...i'll return to my regular snarky writing next week...
Rex
My father bought the Basenji without
asking my mother about it. He knew we
girls would get one look at the small, fox-red, white-muzzled dog, and there’d
be no way she could object. I
named him Rex, and for the first night in our house we swaddled him in one of
April’s diapers—his corkscrew tail protruding from the top—and he slept in my
bed.
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| ...yeah, that's me...in all my tom boy glory... |
Whoever had sold my father the dog had warned
him of the mean streak prevalent in the breed.
But my grandfather had a Basenji, a black and grey variety, and we’d
been around Putteran all of our lives without so much as a howl scaring
us. Putteran herded us around our
grandparents’ Paso Robles ranch, but he’d never even bared his teeth.
My father spent most of the weekend constructing a fenced yard for Rex to
roam. He chose the left side of the
house because of the eucalyptus tree that would provide some shade, enclosing
it with cyclone fencing and putting the gate right off the sliding glass door.
The pen reached around the side of the house so Rex could guard our dirt road. From my parents’
bedroom window I spied on Rex without him knowing, mostly at night just before
I went to bed. I’d press my cheek to the glass, hold my breath and move only my
eyes while I scanned the dark yard for Rex.
He would be sleeping inside his doghouse, sitting near the gate and
peering into the sliding glass door where my family sat watching television, or
lying atop his doghouse—his preferred pose as it allowed him to jump a great
distance and look intimidating to anyone who passed.
My father built the doghouse with its raised
floor and a top that opened on a piano hinge.
We painted it yellow and put an old blanket inside, and the first night
Rex slept outdoors he cried and howled.
“He wants to sleep with me,” I told my parents, coming into the living
room long after I should’ve been asleep.
“Dogs don’t belong in the house,” my mother
said. She sat at the kitchenette, cutting Alpha Beta coupons.
My father’s lips pursed into a thin line. He let out a huff and stretched his back in
his black recliner.
“Grandpa has Putteran in his lap. Scoshee comes inside.”
“Joyce,” my father said.
“Dogs live outside,” my mother said. “Your sister can’t breathe.”
April’s asthma had improved since we moved to
the desert, but something as minor as Rex’s short, bristly hair could set her
off.
“Go back to bed,” my father said. “He’ll quit in a minute. He’ll get used to being out there alone.”
And he did.
He was standing on top of his yellow doghouse each morning when I came
outside to tell him goodbye before I left for school. When I walked home from the bus stop, he was
still standing, his nose lifted, smelling for me as I came down the road. He eventually wore away the paint with his
nails and gnawed the corners of the plywood roof.
Rex needed something other than tumbleweeds to
herd. So on the weekends my father
trained him to run after birds. Crows
landed in dark clouds in our back acre and my father eventually got Rex to run
after them. Sometimes he launched
himself into the sky trying to catch one.
He never did, but when they perched in the eucalyptus he howled and
snarled, causing my father to burst into a fit of laughter. We trained him with a Frisbee after that and then
a softball. His mouth was too small for
the ball, even after he’d reached full growth, but he snapped at the laces and
eventually could get hold of a loose one and carry it back to me. After school I played with Rex. When my father came home, we played with him
together.
But Rex growled and snarled at strangers. My mother and sisters didn’t care for him. It
fell to me to care for him while my father was at work, feed him twice a day,
and rub his fine short coat. We ran the
length of the dog pen, and I walked him around the back acre on his leash. When
it was time to fetch, I let him run to the back corner where the Ditmeyers had
a fence where he’d turn and charged at me, trying to herd me into the
house. Sometimes sidetracked, he chased
a rabbit or crow. His fine red body
stood out like a blaze in the yellowing tumbleweeds. Sometimes we raced up and down the street. He howled at cars and snapped at neighbors,
and I wouldn’t fear a thing.
No other kids came around; they were afraid of
our dog.
In the fall of 1987, just a few months after my father was sentenced to 101 years in prison, Rex went to the
pound. I was at school when they came
for him, and when I got home he wasn’t sitting on his yellow roof. The dog pen was empty. “Someone will adopt him,” my mother said when
she told me, and I began to cry. “We
can’t keep a dog. We can’t keep this
house.”
Grandma came for dinner that night. She’d moved to the desert by then, and since
my father’s arrest, I’d been splitting my time between houses. After we ate—a quiet dinner where I sniffed
and couldn’t look at my mother—I went to my room with my He-Man figures. I fought the urge to sneak down the hall and
press my nose to the glass in my mother’s bedroom. I had convinced myself I could bring Rex back
if I stayed there long enough.
Before
the arrest, Grandma often brought Brandy with
her on her nightly visits to our house.
She and Rex would touch noses through the fence, and Grandma would sneak
him little pieces of chicken. “He isn’t
mean. You’re mother just hates dogs,”
Grandma said.
“So what?” my mother would answer her.
Grandma would shrug, as if to say, You’re an idiot. Don’t you know dogs are a man’s best friend?
Perhaps that was the problem all along.
Though they didn’t think I could hear, Grandma
and my mother sat talking about what had happened the day Animal Control came
for my dog. I heard them whisper
“choking,” “muzzle,” “cage,” and “pitiful” while they sat in the living room
talking the way they’d come to talk since my father’s arrest. I crawled into
the center of my large bed, my face burning, my throat suddenly sore and
tight. Rex had been put into a metal
cell, the kind the janitor at school used to catch the feral cats living under
the modular classrooms. They smelled
like piss and shit and spray. And now
Rex was in one. Or he was out at the
pound, a place I imagined as jail for mean animals, where he’d be cooped up
inside without his dog house, no fence to watch me through. That night I
imagined I heard him howling for me. I
soaked my pillow with tears, and in the middle of the night I snuck out into
his pen and sat on the dog house waiting for him to come home. I watched the
clear, cold sky and prayed to the only God I knew to please bring my dog
back. Even if he couldn’t do anything
about my father—as my mother had told me—I begged him for my dog, for my best
friend. If I’d known he was going to be taken away, I told God, I would’ve let
him run. I would’ve opened the gate and
let his mean little body loose on the world.
I would’ve given him an escape. I ended my prayer the way my father
always ended his, “I ask these things in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.”
Rex has been dead for over twenty years. I know now they must have euthanized him in
the first week. He was dead when I
waited for God to deliver him to me after school, dead when I thought I heard
him howl, dead when I moved away from our T-14 house for good. He was dead when I cried and begged my mother
not to leave the house because God was going to bring Rex back and I wouldn’t
be there to rub his fine coat.
I still choke on the memory of him, the
futility of childhood, my father’s laugh while Rex ran the acre catching
Frisbees and herding crows. Though I
never once wished or prayed for my father to return—in fact I soon learned to
do the opposite—years after he was taken I still waited for Rex to show up
wandering along a Littlerock dirt road, waiting for me to claim him.
