flashquake Nonfiction

LITTLE BEAGLE PUPPY
by Russ Anderson, Jr.

I knew something was wrong as soon as I pulled up.

It was nearly seven on a weeknight in late January. Traffic around the beltway had made me later than usual, but Trelina, who should have been wearing sweats and curling up in front of the TV by that time, was still sitting in her car. She got out as I turned my engine off. I assumed she'd locked herself out of the house somehow, and started to poke fun at her for it as we met on the sidewalk.

"I came home," she said, visibly trying to hold it together, "and the dog was dead."

The inside of our townhouse was completely dark. One of the cats — the "outdoor" one — had run outside and treed herself when Trelina got home. The other was still in here, but she scuttered away from me when I opened the front door. They knew something wasn't right, and though neither of them had felt any love for the puppy, they weren't going to throw a party now that he was dead.

I found him in the bathroom, lying on his side next to the toilet. The paper Trelina had laid down for him that morning was cleared away in that spot, but it didn't look like he'd kicked it aside in a panic. Maybe that meant he hadn't been in pain, that he hadn't died afraid. It was cold comfort, but I took it.

I wrapped him up in his blanket and a black garbage bag and, as Trelina cleaned the bathroom floor, I called the emergency vet clinic and tried to figure out what had happened. There was nothing he could have gotten into. The house was warm. He'd been perfectly fine just that morning. It wasn't likely to be parvo or any other puppy illness, the very sympathetic woman on the other end of the line said. Probably something congenital. Most likely there was nothing we could have done, no signs we might have spotted. These Things Happen.

Standard practice in Maryland is to cremate dead pets and spread them over a mass grave in Pennsylvania (in an apple orchard, the woman said, but I'm not sure even now if I believe that). I wasn't having any of it. I was going to bury him myself, in my backyard, Baltimore County law and homeowner's association be damned.

But as soon as I started digging under the single tall tree out back, I hit something that sounded an awful lot like a water pipe. Cowed by visions of a submerged yard and basement, I had a seat on the deck steps, next to the black plastic bundle that had been my dog twelve hours ago. I had no idea what to do.

Bogart's mother belonged to a friend of Trelina's. We'd brought him home less than a week before, and his adjustment to his new surroundings and the absence of his littermates had been... difficult. Nights had been particularly rough. He'd howl if he was left in his crate, but we couldn't keep him in the bed either, since he would constantly nuzzle and gnaw on us, pausing only long enough to squat and pee at the foot of the mattress once or twice a night. We'd finally resorted to keeping him boxed up in another room, covered with blankets to muffle the sound of his howls. Little beagle puppy. What a pain in the ass you'd been in life.

I cried a little then.

We decided to have him cremated. We could keep the remains rather than having them sprinkled over that imaginary Pennsylvania apple orchard. He'd be easier to bury in a tiny wooden box than a big plastic bag, and I would have time to find out where the pipes were beneath the yard. My angry determination drained away.

We took Bogey to the clinic I'd called earlier, left him to be stuck in a freezer for a week until the next scheduled arrival of the crematory's retrieval truck. I cried on the way there, and cried again on the way back home, so hard that I probably shouldn't have been driving. But Trelina was no better off.

We lay in bed together later, neither of us talking much. Trelina's arm was draped across my stomach, and I couldn't say for sure what was going through her mind, but it probably wasn't too far from what was going through mine:

Abdominal pains. A trip to the hospital during the holidays. An abortive clot of blood and miscarried tissue that might have been the most beautiful baby in the world if only it had been given a chance to grow. Tears just like those spilled tonight, and for much the same reason. All of it, less than a month ago.

I held onto my wife's arm, and hoped that February would be better.

Copyright 2003 by Russ Anderson, Jr.

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