Pugger
I flew to Oklahoma to get him. The flat where he was born was above a veterinary clinic, a chaotic perpetual motion machine of a dozen others like him plus one cranky dachshund. His father proudly wore a green diaper festooned with bowtied bones as though it certified his snorting, slobbering monarchy. He gave the puppy a final approving sniff and me a blast of his foul breath before I placed the ball of yellow fur in a soft-sided carry on with mesh windows. When I pulled him out of it back in Colorado late that night, my daughter clutched him to her blue and white nightgown. He was her surgery dog. Her lifeline out of another unimaginable blow.
In time, we’d learn that this second entry to her brain finally got it all. That came after her mother died a year prior from her own brain cancer, after she’d asked me if mom had caught the cancer from her, after the tumor in her own head blew apart her body’s fight or flight cascade so that her vitals oscillated in terrifying swings as she willed herself to rise above the second time she was forced to spend an entire day with sterilized instruments snaking their way from the back of her nose to the cavities within. The dog was the turning point. An avatar of normalcy that let her look beyond. When she hugged him to her chest, I had to look away.
For years, he spent each night in her bed, snoring intermittently like a drunken old man. A white noise machine from hell. She’d pull him close and then thrust him away, sometimes yelling at him, depositing him on the floor or even out of her room. He’d absorb the mild assaults with typical sangfroid, content to curl up and wheeze somewhere else for a bit until he’d return to the bed and brace his front paws on its side, training his bulging eyes on the girl above. No, no, don’t give me those puppy eyes, she’d say in mock rebuke, before she brought him up once more.
She named him Fang. He had none in his wizened face, yet still managed to hoover food as though he were some kind of power tool. Once, he shot in to steal a rawhide belonging to a far larger neighbor dog and received a bite-sized hole in his head for his efforts. He went back for more. Another time, he blew up a piece of chocolate cake all over the girl’s white comforter. She considered doling out her own hole to the head but settled for banishing him to his crate, where he snored happily. When we moved to Montana, he spotted a bear in the backyard and charged it with impunity, prancing and wheezing in outsized pride after the bear shoved off.
When the doorbell rang, he’d attack the larger dog and be tossed into the mudroom for it; there, he’d sometimes sit for hours, unperturbed by being forgotten in havoc’s wake. He’d just emerge calmly and resume his favorite position by the fire. Or if the sun was hot enough, he’d decamp to the nearest patch of cement and go to his back, where his feigned rigor mortis was convincing enough that we’d sometimes go pull on an outstretched leg. Just to be sure.
When he stole my wife’s sweater while she showered, and then summarily dragged it to the yard, he simply became Pug. As in, the pug did it. In time, he was Pugger. The girl grew and her cancer remained at bay and her room morphed into an early teen temple in which his prolific shedding and occasional refusal to go outside to use the bathroom was no longer welcomed overnight. But he’d curl in her chair and harmonize with the sound machine until he was sent back to sleep by the fire. When she emerged each day, he’d greet her with his Cheshire grin and the barest twitch of his curled tail.
One friend rechristened him as Gerald. Another spun an entire personality for him as a laid-back drug dealer. My parents took him in for a year, where they joined the inevitable chorus of recounting his exasperating path through the world, but so too did my mother hold him on her lap each day, the dog in a softly vibrating ball, the book or tablet balanced just above. He always worked himself into daily conversation.
Three weeks ago, he crashed through the dog door at 2 AM in pursuit of another bear in the yard. This one a repeat visitor who liked to nap on the outdoor sofa. Perhaps in respect for the bruin’s ethos, they reached a détente and the girl awoke to find bear and dog simply following each other casually across the grass. If you knew the pug, this would make sense. Four days before his time came to an end, he slept happily a few feet away while the same bear opened the back door, entered the living room, and looked around for a bit. We like to think he’d just come to see his friend, for he left without damage.
The girl stood in a semicircle of her family around the steel table with the blanket on top, her hand on his ruff, intertwined with those of everyone else. She leaned over and gave him a kiss before one syringe was depressed, then another. He stunk and he shed like hell and he maddeningly licked the air for hours on end and he refused to listen and we loved the little bastard fiercely with all of our hearts.
