Just Between Us

 

   Wayne says that he’s the one who took care of Clyde.  He does not want to take care of another dog.  

 

    But Clyde and I know differently.  Clyde and I had an agreement.  Wayne needed someone to take care of and Clyde and I agreed he would be the one.  This was our secret. 

 

     That was partly why I loved Clyde so much, because he and I agreed that he would take care of Wayne by making Wayne take him for daily walks, and give him treats, even bake him special liver treats handmade by Wayne, and feed and water him, and teach him how to behave.  I’m the one who really taught Clyde how to behave, but that was our secret as well.  Wayne did not know any of this and he will not believe it now.  It was just between Clyde and I. 

     Right when we very first got him, I taught Clyde to stay off of the Persian rugs in the house.  I did this by using a spray bottle filled with water and squirting him whenever he went onto the rug.  Clyde thought this was a dirty trick and looked at me askance, sort of with a sideways glance, to tell me that not only was it a dirty trick, but that he knew it was a dirty trick.  He agreed to stay off the Persian rugs and the Himalayan rug too, but from then on he always put one paw on the edge of the rug just to let me know, just to remind me that the spray bottle was not nice; it was a dirty trick but he still forgave me.

     Clyde was a big dog but he did not feel like that should count against him.  He thought that even if he was a big dog, he should get to jump on people like any happy ass dog would so I had to teach him a special command, “Off!”  The way I taught Clyde that was I would turn my body away whenever he jumped on me and ignore him.  Clyde hated that.  Wayne would probably say he’s the one who taught Clyde this, but Clyde and I know it was me, even if Clyde is no longer here to verify it. 

    We had to teach Clyde that because, even at nine months old, when we first got him, he was huge and beautiful.  He had a shiny coat of black fur and a long red tongue that fell out of one side of his mouth because he lost a tooth when either a moose or a horse kicked him - back when he was an orphan before his original owners, whoever they were, abandoned him and left him to die by the side of the road.  Or maybe it was a ranch.  The story varied every time Clyde told it.

          But Clyde never forgot to remind me how we fell in love at first sight, he and I, when he almost knocked me over with that long happy tongue and his big happy grin just like I never forgot to remind him that I hated dog licks until I met him and it wasn’t the crazy wet tongue on my face, it was the quivering ecstatic shaking of joy filling his big 60 pound puppy body that got me, that made me feel it too, that joy deep in my cells, a joy Clyde brought with him, his purpose in life, to remind me.  Life, his joy said.  Live!

         Clyde knew, as I knew, that he had been a wild mustang in his previous life and that I had been a wild girl, a barefoot girl, who once rode him bareback through meadows where high golden grass grew tall and waved in the breeze like Clyde’s mustang mane did that lifetime, like his proud tail shaped in an S flew proudly behind him.  Clyde and I both knew this, though we spoke of it rarely, and in hushed tones.  We knew we were not supposed to remember such things in this lifetime, but sometimes we couldn’t resist and then we would just run and run down on the beach on Kachemak Bay behind the house in Alaska Wayne built us.

     Clyde and I shared secrets we never had to put a single word to, like the one about taking care of Wayne.  The day Clyde chose to leave; he was sick with a rare blood cancer that came suddenly and out of nowhere, at least for me, (Wayne had known, Clyde told me in our secret code, even though I hadn’t, that he was that sick, not just sick like in getting better sick like I thought) so it was terrible for me to suddenly have to face losing him in one day and he knew that but he knew too, and told me clearly and in strong language, how it had to be for Wayne – that he couldn’t linger, that he would if it was just me, because he loved me, but he reminded me of our deal about him taking care of Wayne, and, of course, how we both knew Wayne couldn’t handle that, Clyde lingering, Clyde suffering.  Clyde could, if I needed him to, he said, just to hang out together a little bit longer, but is that what we wanted to put Wayne through, he asked me?  No, he said so clearly.  I’m doing my job here, he said.  I know, I said back.  I know you are, Clyde and I love you for it and we both love Wayne, don’t we?  Yes, Clyde said.  We do. 

     And so, just between us, we said goodbye and part of our goodbye was thanking each other.  We thanked each other for loving each other, but mostly, we were just both so grateful to each other for how much we each loved Wayne – that we were a team – and how we shared that.

     Now I keep thinking maybe if we had another dog, I wouldn’t miss Clyde so much even though I know that I will always miss him that much.  But Clyde is still with me and he says be patient; he says that I am not just missing him, but I am missing how we shared our love for Wayne.  Clyde says we may or may not have another dog someday.  He says remember our pact that he will take care of Wayne?  Yes I say.  Well, Clyde says, I've never stopped.  Besides, you never know when a great spirit may enter your lives again.  It could happen.

     Clyde shows me this picture then (because Clyde mostly thinks in pictures) of him climbing into the truck with us the day we brought him home, how happy he was to find us, how perfectly we fit. 

     When and if another great spirit comes, Wayne will know, Clyde says.  Just like he did when you found me.  Remember?  Yes, I nod.

       I came as a dog this time, Clyde reminds me.  In another life, I was a mustang.  Who knows in what form we’ll meet again?

     I swear I can feel that big lug of a puppy lick my face again. 

     Keep an eye out, Clyde tells me. 

     I promise.

     He sends me another word picture.  He is headed down toward the beach, right at the beginning of Jeremy’s trail.  He pauses a second, looking back.  Our eyes meet, and then he disappears into the brush, leaving the fireweed and the devil’s club behind.  I get a last glimpse of his tail, shaped like an S, then he’s gone, headed, I know, straight for the water he loved, the ocean he once swam in, chasing some imaginary ball out on the horizon.

     Any minute, I know, he’ll come trotting back with it.  I just need to keep an eye out.

    

     

    

Clyde The Fraud Dog Days

Summer 2005: There is a rainbow, the last fourth of it shining out from the depths of a billowy white cloud with grey edges sitting over some small cove across the bay. The water today is cerulean blue and the trees myriad shades of bright green, the kind of green that comes from mixing blues with yellows, and Clyde is running in what we call a yard, a little over a acre of grass edged with alders, devils club, fireweed, nettles, and raspberry bushes clinging to clay soil as though their fragile roots could hold off high tide and wind and all the forces of erosion that chip away at the bluff our house sits on and just above.

Clyde’s coat is shiny black, almost achingly gleaming, and feathered strokes of white wisps curl off his chest and toes. Clyde prances like a proud horse, if his nostrils were larger, I swear I could hear him snort like a mustang. He paws the ground and throws his head back, glancing at me to see if I’m watching. He finds his new toy and brings it to me but then changes his mind and runs the other way trying to get me to play the game his way. I watch the neighborhood pheasant make an awkward u-turn as he stupidly wanders in Clyde’s direction, but Clyde is sufficiently distracted and not much of an animal chaser anyway.

I walk with Clyde up the dirt road we call our street for half a mile or so and then we turn around and slowly walk back down, stopping every few feet just to stare at the rainbow and how it just sits there without fading over some small cove across the bay, how it shines color on some happy place blessing the entire bay with its presence and how it is not by any stretch of the imagination the first rainbow I’ve seen since moving here and I wonder if I will ever become desensitized to rainbows.

Wandering down the dusty lane flanked by green I notice a neighbors log house and how like a kingdom it seems. It is a home assuredly grown over decades of living in one place and it reigns over at the same time that it seems to serve the land it sits on, the ocean it looks out on, the open sky it surveys, the mountains and glaciers and coves over the water that beckon.

When I was a girl, I played outside for hours. I hated coming inside even to pee. In the face of this- yet another rainbow- I strain to remember myself, a girl who climbed trees, caught crawdads, played in creeks, built bridges over ditches, and took long solitary hikes out of the subdivision and into nearby farmland. A girl who built tree houses and forts, I wandered the outdoors, swam, rode bikes, skateboarded, and pitched tents in the backyard. When my parents took us to visit relatives who lived by the river and the woods, they were the first place I headed, with another child or alone. Let loose from the car on a Sunday drive in the mountains, I scrambled headlong up the nearest rock as fast as I could, my lungs screaming until I could climb not one inch further and had gotten myself into a spot I surely might never get out of and always did, inching my way back down eighty degree inclines of slick rock to taunt my younger brother for not keeping up and then turning abruptly to lead him up yet another direction and possible disaster.

These are the things I remember now staring at this perfect place and this perfect rainbow. Clyde is patient with me, sitting beside me as long as I want to stand in one place, motionless. Homer, and the bay it calls home, appears, a long lost prince come to catch me sleeping, showering me with rainbows and light that turns shadows into glitter, waking me up from my adult slumber. Three cranes fly overhead, their necks long like their legs, their bodies a brown oval. The sound they make is haunting and beautiful. It is the sound that desire might make if it were made into music. It is the sound of a mother calling a child home at the last light of day.

I tell Clyde that we will be taking long walks on the beach, to prepare to spend entire days wandering up and down the east end of the bay. I advise him that it is time for me to go outside and play again, for no reason at all. That it is time for me to stay out long after I have to pee. He can come with me and we will look for dead crabs on the shore and circle rocks and more. I will throw sticks for him and he can swim all he wants in the ocean. Clyde’s tongue hangs crookedly out of his happy mouth and he meets my gaze with his, evenly as though to say I’ll hold you to that promise. We finish our short walk of long pauses and sit on the deck together. I wrap myself in a blanket and watch the sky until it is very late. Clyde sits at my feet with his head on his paws.

The rainbow does not fade. Stubbornly, bands of red, yellow, and green hang in the midnight sky of deepening dusk. The billowy cloud drifts away revealing more of the rainbow, which now arcs over half the sky, even as I retire for the night and the sun slowly makes its summer descent. Sleep comes slowly and I think it is my imagination when I hear the cranes again, whooping faintly, but insistently in the distance.

Clyde the Fraud Dog

There is such a thing as a dog-person and I am not one of them. I have had only one other dog, other than Clyde, in my life - that was Angel, a small German Shepherd mixed breed of mutt. Angel was the puppy we got for my daughters when they were elementary school age and she came to be one of the family.
Angel had a litter of pups and we kept one that we named Decker - for that wild part of me, for he was a wild dog. Sadly, Decker was but a pup when the girls' stepfather and I divorced. Decker went with Bob. We got custody of Angel, who lived to have yet another litter; puppies we had to give away (actually we sold them for $5 each, as people don't want free puppies; you get a much better rate of response if you set a price on them.)
Angel became part of our family lore and I still cherish the photo of her wearing sunglasses and lounging with us on one of our family camping trips. Angel is gone now and my daughters are grown up with families of their own. Once in a while, one of us says, "Remember Angel?" and then we tell a story - like about how she allowed Jennifer to put doll clothes on her and lug her around, legs up, like a baby and never complained. Poor Angel. How she loved us!
She was aptly named Angel, for she loved us like one and took our well-being as her personal mission; not a guard dog by any means, but a lover - with the eyes of a doe; seriously, we could have named her Bambi.
Clyde the Fraud Dog came by his name due to his last-minute reprieve and rescue from the dog pound and sure death - or so we were told.
We were new to Alaska - cheechakos as they call greenhorns here - and it was around Christmas time. We had lived here about four months and were headed into our first winter, the darkest part of the year, when we met Clyde at a potlatch (Alaskan for potluck dinner) given by one of our new Alaskan acquaintances, Shelly Gill.
Shelley Gill is a well-known children's book author in Alaska and elsewhere, but before that she was famous for being one of the first women to run the Iditarod in the seventies; she writes about the adventure through the eyes of her lead dog in her children's book, "Kiana". She's a colorful personality and she's the one who introduced us to Clyde.
Clyde, Shelley claimed, was a "Newfie"; well, "half- Newfie" anyway, some kind of a "Newfie-mix"; meaning he was part Newfoundland. The reason they had Clyde, she went on to tell us, (and making a pest of himself besides), was that Shelley's daughter, Kai, a volunteer for the local animal shelter, had brought him home with her a few days earlier (it could have been weeks, but you know how stories go) to "save him from death row". He was about to be, to use the euphemism, "put to sleep". They had no room for another dog, but - Shelley sighed and shrugged - what's a mother to do? For the moment, we learned, he was allowed to sleep on the porch with absolutely no house privileges allowed.
I admit that, at the time that we met Shelley and thus, Clyde, Wayne and I had been discussing the possibility of getting a dog. Wayne was generally against it- his argument was that a dog would be a huge responsibility, would tie us down, and would prevent us from traveling. Did I say he was "generally" against it? Let's just say he wavered once or twice and a waver is good enough, as he'll tell you, for me.
"Give her an inch; she'll take a mile".
Further, I was, most likely,homesick. (Do you know how far Alaska is from the contiguous lower 48 United States?) But rather than admit that I felt adrift, I fantasized that a dog would provide the familiarity and sense of stability that seemed to have left me since our move cross- country to Alaska.
True, I am a "wild girl" and a true-blue Decker, and "running off to Alaska" at mid-life seemed exactly the sort of thing that I would do. But there is another side to me that is deeply rooted in my family and, though I had not lived closer than a thousand miles to them for twelve years prior to moving to the Great Land, I had foolishly believed that their proximity would be just a matter of getting on an airplane.
Once here, stakes and all, leaving Alaska can be a hefty undertaking.
When we lived in Southern California going out-of-state was a simple matter of an hour's drive to the airport and a relatively short flight to anywhere in the country. Try flying out of Alaska. Basically, taking expense, time, and coordination of connecting flights into account, it can take two days to get anywhere. Being the gypsy hearted girl I am, with our move to Alaska I began to feel claustrophobic as I progressively processed the enormity and ramifications of our decision to move here. But here I was in the biggest state of all - a state that could contain over half of the United States within it, a state very remote from anything I had ever known - when I met the Fraud Dog.
What does this have to do with a dog?
Everything.
A dog, I imagined, in my homesick condition, would make us complete. A dog would provide a sense of family, something that, really, I have missed since I was eight years old and we moved - away from my Grandma Decker Saltsman - "out west" to Colorado - where I was to live the next thirty-one years of my life.
I was to forever miss my Grandma, although we took trips back yearly to see her. I missed the every Sunday dinners at her house, the multitude of aunts and uncles and cousins, the farm she and Pa, my grandpa, lived on, the pump where I got, in a tin cup, drinks of the coldest best water I ever tasted, the hen house, Grandma's gardens, the barn, the 'forbidden' grain silo that we kids played in anyway, the animals...but mostly, Grandma.
Now, in Alaska, I found myself imagining that our house and acre and a half of land could be a little bit like Grandma's farm. I even went to hang a tire swing on a tree, before I realized that most of the trees in our part of Alaska that had swings featured life buoys, not tires. So I got a bright blue life buoy and Wayne helped me hang it from a branch on one of the huge birch trees on our land.
You see how perfectly a dog fits into this scenario. The only thing I was missing, beside the dog, was a fresh water well - and that I was not going to get. Too much arsenic and copper even if we could reach underground water. Then again, I was also missing the hen house and the garden, but Wayne would take care of the garden part - he's a real green thumb and the hen house, I decided, remembering how dirty chickens were, I could do without.
We didn't have to have a real farm, I decided - being "out in the country" was enough. (We live 4.1 miles from town.)
Clyde, at nine months old, was big. Huge. A perfect Alaskan farm dog, right? For some reason, the idea that he was Newfoundland, even if a mix, appealed to both Wayne and me. I looked up the breed on the Internet, even went so far as to join a list-serve. Before long, I had ordered a book on Newfoundland dogs from Amazon. All this after only one meeting with Clyde, who had rushed me with all the enthusiasm only a puppy can have, and solidly licked my face. Which I hated, by the way. I hate being licked by dogs. Somehow, though, Clyde's big red floppy tongue did not offend me. His big, clumsy puppy body quivered with joy; his enthusiasm for making friends overshadowed any reservations I could manufacture.
Wayne, the Scrooge of Dog-Adoption, was - rather quickly ( and suspiciously, I now think) - won over, considering that he still insists it is my fault whenever there is a problem with Clyde (like having to find a kennel or a dog-sitter when we want to leave, even for a weekend, or like when he does something embarrassing, like barreling full speed into a 78 year-old visiting guest and knocking her over.) Within a week or two of meeting Clyde, we were on the phone to Shelley, "We'd like to adopt Clyde."
"Come and get him!" Shelley pinned us down for a time and date immediately.
We should have suspected when, before we even got half-way parked in the driveway, Shelley immediately showed up at the door of the truck and shoved a befuddled Clyde, all the then sixty or so pounds of him, into the passenger side and on top of me. I was too love-struck to notice and, evidently, so was Wayne, for regardless of how much he loves to remind me that getting Clyde was not his idea, he allowed that big lug of a pup right into my lap, his truck, and our lives.
So we had ourselves a Newfie - we thought. But Clyde the Fraud Dog, about nine months old when we got him, stopped growing at around eighty-five pounds and stayed there. He didn't double or triple his size, as we expected, and as a Newfie would. If we squint just right in the light some days, though, he does retain just a hint of the helmut head that Newfies are famous for - but Clyde the Fraud Dog is not much of a Newfie, it turns out, at all. He doesn't even drool. But he is black. He is big. Just not as black and as big as a Newfie.
Anyone who has ever been to Homer, Alaska knows- just look around - there's one in the back of every pick-up truck - a big old black Labrador dog. With the exception of his slightly curly fur and the big white patch on his chest, we suspect that Clyde's parentage was largely Labrador - the classic dog of Homeroids, if sheer numbers tell the tale. True, Huskies are popular here, due to the Iditarod, but they're runners, so most non-mushing folks get themselves a big ol' black Lab. We see them everywhere. That increases the odds, we tell Clyde, that he doesn't even have so much as a lick of Newfie in him.
"You're a fraud dog, Clyde!" we tell him.
We have to hand it to him- pretending to be a Newfie - instead of the everyday run-of-the-mill token black Lab so common around here - got him off death row and into our hearts - hey, how's that for a Fraud Dog? Clyde the Fraud Dog, we call him.
Nope. I'm not a dog person. But Clyde does have one sure Newfie trait - he's a people-person.