toys with great malice. Finally, I could take no more and I moved in, teeth bared for attack, to end the brutal burlesque once and for all. But before I could get the demented zebra in my fangs, it stopped dancing and stood on its hind legs before me. Then it reached down with its forelegs and tore at the seam that ran down its belly. Its own seam! It ripped the seam open until it was able to reach in and tear out its own stuffing. It continued dismantling itself, seam by seam, handful by handful, until it expelled whatever demon’s blood had brought it to life and was nothing more than a pile of fabric and stuffing that undulated on the floor, beating like a heart ripped from a chest, slowly, slower, and then nothing.
Traumatized, I left Zoë’s room, hoping that what I had seen was in my mind, a vision driven by the lack of glucose in my blood, but knowing, somehow, that it wasn’t a vision; it was true. Something terrible had happened.
The following afternoon, Denny returned. I heard the taxi pull up, and I watched him unload his bags and walk them up to the back door. I didn’t want to seem too excited to see him, and yet at the same time I was concerned about what I had done to the doormat, so I gave a couple of small barks to alert him. Through the window, I could see the look of surprise on his face. He took out his keys and opened the door, and I tried to block him, but he came in too quickly and the mat made a squishy sound. He looked down and gingerly hopped into the room.
“What the hell? What are you doing here?”
He glanced around the kitchen. Nothing was out of place, nothing was amiss, except me.
“Eve?” he called out.
But Eve wasn’t there. I didn’t know where she was, but she wasn’t with me.
“Are they home?” he asked me.
I didn’t answer. He picked up the phone and dialed.
“Are Eve and Zoë still at your house?” he asked without saying hello. “Can I speak to Eve?”
After a moment, he said, “Enzo is here.”
He said, “I’m trying to wrap my head around it myself. You left him here?”
He said, “This is insane. How could you not remember that your dog is in the house?”

He said, “He’s been here the whole time?”
He said very angrily, “Shit!”
And then he hung up the phone and shouted in frustration, a big long shout that was very loud. He looked at me after that and said, “I am so pissed off.”
He walked through the house quickly. I didn’t follow him; I waited by the back door. A minute later he returned.
“This is the only place you used?” he asked, pointing at the mat. “Good boy, Enzo. Good work.”
He got a garbage bag out of the pantry and scooped the sopping mat into it, tied it closed, and put it on the back porch. He mopped up the area near the door.
“You must be starving.”
He filled my water bowl and gave me some kibble, which I ate too quickly and didn’t enjoy, but at least it filled the empty space in my stomach. In silence, fuming, he watched me eat. And very soon, Eve and Zoë arrived on the back porch.
Denny threw open the door.
“Unbelievable,” he said bitterly. “You are unbelievable.”
“I was sick,” Eve said, stepping into the house with Zoë hiding behind her. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“He could have died.”
“He didn’t die.”
“He could have died,” Denny said. “I’ve never heard of anything so stupid. Careless. Totally unaware.”
“I was sick!” Eve snapped at him. “I wasn’t thinking!”

“You don’t think, people die. Dogs die.”
“I can’t do this anymore,” she cried, standing there shaking like a thin tree on a windy day. Zoë scurried around her and disappeared into the house. “You always go away, and I have to take care of Zoë and Enzo all by myself, and I can’t do it! It’s too much! I can barely take care of myself!”
“You should have called Mike or taken him to a kennel or something! Don’t try to kill him.”
“I didn’t try to kill him,” she whispered.
I heard weeping and looked over. Zoë stood in the door to the hallway, crying. Eve pushed past Denny and went to Zoë, kneeling before her.
“Oh, baby, we’re sorry we’re fighting. We’ll stop. Please don’t cry.”
“My animals,” Zoë whimpered.
“What happened to your animals?”
Eve led Zoë by the hand down the hall. Denny followed them. I stayed where I was. I wasn’t going near that room where the dancing sex-freak zebra had been. I didn’t want to see it.
Suddenly, I heard thundering footsteps. I cowered by the back door as Denny hurtled through the kitchen toward me. He was puffed up and angry and his eyes locked on me and his jaw clenched tight.
“You stupid dog,” he growled, and he grabbed the back of my neck, taking a huge fistful of my fur and jerking. I went limp, afraid. He’d never treated me like this before. He dragged me through the kitchen and down the hall, into Zoë’s room where she sat, stunned, on the floor in the middle of a huge mess. Her dolls, her animals, all torn to shreds, eviscerated, a complete disaster. Total carnage. I could only assume that the evil demon zebra had reassembled itself and destroyed the other animals after I had left. I should have eliminated the zebra when I had my chance. I should have eaten it, even if it had killed me.
Denny was so angry that his anger filled up the entire room, the entire house. Nothing was as large as Denny’s anger. He reared up and roared, and with his great hand, he struck me on the side of the head. I toppled over with a yelp, hunkering as close to the ground as possible. “Bad dog!” he bellowed and he raised his hand to hit me again.
“Denny, no!” Eve cried. She rushed to me and covered me with her own body. She protected me.
Denny stopped. He wouldn’t hit her. No matter what. Just as he wouldn’t hit me. He hadn’t hit me, I know, even though I could feel the pain of the blow. He had hit the demon, the evil zebra, the dark creature that came into the house and possessed the stuffed animal. Denny believed the evil demon was in me, but it wasn’t. I saw it. The demon had possessed the zebra and left me at the bloody scene with no voice to defend myself—I had been framed.
“We’ll get new animals, baby,” Eve said to Zoë. “We’ll go to the store tomorrow.”
As gently as I could, I slunk toward Zoë, the sad little girl on the floor, surrounded by the rubble of her fantasy world, her chin tucked into her chest, tears on her cheeks. I felt her pain because I knew her fantasy world intimately, as she allowed me to see the truth of it, and often included me in it. Through our role-playing—silly games with significant telltales—I saw what she thought about who she really was, her place in life. How she worshipped her father and always hoped to please her mother. How she trusted me but was afraid when I made faces at her that were too expressive and defied what she’d learned from the adult-driven World Order that denies animals the process of thought. I crawled to her on my elbows and placed my nose next to her thigh, tanned from the summer sun. And I raised my eyebrows slightly as if to ask if she could ever forgive me for not protecting her animals.
She waited a long time to give me her answer, but she finally gave it. She placed her hand on my head and let it rest there. She didn’t scratch me. It would be a while before she allowed herself to do that. But she did touch me, which meant she forgave me for what had happened, though the wound was still too raw and the pain was still too great for her to forget.
Later, after everyone had eaten and Zoë was put to bed in her room that had been cleaned of the carnage, I found Denny sitting on the porch steps with a drink of hard liquor, which I thought was strange because he hardly ever drank hard liquor. I approached cautiously, and he noticed.

“It’s okay, boy,” he said. He patted the step next to him and I went to him. I sniffed his wrist and took a tentative lick. He smiled and rubbed my neck.
“I’m really sorry,” he said. “I lost my mind.”
The patch of lawn behind our house was not big, but it was nice in the evening. It was rimmed by a dirt strip covered with sweet-smelling cedar chips where they planted flowers in the spring, and they had a bush in the corner that made flowers that attracted the bees and made me nervous whenever Zoë played near it, but she never got stung.
Denny finished his drink with a long swallow and shivered involuntarily. He produced a bottle from nowhere—I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it—and poured himself another. He stood up and took a couple of steps and stretched to the sky.
“We got first place, Enzo. Not ‘in class.’ We took first place overall. You know what that means?”
My heart jumped. I knew what it meant. It meant that he was the champion. It meant he was the best!
“It means a seat in a touring car next season, that’s what it means,” Denny said to me. “I got an offer from a real, live racing team. Do you know what an offer is?”
I loved it when he talked to me like that. Dragging out the drama. Ratcheting up the anticipation. I’ve always found great pleasure in the narrative tease. But then, I’m a dramatist. For me, a good story is all about setting up expectations and delivering on them in an exciting and surprising way.

“Getting an offer means I can drive if I come up with my share of sponsorship money for the season—which is reasonable and almost attainable—and if I’m willing to spend the better part of six months away from Eve and Zoë and you. Am I willing to do that?”
I didn’t say anything because I was torn. I knew I was Denny’s biggest fan and most steadfast supporter in his racing. But I also felt something like what Eve and Zoë must have felt whenever he went away: a hollow pit in my stomach at the idea of his absence. He must have been able to read my mind, because he gulped at his glass and said, “I don’t think so, either.” Which was what I was thinking.
“I can’t believe she left you like that,” he said. “I know she had a virus, but still.”
Did he really believe that, or was he lying to himself? Or maybe he just believed it because Eve wanted him to believe it. No matter. Had I been a person, I could have told him the truth about Eve’s condition.
“It was a bad virus,” he said more to himself than to me. “And she couldn’t think.”
And suddenly I was unsure: had I been a person, had I been able to tell him the truth, I’m not sure he would have wanted to hear it.
He groaned and sat back down and filled his glass again.
“I’m taking those stuffed animals out of your allowance,” he said with a chuckle. He looked at me then, took my chin with his hand.

“I love you, boy,” he said. “And I promise I’ll never do that again. No matter what. I’m really sorry.”
He was blathering, he was drunk. But it made me feel so much love for him, too.
“You’re tough,” he said. “You can do three days like that because you’re one tough dog.”
I felt proud.
“I know you’d never do anything deliberately to hurt Zoë,” he said.
I laid my head on his leg and looked up at him.
“Sometimes I think you actually understand me,” he said. “It’s like there’s a person inside there. Like you know everything.”
I do, I said to myself. I do.
12 (#ub767ece2-1567-58f3-b2ff-8b22efe182b5)
Eve’s condition was elusive and unpredictable. One day she would suffer a headache of crushing magnitude. Another day, debilitating nausea. A third would open with dizziness and end with a dark and angry mood. And these days were never linked together consecutively. Between them would be days or even weeks of relief, life as usual. And then Denny would get a call at work, and he would run to Eve’s assistance, drive her home from her job, impose on a friend to follow in her car, and spend the rest of the day watching helplessly.
The intense and arbitrary nature of Eve’s affliction was far beyond Denny’s grasp. The wailings, the dramatic screaming fits, the falling on the floor in fits of anguish. These are things that only dogs and women understand because we tap into the pain directly, we connect to pain directly from its source, and so it is at once brilliant and brutal and clear, like white-hot metal spraying out of a fire hose, we can appreciate the aesthetic while taking the worst of it straight in the face. Men, on the other hand, are all filters and deflectors and timed release. For men, it’s like athlete’s foot: spray the special spray on it, they say, and it goes away. They have no idea that the manifestation of their affliction—the fungus between their hairy toes—is merely a symptom, an indication of a systemic problem. A candida bloom in their bowels, for instance, or some other upset to their system. Suppressing the symptom does nothing but force the true problem to express itself on a deeper level at some other time. Go see a doctor, he said to her. Get some medication. And she howled to the moon in reply. He never understood, as I did, what she meant when she said that medication would only mask the pain, not make it go away, and what’s the point of that. He never understood when she said that if she went to a doctor, the doctor would only invent a disease that would explain why he couldn’t help her. And there was so much time between episodes. There was so much hope.
Denny was frustrated by his impotence, and in that regard, I could understand his point of view. It’s frustrating for me to be unable to speak. To feel that I have so much to say, so many ways I can help, but I’m locked in a soundproof box, a game show isolation booth from which I can see out and I can hear what’s going on, but they never turn on my microphone and they never let me out. It might drive a person mad. It certainly has driven many a dog mad. The good dog that would never hurt a soul but is found one day having eaten the face of his master as she slept deeply under the influence of sleeping pills? There was nothing wrong with that dog except that his mind finally snapped. As awful as it sounds, it happens; it’s on the TV news regularly.
Myself, I have found ways around the madness. I work at my human gait, for instance. I practice chewing my food slowly like people do. I study the television for clues on behavior and to learn how to react in certain situations. In my next life, when I am born again as a person, I will practically be an adult the moment I am plucked from the womb, with all the preparation I have done. It will be all I can do to wait for my new human body to mature to adulthood so I may excel at all the athletic and intellectual pursuits I hope to enjoy.
Denny avoided the madness of his personal sound-booth hell by driving through it. There was nothing he could do to make Eve’s distress go away, and once he realized that, he made a commitment to do everything else better.
Often things happen to race cars in the heat of the race. A square-toothed gear in a transmission may break, suddenly leaving the driver without all of his gears. Or perhaps a clutch fails. Brakes go soft from overheating. Suspensions break. When faced with one of these problems, the poor driver crashes. The average driver gives up. The great drivers drive through the problem. They figure out a way to continue racing. Like in the Luxembourg Grand Prix in 1989, when the Irish racer Kevin Finnerty York finished the race victoriously and later revealed that he had driven the final twenty laps of the race with only two gears! To be able to possess a machine in such a way is the ultimate show of determination and awareness. It makes one realize that the physicality of our world is a boundary to us only if our will is weak; a true champion can accomplish things that a normal person would think impossible.
Denny cut back his hours at work so he could take Zoë to her preschool. In the evenings after dinner, he read to her and helped her learn her numbers and letters. He took over all the grocery shopping and cooking. He took over the cleaning of the house. And he did it all excellently and without complaint. He wanted to relieve Eve of any burden, any job that could cause stress. What he couldn’t do, though, with all of the extra he was doing, was continue to engage her in the same playful and physically affectionate way I had grown used to seeing. It was impossible for him to do everything; clearly, he had decided that the care of her organism would receive the topmost priority. Which I believe was the correct thing for him to do under the circumstances. Because he had me.
I see green as gray. I see red as black. Does that make me a bad potential person? If you taught me to read and provided for me the same computer system as someone has provided for Stephen Hawking, I, too, would write great books. And yet you don’t teach me to read, and you don’t give me a computer stick I can push around with my nose to point at the next letter I wish typed. So whose fault is it that I am what I am?
Denny did not stop loving Eve, he merely delegated his love-giving to me. I became the provider of love and comfort by proxy. When she ailed and he took charge of Zoë and whisked her out of the house to see one of the many wonderful animated films they make for children so that she might not hear the cries of agony from her mother, I stayed behind. He trusted me. He would tell me, as he and Zoë packed their bottles of water and their special sandwich cookies without hydrogenated oils that he bought for her at the good market, he would say, “Go take care of her for me, Enzo, please.”
And I did. I took care of her by curling up at her bedside, or, if she had collapsed on the floor, by curling up next to her there. Often, she would hold me close to her, hold me tight to her body, and when she did, she would tell me things about the pain.
I cannot lie still. I cannot be alone with this. I need toscream and thrash, because it stays away when I scream.When I’m silent, it finds me, it tracks me down and piercesme and says, “Now I’ve got you! Now you belong to me!”
Demon. Gremlin. Poltergeist. Ghost. Phantom. Spirit. Shadow. Ghoul. Devil. People are afraid of them so they relegate their existence to stories, volumes of books that can be closed and put on the shelf or left behind at a bed and breakfast; they clench their eyes shut so they will see no evil. But trust me when I tell you that the zebra is real. Somewhere, the zebra is dancing.
The spring finally ground around to us through an exceptionally wet winter, full of gray days and rain and an edgy cold I rarely found rejuvenating. Over the winter, Eve ate poorly and became drawn and pale. When her pain came, she often went for days without eating a bite of food. She never exercised, so her thinness had no tone, slack skin over brittle bones; she was wasting away. Denny was concerned, but Eve never heeded his pleas for her to consult a doctor. A mild case of depression, she would say. They’ll try to give her pills and she doesn’t want pills. And one evening after dinner, which was a special one, though I don’t remember if it was a birthday or an anniversary, Denny suddenly appeared naked in the bedroom and Eve was naked on the bed.
It seemed so odd to me because they hadn’t mounted or even played with each other in such a long time. But there they were. He positioned himself over her and she said to him, “The field is fertile.”
“You aren’t really, are you?” he asked.
“Just say it,” she replied after a moment, her eyes having dimmed, having been sucked deep into their sockets and swallowed by the puffy skin, suggesting anything but fertility.
“I embrace the fertility,” he said. But their exchange seemed weak and unenthusiastic. She made noise, but she was pretending, I could tell, because in the middle of it she looked at me and shook her head and waved me off. Respectfully, I withdrew to another room and drifted into a light sleep. And, if I recall correctly, I dreamed of the crows.
13 (#ub767ece2-1567-58f3-b2ff-8b22efe182b5)
They sit in the trees and on the electric wires and on the roofs and they watch everything, the sinister little bastards. They cackle with a dark edge, like they’re mocking you, cawing constantly, they know where you are when you’re in the house, they know where you are when you’re outside; they’re always waiting. The smaller cousin of the raven, they are resentful and angry, bitter at being genetically dwarfed by their brothers. The raven, it is said, is the next step up the evolutionary ladder from man. The raven created man, after all, according to the legends of the Northwest Coast natives. (It’s interesting to note here that the deity that corresponds with the raven in Plains Indian folklore is the coyote, which is a dog. So it seems to me we are all smashed together at the top of the spiritual food chain.) So if the raven created man, and the crow is the raven’s cousin, where does the crow fit in?
The crow fits in the garbage. Very smart, very sly, they are best when they apply their evil little genius to uncapping a garbage can or pecking through some kind of enclosure to get at scrap food. They are scum, creatures of cluster, they call them a murder when they are in a group. A good word, because when they are together, you want to kill them.
I never chase a crow. They hop away, taunting, trying to dupe you into a chase in which you will become injured. Trying to get you stuck somewhere far away, so they can have their way with the garbage. It’s true. Sometimes when I have nightmares, I dream of crows. A murder of them. Attacking me ruthlessly, cruelly tearing me to shreds. It is the worst.
When we first moved to our house, something happened with the crows, and that’s why I know they hate me. It’s bad to have enemies. Denny always picked up my leavings in small green biodegradable bags. It’s part of what people do as a penance for their need to keep dogs under such strict supervision. They must extract our excrement from between the grass blades with a plastic bag that has been turned inside out. They must grab it with their fingers and handle it. Even though there’s a plastic barrier, they never enjoy the task because they can smell it and their sense of smell lacks the sophistication to discern the subtlety of the layers of scent and their meaning.
Denny collected the small crap-filled bags and kept them in a plastic grocery bag. Occasionally he would dispose of the larger bag in a garbage can in the park up the street. I guess he didn’t want to pollute his own garbage can with bags of my feces. I don’t know.
The crows, who pride themselves on being cousins of the raven and therefore being very smart, love going after a bag of groceries. And they have, on many occasion, gone after a bag on the porch left outside when Denny or Eve brought home more than a few at a time. They can get in and out so fast, maybe find some cookies or something and fly away.
On one occasion, when I was young, the crows spotted Eve bringing home the groceries and they crowded nearby, clustering in a tree just on the edge of the property, so many of them. They were silent, not wanting to draw attention to themselves, but I knew they were there. Eve had parked in the alley, and she made several trips with bags from the car to the porch, then from the porch into the house. The crows watched. And they noticed that Eve had left a bag behind.
Well. They are smart, I have to give them credit, for they didn’t move in right away. They watched and waited until Eve went upstairs and undressed and got into the bathtub, as she sometimes did in the afternoon when she had a day off from her work. They watched and were sure that the glass-paned kitchen door was closed and locked so thieves and rapists couldn’t get in, and so I couldn’t get out. Then they made their move.
They swooped in, several of them, and picked up the bag with their beaks. One of them goaded me by walking up to the glass and trying to get me to bark. Normally, I would have resisted the urge, just to spite them, but knowing what I knew, I barked a few times, enough to make it convincing. They didn’t go far. They wanted to taunt me with it. They wanted me to watch them enjoy the treats in the bag, so they stopped inside the yard, on the grass, the whole group of them. They danced around in circles and made faces at me and flapped their wings and called for their friends. They tore open the plastic and they dove in with all of their beaks to eat the wonderful food and delicious items that were hidden inside, and they ate. They gulped, those stupid birds; they ate from the bag and they swallowed with glee. And they choked on giant mouthfuls of my shit.

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