Day 47

Six Swift Dogs

I brought home a dog that reminded me of my sister. Not in that they look alike, but that this is the dog she always told me that she wanted when we were six, underneath our mother's kitchen table, the chairs pulled back with three comforters thrown over the top. I was eight, probably too old for blanket forts, and she was six, and we were drawing, she with crayons and me with colored pencils because I felt they were more refined. She told it to me like this:

"He's going to be a German Shepard with one brown ear, and one not so brown ear. He won't have a light colored tummy like most dogs, he'll be all over black except for that ear and around his eyes, they'll be brown, and he'll have a ghost mark."

"A ghost mark?" I'd asked, curious to what a something like that could be.

"Yeah," she snapped back, pushing harder on her crayons. She was drawing a "green bush" that looked like a small tree.

"What's a ghost mark?"

"It's a mark left by a ghost. He's gonna get it after he sees somebody die and then try to help them. It'll be a nice lady that gets stabbed in the stomach and he'l get real close, close enough for her to touch him on the nose before she dies. Where she touches him will be the ghost mark. He'll be really smart because of it, and he'll care about everybody a whole. That's how I'll know him. His name will be Hon."

I nodded, "That sounds like a cool dog. I like I want a corgi named Blast Off."

"That sounds good too." She said, and we both kept drawing until our mother came home and yelled at us for making a fort in the kitchen. The kitchen was for food is what she would tell us, not blankets.

Twenty years later I'm in an animal hospital putting dogs to sleep. Its not as you would think. I find the big vein that wraps around their shoulder running up to their brain and shoot them full of enough tranquilizers to make them falls asleep and then stop their heart. Its really not bad, I don't get sad. The guy before me had to quit though. Dr . Adler got weepy one day when he had to put down a labrador, chocolate colored, his hand shook too much and the dog didn't know what was going on and bit him on the hand. I was working in the back sorting prescriptions and he handed me a syringe. I put Flossy down easy. Flossy was the chocolate labs name. I learned that from her tags, which we kept because the owner didn't want them. Flossy was a breeding dog that got liver cancer and diabetes, and after she couldn't support a litter he dropped her off here. We keep the tags if they don't want them. And I feel a little better knowing that we do.

I was eight dogs in that day, George, Nibbles, Smokey, Big Guard, Downey, Sparkle, Freddie, and Ray Liotta. Ray Liotta was an English Bulldog that lost half of his jaw in a fight with a garbage truck. It got so bad that he couldn't even eat the watery mash that his owner provided to him, couldn't make him eat by sticking his fingers in the gap where Ray's jaw used to be and pull it open, the dog had figured out a way to make himself throw up. So the owner asked to put him down, and I obliged.

That day was a little slow, eight dogs is a little slow when you understand how many dogs there are in Hunter's Hills, which is the name of the town. After I got my degree to practice medicine, on animals, I wound up here, it was the closest place to my university with an opening for a specialist in anesthetic and medicine, and I learned four years enough to get the job.

At two thirty the receptionist called from the front room that there was only left. I hadn't learned her name yet, even though she had been on the same shifts as me for two weeks. I had just found a girlfriend and every other woman on the street was just that to me. I was bad with names too.

"One more," I heard as the metal door clanged against the metal cabinets on the inside of the operating room. I scanned the thirteen chairs in the waiting room for an old man whispering sweet goodbyes to an animal that could never understand him or an young woman who had just finished crying, and couldn't see any. I turned my head to the receptionist across the space behind the counter that ran up to her neck. She stood up and reached over the counter, pointing down and across the room.

"There," she said. "One more."

I swiveled my head back around and sitting to the left of the doorframe, staring out through the wall length window was a dog, a german sheperd. It craned its head to look at me as I looked at it and there were three white stripes across its muzzle, running from the top of the snout and then swiping down along its right side.

"Where's the owner?" I asked the dog, without meaning to, I just kept staring at it.

The dog stared back and dropped his jaw as if to speak but the receptionist answer first. I found out later her name was Julie.

"He's all signed out. I just filed all of the paperwork away. He's set up to go in the back." Go in the back was our code word, I always told Dr. Adler that we should have a better one, even a dog could figure that one out. And as if he could the dog stood up and walked around to face me, looking now into the operating room. I still watched him.

"What's wrong with him?" The receptionist brought her tan arm back behind the cover.

"No reason. Owner cannot fully care for the animal anymore, in this state that's legal."

"Seems like a lousy thing to do." The dog waited at the lip of the doorway and I scouted back a bit and he scooted forward.

"It was a part of a will. I remember her saying that."

"Oh." This is where I turned away to get a new pair of gloves and the dog walked in after me. Without my usual needed gesture or beckoning he hopped to the table and sat on it. This was unusual, there was never a dog so eager to have his heart stop before, so as I closed the door and locked it I kept the gloves balled up for a moment walked to inspect him. Nothing shot into my mind except that he was very dark for German Shepard, they are bred to have that cookie-brown stomach, which was all dark on him. There's a memory buzz in the back of my head that doesn't click the hammer all the way back until I run my fingers beneath his collar and bull the jangle of tags into the light. Then he and I spend a moment stuck.

Twenty minutes later the clinic closes and I heard Hon into my car. Julie doesn't look up from the desk because she isn't there anymore. She had been leaving fifteen minutes early the entire two weeks we've been working together and Hon jumped into my car like this was a thing we did together, I almost put him to sleep and instead to drive him back to my apartment and keep him every day. I rolled down the window so he could stick his head out, but he sat still, finding it better to look forward instead.

The ride home is spent in near silence, I turn the radio down low, but I can still hear the twang of a steel guitar when the wind dies down. Meredith, my sister, lived half the country away in upstate New York and I highly doubted someone trekked all the way out here to send me some kind of sign. This is a really ham-fisted way for God to tell me to call my sister, but it worked anyway.

Hon followed me up the stairs to the third floor like a shaggy ghost. I never asked him to do anything, he just followed, which is a little sad when you think about it. A dog this attentive and intelligent was thrown to me, but that’s just preaching, and I’m not all that much about morals. I get inside and there’s not much to see.

“Hello,” I actually speak first, a nervous habit that I have that hopefully she will remember. “Hello Mery?”

There isn’t an answer for a little while.