The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [43]
The office door opened and Fred emerged, looking indifferent.
“Some mess you make, mon,” Winston laughed.
“Just give me the keys and shut up.” Fred held his hand out.
“Ease up, Fred. Take it teasy.”
“Just give me the keys and get out,” Fred barked.
Winston reached into his pocket and pulled out a ring with five keys on it. “Okay, Fred. There’s the keys, right? If me go, who ’gwan clean all dis up? And who ’gwan do all your shopping? Who—”
“Okay, I get the point. Just leave me alone.” Fred walked back to the office and slammed the door.
He slapped the new key ring on the desk, fixed himself a bourbon on ice, and sat down to ponder. Winston began to clean the enormous condo, playing loud music wherever he went. Rusty had accidentally gotten locked between the glass door and the back door and no one heard him crying, so he finally had to squat and push right there on the terra-cotta tiled floor. What was worse was that he had to stay there and look at it, until someone found him and subsequently punished him; it was like spending the weeks before a murder trial in a cell with the festering dead body.
Fred found him. Winston’s music had driven him out of the office to deal with the stereo, and then the smell of fresh dog shit drove him to the door where Rusty sat whimpering and looking sorry. Five minutes later, the dog was still trying to remove remnants of his own feces from his nostrils. It was drying in the fur behind his eyebrows, and he continually pressed his wide head into the sand to scrub it from himself. He ran to the sea and snorted salt water through his nose, and then took off toward the tree line.
In growth too dense for any human (unless armed with a sharp machete), Rusty and some other dogs from the neighborhood made tunnels and roamed them daily, sniffing and marking boundaries. Some of them had made a home of it, burrowing dens into the steady incline under screw pine roots and claiming chunks of territory. Rusty had a favorite spot too, and stayed there whenever he grew tired of Fred’s beatings.
He found a sunny spot and groomed for ten minutes, then walked his rounds and stopped at a place between two tree trunks—a small space of only a yard or so. He positioned himself between the trunks, sat up tall, and took a huge breath of air. He exhaled, letting his bulky body fill the gap, and fell into a lazy, depressed snooze.
A few times, he shifted his weight and felt a poke in his rib cage from an object sticking out of the sand, then shifted again to avoid it like it was a loose spring in a mattress. After a few minutes of shifting, Rusty grew impatient with the sharp intrusion and got up. He backed away to sniff at whatever had poked him, and then leaned down to lick it.
Any human would have known that it was the corner edge of a shovel head. But to Rusty, it was simply a familiar metallic taste, one that reminded him of the dumpster outside the Island Hotel Restaurant and the gatepost next to the pool.
DOG FACT #4
Humping Inanimate Objects
Adolescent dogs, when excited, often mount inanimate objects. This can embarrass owners, and is best controlled by doing something else and not thinking about it.
How many times have we heard a master exclaim, “That dog is simply shameless!” And indeed we are. Shameless and stupid at first. Do you think we want to be humping the furniture? Did you want to hump that awkward pimply sophomore in the back of your father’s Buick? I doubt it, but you know, everybody has to start somewhere.
Dogs start with whatever is handy. The more there are other dogs around, the less your dog will feel the need to rub his most private parts against your leather sectional. I preferred a more malleable practice partner—a throw rug, a visitor’s jacket, children’s stuffed toys. That was when I lived in New Hope, Pennsylvania, in the 1960s with the bumper-sticker people. They had a collection that covered every square inch of their two cars and every interior wall of the small Victorian row