"Lucky you are, and lucky you'll be!" Jack had said to me often, in better days when his spirits were high and his jug by his side. Lucky I am! Lucky I'll be!
I wonder what's in store up ahead!
Quickly, feeling foolish, I corrected the obvious error in the poem. In store for me, I amended.
Poetry is a difficult art, I thought as I neatened the area where Jack still lay. It was the least I could do for him, since I had decided against wasting away in his honor.
I rubbed my head affectionately against his lifeless fingers and whimpered a goodbye, adding why to make it into a variation on the elegy I had composed only a few hours before. Then I turned and left the hollow under the bridge, giving a final and very ferocious growl toward the sewer pipe, in hopes of keeping the rats unnerved. As I walked away from what had been my home during almost all of my formative first year, I held my head high in homage to Jack and all that he had taught me about life, adversity, and how to obtain food.
Upright, my tail! Forward, my feet!
The next line had not yet come to me, though I was considering fleet as an appropriate rhyme for a leavetaking, when suddenly I spotted something that caught my attention and wrote itself into the poem:
I see a child across the street!
It was true. In this most unsavory part of the city, beside a graffiti-covered board fence, a young boy wearing an odd hat stood alone, his hands in his pockets, a captivating smile on his face. He was clearly in need of protection, though his attitude was self-confident. I suspected that he did not know what danger might come to him if he loitered here. Glancing quickly both ways, alert to the vehicles my mother had repeatedly described as my greatest enemies, and as ever on the lookout for Scar, who might be lurking almost anywhere, I bounded across the street to the boys side.
Panting, I looked up at him, expecting a pat of welcome on my head. Humans always reach for the head, for some reason; it is actually the spot behind each ear that we dogs most prefer to have scratched. But we tolerate the head pat until we can maneuver ourselves into a position where the human understands the need. I planned to let the boy pat my head; then I would rub myself against his legs; then he would reach down and I would tilt myself into a position so that his hand would encounter the right place. It wouldn't take long to train him. Jack had learned quickly, and this human was much younger and therefore even more educable.
To my amazement, he did not pat my head at all. He kicked me.
It wasn't a painful kick, because he was wearing sneakers that were much too large and so the toes of them were empty. In truth, it was more of a foot-nudge. But it was a surprise, and a disappointment. It was contrary to every lesson my mother had taught me about children.
"Get lost!" he said.
And that was a surprise, too. According to my education, the first words a child usually says, upon encountering a new and appealing dog (I was assuming, of course, myself to be appealing. In my new maturity, I felt that my tail, in particular, had developed a certain plumelike quality; and as for behavior, I had certainly been on my best, though I must say the boy had not), are "Can I keep him?"
So "Get lost" came as a surprise. In addition, since I already felt myself to be somewhat lost, I did not see how I could possibly "get" more so. I stared at the boy curiously. In addition to the very large shoes and the hat that looked like an unsuccessful cupcake, he was wearing enormously baggy trousers and a bright-colored shirt with writing on it.
"Beat it!" he whispered to me, appearing more frustrated than ill-tempered. "You're ruining my shot!"
Shot? He had no gun. He didn't even look like someone who wanted to have a gun. He was a boy. A kid.
I hesitated, looking around to see what was going on.
Farther down the street I saw a number of people grouped around a large camera. A tall woman with a notebook was writing things down as if they were important. A man was adjusting some tall lights with pale umbrellas behind them.
"What's with the dog?" the woman asked, looking up from her notebook. "Whose is he? Is that your dog, Willy?"
"Moi?" A thin man wearing a denim jacket asked. "No way. I'm a cat person."
Whose is he was a phrase that raised my hackles. Why is it that humans feel dogs belong to them? How can that be? Jack never felt that way, or treated me like property. We had chosen each other, Jack and I.
If I were ready to choose another human—and I was not—it would not be this thin man who had already announced his preference for cats, a dubious species at best.
Even as I was thinking about it, the man named Willy jogged toward me, carrying a leather case. "I'm just going to touch up your hair," he said cheerfully, and took a comb from the case. I winced. I didn't want my fur tampered with, and especially not by a man whose clearly professed commitment was to cats.
But he was talking, it appeared, to the boy. He removed the hat, combed and arranged the boy's hair so that it appeared windblown and casual, and then replaced the unattractive hat so that the freshly groomed hair was hidden.
"I can't get the dog to go away," the boy complained to him.
"What about the dog?" the hair person called to the camera people. "I don't want to be the one to drag him away. He looks like a biter to me!"
The dog: a phrase I loathe. A biter indeed. I wished Jack were alive. Jack would tell them where to go. There had been times in our past, Jack's and mine, when people had been apprehensive about "the dog" and Jack had been very firm with them, explaining that the dog had feelings and intelligence, that the dog had more integrity than most humans, and that, most important, the dog had a name and should be addressed accordingly. Sometimes people would drop money into Jack's outstretched hand and hurry away quickly, just to flee the lecture about mans best friend.
"I love the dog," the woman with the notebook called. "Keep the dog. The dog works."
I wasn't entirely certain what she meant by that. Of course I worked. I worked at staying alive, finding food, guarding against rats, and tending Jack when things turned bad.
"I'd like the dog's hair a little more disheveled, Willy," she called. "Think you can do that for me?"
Willy was the man with the comb, the one who had called me a biter. He glanced down at me now, and I raised my lip a little. I murmured a warning. It wasn't a growl, really, but Willy didn't know that.