Little Boy Blue Page 2

  When Floyd turned eleven, I bought a house on five and a half acres of woodland in west-central New Jersey, right between New York City and Philadelphia, in a place where deer still roam in herds and the occasional cow takes a morning stroll up the street. My husband had gotten a job nearby, and my savings had allowed us to trade up from the two-bedroom townhouse where we’d been living into a four-bedroom colonial on a cul-de-sac. The backyard must have looked like a football field to Floyd after all those years of apartment and condominium life, and I took my veterinarian’s suggestion to encourage him to run around by bringing home a playmate.

  This time I logged onto Petfinder.com. The year was 2005, and Petfinder had been live since 1996, when Floyd was just two years old. I can’t remember seeing any publicity about it, but somehow I had internalized the idea that this website had replaced the local classified ads as a nationwide billboard for pets in need of homes. I was far from alone in my thinking. By 2008, Petfinder would claim more than sixty million visitors each year. That’s a heck of a lot of people. It’s more than fifteen times the number of fans who attended a game in 2010 at Yankee Stadium, which was the best-attended venue in all of Major League Baseball. It’s about the same number of people who receive Social Security—the largest federal program in the United States. It’s about three times the number of people in America’s six largest cities, if you combine the entire populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Phoenix. Petfinder quickly grew into the largest website of its kind, with some thirteen thousand rescue groups and shelters uploading photos of adoptable animals every day. Since its inception in 1996, the website has helped to connect an estimated seventeen million animals with new homes.

  Mine was about to become the next one. I typed in my New Jersey zip code and the word “hound,” figuring that Floyd would want a friend who could understand him when he sang out one of his big, bellowing bays.

  A brown face with a white lightning bolt caught my attention immediately. She was listed as a Pointer/Labrador, about twelve weeks old, and less than a half hour away. I clicked on the link and was asked to fill out a three-page form detailing our intentions for the dog’s training, the status of our yard’s fencing, and the number of hours my husband and I spent away from home at work. I half expected to offer a blood sample and submit to a drug test. It felt like winning a reprieve from a tax audit when Rawhide Rescue invited us to meet the pup in Plainfield, New Jersey, and pay $250 to bring her home. What a difference from the farmer who had wanted thirty-five bucks to take a “damn mutt” off his hands. The act of acquiring a puppy in America, it seemed to me, had changed substantially during the past decade.

  We decided to call her Stella because, well, it was fun to shout her name like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. We of course loved her instantly, but we wouldn’t realize for nearly a year that Stella is no Labrador at all. Most likely, according to the breeders, veterinarians, and trainers I consulted, she’s a combination of Foxhound, Pointer, and American Pit Bull Terrier—not to mention a sixty-pound alpha female with aggression tendencies that would require a $100-per-hour private trainer for us to learn how to manage. I had always enjoyed my daily walks with Floyd, but Stella’s insatiable energy required me to become a jogger, with runs as long as five miles simply to help her work out her excessive intensity. She broke her kneecap trying to jump over our four-foot-tall split-rail fence to chase a deer. She figured out how to open the spare bedroom door and ate enough Gorilla Glue to require an expensive chiseling of her stomach. She worked her way past the downstairs doggy gate and shredded our newly reupholstered sectional sofa. Not just the cloth and cushion stuffing, mind you, but also the wooden frame.

  Floyd liked Stella for maybe the first three days. Though he would live to be nearly sixteen, he was already old at eleven, and the daily tornado that Stella became was just too much for him to bear. They’d make their peace after about a year, when Stella finally stopped nipping at him, but by then her favorite game had become getting her face as close as she could to his, like a bratty kid who insists, “But I’m not touching you!” And that was better than the countless times when he’d be sitting in the kitchen, an old man content merely to be breathing, and she’d wander by, line her butt up alongside his head, and whap him onto the floor with a flick of her hip. The word bitch most certainly applied.

  I was surprised by how lonely Stella seemed after Floyd died. She was never one to sit by my feet as I typed magazine articles and books on my keyboard, but once he was gone from his favorite pillow beneath my desk, she peeked through the door to my home office more often than usual. It was Stella who stood next to me for a solid ten minutes on the day I emptied the dryer’s lint trap, found it full of Floyd’s black hair, and began to bawl. I’m not sure whether she actually missed him, too, or whether she just knew that I was devastated, but I felt sure that she wanted another dog in the house just as badly as I did. My husband, too, could tell my heart was aching. Stella was my girl, but Floyd had been one of my soul mates.

  By now it was 2010. Stella was five years old and I was back on Petfinder.com, scrolling along with millions of other people through the puppy pictures. A male brindle listed as a Labrador/ Plott Hound, only a half hour away in Pennsylvania, caught my eye. This time the form was not three but five pages long, and a volunteer named Jane Zeolla from Lulu’s Rescue actually showed up to inspect the house instead of just asking me about it. She spent half an hour interviewing me, nosing around for anything that might be dangerous to a dog, and, in general, sizing me up as a potential puppy adopter. I actually felt nervous, despite my nearly forty years of having lived with dogs as my housemates. I took Stella for a long walk and gave her a bone filled with peanut butter just before Zeolla arrived, hoping my beloved maniac would somehow instantly transform into an accomplished graduate of New England’s finest finishing schools.

  Zeolla said she thought our home would be ideal for the pup in question. I had carefully selected him after more thought and research than I allowed for my own wedding gown. I knew I needed just the right dog as Stella’s everyday pal, lest she turn him into a chew toy. I required a young, nonthreatening male with some kind of hunting hound in him, and with a history of fearlessness when playing with dogs at least twice his size. Nobody knew this particular puppy’s origins, but I was told he’d spent his most recent days on a foster farm playing with lots of other dogs, including a seventy-pound Labrador/pit bull mix. That, plus his achingly adorable face, led me to believe he was our boy.

  I asked if I could meet him to see if he was “as advertised.” As much as I’d grown to love Stella, I also liked the new sofa. I didn’t need another reenactment of Jaws being played out in my den.

  That’s when I learned the puppy wasn’t in our part of New Jersey, or even in our region of the United States. He was in rural North Carolina, somewhere north of Durham.

  “But the Petfinder site said just over the border in Pennsylvania,” I blurted, utterly confused. I had specifically searched for pups within a hundred miles of our home, so I could check them out before committing.

  Zeolla explained that rescue groups up North now put their own zip codes onto sites like Petfinder.com so people like me will find dogs who are far away, but dearly in need. “There are so many unwanted dogs in the South that they don’t know what to do with them,” she said. “The people don’t spay and neuter. In the shelters up here, all you find are pit bulls from the inner cities. They’re not likely to be adopted because so many people are unfairly biased against the breed. But down South, you find all kinds of adoptable, healthy dogs who are being killed because they don’t have homes. So we work with a network of volunteers to bring them up here, and we use our own address to get them adopted locally.”

  It was my first hint that this puppy’s story was somehow larger, the first bread crumb on a trail that I could not even imagine while sitting at my kitchen table that sunny spring afternoon.

  My new bo
y, she told me, would most likely be brought by “ground transport,” assuming she could get him a spot on one of the RVs that volunteers drive from as far south as Florida to as far north as Maine every weekend, often carrying dozens of dogs at a time. There was also a chance he could arrive on a private plane, which was sometimes an option if all of the ground transports were full.

  I nodded as if I understood, and I nonchalantly offered to refill her glass of iced tea. All the while, I was thinking, A private plane for a shelter dog? Are these rescue people from the Twilight Zone?

  Her description turned out to be spot on. Three days later, I found myself driving to a shopping center on the New Jersey– Pennsylvania border. In its parking lot, I met a perfectly pleasant, if entirely exhausted, couple who had driven through the night in their RV full of rescued dogs from the Carolinas. It was about 9:30 A.M., and the shopping center was their third stop already that morning. I knocked on the RV’s driver-side window. The husband motioned for me to go around to the side door.

  Out came the wife. I didn’t hear any dogs barking, and I didn’t see any dogs right away. “You must be Kim,” she said with a weary smile.

  “I am,” I replied. I felt the way drug addicts probably do when they try to score a dime bag on the side of the road. “How do we do this?”

  She and her husband, I’d learn, had done this countless times before. They charge ninety-five dollars per dog and sometimes transport more than a dozen dogs every weekend. She disappeared back inside the RV while I stood on the curb, fumbling with the swanky new collar and leash I’d bought the day before. I wondered how the new puppy would like the name we’d picked out for him. Although Stella’s name had come from one of my favorite Academy Award-winning theatrical releases, this dog’s name had come from one of my husband’s recent finds. It was from the movie Old School, when Will Ferrell shouts over the coffin of a fraternity pledge who dies of a heart attack during a jelly-wrestling match, “You’re my boy, Blue!”

  A few moments later, the woman reemerged holding a twentypound puppy whose face looked exactly like the photograph I’d seen online. With the fluid motion of a nurse in a delivery room, she handed him to me and stood back to watch my reaction.

  Blue was no more a Labrador than Stella, despite their similar advertisements by rescue groups doing their best to guess at the breed mixes involved. He was already four or five months old based on the adult teeth that had come in, and he was about the size that a beagle would be at that age. His face shape and ears looked beagle-ish, too, albeit with eyes and a forehead that could easily have been genetic hand-me-downs from a pit bull. He had an exceptionally long torso, like some coonhounds native to the South or, perhaps, a Dachshund. His brindle coat reminded me a great deal of Boxers I’ve known, a rich caramel brown with black tiger stripes. And he had a white “tuxedo shirt” on his chest, plus white bands around all four paws where a gold toe might be on a sock. He was not precisely what I’d expected, but he was, in a word, gorgeous. If he hadn’t been a mutt found in a shelter, he might have passed for some new and strangely named designer dog breed, like a Puggle.

  He seemed shell-shocked—as any baby would be after riding five hundred miles in a cage in an RV in the middle of the night—but he let me hold him, and he gave me a kiss, and he looked up at me with big brown eyes that said, “Trust me, I’m a survivor.” I handed over a check for nearly $400 that included the transport fee—four hundred dollars for a shelter dog, I thought—and placed Blue in the Jeep for our ride home. The couple in the RV continued about their business, I suppose shifting dogs from crate to crate before driving onward to their next stop. I didn’t even catch their names before I said goodbye. It never occurred to me that I might want to find them again in the near future.

  Much to my delight, Blue’s first steps on the grass of New Jersey included walking up to Stella the way a featherweight contender approaches a heavyweight champ. He was absurdly outclassed in size, easily at a forty-pound disadvantage, but he wasn’t afraid as the two of them sniffed one another on the neutral turf of my neighbor’s backyard. Blue knew not only how to avoid a fight, but also how to create an ally. He rolled on his back to let Stella know she could be the boss, then hopped right back up to show her that he wanted to play at her level. Stella tried to wrestle with Blue, but realized he was too small. She tried to play tug with him, but figured he was too weak. Just when my favorite little headache was probably thinking, “This dog’s only use is as a punching bag,” Blue broke into a sprint and encouraged her to give chase. It was their favorite game by dinnertime that night, and they’ve played it every day since.

  Blue is asleep at my feet as I type this, tired from his morning walk and using Stella’s backside as a pillow on a floor littered with squeaky toys, tennis balls, and chew bones. He is an absolutely wonderful puppy. He’s a fast learner—he knew his name, “sit,” and “lie down” inside of four days, and he set a world record of only three accidents before figuring out how to use the doggy door. He can never replace Floyd in my heart, but he sure does help to supplant the overwhelming sense of loss and sadness with pure, unadulterated joy. He bounds at me with puppy love practically flying off the tips of his flapping ears, jumping into my arms several times a day simply because he’s so happy. And I get stopped at least three times a week at the local parks by people asking what breed he is, with his gorgeous brindle coat standing out in a suburban desert of yellow Labradors.

  The more I considered Blue’s personality, the more I realized how different from Stella he was. I began to see how somebody might have called Stella “damaged” or “unadoptable” because she needed so much training, so much exercise, and so much patience during the first couple of years. A lot of people would have given her right back to a shelter with less thought than they give to returning a dented baking pan at the grocery store. I most definitely do not agree that Stella was unworthy of saving, but I can see the argument arising, especially in towns where any puppy who even remotely resembles a pit bull is considered dangerous. She’s lucky she didn’t get the needle before being given a chance to grow into the terrific adult dog that she is, one who will perform on cue not only “sit” and “stay,” but also “high five,”“jab,” and “left hook.”

  Blue, though, is an altogether different kind of puppy. He has not presented a single major challenge, unless you count the fact that he wants to be cuddled twenty-four hours a day without breaks for a good night’s sleep. He’s a lifetime companion in the making, just like Floyd was from the first days that I knew him.

  When I started to think about how Blue had to be driven hundreds of miles in that RV to find a happy home, I was baffled. He struck me as a truly awesome boy, and I couldn’t imagine why it would require such effort to find him a family. The only indications Blue showed that first day of having endured anything strange were the healed-over scabs and tiny, hairless spots that I found from his face all the way to the middle of his back. They weren’t big or disgusting, but the more I petted him, the more spots I found beneath the patches of hair that were already growing back. He didn’t scratch at them, and he didn’t wince when I touched them, but they gave me enough concern that they became the number one thing I decided to mention when I took him to my veterinarian for his initial checkup.

  It was there that I would get my first real insights into the place where he’d started his journey, along with my first inklings that something about his situation had been horribly, horribly wrong.

  Quarantine and Questions

  No children live in my house, but kids are always underfoot. My property sits on a cul-de-sac where neighborhood pickup games often result in a wayward kickball or baseball rolling across my front yard. Whichever kid runs down the hill to retrieve the lost ball inevitably sees my dogs staring like bleacher creatures out the front door, lacking only for official scorecards and the opposable thumbs required to fill them in. Once word spread among the elementary- and middle-school kids that there was a new puppy sitti
ng just beyond my welcome mat, I heard a knock at my door at least once or twice a day.

  I wanted Blue to know youngsters of all ages while he was still a puppy, so he’d learn to behave properly around them whether they were gently rubbing his ears or mischievously pulling his tail. So it was that Blue’s first playmates included my neighbors Erika and Andrew. Erika was about to graduate from high school, and Andrew was a couple of years younger. They’d grown up around dogs and had always done well with the dogs at my house, and they’re smart kids whose parents are generous. They eagerly volunteered to be the guinea pigs as we tested Blue’s reaction to older kids, with their mother, Stacy, and me standing cautiously next to them in their backyard.

  I let Blue off his leash once he was safely inside their fence, and he stood for a few moments getting the lay of the land. Both kids were desperate to play with the puppy, but Blue took his time, sizing them up the way a blackjack player seeks out a friendly-looking dealer at a casino. After a few minutes, my all-too-typical little man decided that he first wanted to meet Erika, who happens to be an attractive blonde. She knelt down at his level and cooed so instinctively at his cuteness that we thought her heart might actually be melting with love. He didn’t so much walk up to her as he did a belly crawl, inching his way across the grass in a posture so submissive you’d think he was yet another shy high-school boy angling to ask her for a date. When Erika reached out to pet Blue, he rolled onto his back and exposed his tummy to her. She rubbed it gently for a few seconds before he flipped himself and sprang to his feet, wagging his tail faster than a hummingbird flutters its wings. Erika’s smile was as bright as the sunshine that afternoon, and Blue’s demeanor was just as warm.