Carolyn Mikulencak
You were not Larry in Luling, Louisiana. You were not yet ours in that woman’s living room. We sat on the couch while you stood by the back door, ears folded against your head like birdwings. The racetrack had named you Fair Dinkum Mate, which was hard to say in one breath although the woman tried. “Come here, Fair Dink,” she said and slapped her thigh. “Here boy,” she said, wanting to show you off to us. But you stayed by the back door, not caring if we picked you. Her teenage son stood opposite me in the distance beyond the stucco archway that opened into the kitchen. He leaned against the counter eating a bowl of cereal in the dark. I watched him watch you. The woman told me earlier on the phone that you had grown fond of him. He liked to take you out in the back yard to run circles. He’d slap your rump. You’d chase him, your tongue sloppy. When the boy’s spoon tapped his bowl, your ears pricked up and then folded in again.
“Larry?” I tried.
We had joked about one day owning a dog and naming him Larry. We joked in the different apartments while sitting on the futon, the windows open to the bars and to the busy street and to the library where a homeless man killed himself on the steps, the sanitation workers hosing blood off the cement in the morning. In all these petless places, William and I thought it would be funny to have a dog and name him Larry. Perhaps we didn’t know what to do with our desire. We made light of it by turning the dog we couldn’t have into something amusing, into a Larry. But when I called you Larry that night of your adoption, it didn’t feel like a joke.
“Larry,” I tried again, holding out my hand. “Come see.”
One of the apartment buildings, the one across from the library, kept a resident cat we’d coax through our front door. She was cream and orange and meant to kill the mice that crawled in the empty spaces between the walls. We probably could have heard the mice scurry any time of day if we listened, but it was at night with the lights off and with the hope for sleep that we tuned in to the scratch of their frantic movements behind the plaster. “Don’t feed her,” the landlord warned us about the cat, “Or she won’t be hungry enough to do her job.” She liked the windowsill in our living room the best. She’d perch there in immobile contemplation, her tail hanging down in a hook. She was the kind of cat that when she meowed, she meowed without making a noise. Her mouth yawned open when she rubbed her head against my hand, and her eyes squinted. She seemed to be saying something. “What’s the matter,” William would say when he caught me looking out the window and petting the cat, and I’d say, “Nothing.” I’d say, “Why do you ask?”
***
Oh, Larry, that woman and her son, the Luling backyard, it’s strange to think you have memories that precede me. The peripheral passing of chain link as you ran happy circles, the crab grass coming up at you, the boy’s sneakered feet, I’ll never know. Even when you’re lying in your bed under the oleander, I wonder what you see that I don’t from my place on the stoop. “He’s digging his own grave,” I tell people about the nest you’ve excavated in the mulch and mud under the tree. They often stop on the sidewalk when they see you. Those who live on the block say, “Hey Larry,” and sometimes you’ll look up. Their leashed dogs bark and strain and stick their noses between the fence posts with an eagerness that is uncomfortable for everybody.
There’s the girl who walks around the neighborhood with a pet rat perched on her shoulders. I’ll talk to her and not know the rat is there until it peeks out from her curtain of hair, a whiskered nose emerging from one side, a pale tail flicking down the other. “I know your dog,” she told me the first time we met. She and her dad pass our house every morning on their way to school. She thinks you look like a deer. She thinks that when you curl up under the oleander, you look dead. “Well,” I tell her, “He is cadaverously calm.”
William wants to plant a sago palm in your spot under the tree because it’s the only empty place left in the yard, and when William gets nervous he likes to plant things. The pipes rumble beneath the kitchen floor, and I’ll know he’s out front with his pants rolled up at the cuff hosing new elephant ears and nursing caladiums. I can even tell from the sound when he slides his thumb over the nozzle to scatter the spray.
***
You seemed happy enough when we first brought you to the house. We developed rituals, the morning walk to the coffee shop, a run along the levee. We learned to pet only your head because the rest of you would shed clumps of white hair that gathered in the bedroom corners. Luca, the neighbor, worried you were coming down from amphetamines and horse steroids from the racetrack. “Look,” he said one afternoon, gesturing to you splayed on the sidewalk. Your long mouth was slack, your tongue lolling onto the cement and your brown eyes, deep pools always, especially impenetrable that day, glazed open but seeing nothing. “He’s stuck in a K- hole,” Luca said. “It’s withdrawal.” But I told him no, you were meditative, dreamy. It’s the dog equivalent to walking with your head down, I said. How you learn to walk with your head down, private worlds unfolding inside but outside nothing. A girl walks with her head down and bumps into people. “Whoops,” I often hear myself say to strangers, “Sorry.”
My mother worried how you would react to the first baby. She read news reports about dogs mauling infants. She thought you could confuse a baby for a rabbit. “What about his predatory instinct,” she asked me. “Do you think it just goes away?” But when we pulled to the curb with the new baby in the car, you only lifted your head and then harrumphed back down into the dirt.
It’s not like we paid an outrageous amount of attention to you before, so I don’t think you felt neglected with the new family arrangement. I think you felt relieved not to have to try anymore. When we rolled the wind-up swing into one room, you got up and moved into another. You barked more often to be let out. “Who can blame him?” William and I would say to Luca, although secretly we missed the way you used to stand in the middle of the action, if we had a party or were just unloading the dishwasher, and you would remain there stoically in the way, not asking to be a part but not leaving either.
“Sometimes I think all Larry needs to be human is a pair of arms,” William told me one morning in bed, the baby thank god still asleep in his crib. The sun was throwing rectangles of light around the room that would fade and reform with each passing cloud. We could hear you lapping water in the kitchen and the clang of your rabies tag hitting against your heart tag hitting against your name tag when you lowered your long neck to drink from the bowl. “I think I see Larry in every animal,” William said.
And then there was the night at the coffee shop when William fed you ice cubes to make the baby laugh. The way you held your head up to snap at the cubes, it looked like you were talking.
I would understand if you confused the arrival of the twins with the men who added the extra room, a real nursery this time, to the back of our house. The construction was hard on both of us, your stomach groaning with coiled anxiety and mine fat with babies. The men were in and out of the house, knocking down walls and tracking plaster dust on long sheets of paper they had rolled out to protect the wood floors. You walked the edges of rooms and sniffed the handles of hammers and then skittered away when one of their hands reached down to pet you. The house was getting bigger, but your world was shrinking. The men tramped past your oleander, back and forth from the door to their truck that played a loud, untuned radio station. They opened windows to air out the dust. Curtains billowed toward you, and doors slammed in secret drafts, all the noise and movement your private terror, your constant pant. You found a small space between the refrigerator and the kitchen cabinet to curl up and hide. You willed yourself to be small, almost invisible, a penny someone had dropped, a Cheerio never swept up.
Even outside, and I know you’ll claim this was an accident but there are no accidents, life guns a person toward one end through direct or indirect means, you know that, Larry, even outside, leashless in Audubon park where people flock on nice days with blankets and rollerblades, even there where the laugh therapy group sits cross-legged under the giant oak tree laughing and rocking, rocking and laughing, even there, you found tragedy on the edge of an algae-slicked pond you mistook for grass. I heard the splash and knew it was you before I turned away from the stroller and looked. A boy approaching from the opposite direction also stopped. Together we watched the water ripple out in little backwards waves that disrupted the green scrim you had disappeared beneath. “He’s okay,” I think I told the boy, although I did wonder if you could swim. I could never count on survival instincts with you. We held our breath until you surfaced, stiff legs first like a drowned mule. You bobbed and righted yourself and clambered up the bank. You climbed back onto shore. Well, okay, let’s get on with it, you basically told me. You had cut your back leg in the resurfacing, a slice on your thin skin that trailed a line of blood on the sidewalk so that we had to stop and make a tourniquet with a baby wipe.
Once home, I put the babies—there were three of them now—in their beds for a nap and crawled into my own. I could hear the murmuring of the neighbor eating lunch with a Dutch friend in her back yard, the clanking of her knife against her plate. They were talking about cancer. “You know,” the one said, “It literally ate her brain. It’s horrible,” she said. Later, when I went into the kitchen for a glass of water, I found you again between refrigerator and counter, licking, licking, your tongue flat and deliberate; you had licked the baby wipe off the wound and refused to let the blood coagulate. Your mouth and legs were stained red.
“Larry,” I said, “We’ve got to put a stop to this.”
But we didn’t stop.
Stitched and returned to your bed under the oleander, you still caused trouble. The veterinarian had gone on about your teeth, about periodontal disease, its abscessation and sub- gingival calculus, the way a tooth can rot from the inside out. I listened and nodded. There’s a lot of pressure to love you at the veterinarian’s office. Ned, the vet, a surfer, sells a self-produced record of songs about dogs by the cash register. He and his Golden Retriever are on the cover of the album, all sandy feet and mandolin as though enough money—and, Larry, the vet charges a lot—can prevent the suffering and death we all know is coming.
When we walk into the office, the receptionists ooh and ahh over you and call you Old Man and stroke the length of your body with manicured hands that you lean into, traitor. They ask me if you’ve been eating. They ask me if you’re feeling good, as though I have access to your thoughts and would know, as though anyone could really know how another feels. And I do love you, but I refuse to make a display of my affection for them. I also refused to pay to have your teeth cleaned, which, in addition to being expensive, seems undignified and extravagant for a dog, who should be nose deep in the dirt, rolling legs up on the grass. So the day I stood behind Ned in the grocery store line became uncomfortable. I tried not to talk about you—there are other interests in this world—but the woman in front of us had a cart full of food, and our conversation went on until it narrowed into you, your teeth, my guilt. I admitted how your breath does smell like a fish factory. “If his breath is bad,” Ned told me, “It’s because his teeth are rotting.” Make the appointment, he urged. “It’s the reasonable thing to do.”
But when have we ever been reasonable, Larry? I know you hate the vet. You make me use the leash to pull you out of the van. You resist me all the way up the stairs and through the door. All you want from life is to stop and smell where other dogs have peed, and I pull you away from even that pleasure because I can only stand and wait for so long. Better to let you walk without tether. I started leaving the leash at home, trusting you to follow me to the coffee shop. I let you cross busy streets unfettered much to the alarm of William and other pedestrians. I even started leaving the front gate open in case you wanted to escape your oleander nest for a stroll.
Once you snuck out and followed me and the kids to the grocery store without us knowing. We returned home to an open gate, an empty yard. “Mom, how many times have I told you to close the gate?” my oldest son scolded me. A man who read your phone tag left a message saying he was standing with you outside the automatic doors of the Winn-Dixie and then another message saying he was loading you into his car and taking you to his house to play with his dogs until he heard from me. The kids scrambled out of the van when they saw you in his huge, fenced-in yard. “Is that Larry?” one asked. And there you were, a dog among dogs, a pack running heedless from the front yard to the back yard to the front again, running so fast your hind legs flew out beneath you when you banked for the turn. I didn’t want to bring you home.
Later that week, the vet receptionist called to book your teeth cleaning appointment. She asked if she was talking to Larry’s mom, and I said no, you’re speaking to Larry’s owner.
***
I know you know what I was up to. You had already started to bleed when I walked out the door that night. To meet a friend for a drink, I had told William and the kids. I bent down and took your leg in my hand. I thought maybe you had cut yourself again on the thorns of the bougainvillea. Larry’s bleeding, I called to William through the screen door, and he said he’d take a look, and so I left. It was a licked smear of red. It was nothing. And around midnight, when my phone started to ring, I didn’t answer. I’m allowed to have drinks with my friend, I thought to myself. I’m allowed, I thought, even though we all knew my friend was more than a friend. When the phone continued to ring, I turned it off because I knew. Just like that, I knew it was all over. I drove home without the radio playing, always playing, but not tonight. You didn’t lift your head when I pulled up to the curb or when I clanged the front gate closed. The house was dark; you were curled under the oleander, listless except for your tongue licking your mouth, licking your leg. It was not you that I saw in the dark but the movement of your tongue flattening out around your leg. Larry, I tried. I knelt and held out my hand. “Come see,” I said. You shifted the position of your head in the dirt, revealing a dark pool of blood. Your nose was dry, your legs licked red. “Where have you been?” William yelled from behind the screen door. I couldn’t see him either, only the darker outline of a body in dark doorway. “I’ve been calling you and calling you for the van and where have you been?” he asked, although I think he knew too that it was not the dog or the van we were arguing about. I looked at your mouth. The inside pus had festered and split open your gums. “He’s been bleeding all night,” William said. “I couldn’t get him to the emergency vet,” he said. “I was calling you for the van. All I wanted was the van,” he said.
And there I was kneeling beside you, petting you, the whole length of you, and oh, Larry, it doesn’t have to be like this. “You’ve killed him,” William says from behind the screen. “You’ve finally killed him.” Mulch hangs from your lips, clotted up in lumps of your blood, and Larry it doesn’t have to be like this. “You’ve killed our dog,” William is saying from the door, and I want to tell you that there are other ways to be happy. I saw wild parrots rise from the ground the other day. They lifted up all at once, as though blades of grass were ascending.
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Carolyn Mikulencak lives in New Orleans. Her stories and essays have appeared in such places as The Oxford American, Psychological Perspectives, Southwest Review, and Pinch, where her essay “The Truth the Dying Know” won the 2024 Page Prize in creative nonfiction. Her chapbook, Center of the Universe, was published as #17 in the Belle Point Press Prose Series. https://www.carolynmikulencak.com/