Dog Day Afternoon

[This is another excerpt from my novel Below Sea Level. It is not for children, and it is not light reading.]

Standing over the dead body of the dog that meant more to us as a couple than any other animal we had yet to own, I am not believed.

We are burying Sage—a Dalmatian-Brittany spaniel cross I had rescued eight years prior that Eric grew to love as one would love a child, loved in certain ways more than me—under a circle of pines and the ever-shedding Eucalyptus tree, to protect her forever from the wicked Arizona sun. But there are roots, and they are making the process difficult—close to impossible. We are both taking turns in the desert heat of early May, but we are getting nowhere. A hundred degrees and the humidity of recent irrigation make us feel like we are laboring under water. As we work, our living dogs, Rosemary and Thyme, are getting worked up. Thyme is running fast and furious circles around the makeshift gravesite. Rosie has stopped running and has settled her slight figure just next to where I stand waiting for my turn to dig. She is trembling as she sits awkwardly, looking as if she might take flight any moment, and moves her gaze rapidly between Eric, me, and the body of her dead friend. She needs reassurance and there is no one available to give it. I have always anthropomorphized my smallest canine companion and, as a result, I can’t even bear to look down and see the expression I know is on her face—a wrinkled brow, a question. I reach deeper in my pockets for Kleenex I know I’ve already used up. I am trying to imagine how I can withstand the death of this dog on top of the omnipresent pain of my dying marriage. It is unimaginable.

As Sage lies next to the shallow depression rent with roots of a gnarled 50-foot pine, Eric snaps the handle of the old shovel we have been using. “Motherfucker.” He throws the handle across the yard. Thyme pauses for a moment before resuming her circles. “I’m going to Clint’s.”

Our retired neighbor Clint had a tool for everything—he’s the only man we know with a more diverse set of tools than Eric. He’s been building and rebuilding his farm for twenty-odd years, and a man raising children and then draft horses can accumulate a lot of useful equipment in that amount of time. I stay behind with Sage and with Rosemary, whose gaze I can feel moving repeatedly from Sage to me and back again. Mostly to avoid her gaze, I wipe the sweat from my face and neck with my shirt and start digging out dirt with my hands from between the roots that criss-cross Sage’s grave. Thyme, only five months old but already outweighing Sage’s fifty pounds, runs aimlessly through the trees, tossing her toys and then chasing them down, and stops only briefly to sniff her still companion from time to time. Thyme is not confused, because she is not aware. She is, however, panting heavily, and I worry briefly about her overdoing it in this heat. I don’t call her over, though, because I don’t need more complications.

Clint’s place is only three acres away, and I can actually hear something metal clang when Eric finds it and throws it in the bed of his truck. No sign of Clint. Eric will be relieved not to have to share his current mental state with him. Knowing Clint, he would have followed Eric back, and what couldn’t possibly become more painful and awkward would have. Eric is already on his way home—he is backing slowly all the way from Clint’s since the irrigation canals leave no room for Y-turns with a Ford F350—when my cell phone rings. I can’t believe that I pull it out to bother checking the number, but I do. It is my sister, Sam, calling in from across the country, probably with a funny story to tell. The pain is too much to carry alone, and I answer the phone. My voice is low and my nose is beyond stuffed up from sobbing, so she knows immediately there is something wrong.

“Sage died today.” I hear her gasp and feel guilty instantly for sharing this pain with her.

“I came home from work and saw that Eric hadn’t opened the dog door yet to let the girls in. He must have only been home a few minutes. I went out on the back porch and there she was, lying on the floor of the Arizona room.”

I hear Sam say something unintelligible. She is crying. It has been less than a month since she has thrown a ball for Sage. “I assume it was a heart attack. I don’t know.”

Sage had been coughing a congestive heart failure type of cough for months, now, and stopped being able to bear anything more than a twenty minute walk a few weeks back. At the time, I had mistakenly and naively figured she probably only had a few years left, and grew saddened at the thought. And last week, she was uncharacteristically clingy, wanting to be the lap dog she used to be. We couldn’t figure it out at the time, but it made a lot more sense now. When I found her that afternoon, she lay stretched out on her right side on the cool cement. I felt sick that she died on concrete and not on carpet, or grass, or her blanket, which was hanging on a line in the backyard to dry from being washed the night before. Her tongue was lavender in color, and spilled onto to the floor like some caricature of a dead dog. She was slightly warm, but only from the heat of an Arizona shade. Judging from her stiffness I figured she had died around lunchtime.

I don’t tell Sam about the coughing, the lavender tongue, the stiffness. She is crying hard now. We are both useless. Eric’s truck pulls back in to the drive. “I have to go. Eric needs my help.” I have ruined her evening, no doubt.

I am still crying as Eric brings over what I think is called a maul, but decided against asking to be sure. Anger has possessed Eric, and I’m jealous he’s found a way to not feel the pain, if just for a moment. He starts to attack the buried tree limbs with renewed energy, and I find myself surprised that he has not asked the identity of the caller. He was walking towards me as I closed the phone, wiped the dirt from it and put it back in my pocket. It is second nature to both of us that I should be quizzed on who would be calling me. He is ever convinced that I am being pursued by someone, anyone, who will treat me better than he can. Reassuring him that this is not the case is a full-time job. I find his lack of curiosity so unusual I tell him without his asking that Sam called, and we were both crying so badly we had to hang up. He continues to work in silence, the occasional dry sob escaping him.

It is now very warm, I’m-going-to-be-sick-and-pass-out warm, and I struggle to keep up with Eric, as if I ever could. Used to working outside all day, every day, even he is exhausted, and sweat covers his face, neck and chest. He shed his shirt long ago. He keeps resting on the handle of the maul as if he’s short of breath. Seeing him tire is unnerving because it is so rare, and I have to pull the tool from his hands—and his angry eyes—to get him to release it to me. I can feel his impatience as I make ridiculously little progress, and let him take possession of the tool after only a few minutes.

After roughly thirty minutes, we have made it about three feet down. I am worried it is not enough, but he says it is, and I defer to his assumed previous burying experience. I also know better than to argue with a deeply grieving, unstable man holding a 20 lb piece of iron. We both look at Sage and try to accept what we are about to do to her. He initially tries to shake me off when I reach for her at the same time, but relents and lets my arms join his under her body.

Lowering her into the cool bed we have created for her is excruciating, and my eyes close rather than risk meeting Eric’s above her as we hold her together. It is at this point I become aware that I am not able to feel my own grief because I am so overwhelmed with his. In some way this seems unfair to Sage, and I briefly find the energy to be angry with Eric. We have just laid her to rest when Rosemary flies without warning into the hole with Sage. Now her imagined grief washes over me too, and I am undone. Eric turns away and begins to cry once again. In my mind she has figured out what we intend to do, and she is horrified and confused. Whatever her true thoughts, she is undisputedly distressed. I scoop her into my arms and hold her as she scratches to be let down, now crying out with a high-pitched call. I set her on the edge of the grave and tell her to stay, and she does, eventually switching her gaze from my worried face back to Sage. Her face is now one tragic question. Eric and I find Sage’s favorite toys which lay scattered about the yard and lay them with her. Thyme perks up when she sees us collecting toys but retreats at Eric’s look. I am reaching for the broken shovel when Eric says, rather frantically, “Wait. She needs a tennis ball.”

I hold my breath and wait for him to find one and lay it between her paws. Death would have been preferable to witnessing this death of a friendship—maybe his only true friendship. Unable to put it off any longer, we begin to fill the hole we worked so hard to create just moments before. When we have returned all the dirt we had removed, we start collecting rocks from around the farm to lay them on the mound we have created. We have spent years clearing rocks from all parts of the property, yet for some reason we cannot find enough of them to do her justice. While Eric searches in the back of the property, I go around to the front of the house, to my flower garden. It is not a garden now—the heat, the gophers and my depressed indifference have killed its beauty weeks before—it is nothing more than a crescent-shaped piece of earth surrounded by heavy and variegated stones I have put there over the course of the previous months.

One by one, we move them to the backyard for Sage. We pile them on her to keep her safe from anything that would dare disturb the peace she has earned from her eleven years on this earth. I feel I could kill a marauding coyote with my bare hands should I catch one defiling her final bed. Rosie has gone back to playing with Thyme now, and seems reconciled to her loss, and I envy her desperately. The same cannot be said for Eric. He asks me to be left alone with her, and I gladly retreat. I try to stay occupied with the chores I have yet to complete. A few hours pass and darkness falls. No one eats, but Eric drinks interminably sitting in his office, multiple beers lined up in front of him to save him the hassle of getting up and down every few minutes for a new one. He easily downs 9 or 10 in the first 90 minutes.

On edge from his drinking but unable to stand the sight of him bearing this alone, I go and sit with him in his office, where he sits quietly. He has been there for hours. A few moments after I join him, he sets his beer down on the desk before him. He does not raise his eyes.

“Who really called today?”

I am caught completely off-guard, which in and of itself catches me completely off-guard. I am astounded that his fear has percolated through the pain of this loss to aim for me. Why should I have been surprised? We did not experience emotion even remotely the same. This had sent him God knows where, and I had lost his trail in our combined grief.

“I told you while we were outside.” Was he really questioning my honesty while burying my own dog? I could not believe that. Not even from Eric. There had to be some mistake. “Samanatha called while you were at Clint’s, and I hung up when you drove up so I could start helping you dig again.”

“There is no record of her call on your cell.”

This cannot be happening. This cannot be happening on top of the devastating death of my dog. I have wandered the house and yard for hours, trying to find a place for the pain, and trying even harder to find a place for his, and he has found time in his mourning to double-check the record of incoming calls on my phone.

That fucking phone. How many times had I wished I had left it lying in the weeds when he threw it out of the RV in Idaho during a drunken rage years ago? It had brought me nothing but hell. It was nothing more than a monitoring device he may as well have buckled around my neck the day I got it. Just the sound of it ringing—and I initially typed “wringing”—was now enough to double my heart rate, just anticipating the next tirade he was calling me with; or worse, fearing a wrong number that would lead to an endless, meaningless interrogation when the phone bill—with all its errantly damning numbers—came in the mail. I wished fervently that I had dropped it in the ground with Sage before we heaped the dirt back upon her.

These thoughts occupied the space of a second. Within two I was out of my chair in search of my phone, unwilling to stand falsely accused by a technical glitch.

“Sit down,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

It mattered. One more time, Eric had taught me that just when I was convinced there was no room inside of me for any more grief, there still was. My grief for Sage was torn now with renewed grief for us. I should have handed the phone to Eric while Sam was still on the line. I shouldn’t have answered at all, and she’d have left a message. I should have left the phone in Idaho… I left his office and went to Sage. I cried in anger now. How could a dog so loyal leave me alone in this life? Rosie crawled into my lap in the darkness, and together we cried.