Garth Stein - The Art of Racing in the Rain

He lifts me easily, he cradles me, and I can smell the day on him. I can smell everything he’s done. His work, the auto shop where he’s behind the counter all day, standing, making nice with the customers who yell at him because their BMWs don’t work right and it costs too much to fix them and that makes them mad so they have to yell at someone. I can smell his lunch. He went to the Indian buffet he likes. All you can eat. It’s cheap, and sometimes he takes a container with him and steals extra portions of the tandoori chicken and yellow rice and has it for dinner, too. I can smell beer. He stopped somewhere. The Mexican restaurant up the hill. I can smell the tortilla chips on his breath. Now it makes sense. Usually, I’m excellent with elapsed time, but I wasn’t paying attention because of my emoting.

He places me gently in the tub and turns on the handheld shower thing and says, “Easy, Enz.”

He says, “Sorry I was late. I should have come straight home, but the guys from work insisted. I told Craig I was quitting, and …”

He trails off, and I realize that he thinks that my accident was because he was late . Oh, no. That’s not how it was meant. It’s so hard to communicate because there are so many moving parts. There’s presentation and there’s interpretation and they’re so dependent on each other it makes things very difficult. I didn’t want him to feel bad about this. I wanted him to see the obvious, that it’s okay for him to let me go. He’s been going through so much, and he’s finally through it. He needs to not have me around to worry about anymore. He needs me to free him to be brilliant.

He is so brilliant. He shines. He’s beautiful with his hands that grab things and his tongue that says things and the way he stands and chews his food for so long, mashing it into a paste before he swallows. I will miss him and little Zoë, and I know they will miss me. But I can’t let sentimentality cloud my grand plan. After this happens, Denny will be free to live his life, and I will return to earth in a new form, as a man, and I will find him and shake his hand and comment on how talented he is, and then I will wink at him and say, “Enzo says hello,” and turn and walk quickly away as he calls after me, “Do I know you?” He will call, “Have we met before?”

After the bath he cleans the kitchen floor while I watch; he gives me my food, which I eat too quickly again, and sets me up in front of the TV while he prepares his dinner.

“How about a tape,” he says.

“Yes, a tape,” I reply, but of course, he doesn’t hear me.

He puts in a video from one of his races and he turns it on and we watch. It’s one of my favorites. The racetrack is dry for the pace lap, and then just after the green flag is waved, indicating the start of the race, there is a wall of rain, a torrential downpour that engulfs the track, and all the cars around him spin out of control into the fields and he drives through them as if the rain didn’t fall on him, like he had a magic spell that cleared water from his path. Just like the 1993 Grand Prix of Europe, when Senna passed four cars on the opening lap, four of the best championship drivers in their championship cars—Schumacher, Wendlinger, Hill, Prost—and he passed them all. Like he had a magic spell.

Denny is as good as Ayrton Senna. But no one sees him because he has responsibilities. He has his daughter, Zoë, and he had his wife, Eve, who was sick until she died, and he has me. And he lives in Seattle when he should live somewhere else. And he has a job. But sometimes when he goes away he comes back with a trophy and he shows it to me and tells me all about his races and how he shone on the track and taught those other drivers in Sonoma or Texas or Mid-Ohio what driving in wet weather is really about.

When the tape is over he says, “Let’s go out,” and I struggle to get up.

He lifts my butt into the air and centers my weight over my legs and then I’m okay. To show him, I rub my muzzle against his thigh.

“There’s my Enzo.”

We leave our apartment; the night is sharp, cool and breezy and clear. We only go down the block and back because my hips hurt so much, and Denny sees. Denny knows. When we get back, he gives me my bedtime cookies and I curl into my bed on the floor next to his. He picks up the phone and dials.

“Mike,” he says. Mike is Denny’s friend from the shop where they both work behind the counter. Customer relations, they call it. Mike’s a little guy with friendly hands that are pink and always washed clean of smell. “Mike, can you cover for me tomorrow? I have to take Enzo to the vet again.”

We’ve been going to the vet a lot recently to get different medicines that are supposed to help make me more comfortable, but they don’t, really. And since they don’t, and considering all that went on yesterday, I’ve set the Master Plan in motion.

Denny stops talking for a minute, and when he starts again, his voice doesn’t sound like his voice. It’s rough, like when he has a cold or allergies.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m not sure it’s a round trip visit.”

I may not be able to form words, but I understand them. And I’m surprised by what he said, even though I set it up. For a moment, I’m surprised my plan is working. It is the best thing for all involved, I know. It’s the right thing for Denny to do. He’s done so much for me, my whole life. I owe him the gift of setting him free. Letting him ascend. We had a good run, and now it’s over; what’s wrong with that?

I close my eyes and listen vaguely in a half sleep as he does the things he does before he sleeps each night. Brushing and squirting and splashing. So many things. People and their rituals. They cling to things so hard sometimes.

2

He picked me out of a pile of puppies, a tangled, rolling mass of paws and ears and tails, behind a barn in a smelly field near a town in eastern Washington called Spangle. I don’t remember much about where I came from, but I remember my mother, a heavy bitch of a lab with pendulous teats that swung to and fro as my littermates and I chased them down from across the yard. Honestly, our mother didn’t seem to like us much, and she was fairly indifferent to whether we ate or starved. She seemed relieved whenever one of us left. One fewer yipping mammal tracking her down to bleed her of her milk.

I never knew my father. The people on the farm told Denny that he was a shepherd-poodle mix, but I don’t believe it. I never saw a dog that looked like that on the farm, and while the lady was nice, the alpha man was a mean bastard who would look you in the eyes and lie even if telling the truth would serve him better. He expounded at length on the relative intelligence of dog breeds, and he firmly believed that shepherds and poodles were the smart ones, and therefore would be more desirable—and more valuable—when “bred back to a lab for temperament.” All a bunch of junk. Everyone knows that shepherds and poodles aren’t especially smart. They’re responders and reactors, not independent thinkers. Especially the blue-eyed sheep dogs from Down Under that people make such a fuss over when they catch a Frisbee. Sure, they’re clever and quick, but they don’t think outside the box; they’re all about convention.

I’m sure my father was a terrier. Because terriers are problem solvers. They’ll do what you tell them, but only if it happens to be in line with what they wanted to do anyway. There was a terrier like that on the farm. An Airedale. Big and brown-black and tough. No one messed with him. He didn’t stay with us in the gated field behind the house. He stayed in the barn down the hill by the creek where the men went to fix their tractors. But sometimes he would come up the hill, and when he did, everyone steered clear. Word in the field was he was a fighting dog the alpha man kept separate because he’d kill a dog for sniffing in his direction. He’d rip the fur from a nape because of a lazy glance. And when a bitch was in heat, he’d mount her good and go about his business without a thought about who was watching or who cared. I’ve often wondered if he sired me. I have his brown-black coloring and my coat is slightly wiry, and people frequently comment that I must be part terrier. I like to think I came from a determined gene pool.