Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

I walked through the fields I’d last seen him in. I walked the road parallel to the fields. I went down to the old apple trees, then past them and past the old fence and over the small creek. I followed it in the dark down through the aspen forest to where it foamed in a little waterfall. My shoes and trouser legs were soaked, and my hands ached from the cold. I had fallen a couple of times and had not, I noted, sprung lithely back up. There were creatures around me, field rats and maybe an owl, but there wasn’t a stalky, imperfect Labrador retriever who knew less about handling himself in these woods than the average beginning Boy Scout.

I fell again as I bushwhacked up to the house, and, speaking of tenderfoots, this time I opened up some skin and broke my flashlight. “Bear,” I shouted in the darkness, a little embarrassed by the panic I heard above the grass that insisted on making noises, in the freshening wind, as if something coursed in instant response to my call.

I found another flashlight that worked, and then I drove the car back and forth on our road. I went miles in each direction, pausing to aim the flashlight through my opened windows at the grounds of every trailer, double-wide, shack and farmhouse I passed. There weren’t that many, and the dog was at none of them. At home, I locked up and, sitting in wet clothes and a shirt with blood on the right cuff, I said to the old dog that the puppy would doubtless come back in the middle of the night, that he was running a deer or ferreting in somebody’s compost heap. “You wake me when he comes,” I told Pooh before I went up. He hadn’t made it upstairs for a couple of years.

Dogs drift. They stray. They take off because of a smell, a sound, something inside their skulls that is part of what makes them other than us. I fell asleep in our bed and not that much later I woke, as I’d been waking for a while, to the sound of my voice. I took a bathrobe downstairs with me and passed the sofa onto which Pooh, in spite of his lameness, was able to haul himself every night. I went to the other sofa and lay beneath one of the heavy old quilts.

Looking out from under it, I said to Pooh, “Any word?”

His cloudy eye glittered in the darkness of the living room and then it closed.

After hospital rounds the next morning, I drove the twenty miles home because I knew that Bear would be sitting on the porch, looking, as usual, bewildered. He was not. I drove back, and I continued to wrestle with my imagination as I’d done, fairly successfully, the night before. Every time I saw the dog cringing from headlights on a two-lane highway, or, tail down and back curved in fear, crouching over his forepaws in a dark forest that felt alien, I pulled down the wide black window shade I remembered my grade school teachers hauling on small pulleys so that we could better see a film strip on how corn grows or why the washing of one’s hands is a precious errand and a high responsibility. I drew the black blind between me and the terrified Labrador, who’d been struck with a stick by a man at his trap line, or who was bleeding from the flanks where he’d been shot with a hunting bow, or who ran at a sideways angle, slower and slower, because of his kicked-in ribs.

Instead of eating lunch before my clinic hours, I drove home again, pulling the blind as I needed to, and inspected the house and the grounds. I drove with the windows open and the radio off so I could hear him, and so I could whistle for him as I drove. Past Dorney Walters Road, past Sanitarium Road, I signaled to him, in case he was caught, or lost, or injured, that I was here, that this — toward the sound of my calling and calling — was how to come home.

After work that day, at a quarter of six, before I went back to feed Pooh, to maybe find a young black dog on my porch, I telephoned my daughter’s office. I lay in the swivel chair and let my tired feet dangle. I thought I was in danger of talking about Bear, but I wanted to be certain I was calm for her, even casual, so I rehearsed. You know that dumb-ass puppy took off on me, I said. Probably got himself lost in the hills or near the river, I said. I thought about rivers, how fast and deep and cold they were. I’d never put ID collars on the dogs because I didn’t want them getting snagged and drowned in rivers or streams. I said to her, I have to confess I’m getting worried, and if I had put them in collars then maybe someone, finding him, could call me. Maybe he wouldn’t be lost or mistreated or frightened someplace. I pulled on the long white sash cord, and the broad black screen came down. She wasn’t in, and I went out and drove back, climbing into the wild hills I lived in with, apparently, one less dog.

I remembered what I had actually said to myself in rehearsal for my daughter and then had chosen to dismiss: if they wore collars, I had said in my thoughts, then maybe someone could find me . I was reminded of something. I thought I knew what, but I drew the blind back down and, once I saw that nothing— no one were the words I heard in my head — was lying, all muzzle and ears and big, dark eyes, on the porch, I went through the business of the early evening without allowing myself a glimpse of what I didn’t want to see. I took Pooh out and hung around the yard while he limped from bush to rock to fence post. “You do your rounds,” I told him, “and I do mine. And you piss up posts a good deal better than I do.” Then I fed him and thought about feeding me, but settled for some slices of cheddar somewhat spotted with blue-green mold. I chewed on one for a while and then, leaning over the garbage pail, which direly needed emptying, I spat the mouthful out. I was reminded, again, and again I drew the screen up. But I’d remembered by then. I thought to call my daughter and tell her how close I’d come that night to conversing with her mother again. But I put my coat on, instead, and went out with Pooh, the two of us crabbing our way up the road half a mile or so, Pooh marking and sniffing and glaring with his opalescent eyes, me calling with, I heard, such desperation that I sounded like a warning, not a request to please come back.

The next morning, I called the Sheriff’s Department and spoke to one of the dispatchers I was friendly with. I worked in the jail as their doctor one night a week, inspecting prisoners, and I knew most of them well enough. I asked if the deputies on patrol could keep an eye out for Bear. I learned the names of the area dog wardens, and I telephoned descriptions to two of them, leaving a message for the third. I called four veterinarians to ask if anyone had brought Bear in. I called the SPCA. Now everyone knew that one more dog was missing. I let Pooh out for a final pee, then locked him in and went to work. On the way, I stopped at the offices of our newspaper and paid for a large ad. I headed it REWARD. The woman behind the counter watched the pencil, then looked up at me. She looked, and then she said, “Family pet, huh? Everybody takes it hard.”

“Do they?”

“Like a child’s gone, sometimes,” she said.

“Really,” I said. “That serious.”

“Look at you,” she said. “Here. Let go of the pencil. I write these all the time.”

“Thank you,” I said. “That’s tough work.”

“No,” she said, studying the form she printed on, “what’s tough is having dogs, I’d say.”

One strep throat, one battered baby whose mother was a battered wife, a half dozen leaky sinuses, one possible appendix, one definite milk allergy, a third pneumonia for the week, and the bonus — sixteen normal, healthy kids — and I was done and driving home. I stopped at the seasonal road a quarter of a mile from the house and parked with my windows open. I whistled for him. I listened to the strengthening winds in the evergreens before me on the hillside and to the dry grass rattling on the slope below. They were so much louder and more powerful, and I stopped my little noises and sat there awhile. An airplane engine tore up the sound of the wind, and I saw a light plane banking a couple of hundred feet above, then climbing to crest the hill that overlooked the house. The plane circled in slow, widening loops. I thought — the way you laugh hysterically — of finding a way to ask the pilot to look for Bear on the fields of yellowing grass and bony weed and corn stubble that lay on the other side of the ridge.