Dean Koontz: A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog

In the photo, a dozen dogs face the camera in a semicircle. Most are goldens and hard to tell apart in a photograph, but a few are Labradors. Eleven of the dogs sit erect, in stately poses, chests out, heads raised, each holding the end of its leash in its mouth as proof of its high degree of learning.

The twelfth dog sits with legs akimbo, grinning, head cocked, a comic portrait of a clownish canine, ready for fun. This obvious free spirit is Trixie.

A trainer told us that when Trixie and her classmates were being taught the stay command, Trixie learned it quicker than the rest. At that point, further lessons on the same subject became a chance for her to have fun.

After the dogs seemed to learn to stay, all the trainers went into the adjacent room, closing the door behind them, leaving not one human in sight. Between rooms, a view window on the trainers’ side was a mirror from the dogs’ perspective. The teachers could watch the students and learn how long each maintained the stay.

For a minute, all the dogs did well. Then Trixie surveyed the room to make doubly sure no human had returned, and she broke her stay. She went to each of her classmates, one by one, and tried to tease him or her into joining the rebellion.

One of the trainers rattled the doorknob. Trixie sprang back to her original position, as if she had never disobeyed the command.

Until all the dogs in the class had learned to hold the stay, Trixie played the temptress. Frequently she induced a few classmates to break their positions, but at the rattle of the doorknob, she sprinted to her place and sat with her chest out and head raised, letting her pals take the fall.

Many incidents confirmed that Trixie had a sense of humor and suggested an uncanny level of intelligence, but my favorite occurred one night when we went to our friend-and assistant-Elaine’s house for dinner. By this time, we had moved into our new home and closed our offices in Newport Center. Elaine now worked in our house with Linda, and Trixie spent hours every day in their office.

I’m reluctant to compliment Elaine in this account because she’ll take it as a sign of weakness. Around here, giving anyone too many compliments brings out in that person the same predatory instinct that energizes a hungry lion when it glimpses a limping gazelle. My kind words will earn me much mockery not only from all our friends who know Elaine but also from Elaine herself. I must admit, however, that being a target can be as much fun as dishing it out.

Anyway, here goes: She is an attractive lady with lovely blue eyes, much older than anyone would believe, very much older, beyond my powers of calculation, but it is her personality that wins her so many friends and makes them so loyal to her. Elaine genuinely likes people, and she is sincerely interested in the lives of everyone she meets.

When Elaine worked for us, she went to the post office every day, to Federal Express and the office-supply store, and numerous other places, in part because we wanted her out of the house as much as possible, but also in part because we never had to worry that Elaine would be unkind to anyone or impatient with anyone. When you are even to a small degree a public figure, it is especially important that the people interacting with the world on your behalf should be liked and respected by everyone with whom they deal. Long after Elaine retired from her position with us and even after we finally were able to expunge the peculiar stains from the limestone floor around her desk, people everywhere that she went on our behalf were still asking about her, still under the spell of her inexplicable charm.

One thing that particularly fascinates Elaine’s friends is that every man she has ever dated, considered dating, or rejected without dating remains in touch with her and continues to adore her. Even those beaus who served in the Spanish-American War and can no longer recall their own names nonetheless vividly remember Elaine. She has turned down marriage proposals, and those whose hearts she’s broken with a smile continue to be her hopeful admirers, their infatuation undiminished by her rejection.

A gentleman named Al almost convinced Elaine to join him at the altar. In the end, however, he met the same fate that is visited upon all her suitors and was let down gently; this is better than having your head bitten off, which is what the female praying mantis does to its male companions, but it still hurts. Even after he had been torpedoed by Elaine, Al continued sending her flowers, candy, and other gifts to express his abiding love. One of the things he gave her was a cowboy doll that, when squeezed, played Billy Ray Cyrus singing “Achy Breaky Heart.” Elaine thought this gift was sweet, though her friends-well, the few with taste-thought that perhaps she had done a wise thing when she had moved on from Al to destroy the last desperate romantic dreams of myriad other men of advanced age.

Elaine threw a dinner party for a group of us who were all friends and former neighbors of one another. As always, she invited Trixie, whom she saw every day at work and sometimes walked. Everyone who met Trixie loved her, just as everyone loved Elaine, a fact that I have often brooded about without deciding on its meaning.

Dinner that evening was not served until ten thirty because Elaine had forgotten to turn on the oven after putting the roast in it. She looked through the view window a few times, upset that the meat would not cook, before she noticed the oven was off. None of us in attendance-and starving-found this development surprising. Elaine can spend ten minutes looking for the car keys that she’s holding in her hand. Lest you worry that her occasional confusion indicates the onset of Alzheimer’s, people who knew her when she was a teenager tell us that even then she could spend ten minutes searching for the horses to pull the covered wagon when the poor beasts were already standing in their traces and ready to go.

When you start drinking red wine at six o’clock, expecting dinner at seven thirty, and when dinner arrives three hours later than promised, you are in a very forgiving mood and find the chef to be as adorable as do the uncountable men whom she has discarded like old shoes. Conversation around the dinner table was lively if not raucous, and surprisingly coherent, considering. About halfway through the meal, someone asked Elaine if she had heard from Al lately, and before she could reply, from under the table came the voice of Billy Ray Cyrus singing “Achy Breaky Heart,” as if Al were under there, concealed by the tablecloth.

Trixie, when visiting a friend, never before or thereafter appropriated the property of the host for her own use, but with her timely addition of a soundtrack, she got the biggest laugh of the night, and came out from under the table to accept applause.

Any Spot or Fido might decide that a colorfully outfitted cowboy doll must be a dog toy. Settling with it under the dinner table would also be predictable dog conduct.

But Trixie had stood on her hind feet to pluck the doll off a shelf that she could barely reach. Instead of munching it at once and activating the recording, she took it quietly under the table, without anyone seeing her. That she bit the song from it precisely when someone asked Elaine if she’d heard from Al lately…

Well, I won’t go so far as to say that this uncanny canine knew Al had given the doll to Elaine, that she bided her time and waited to hear Al’s name, that she knew why this would strike all present as hilarious. For suggesting such a thing, I would no doubt attract the attention of the Bureau for the Compassionate Care of the Inadvisably Mystic-Minded or some other government agency that would want to lock me up for my own good. But as with so many things about Trixie, this moment at a dinner party was magical and uncanny.