Lucky
Something you should understand about dogs: we don't "love" our masters. I mean we do, but it's not like humans love each other. They describe our relationship with those kinds of words, but really it's both more and less than that. If that seems confusing, I'll try to illustrate: you are a person. You have a hand. The hand is part of you, yet it doesn't often do what it wants to do. It does what you will it to do because it's your hand. That's the nature of your hand. So it is with dogs and men.
My mother was a mess of all sorts of dogs; primarily Australian Cattle Dog I think, whereas my father was an Old World German Shepherd who jumped the fence and had his way as he was running from his old home. I was born with several brothers and sisters who all died because it was a particularly cold winter and my mother's human was not the most attentive owner. I don't think she even knew my mother was pregnant until she was giving birth. My mother licked all of us pups clean, but I was the only one who licked back. Licking is how we show our submission, you see.
The story of my life is riddled with here's and there's, places I lived and places in between. It's not really worth telling, truthfully. No one ever really called me theirs for about eight years, and then one day I was taken to the pound and placed in a warm cell and given good food while the humans waited to see if anyone would take me in before they had to kill me. I know the people at the Humane Society tried not to let it show on their faces that my time was coming close, but it didn't matter. Dogs can sense things humans try to hide. Owing to my heritage, I just didn't look like much of anything; about as dog as a dog can be, but nothing special or unique. Humans love fancy dogs or big dogs or useful dogs, and I just wasn't any of those things.
It was my last day at the shelter when Jared came into my cell. God, he must have been what... forty-seven? He was very quiet and seemed to be made uncomfortable by the shelter worker who was trying to sing my praises to him. Finally, put off by the silence, she left he and me alone. Jared shambled over to me and held his hand out for me to lick, which I did because I'm a good dog.
He looked back and made sure that he was alone, then hunkered down and whispered something to me in confidence, which humans sometimes do because dogs don't repeat secrets. "Now look here, dog. I'm not very good with people and don't have much use for them anyway. I live in the country alone and am pretty fine with that. But I'll take you out there if you promise to be a good dog and watch out for people I don't want on my property. I'll give you dog food and water. Do we have a deal?" I looked at him as if I was confused, because you can't always be sure who to trust in this world and especially when you haven't belonged to anyone, which is a very difficult thing for a dog. But he must have taken the look to be acceptance, because he stood up and called out in a loud voice, "I'll take this one then."
Dogs don't have names, but humans do and insist on giving them to dogs too, because they don't like to think of us as possessions even though we are. As you might expect, Jared was not full of imagination, so he just called me Lucky because that's what the shelter called me.
We had several good years together. It was hard for him at first because he would often tell me to do one thing and then backtrack and tell me something different, and while I just did what a good dog does he thought I must be stupid. After a while he went to the library and got a book on training and started using specific commands and trying to get angry less, and we fell into a good balance, he and me. He found out that Lucky was a good name because it ends in the long 'e' sound, to which dogs are more responsive. Every now and then I would bark at something that seemed suspicious, but after a while I resigned myself to the fact that life was not that kind of exciting, and that was okay. For the most part I would lay out under the sun while he tended to his little frustrating garden, or I would lay by his La-Z-Boy while he watched TV, or I would lay at the foot of his bed when he went to sleep. Every now and then he would drive into town to get some food or something or other, and he always brought me a smoked rawhide to chew on when he left the next time. He tried to teach me to fetch the mail for him, but the one time I managed to get my teeth on the letters I guess I ruined his disability check, so after that he just got the mail himself, which was fine with me.
One day we were in the living room watching the news when the TV picture started shrinking, compressing at the top and bottom until it was basically a white line. The sound was fine, but the picture was shot forever. Jared raised an eyebrow and stared for a while, then walked over to the set and banged on it. The picture shook but didn't change. He muttered for a while and then turned to me.
"Lucky, I think I need to get a new TV."
It took a couple weeks for the delivery to come. A tall thin man walked in with a new TV on a dolly. He laughed when he saw the age of Jared's old TV, then apologized and finished installing the new one while Jared went out to work on the garden. I lay watching the deliveryman quietly. At one point I saw him crane his neck to look out the window, looking to see if Jared was paying him any mind. Then he got up and walked back toward the bedroom. I got that funny feeling dogs sometimes get in the back of the neck when something just isn't right, so I followed him quietly. The door was open, and the deliveryman was in the bedroom at the window, doing something to the lock on it. I growled at him and he turned sharply in shock. I started barking angrily at him, and I could hear Jared yelling "Hey!" from outside, but I didn't care. This man was up to something no good, and I wasn't having it in my house with my human. He ran to the bathroom and I followed him, practically foaming at the mouth.
"Lucky! For God's sake, Lucky!" Jared reached down and grabbed me by the collar, and I calmed down but continued growling at the deliveryman. "I'm terribly sorry about this... my dog usually isn't this way, I'm so sorry..." Jared dragged me out of the room before the terrified man's eyes and locked me in a closet while the two of them went back to finish up the delivery. When I heard less and less shuffling and then finally the sound of the delivery truck making its way out of Jared's driveway, I knew the house was safe again. Jared came back to the closet and opened it, glaring balefully at me. I drooped my ears and tucked my tail between my legs, which meant that I was full of holy dread of him. His glower softened a little and he called me back out of the closet to go watch the new TV.
Over the next couple of days nothing really happened, but every now and then I could swear I caught the scent of that deliveryman again. I chalked it up to that new TV smell and that was that. And then a few days later, I caught the scent again. Jared was in the bathroom, on a stepladder, trying to install a new fixture over the sink. I slunk over to the window and looked out. There he was: the deliveryman, now in plainclothes, sneaking around in the pine trees just outside. I barked and barked and he got spooked and turned tail.
"Lucky! What on Earth... Lucky! Shut up dog!" Jared was yelling at me from the bathroom, but I raced over to the south window to make sure the deliveryman wasn't coming back. I saw him stop to catch his breath and barked and growled even louder to make sure he knew he wasn't welcome.
"Lucky, goddammit, shut uuuuaahhhh!" I heard a loud crash from the bathroom, and ran over to see. Jared had fallen off of the ladder, and though it was a short fall he'd hit his head pretty badly on the toilet, and was laying on the ground, out cold, bleeding terribly from the forehead. I whimpered and ran over to him, licking his face, trying to get him to wake up. I whimpered louder and started barking, hoping someone might hear and come help Jared. But there was no one around for miles now. The deliveryman was long gone and we had no neighbors. The TV, which had never been shut off, proclaimed the news of some tragic event somewhere in the world.
A couple of hours passed. Too long for Jared to have just been knocked out. I began to fear the worst. I looked back into the bathroom and Jared was pale, his blood all over the bathroom floor, the fixture he was trying to hang still suspended by a single screw above him. I had to urinate but there was no one to let me out into the yard, and the doors were all shut tight. I whimpered and ran around the house, looking for some way out, yelping occasionally in case someone might hear. I finally went into his bedroom and found an inconspicuous corner and relieved myself, my ears drooped because to pee in your human's house after you have been trained not to do so is a terrible shame.
In spite of this, I found myself returning to the room several more times as the hours went by. Jared was now gone. I knew then that I was on my own again for the first time in several years. I walked slowly into the bathroom and curled up against him in the puddle of my human's blood that was now beginning to dry in the stale air. I howled mournfully, in part so that someone could come and care for us, and in part because there was nothing else to do. What does a hand do when the person who owns it is no more?
After a couple of days I was getting very hungry. Jared had begun to stink, and it burned my nose, because dogs have a powerful sense of smell but can't really do much about turning it off. I licked his cold face and immediately my neck hairs stood on end as I felt a strange sensation coming over me. Before I could identify what it was the feeling had passed, though, and I was hungrier than ever. I walked into the kitchen and pawed at the cabinet where I knew he kept my food, but it would not budge. If only I'd been a Border Collie, I could have figured out how to open the thing.
I stood up as best I could on the counter and just managed to knock off a box of Nabisco Shredded Wheat, which I tore into ravenously. I had dog sense, so rather than eat a little and save some for later I devoured the whole box in a few seconds, and then spread the pieces of the plastic bag all around the kitchen floor. I was also thirsty. Thankfully Jared never did get around to fixing that leak in the bathtub, so I could drink a few drops of water at a time and that seemed to be okay for a little bit. For the most part I just curled up next to Jared's body, though, and wished for death.
Several more days had passed. There was no more food to be found. Jared's body was completely stiff and almost white in the flesh. I began to vacillate in and out of consciousness. Every now and then I would lick Jared's face out of blind instinct, and that sensation would wash over me again. I soon realized what it was, and it horrified me. I mean, if I were as crass and terrible as a cat the thought probably would have occurred to me while poor Jared was still warm. A horror movie marathon was playing on the lonely TV, and the sounds of Night of the Living Dead echoed in my fractured mind as I fought off the terrible demon taking over me.
One more day. The counters and cabinets within my reach in the kitchen were all scarred and scratched from my efforts to get inside them. I was getting weak. I had torn up a bit of the carpet hoping to eat some of that, but it was no use. My corner in Jared's room was squalid, but there was nothing left inside me to put there anymore. I walked over to the bathroom, my head making a noise like air rushing past a hollow tube, and there was Jared's body. Cold and lifeless. He was gone gone gone. I was so hungry. Surely I could be forgiven... I limped over to him with my limited strength and just stared for a long time, my tongue hanging out stupidly. I had no more strength to bark for help, even if anyone could actually hear. It had to be done. He had been wearing a sleeveless shirt when he'd been hanging the fixture, and there was a bare spot on his shoulder I couldn't tear my eyes away from. I lolled my tongue over it and opened my mouth to take that first, abhorrent bite.
Jared shot to his feet before me and I lurched backwards in terror. "Lucky! Goddammit dog, what the hell is wrong with you?!" My ears drooped and my tail sagged and I whimpered silently as Jared walked toward me with his hands out, ready to wring my neck. I squeezed as tightly as I could against the wall and looked away from him, for dogs are not meant to look humans in the face, especially when they are being punished.
"...Lucky?" I braved a look at my master's face, and in the glow of the bathroom light he seemed to have a halo around his head. "Lucky... I'm sorry. I'm sorry buddy." His face contorted, grimaced, and then he sank to his knees over me, crying. "I'm so sorry Lucky. I'm sorry I got mad. I'm so so sorry..." I pushed into his body with what little strength I had. I wanted him to know that I forgave him and that I was sorry for what I'd almost done. I felt his hand on the back of my neck, but rather than feel the safety of my master's touch, I got that something-isn't-right feeling again, and tail between my legs I bolted out of the bathroom, with Jared sobbing in protest.
"Lucky!"
I blacked out before I even made it into the kitchen again, and when I awoke blearily, I looked back into the bathroom. Jared's body was still lying there, pale and stiff in the same form as it had been for a couple of weeks now, with the exception of four small puncture marks in his bare shoulder. Aside from that he was undamaged, except of course for his head. I curled up next to him with my last ounce of strength, collapsed, and let my starving death wash over me.
...the sound of birds... a guinea in the yard. I would have barked at it but I had no bark left. I closed my eyes again.
...a thunderstorm. The rain pelted gently against the roof. A loud thunderclap. I might have run under Jared's bed at the sound of it only a month ago, but now I just listened until my ears couldn't hear anymore.
...pounding. Silence. More pounding. The door. Someone was pounding at the door. Everything else in me was failing or had failed, but my nose was still sharp. It was the deliveryman.
"Hey, is anybody in there?" More silence. "Okay, good. I mean your car is out here..." I could hear him walking around to the back, to the bedroom window. "...I guess I can finally just open this here, and..." He opened the still unlatched window from the outside and crawled in. I could hear him from around the corner. He walked toward us and stopped in his tracks.
"J-Jesus... Jesus Mary and Joseph!" He crossed himself several times and fell back against the door jamb in terror. "G-God... gotta do... something... oh shit, Jesus." He reached into his pocket for a cell phone and dialed a number, then quickly hung up. "No, you idiot! Oh... Oh Jesus it stinks too. Oh... okay. Deep breath." He dialed the number again and tried to collect himself as best he could. "Yes, this is Lawrence Pelosi, and I uh, I delivered a television to this guy out at 34756 Rt. A, outside of town, and I, uh, was supposed to go back..." He held the phone away from his mouth and retched silently, but continued. "Um yeah, I was supposed to go back and do some work on it and I can't get him to come to the door and there's a weird smell. Yeah. Yeah, it might be a good idea to check it out. Okay yeah. Oh, well just trying to be a good neighbor and all. Okay thank you. I won't be here when they get here, okay?" Then he pocketed his cell phone, made sure the bedroom window was shut and locked again, and then let himself out through the back porch door. My eyes fell shut again.
I heard the sound of the door being broken into and managed to open my eyes enough to see two policemen walking our direction.
"Oh Christ, Lonny, there's a dog too. Too bad."
"This guy doesn't have any pictures of anyone around here, Vince. I kinda think he's some sort of loner. Hey, wait a second! Look at the dog!"
I had no strength to lift my head, but I managed to feebly wag my tail a couple of times. The first policeman, Vince, walked over to me and knelt beside me, lifting my head in his hands.
"He's still kickin', Lon. He's still alive! Man. This is one lucky dog."
"Vin, I gotta say, though. I don't think this guy's got anybody. If we can't find his next of kin, this dog's probably gonna get put down."
Vince looked down at me and I opened my mouth and licked his hand because I'm a good dog. He smiled at me and then looked at Lonny.
"Oh... I don't think he will, buddy."
Once in a while Jared would take me for a walk out on his land, though he couldn't walk for long stretches. We would sometimes hike through the woods or walk along the ditch by the roadway, looking at tadpoles in the dirty water. My favorite moments, though, were spent at the cemetery down the road. The stones and markers meant nothing to me; they were men's ways of remembering men. Dogs have their own ways of remembering things, ways I can't really explain to you in words you'll understand. All I know is that I remember that cemetery, and how calm it was, and how you could see fields for miles at the top of the hill there. But despite all that the thing I remember most fondly is my human's hand on my neck, scratching that magical spot just behind the right ear, and thinking that in some way, some special way that a man couldn't explain to me in words I'd understand, I'd be remembered, and people would say, "That Lucky. He was a good dog."