Michael Christie - The Beggar's Garden

The thought of Buddy feasting upon his corpse filled Dan with a curious pride. Buddy would do what he had to do to survive. This stood as another example of what non-dog-owners could never understand.

“I just don’t want to see you miss out on an ideal opportunity is all,” Winston said.

“You know what the saddest part about this whole Ginnie situation is? Who the biggest losers are?” Dan said, excited like an oilman who’d struck it rich with a geyser of the unsaid. “Jo and Buddy, that’s who. Those dogs love each other. You can tell. Buddy hasn’t been himself all week. He’s having trouble eating. And how cruel and immature is it for someone to deny these two innocent dogs their only pleasure.”

“You’re aware of my theories on female friends, Dan. Nonexistent. Oxymoronic. And I don’t want to tell you who the moron is in this situation. Believe me, there are plenty others out there, and to be honest, she wasn’t exactly Best in Breed at Westminster, if you know what I mean.”

After they hung up, Dan realized his eyes had been tracing the geometry of Ginnie’s building in the same way he’d doodled whenever on the phone as a kid. The drawings he’d found he’d done were always more interesting than anything he managed with conscious effort.

Sheets of light had punctured the clouds and were refracting in the facets of her condo. The structure seemed more in the way now than it ever had. Like it was a spaceship recently touched down and the crew, disguised as humans, were wreaking immeasurable havoc on the city. There should be insurance for something like this, Dan thought. There ought to be a guarantee on something as important as a view.

He saw movement in her window and realized this would look really bad. Him out there, it looked creepy. Great, he thought, now he couldn’t even use his balcony.

That night, Dan and Buddy watched the special features on one of his DVDs, then Dan fixed himself a cosmopolitan and grilled some salmon.

“You know what the truth is?” he said to Buddy, because he seemed like he wanted to hear it. “The truth is there’s probably — no, very probably — someone out there in the city, maybe someone even living in this building, my building, who’s just like Ginnie in every way. She may even be a nurse for all I know, maybe she even has the same messy car and all the same opinions on things, only she doesn’t … you know, without the, the affliction Ginnie has.” Buddy’s smacking of the blackened salmon skin seemed to be an agreement.

Dan hand fed him some of the filet and scraped the rest into the dog’s bowl. Better to give it to someone who’d enjoy it, and he was having trouble tasting because of the booze. After a while Dan ran out of Cointreau and cranberry juice, so he started drinking the vodka straight, calling them vodkapolitans to Buddy as a joke. It grew dark and he turned on the lights. Reflected images of his home leapt into the windows and he could no longer see Ginnie’s building or anyone else’s, and both Buddy and Dan liked it that way.

They played for what must have been hours with one of Buddy’s favourite toys, a rope connected to a rubber ball. Buddy’s jaws were strong enough for Dan to pick him up and swing him like an Olympic hammer-throw. They were doing exactly this when Buddy unlatched and went flailing across the living room, his body glancing an end table and sandwiching a lamp against the wall, breaking its ceramic base in two.

Buddy lay there, his husky breathing laced with whines, and he flinched at Dan’s touch. It seemed so sad to Dan that Buddy could never grasp the concept of intent. “I’m so sorry, Buddy,” he repeated over and over as he ground his face into the carpet, level with the dog, whose breath was hot and meaty, his gums slick black. Dan found himself weeping. The dog squeezed out one final whimper and began licking Dan’s hand, then his face.

In the same instant, Dan realized both that he’d been lonely and that he wasn’t anymore, like a person waking up after routine surgery and being told in the same breath that they’d found a tumour and that it had been successfully removed.

Late that night, the vodka long gone, Dan flicked the lights vigorously, making a giant strobe light of his place, like a fucking disco in here, he said before he lost consciousness on the couch.

She called early the next day.

“Dan,” she said, “I’m sorry to ask you this.”

“It’s okay,” Dan said, “just say it.” His hangover was just getting going and he felt benevolent.

“My brother”—Ginnie’s voice veered toward a sob but she recovered—“he isn’t well, and I need to go to Toronto for a week to drive him to appointments. I need you to dog sit.”

Dan told her he was sorry to hear that. “Have you known for a while?” he asked, with a selfish desire to be sure this was what had kept her from calling.

“I just found out. Look, Dan, I don’t know who else to ask. You’re so good with her. And Buddy is too. I would take her to a kennel, but you know how those places are.”

“You could take her to a dog spa?” he said, wanting to stretch this moment out as long as possible, her needing something and him about to provide it.

She laughed, sniffed. “Yeah, not likely.”

He met Ginnie and Jo in the lobby of his building. There was a flurry of phone numbers and intricate instructions for Jo’s feeding and general care. Ginnie’s hair was up but she’d left pieces to hang like spider legs at her temples. Ginnie was someone who still believed in dressing up to fly and he couldn’t help but find this charming. Her voice was strong with tragedy and necessity.

“I think I might have made some kind of mistake …,” he said at the last possible minute, the beginning of a speech he hadn’t known he’d been preparing.

She looked relieved. “Dan, I agree, it was a mistake, and I got weird the other night. Can we just be friends again and act like it never happened? Sort of block it out? I’ve thought about it and that’s what I want. I just think it’s really important for the dogs to stay friends.”

“That’s basically what I was thinking,” he replied.

She kissed his cheek and they hugged and she got in a cab.

“Look who’s here,” Dan said, and Buddy leapt almost as high as the fridge.

He took the reunited friends to the park, ran them for hours and later grilled the last of the salmon, which was now officially Buddy’s favourite. Buddy had more energy than Dan had seen in weeks, and as for himself, Dan found that another animal in the house simply doubled the amount of joy.

His life felt full, he thought that night in bed, populated. This business with Ginnie had convinced him once again of the irrationality of others. How awful it was that Buddy was the one who’d had to endure the worst of it. Dan decided then that he would get another dog, as a companion for Buddy. This way Buddy could never again have his best friend taken from him on a whim, and Dan could watch the dogs grow together. He knew another Andalucian would look a little obsessive, but he didn’t care. The ‘Lucian was the finest breed he’d ever known. He settled on emailing Sandy and Ihor the next day.

In the morning he woke to an odd, two-tone sound, like a faint police siren with inadequate power. He padded to his living room and discovered that the sound originated from a furry heap. It was Jo and Buddy. They were next to the couch, by his DVD rack, fucking. Buddy had mounted her, with something that resembled lipstick passing between them.

He wondered if he should stop them but did nothing. He watched. It wasn’t a bestiality thing, nothing like that, he wasn’t close to aroused, it was something else — a kind of vicarious admiration he’d seen on Winston’s face that day in his backyard when he watched Jacob hit a ball with a green plastic bat. Buddy perked up and regarded Dan with a sort of smile, mostly on account of his mouth being just shaped that way, but Dan knew there was real joy there, the little guy probably felt like he was back in Spain, releasing some tension after a long day of vigilant herding. Dan wondered how he would explain things to Ginnie if Jo became pregnant. But even if Buddy wasn’t fixed, he believed Jo almost definitely was, so he put it out of his mind. Dan watched as Buddy, in a workmanlike way, devoid of all the absurd facial expressions and ridiculous moanings of humans, pushed Jo around in a little circle.