Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
TwitThis
"You try it," Katarina said.
Phoebe copied the technique. And waited.
"He's not coming out," I muttered. "This isn't working."
Sally didn't respond. Watching our daughter closely, my wife was seeing what I couldn't: This dog was coming home with us.
When Gandalf darted out, grabbed the treat, and hid again, our daughter stood up and looked at us.
"Can we have him?" she said. "Can we? Can we?" She followed that with a knockout punch: "Please?"
After a staffer explained the shelter's return policy—we had 30 days to take the dog back for a full refund, no questions asked—I signed forms and wrote a check. Katarina mentioned something about Gandalf being wary around men; he might have had a tough time with them in the past. "But he's a sweetheart," she added quickly. "I know you'll give him plenty of love."
The moment we got home, the no-longer-Gandalf but still unnamed dog set out to claim his new territory. Nose to the ground, he began vacuuming the living room, dining room, and hallway for scents and bits of food. Angling across one room and doubling back, he suddenly stopped in place and glared at us. He was like a wild beast caged up with his captors.
"How long do you think he'll do this?" I asked.
Phoebe simply followed the dog around, cooing to him. Sally unfolded a plastic drop cloth in the dining room, lined the floor, and secured it with tape. She put up gates across the doorways and placed the dog's plastic sleeping crate in a corner. Then she told Phoebe to bring him over.
Once Phoebe placed him on the floor of his new bedroom, Gandalf started pawing at the plastic, tearing holes in it. The tape was next; he gnawed furiously.
"Hey, stop that," I said.
Gathering himself, the dog now took a run at the gate that closed off the wide entrance to the living room. In a great, arcing leap, he cleared it with room to spare, his tail lifted in triumphant salute. We were speechless.
It was a long night. By bedtime, Phoebe had named him Como. She coaxed him into his crate, told him to lie down, and added, "Be a good boy."
The dog looked miserable.
I decided to act as if all was well.
"Good night, Como," I said. I turned out the lights and went upstairs.
Darkness magnifies everything. The moment Sally and I pulled the sheets up over us, we heard it—a heavy, rhythmic thumping. Since a dread of earthquakes is hardwired into every San Franciscan, I assumed the worst and waited for the bed to start shaking.
Sally caught on first. "It's him." The noise stopped, then started again, this time accompanied by a songlike whining, guttural at first, and then keening, eerily catlike. Thump. Bump. Thump-thump. I heard what had to be the crate banging against the cabinet or the wall or both.
"We can't just lie here," said Sally. "He'll wake up Phoebe. She has school tomorrow."
"He's got to get used to sleeping by himself," I said.
Over the next several hours, the dog chewed his way out of the plastic crate, which I had not thought possible. He shredded his blanket. He jumped out of his enclosure, soiled the carpet in several places, and ran through the house. Sally finally cornered our new pet and carried him upstairs. On the floor next to her side of the bed, he flopped down with his head between his front paws.
I tried to pretend the sun wasn't about to come up in a few hours.
In the following days, Como's behavior was so thoroughly, chaotically demanding that anything above ground-level thinking was irrelevant. With Sally and Phoebe at work and school, I was feeding, walking, cleaning, chasing. I developed a rash, possibly from the dog. I even grew a little afraid of the beady-eyed, shaggy-haired mutt.
One afternoon, I left the house for about an hour. There may be a thousand and one reasons for what happened next, most of them connected to the volatile chemistry that had developed between Como and me. In the end, I blame the dry cleaning. If it hadn't been for those plastic-wrapped shirts and pairs of pants fluttering like a flag in my hand as I climbed the front steps, the folly of that dog might have been prevented.
In the driveway, I unpacked the car, tucking odds and ends into the grocery bag with one hand and getting the house keys ready in the other. Then, on a lazy impulse, I added the clothes. What would have been a quick run up the stairs became an ungainly wobble.
A light breeze pulled at the plastic sheeting. The hangers turned uncomfortably on my fingers. As I tried to keep the pants from dragging, I nearly dropped the keys.
"Damn," I muttered. I focused on getting the front door open and my things inside while completely forgetting what awaited me—a dog that had already demonstrated world-class escape-artist skills.
Juggling keys and packages, I turned the knob and opened the door a fraction. Como bolted.
It's often said that physical calamities—collisions, falls, plates of food dropping—happen in superslow motion, every millisecond stretched to a seeming infinitude. Sometimes that's true. Sometimes it's not. Nightmare-like, you're flung into the middle of a frantic chase scene before you even realize you're in the film. That's what happened when Como made his break.
I dropped the grocery bag, let the dry cleaning fall, and spun around. For an instant, he and I froze in astonishment. Neither of us could quite believe he was already out there on the sidewalk, off his leash, or that he'd accomplished this feat so easily. Then he was gone, loping away from me at a brisk clip.
I thundered after him in pursuit, trying to be as quiet and graceful as possible and not alarm Como any more than he already was. I felt like a moose in toe shoes. The fugitive crossed Tenth Avenue and cantered ahead. I barreled behind. The squares of pavement stretched out between us. Como seemed to know just where he was going, beelining toward Eleventh Avenue and taking a left across Lawton Street and heading up a hill.
I lost sight of him. I felt a sickening lurch of panic.
No way could I outrun a fleeing, nonvisible terrier. Just like that, I had ruined everything—destroyed my daughter's new happiness, let down my wife and myself and the community of responsible dog adopters.
I sprinted across Lawton and started hoofing it uphill. When I came around the corner, I could see Como now, but he was almost a block away, his thick tail the size of a Q-tip. The odds were heavily, impossibly, against me.
Then the dog did something that gave me hope: He looked over his shoulder at me. And he kept looking, trotting forward, and looking backward. He almost hit a street sign.
Convinced there was no chance whatsoever of catching him, I decided to try something risky: I stopped. After a few more steps, Como stopped too. He turned around to face me to see what I'd do next.
Advertisement 
