Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [67]
Wally had a loved, longtime companion of a Dalmatian as a kid. He’d thought now to adopt an older dog, one who wouldn’t need a lot of training. We tried cozying up to a couple of the grown-up dogs at the shelter, and endured a serious bout of sympathy for a wild-eyed, frizzy thing who seemed made out of the irreconcilable parts of a dozen breeds, with two different-colored eyes and ears that seemed perpetually to be telling time like clock hands.
But sympathy gave way, in the face of the big black puppy who was already way too big for the cage in which he was confined, down at the bottom of a stack of cages. He lay on his side and looked up at us with eyes of a clear, deep chestnut, tail thumping on the floor. We were his in about thirty seconds. Out of the cage, he was an unsteady ball of rippling black fur, a big domed head, a soft tongue pink and tentative as the foot of a snail. A huge snail, in this case. What was he? Newfoundland and Lab? Some exotic bird-hunting retriever? He’d been found wandering around on a farm, hooked up with an older stray. He’d been growing so fast that, let out of the cage, he seemed hardly able to master his four uncooperative legs. We couldn’t wait to bring him home; he was evidence, he was our common futurity, he was blessed distraction, one thing for us to focus on together that didn’t seem to lead in the same direction everything else did.
He came home with us, riding back from the animal shelter on—was it my lap, or Wally’s? I seem to be able to feel him, still, that body a fraction the size of what it is today, and to see him also with his face against the collar of Wally’s red jacket, eager, tentative, being born right then, in front of us, into the rest of his life.
The doctor Wally was assigned at University Hospital in Burlington turned out to be as knowledgeable as anyone; despite the fact that he practiced in the far and rural north, he valued his status as a specialist, flew off to national and international conferences, and when we referred to anything we read and wondered about he’d always heard something about it already. He was not particularly warm, not emotionally available, but we’d begun to try to sort out our whirlwind of needs; if he could give us expertise, experience, intellectual perspective, then wasn’t that plenty? A hard science man, he had no faith or interest in vitamins, herbs, acupuncture. He thought the answer to AIDS would lie in drugs, and the drug of choice at that point was AZT (as it is, appallingly, these years later, when we’ve seen how poisonous and limited it is). The question was, when to begin. Early intervention, in hopes of shoring up a falling T-cell count? Or was the drug itself toxic, something to be used only when the damage it might do was plainly outweighed by the damages of the unchecked virus?
That summer Wally kept on working, a gesture toward normalcy, a way of maintaining routine. He’d take Arden for long indulgent games of chasing a tennis ball out in the park, and long walks on the railroad tracks; I loved the way the two of them seemed alert to every nuance of the other’s moods and wishes.
We allowed ourselves to feel our way toward change. Wally had been taking classes at the college where I taught, an entertainingly eccentric little liberal arts school which occupied the grounds of a fine old sheep farm. The woods and fields around the grand but derelict old manor house were dotted with examples of what the catalog called “organic architecture”: student-and-faculty-built concatenations of found windows, salvaged beams, decks and balconies mounted