Air Dog by Rebecca Childers

My mom craved pizza. She called my dad’s parents to see if they wanted some. It was summer; all four of my mom’s children were home from college and we wanted pizza, too. Waiting for an update on lunch, we hung out by the phone while she talked to our grandmother. Our mother said a quick hello, listened, and then gasped into the phone, “How long do you think he has?” My little brother, Joshua, grabbed my hand and squeezed. Our mother hung up and said, “It’s your grampa’s brother, Uncle Everett. He showed up at their house last night, half out of his head. Told them he was fixing to die in the next couple of days. Your grandma says he looks it.”

We snapped into crisis mode. All six of us hopped into my parents’ minivan and headed across the river to say goodbye. My grandmother greeted us at the door, relieved us of our pizza boxes, and led us to the dining room, shouting the whole way there. “Poor thing, peed the bed straight through. Yep, I’ve lost eight siblings now–dear God!–and I know the look of one about to meet their maker. I figured we could give him a good place to die.” We tried to get her to lower her voice, but it was useless. “Everett won’t be able to hear me unless I shout it in his ear,” she said. But we knew our grandmother. She wouldn’t have been quiet if he’d had perfect hearing.

The pizza lured him out of bed. Unable to handle the sudden fragility of our beloved uncle, my brother made a beeline for the door when he saw Everett, vacating a seat at the head of the table. Wrapped in four layers of blankets, Everett sat down and ate a piece of supreme with his left hand. His right arm hung beside him, with his palm cupping air and slowly rocking back and forth.  “You patting a dog there, Uncle Everett?” my sister asked, unsure what to say. He ignored her so my grandmother shouted the question into his ear. Then his neck straightened up, his hazy eyes became their old piercing blue.

“I’m petting Jack,” Everett said, now affectionately scratching his air dog’s ears with both hands. “When I was still in my mother, Jack stood guard by her, growling at anyone who put a hand on her, even just to touch her belly. Then, when I was born, he slept beside my crib. I guess he decided he was my protector.” Here Everett paused to lightly chuckle and run a hand all the way down the air dog’s back. “Yep, he protected me then and he protects now,” he said.  

Three days after we ate pizza with Everett and Jack, my grandparents decided they could no longer care for Everett alone and checked him into the hospital to die. The hospital released him a week later. He went back to his house and kept on living. Nobody mentioned it, but I’m sure, that in that hospital room with the beeping boxes and the chaplain leading Everett in a reading of his final Psalm, Jack kept watch.

I am starting to think that the dead never really go away.

§

My dad and I believe that you can have any number of animals that you love in your lifetime, and that love you, but you only get one life-dog. This dog shares your soul. When you hurt, it hurts; when it hurts, you hurt. Everett’s life-dog was Jack.  My dad’s life-dog was a fifteen inch Beagle named Bud. My dad, David, named him Bud, at six, because he wanted a dog to be his bud.

When Bud was a few years old, he decided to go joyriding with David’s dad on his way to work. His dad didn’t notice the dog in the backseat until he was a few blocks away from home. He opened the car door and let Bud out. These details came out fifty years after the fact. All little David knew was that his bud was missing.

About a week later, David’s family drove by Bud, miraculously inside a fence, a few blocks away from their house. David screamed stop, climbed the fence, got Bud, and climbed back out. Now, my dad says he should have knocked on the door. He should have talked to the people who had been taking care of the wandering beagle. But at the time all he knew was he saw his dog, and he was getting his dog back.

When David first brought Bud home, he built a dog house with a wooden fence around it. Bud got out. Then David helped his father build a fence around the whole backyard. Bud climbed the boards like a ladder. So David tied him to a tree with a chain. Bud wiggled his legs back and forth, back and forth, until he wore links of the chain out. David made a chicken wire pen. Bud got out. Finally tied to a chain, surrounded by a chicken wire pen, inside of the wooden fence, Bud stayed in.

Bud never went far when he escaped. He just wanted freedom. He liked to listen for the scrape of the metal door of the storage shed on cool summer mornings. This sound meant my dad and his two brothers were heading out to fish by the river. Bud would follow at their heels, detouring occasionally to chase muskrats and rabbits.

A large wall of grass covered dirt protects Huntington from the Ohio River, and my dad and his brothers lived at the foot of it. Walking on the floodwall allowed David to reach Camden Park, West Virginia’s only amusement park, in a matter of minutes. At that time, it was also a zoo; local residents were lulled to sleep by the roar of the sad lion. David journeyed there to pat the horses the park kept in stables outside the gates. He only went when he felt brave, though.  A mean boxer liked to hang out there. One day with treats for the horses in his pockets, David meandered down to the stables with Bud. The boxer came out of nowhere, growling at the little boy. The Boxer ran towards them. Bud threw his small body under the charging dog. The Boxer flew through the air and landed on his back, okay, but stunned and scared.

Fifty years later, my dad and I walked down the floodwall together. He pointed to a tree he’d climbed at fifteen to place a blue rubber ball in a knot at the top. He wondered if the tree had accepted it, and grown around it on its ascent to the sky. I’d never heard this story and watched closely as my dad used his hands to explain to me how much the tree had grown. This wasn’t one of the important stories, one of the stories that he felt his children had to know to understand him. Like the story of Bud, his Beagle who was never far away. I knew these stories so well they felt like my stories. Bud had been my dad’s protector, so in a way, that made him mine, too. The day my dad told me about the ball in the tree, we wandered off our usual path, accidentally entering the territory of a growling Rottweiler. It ran towards us. “Stay still,” my dad said, calm. We stood still. The Rottweiler stopped running and stared. Then, inexplicably, it darted away. “I bet Bud got him,” he said to me, laughing. “I bet he did,” I said, laughing, too. What we didn’t say out loud was that neither of us worried as the dog ran towards us, teeth bared. We never doubted that the dog would decide it best to turn and run.

§

Observing Uncle Everett patting his air dog was not the first time Jack had entered into family legend. My dad had grown up with the story of Jack and the ditch. One day, when my grampa, Everett’s older brother, was walking home from his one room school house, two guys came out of the woods with guns. They pointed them at my grandfather. “Get him,” one said to the other with a nudge of his elbow. But Jack had come to walk Grampa home from school. He emerged from of a patch of nearby trees and began to growl at the armed men. The giant black German Shepherd snarled, erasing all thought of the blond little boy. “Let’s get the dog,” they said. They turned their weapons on Jack and pulled the trigger, but Jack spotted a crude drainage ditch by the side of the road. He hopped in and crawled on his belly all the way home, keeping himself safe, while distracting the bullies from his young master.

When it came time for my dad to get his second dog, he figured he needed an angle to convince his dad. He thought back to the stories of Jack the German Shepherd and scoured the newspaper. “German Shepherd-Pure breed, No papers,” it said. David’s dad took him down to look at the litter. They picked out the runt, a little black male, and named him Ben.  Like Clifford the Big Red Dog, Ben grew big and strong, over 28 inches at the shoulder, over one hundred pounds.

Around this time, my grandmother started to get lonely for female companionship. She had three sons, a husband, and a giant boy dog. A stray mutt knocked up the neighbor’s beagle, and my grandmother got to view the puppies first. Suzy pranced around in her white fur, interrupted by brown patches. Black stripes ran across the brown. My grandma lifted her out of the neighbor’s yard and sat her down inside her own. Suzy became Ben’s shadow, following his massive paws everywhere. If someone came by the yard, Ben stood by Suzy like a big brother.

A big mutt spotted Suzy in the yard one day. By herself, happily lying in a sun beam, she looked weak and easy to pick on. The dog barreled over to Suzy and growled. She jumped up, howled, and ran. He chased her, snapping at her little paws with his giant teeth. Then Ben, who had been seeing to business elsewhere, heard Suzy’s cries. Within seconds of his arrival, Ben knocked the mutt down with his paws, picked him up by the belly and shook him like a rag doll. When Ben set the mutt down, the dog scurried away. My dad watched all this from the kitchen window.

A week later, my dad saw that mutt again. It was running down the street, frightened. Except this time, it wasn’t Ben, but Suzy who chased him. “Was she all by herself?” I asked my dad when he first told me this story. “Yes, all alone,” he said. “So the dog was scared of her without Ben there?” I asked. “Oh, Ben was there. He might have been invisible, but to Suzy and to that mutt, Ben was there.” You don’t have to be present to be with someone.  I don’t think it is possible to completely leave those we love.

§

I often trace the history of my family by thinking through our dogs. When my parents just had my two oldest sisters, they got a white terrier from the animal shelter named Scruffy. It ran away not long after they got it. When I was little, my oldest sister claimed she had loved it anyway. I didn’t understand why. Scruffy had no loyalty.

The first family dog I met was a Beagle-mix named Kenny. While I was growing up, my mother threatened to write a book about getting Kenny called, “Mommy’s pregnant, time to get another dog.” The kid she was pregnant with was me.

Kenny stars in one of my family’s favorite stories. My sister, Jennifer, the little sister until I came around, once huffed around the kitchen, finally sitting down on Kenny’s back. “I had to sit on the puppy, cause I didn’t have a seat,” she said to defend herself. Kenny yelped, but he soon forgave her. She and my oldest sister walked around the neighborhood with him, picking sour grass and throwing birthday parties for all of the neighborhood dogs.

In a home video, my mother pretends to search for my sister. She points her video camera outside. “Jennifer, where are you?” her disembodied voice shouts, a bit too close to the camera’s microphone. Kenny pops out of a little dog house, the one my dad made out of a gutted TV. The next to emerge: the creature we affectionately called Slobberdog. Then two more dogs come out of the tiny hole. “Wow, that is a lot of dogs in there,” my mother says. She begins to laugh as my sister crawls out of the doghouse on her hands, stands up, wipes her palms on her knees and waves to the camera. “I hope I don’t have to pay them for babysitting,” my mom jokes.

§

Kenny died tragically and far too young. Before his death, my sisters and I had never seen our dad cry. I was five, and we had to find a new dog. On the way to fly kites at the park, we passed a sign that read “Beagle, Gun Dog.” The tiny gun dog had green eyes and bassett-hound-length ears. We named her Kassie.

When I think of my family, all six of us living together in the small brown house, I think of Kassie, too. My dad never thought much of her beagle-ness. To him, Bud was the beagle. But he still walked Kassie on the floodwall he’d walked Bud on, and he let her sniff rabbit trails by that same river.

Kassie was the matriarch of our pets. When our rabbit broke her leg and hopped onto Kassie’s bed for a nap, extending her long cast covered leg as far as it would go, Kassie slept on the ground next to her. When my family decided to bring two starving kittens home, the kittens found the holes in the cover of Kassie’s foam bed and hid there. While she slept, they slid their paws out of hiding and swung Kassie’s ears and flipped her tail up and down. Kassie opened one eye, rolled it, and went back to sleep.

My brother and I didn’t always love dogs. My mother had gates put on the back deck so I wouldn’t be scared to go outside. Joshua often followed my lead, so he didn’t care much for dogs, either. Joshua and I always gave Kassie food we didn’t like and a pat now and then, but she wasn’t ever the reason we were happy to be home. So, when it came time to say our goodbyes to Kassie, we were surprised by how much it hurt. She lay on her bed in the living room floor, covered in blankets. My sisters administered Gatorade to her through a turkey baster every few hours and changed her pee pads. Joshua and I sat in the kitchen with pillows covering our ears in an effort to not hear her wheezes. I wrote some bad poetry.

“Where are the people/ with the casseroles?” I read out loud.

Joshua whispered to me, “This is the most I’ve ever liked someone who died.”

§

A week before my brother Joshua died, tragically and far too young, he laid out for me his elaborate plan to steal the neighbor’s dog.  He’d formed a bond with the Scotty-mix during his midnight walks to buy packs of Marlboros. The dog, Raider, would wear a bandana for disguise, his shaggy gray fur dyed yellow. “That’s the only dog I could see myself really loving, Rebecca,” he said, “besides Brownie, of course.” Joshua loved temporary things. Wanderers. In his twenty-two years, he only had one pet he called his own.  The mutt with German shepherd coloring that Joshua lovingly referred to as Brownie introduced himself to our family during dinner when Joshua was about nine years old. Brownie put his wet nose on our glass back door, poked out his tongue and started to lick the shiny surface. Ignoring the whines of the fat Beagle in the kitchen and the protests of our mother, Joshua picked up the strips of roast he’d been stirring into the mashed potatoes on his plate, opened the door, and dropped them in Brownie’s open mouth.

Brownie became Joshua’s friend after that. He’d drop by when he was in the neighborhood. Brownie didn’t have an owner. My family hypothesized that when Brownie started to walk, he couldn’t stop. Our dad had called him Nomad, until Joshua christened him Brownie.  We spotted Brownie all over our town, sometimes a forty-five minute car ride from our house. Always on a mission. We tried to keep him, several times. Once he limped to our backdoor with a hole bitten through his leg. My parents sat in an emergency room all night, using our bill money to get him ten stitches. Brownie chewed them off. A week later, he turned up with new stitches. He’d been neutered. My family realized we weren’t the only people who wanted him that he didn’t want back. Despite Brownie’s shaky allegiance, Joshua still jumped up and down every time he saw him. They greeted each other like cruelly separated best friends, snuggling for hours on the back porch. The unstable nature of Joshua’s life-dog always worried me.

§

I met my life-dog in a ditch on the way to history class my sophomore year in college. I’d left my parents’ house an hour early in hopes of running into my new boyfriend in the cafeteria.  On the winding road, by the gas plant, about two minutes from my parents’ house, I slammed on my brakes when a black dog darted across the road. I pulled over and got out. I told myself I was just checking to make sure it wasn’t injured. When I walked to the side of the road, I saw that it had crawled into a drainage pipe. “Puppy,” I shouted. It growled back. I looked down at the drainage pipe; it was at the end of a very steep ditch. I knew I would need some help to climb down, get the dog, and climb back up. “I have to go to class,” I told it. “But after that I’ll come back with my sister. I promise.”

I called my dad from school and told him about the dog. I told him about the growl, how I figured it either had puppies or rabies. He thought back to my days of darting under the minivan to escape a harmless St. Bernard. “Leave it to the professionals, Rebecca,” he said. I told him I would. I went to the same school as my sister, Jennifer. When she got out of class, we checked the ditch. The dog was still there. We coaxed it out with a bag of Cheetos. It was a small puppy, a smooth-haired Border Collie mix. We put him in on our car and took him home, letting him have free rein of the back yard. When my dad drove up he admonished me for getting the dog, then said, “Why isn’t there a collar and a leash on him? He might leave.”

I believe that Charlie, the Border Collie, waited in the ditch for me because I’d made him a promise. I honestly don’t know why I did. When I saw the flash of black cross the street, I instinctively followed it. Charlie and I have the same mind. We worry. I have to leave him at my parent’s house with their big yard, but when I come home he nips my ankles, angry for a minute, then we dance together with glee. The day my brother left us, we once again entered family crisis mode, pulling out the minivan to collect everybody. That night no one slept, but we all lay in our beds for a little while with our eyes closed. I tried, but Charlie wouldn’t let me. He poked me with his nose until I followed him. One by one, we went to each person’s room. We watched them breathe for a minute and then moved on. Then we made our rounds again. When I tried to sit down, Charlie cried. So all night, we circled the house, watching people in their beds. The next day I told my dad.

“I guess he’s worried about us,” I said. “No, Rebecca, he’s a herding dog. He thinks he’s lost one of his sheep.”

§

My sister, Jennifer, likes to order eggs off the internet. Once she hatched a family of quail in our living room. Together, the hatchlings planned a breakout, the eight of them scattered. One pooped on my grandfather’s picture. Another on my mother’s lace curtains. A few years after this, a turkey egg came unexpectedly in the mail. Probably a gift from the company: “Here, have a free turkey, then order from us again.” We hatched the turkey and gave him to a man who often saw wild turkeys on his farm. The turkey egg arrived in a box with layers of cushiony foam. We left this box, open and forgotten, on our deck long after the birth of the turkey. Soon, an old Beagle about nine with almost no teeth, bald spots, and sagging nipples from yet another batch of puppies claimed the box as her bed and slept there every night.  Her family had moved out of our neighborhood, abandoning her. Kassie’s death had left an old beagle-sized hole in our hearts. We welcomed the new old Beagle. She and Charlie became bosom buddies. We named her Sally. Charlie believed Sally when she told him they needed to howl at trees or chase leaves like they were rabbits. Sally believed she had to keep an eye on our perimeter. Protect us.

Sally was not like any dog we had ever met. She’d had enough of wandering. When she found that box, she refused to leave. Without a leash or a fence, she stayed. Charlie and I liked to spend summer mornings walking around the neighborhood. Sally spent hers sitting on the back porch, watching the neighbors leave for work.  When Sally saw us leaving, she stood up, stretched her short arthritic legs and followed us down the driveway. We often met Joshua on these walks, on his way back from a cigarette run, the neighbor’s dog, Raider, following closely behind him. We’d take a few laps together. Then we’d all go back up the driveway. Charlie and I went inside the house, Raider turned around and headed home, and Sally sat at Joshua’s side on the porch steps while he smoked. She refused to come in the house until we all were inside with her. After Joshua died, Charlie and I still took these walks. Sally toppled down the driveway behind us, and Raider, coming from the direction of the gas station, met us mid-walk. After several laps, we all headed up the driveway together. Charlie and I went inside, Raider went home, and Sally sat on the porch steps for a while. After the length of a cigarette, Sally tapped her nails on the glass door, wanting to come in.

Rebecca Childers, a West Virginia native, has an MFA from West Virginia University. She teaches writing and film at Marshall University, and she lives with her border collie named Chuck.