Invisible Beasts Page 5

  His favorite haunts are among lunching executives, oblivious to their pockets and handbags, in which he grazes for antacids, breath mints, tobacco, nicotine gum, diet candy, and raw almonds in Ziploc bags. That’s why, at lunchtime, the Jack becomes a social menace. If one party makes a deal-breaking remark and the other party sits up abruptly, chafing the Jack’s sensitive nose in a trouser pocket, or displacing it from a handbag, the Jack reacts with a back-kick that causes choking, turning purple, and the somersaulting of forks. Worse, and not infrequently, the Jack causes cardiac failure among workers who rush along corridors carrying lunch back to their desks. Drawn to the smell of food in their sacks, and exasperated by their speed, the Jack lashes out at their chests just to slow them down, and succeeds only too well. It’s important not to blame the animal, but to remember that his skittish responses are the heritage of all wild creatures that depend on the global business environment.

  Neither my profession nor my tax bracket brings me into the Jack’s company very often, but one Jack did make a bad date memorable. I will never forget being taken to dinner by a corporate lawyer who confided, over the white truffle–truffled breast of ruffed grouse, his thoughts on the legal concept of damages.

  “All relationships can be translated into money, Sophie,” he said. “This is America.” This made me so sad that I desperately signaled the waiter for the dessert menu, and in doing so jostled a soft palpitant donkey nose with my elbow, and the next thing I knew, there was shiraz on everything, and I never heard from him again.

  In the Book of Numbers, a famous ass, a jenny, is beaten by the prophet Balaam because she refuses to trot forward. She sees an angel with a flaming sword barring her way, and being a sensible beast, she balks, then sidles against a brick wall, crushing Balaam’s foot, then lies down under the incensed prophet, who has been oppressing her all the while with blows and insults. At this point, two miracles happen. The first is that the jenny speaks to Balaam, asking him if he hasn’t noticed anything unusual. The second is that Balaam, the human, actually pays attention to her. When he does, he too sees the avenging angel. And duly apologizes. How does this story relate to the Wild Rubber Jack? Well, according to Scripture, angels with fiery swords guard the Garden of Eden to keep humanity from creeping back in and parking our trailers. Viewed in that light, the story means that we should accept the inevitable: Eden is closed. The good times are over. Suck it in. Bust your butt. Sweat till you drop. Forward, march! This message of humility in the face of the inevitable, or divine will, or creative destruction, or whatever it cares to call itself, is aptly delivered by a humble ass of the visible sort, used to taking orders and being ridden and beaten.

  The invisible ass is another story entirely. If Balaam had laid a finger on the Wild Rubber Jack, that beast would have gone nose to the dirt and flipped the prophet like a flapjack onto the angel’s head, then gone off to crop a thistle. The Wild Rubber Jack takes no abuse, not even from the person with the carrots (or almonds). Unlike Balaam’s ass, however, he does not talk. His voice isn’t known for good advice. It’s only the same outrageous, hilarious, earsplitting bray that wild asses have evolved, over the millennia, to call to each other across the untamed deserts and solitudes.

  7

  Thousands of years before humans began domesticating livestock, wolves domesticated humans. Enjoying our garbage heaps, wolves who were bold and friendly set out to make us share the warm, safe spots at our firesides where cooking went on, and the choicest scraps were to be had. They learned our body language better than any other nonhuman species, dogging our every move—and they became dogs. Since then, we have evolved in intimate mutuality. Anyone who thinks that dogs are mere servile pets may learn from the following tale how our consciousness is controlled by those whom we think we have mastered.

  The Riddle of Invisible Dogs

  AT THE TIME OF THIS TALE I was, you might say, between dogs. Because I can’t live without a dog, whenever I lose one of these companions whose only unforgiveable fault is growing old so fast, it’s just a matter of time until a new dog arrives to lick the bowls of a beloved predecessor. Meanwhile, I volunteer at the Humane Society, where my dogs come from. This time, my duties consisted of riding once a week with Lucas, a retired policeman who worked as a humane officer, to enforce the anticruelty laws. We rode in a van with cages in the back and a sheaf of that day’s abuse reports on the dashboard. Most were cases of neglect, and the more I saw, the more I thought about neglect, until I made the discovery recounted here.

  Lucas had heavy-lidded eyes, a self-contained manner, and the build of a sea lion. Filling the doorways of rich and poor alike, of dilapidated row houses and pseudo-Tudor “manors,” he politely pointed out the facts. Sir, maybe you don’t take the dog inside enough, because his belly is all hard mud and I see this hole he dug to get out of the rain . . . Sir, your dog needs veterinary attention, the chain is growing into her neck and the skin is infected, see? . . . Ma’am, the dogs were locked in the house you left, maybe you didn’t notice but it’s not the realtor’s responsibility . . . Ma’am, your son has the right to play paintball, but for the dog’s fur to look like this, and shaking like this, it’s not good for the animal, no?

  We’d ride around all morning. At lunchtime, we’d park outside a donut shop, get coffee, and eat in the van, where Lucas would open his insulated cooler for the stash of steamed tamales his wife made every day. Since he insisted on sharing them, I began bringing homemade fudge. We both licked our fingertips. Briefly, the van lit up with gold and green summery scents of maize and moist corn husks, and in a convivial interlude, the gray scenes of neglect would fade. Then we’d get back on the road, often returning to the Society with confiscated animals. I would wonder if the time had come to bring home one of the rescued pooches. When Dog Day finally arrived, however, it was not at all what I had anticipated.

  Lucas and I rode to a suburban household that had been reported by its neighbors many times before. We parked beside a rise, topped by a modest house overlooking a flight of limestone steps appropriate for a museum, and, to one side, a stone cloister with lancet arches. We climbed to the front door, rang, and waited. Below, the cloister disclosed to our view not the swimming pool I expected, but a giant plaster crocodile and two tall, grappling plaster pandas.

  “You can tell he’s un poco loco,” Lucas said. We exchanged a look. The door cracked open, and Lucas asked a nose-tip and lips for the name of the dog owner.

  “I dunno,” said the lips.

  “We’re taking the dog, it’s really skinny.”

  “Okay, you take the dog, it’s not my dog.”

  “Someone is needed to sign, to surrender it.”

  The door slammed. We went back down the steps into a yard in which stood a pavilion tent, with scalloped trim, near a flailing black-and-gray banner staked to the ground. The black stripes flashed, the gray stripes shimmered, and walking over to this heraldic vision, we found a German shepherd so thin she was almost two-dimensional—the dark stripes were shadows between her bones. Lucas took a cell phone picture. Then he lassoed the dog’s head with a nylon lead, untied her, and hauled her—sniffing and nibbling his pants for biscuits—into the back of the van. She cried as we drove away.

  “I love cases like this one,” Lucas confided. “The evidence is right there. One photo in court. I take the dog and go.” We rode underneath the city zoo’s footbridge painted with multicolored beasts, all grinning like humans.

  “So,” I said, “I looked up the word neglect in the dictionary. It comes from a Latin word, lego. Guess what that means?”

  “‘Lego’? It sounds like you’re talking to a big dog bitin’ on your leg.”

  “It means ‘to choose’ and ‘to read.’ Two different things. I’m wondering, what do those things have in common?” My companion looked sleepy, thinking it over.

  “Paying attention,” he said.

  “Ha! So . . . the real meaning of neglecting a dog is, not paying attention?”
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  “No prestan atencion,” Lucas agreed, in the Spanish of sound generalizations. “This guy,” he thumbed backward, “he’s already got so many charges—animal cruelty is nothing. He neglects the dog because he can always get another one. And I’ll have to go and rescue it again.”

  WHEN I CAME HOME, I lit a fire in my den and sat before it on the hearth bricks. It was October, a good season for contemplation. The walls and ceiling pulsed with ruddy tints. In the bay window, above the woods outside, in a mist of bluish clouds, rose a fiery moon. I drank a glass of wine, made a plateful of bleu cheese on crackers, and heard coyotes yipping to bring the pack together for the night’s hunt—cheery, eerie, noisy coyotes, the free canids of the earth, the ones who scorned pethood. Did they have a better evolutionary deal than dogs? I thought about the gray wolves that once lived in my woods; wolves might have denned where I sat now, with their big heads and icy eyes. And I thought about the young bitch we’d just rescued. Tonight, at least, she was better off than most coyotes: she slept beside a tray filled with more kibble than she could eat. This overfull tray would stay in her cage till she relaxed enough to allow others around her food, without attacking. Then would I be ready to adopt her?

  I reached for my cheese crackers—and they weren’t there. Absentmindedly, I’d brought an empty plate to the fireside . . . I went back to the kitchen, made cheese crackers, and returned.

  The fire, still in its yellow youth, rushed from a bed of breathing embers. I revisited the memory of my last dog, also a German shepherd. Her eyes were intense and sweet, like espresso, and she pushed limits. Forbidden to put her paws on the bed, she’d jump up and put her elbows on the bed instead, her paws scrupulously curled in the air. She had hated closed doors. Every door in the house had been nudged ajar by a slim nose, snuffling through flared nostrils, like a black space probe from a planet of fur . . . I missed a hundred special things about her. Now she was gone out of the universe. How, I wondered, how could anyone live with a dog and not pay attention?

  I reached for my cheese crackers, and they weren’t there. Shaking my buzzed head, I thought I must have eaten them without noticing—shame on me, not paying attention!—and went back to the kitchen to make more, and returned.

  By now, my fire had aged to pink cubes, architecturally heaped, under blue flames chasing their tails. Suddenly, in the darkness, the den shook to a loud thud—my farmer neighbor’s twelve-gauge shotgun, aimed at the coyotes. Then the farmer’s corgis barked telegraphically across fields and woods, and some Great Pyrenees, from a nearby sheepfold, uttered deep grunts, as if to say, “Uh-huh, we hear you.” These sounds had the aspect of a question put as directly as possible. Which was the better evolutionary deal for canids—freedom and the farmer’s shotgun, or pethood and neglect? All the pitiable horrors I’d witnessed streamed through my wine-weakened mind, all the sadness I’d thought I’d gotten used to. Needing comfort, I reached for my cheese crackers.

  They weren’t there. Again.

  “This is getting monotonous!” I yelled aloud. Then I saw, on the softly pulsing wall, the shadow of a wolf.

  I looked around and caught a German shepherd—a big tan brute with ears like trowels—in the act of using my sofa for a dinner napkin, running his muzzle along the cushions and back the other way.

  “Bad doggie,” I said, with feeling. “Bad!” He startled: his ears wilted, his sandy tail melded to his white belly, and he skulked into the kitchen, where, darting at me looks of shock and awe, he trotted into the gap between the sink and the stove, as far as his shoulders, and drooped his head against the wall. He huddled there, rib cage pumping, panting and yawning with stress. A whiff of dog sweat filled the air. What had I done?

  What happened next was predictable. I spent the rest of the evening cooking for a dog. I spent the rest of the year training my new dog. I named him Wolf, for wolfing my snacks. And I discovered that he was invisible.

  MY DISCOVERY BEGAN when the postal carrier slid out of her car with a packet in hand, and walked straight into a dog sniffing her sneakers. As I opened my mouth to call him, she stepped forward, and kept stepping, exactly where Wolf was not. I stared openmouthed, missing my cue about the nice sunshine we were having.

  “I’m so sorry, he isn’t trained yet,” I said. She looked puzzled. “The dog,” I added. “He’s new.”

  “You got a dog? I’m glad he’s not out, I hate it when dogs get out.” She smiled, getting back into the car as Wolf tried to goose her.

  Then Mike, of Mike’s Raccoon Wranglers, came to install shields in my chimney. Wolf trotted out, tongue shaking like a long jelly, straight toward the braced, separated knees of an unsuspecting Mike, who surveyed my roof . . . and sidestepped, boots suddenly nimble. He unfolded his ladder with the motions, if not the conversation, of a workman avoiding a large dog.

  “Sorry about the dog,” I said. Mike looked puzzled. “See the dog?” I asked. Still holding the ladder, with a slightly defensive air, Mike looked all around me. “Oh! Never mind,” I apologized rapidly, “I thought I saw—the neighbor’s dog out there, in the yard, but it was only—oh! Never mind, I must have seen the woodchuck.” Mike laughed and climbed the ladder. All the while, Wolf stood leaning on my legs, panting with pleasure. Conclusions framed themselves. But I knew invisible animals, and I knew people, and this was not the proper behavior of people around invisible animals. They should not be avoiding what they could not see.

  ALL MY LIFE I HAD KNOWN that there were plenty of invisible dogs around; now I faced the surprising fact that I’d never thought seriously about them. I had known that among the unleashed dogs passing me in the street, sniffing behind bushes, or posting liquid messages on trees, a goodly number were not visible to normal humans—but somehow, this had never provoked either wonder, or basic questions. I hadn’t paid attention! Perhaps the fault lay with my childhood bedtime stories, which were often about an invisible poodle named Tidbit, who had shyly but persistently dogged Granduncle Erasmus on his extensive travels through Europe, Africa, and what he’d called “the Orient.” At the bottom of my mind, all invisible dogs were Tidbit, whom I had outgrown, and about whom I had no more questions than I did about swing sets. Shame on me, because the basic questions were burning ones—and Granduncle Erasmus was no longer here to answer them.

  Fortunately, a rich cousin of mine (who wishes to remain anonymous) funds and administers a private archive of my family’s records. I visited this chilled, silent repository, and delved deeply into the papers of the invisible-beast spotters who had preceded me in our genealogy. I read till my eyes watered, taking notes. The papers went back centuries; the oldest ones, too fragile for handling, had to be viewed online. Not one of those diaries, legal documents, scholarly articles, newspapers, handbills, scrapbooks, broadsides, or letters (the most plentiful item) explained why people avoided a dog they could not see. On the other hand, I gathered a good deal of interesting information, and was able to piece together a partial portrait of invisible dogs; I call them Invies, for short.

  The most suggestive item was that Invies seemed to arrive in normal litters; I found no mention of their breeding true. A recessive trait, perhaps? Equal in interest was the fact that they were scavengers, lurking around dumps and households, in a gray area between wildness and domesticity. And they were quite timid. An Elizabethan ancestor—an irascible barber-surgeon who’d lived with a pack of invisible sheepdogs—described them succinctly as Cringeing Curs, tho Artful and eke Thievish. On rare occasions, Invies had formed attachments to my family’s invisible-beast spotters. Tidbit, for instance, would not allow herself to be petted, yet had followed my granduncle around the world. Likewise, a nineteenth-century ancestress—an Ohio schoolmistress who had written a prizewinning monograph on edible cattails—had lived on warm terms with an Invie collie named Hecuba. Recording her cattail honors, this lady wrote in her diary, Hecuba being so very spoilt, I cannot but reflect how easy a thing it is for that much nearer invisible companion, my Soul, to be
as spoilt by worldly Vanities. Helpfully, this diary also described Hecuba’s behavior in the litter where she’d been discovered. The details accorded with other hints about the puppyhood of Invies. They were, in the canine social hierarchy, lower than the lowest—virtual outcasts, not assertive at all: if their littermates merely inhaled with the intention of growling, the little Invies rolled over and piddled on themselves. In adult life, Invies’ groveling status and habits gave them advantages. My granduncle had seen Tidbit snatch scraps from under the nose of a bullmastiff, who had given her a glare instead of a shredded ear. These instances, I noted, must mean that visible animals could see invisible dogs—an idea that violated one of my first principles, namely, that only invisible animals could see other invisible animals. An exception to this rule was hard to credit. Yet, if I accepted the anecdotes, it seemed that an Invie’s subsocial status canceled dogs’ usual responses, giving it a few precious, life-preserving privileges, similar to the position of the fool in a medieval court. And like fools, Invies were highly intelligent; it went with the territory.

  I LEARNED MUCH FROM the archives, but not what I came for. Why did people avoid a dog that they could not see? The question remained unanswered. A last-resort possibility was, simply, that Wolf wasn’t invisible. After all, I reasoned, a postal carrier and a raccoon wrangler were not a reliable sample. To test Wolf’s invisibility, I should bring him out in public, among lots of random people. I put on a dress with long drippy sleeves, slipped a tote bag over my arm, and secured Wolf by a leash tucked behind my sleeves and the bag. Thus attired, I went with my dog to the hairdresser.