Timbuktu

4

HE KEPT ON RUNNING FOR THREE DAYS, and in all that time he barely paused to sleep or look for food. When Mr. Bones finally stopped, he was somewhere in northern Virginia, sprawled out in a meadow ninety miles west of the Chows’ backyard. Two hundred yards in front of him, the sun was going down behind a stand of oaks. Half a dozen swallows darted back and forth in the middle distance, skimming the field as they combed the air for mosquitoes, and in the darkness of the branches behind him, songbirds chirped out a few last refrains before turning in for the night. As he lay there in the tall grass, his chest heaving and his tongue dangling from his mouth, Mr. Bones wondered what would happen if he closed his eyes—and, if he did, whether he would be able to open them again in the morning. He was that tired and hungry, that muddled by the rigors of his marathon trek. If he fell asleep, it seemed perfectly possible to him that he would never wake up again.

He watched the sun as it continued to sink behind the trees, his eyes struggling to stay open as the darkness gathered around him. He didn’t hold out for more than a minute or two, but even before weariness got the better of him, Mr. Bones’s head had already begun to fill up with thoughts of Willy, fleeting pictures from the bygone days of smoke rings and Lucky Strikes, the goofball antics of their life together in the world of long ago. It was the first time since his master’s death that he had been able to think about such things without feeling crushed by sorrow, the first time he had understood that memory was a place, a real place that one could visit, and that to spend a few moments among the dead was not necessarily bad for you, that it could in fact be a source of great comfort and happiness. Then he fell asleep, and Willy was still there with him, alive again in all his fractured glory, pretending to be a blind man as Mr. Bones led him down the steps of the subway. It was that windy day in March four and a half years ago, he realized, that funny afternoon of high hopes and dashed expectations when they rode out to Coney Island together to unveil the Symphony of Smells to Uncle Al. Willy had donned a Santa Claus hat to mark the occasion, and with the materials for the Symphony crammed inside a huge plastic garbage bag, which he had slung over his shoulder and which made him walk with a stoop, he looked for all the world like some drunk-tank version of Father Christmas himself. It’s true that things didn’t work out so well once they got there, but that was only because Uncle Al was in a bad mood. He wasn’t a real uncle, of course, just a family friend who had lent a helping hand to Willy’s parents after they arrived from Poland, and it was only out of some ancient loyalty to Mom-san and her husband that he allowed Willy and Mr. Bones to hang around his store. In point of fact, Al had little use for the novelty business, and with fewer and fewer customers showing up to buy his goods, there were certain items that had been languishing on the shelves for ten, twelve, and even twenty years. By now it was no more than a front for his other activities, most of them illegal, some of them not, and if the shady, fast-talking Al hadn’t been turning a profit on fireworks, bookmaking, and the sale of stolen cigarettes, he wouldn’t have thought twice about closing the door of that dusty emporium forever. Who knows what scam had backfired on him that windy day in March, but when Willy traipsed in with his Symphony of Smells and started yammering to Uncle Al about how his invention was going to turn them both into millionaires, the proprietor of Whoopee-Land USA turned a deaf ear on his faux nephew’s sales pitch. “You’re out of your skull, Willy,” Uncle Al said, “you’re fucking bonkers, you know that?” and promptly shooed him outside with his garbage bag of stinks and smells and collapsible cardboard labyrinths. Not to be dissuaded by a little skepticism, Willy enthusiastically set about to construct the Symphony on the sidewalk, determined to prove to Uncle Al that he had indeed come up with one of the genuine marvels of all time. But the air was exceedingly gusty that day, and no sooner did Willy reach into the garbage bag and start pulling out the various elements of Symphony No. 7 (towels, sponges, sweaters, galoshes, Tupperware boxes, gloves) than the wind caught hold of them and blew them down the street, scattering them in several different directions. Willy ran off to retrieve them, but once he let go of the bag, that too was blown away, and for all his supposed kindness to the Gurevitch family, Uncle Al just stood in the doorway and laughed.

That’s what had happened four and a half years ago, but in the dream Mr. Bones had that night in the meadow, he and Willy never got off the subway. There was no question that they were on their way to Coney Island (witness the red-and-white Santa hat, the bulging garbage bag, the seeing-eye-dog harness strapped around Mr. Bones’s shoulders), but whereas the car of the F train had been quite crowded on the afternoon of the real journey, this time he and Willy were alone, the only two passengers riding out to the end of the line. The moment he became aware of this difference, Willy turned to him and said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Bones. It’s not then, it’s now.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” the dog replied, and so naturally did these words come to him, so clearly were they the product of a long-standing, thoroughly proven ability to speak whenever he had something to say, that Mr. Bones was not the least bit astonished by the miracle that had just occurred.

“It means you’re going about it all wrong,” Willy said.

“Running away from Baltimore, moping around in dumb-ass meadows, starving yourself for no good reason. It just won’t do, my friend. You find yourself another master, or your fur is toast.”

“I found Henry, didn’t I?” Mr. Bones said.

“A plum of a boy, that one, true blue through and through. But not good enough. That’s the trouble with young ones. They might mean well, but they don’t have any power. You have to go straight to the top, Mr. Bones. Find out who’s boss. Find out who makes the decisions, and then attach yourself to that person. There’s no other way. You need a new setup, but it’s never going to happen unless you start using your head.”

“I was desperate. How could I know his father would turn out to be such a louse?”

“Because I warned you about those places, didn’t I? The moment you saw what you were getting yourself into, you should have cashed in your chips and run.”

“I did run. And when I wake up tomorrow morning, I’m going to start running again. That’s my life now, Willy. I run, and I’m going to keep on running until I drop.”

“Don’t give up on men, Bonesy. You’ve had some hard knocks, but you’ve got to tough it out and give it another try.”

“Men can’t be trusted. I know that now.”

“You trust me, don’t you?”

“You’re the only one, Willy. But you’re not like other men, and now that you’re gone, there isn’t a place on earth where I’m not in danger. Just yesterday, I nearly got myself shot. I was taking a shortcut through a field somewhere, and a guy came after me in a red pickup truck. Laughing, too, I might add, and then he pulled out a rifle and fired. Lucky for me he missed. But who knows what’s going to happen next time?”

“He’s just one man. For every person like him, there’s another one like Henry.”

“Your numbers are off, master. There might be a few stray fools with a soft spot for dogs, but most of them wouldn’t think twice about loading up their shotguns the moment a four-leg sets foot on their land. I’m scared, Willy. Scared to go east, scared to go west. The way things stand now, I think I’d rather starve out here in the wilderness than run into one of those bullets. They’ll kill you just for breathing, and when you’re up against that kind of hatred, what’s the use of trying?”

“All right, give up if you want to. It’s no skin off my nose. I could sit here and tell you everything’s going to work out, but what’s the point of lying to you? Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t. I’m no fortune-teller, and the truth is that not all stories have happy endings.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“I know that. And I’m not saying you’re wrong.”

Until that moment, the train had been speeding through the tunnel at a steady clip, rushing past the empty stations without stopping. Now, suddenly, Mr. Bones heard the screech of brakes, and the train began to slow down. “What’s happening?” he said. “Why aren’t we going fast anymore?”

“I have to get out,” Willy said.

“So soon?”

Willy nodded. “I’m going now,” he said, “but before I leave, I just want to remind you of something you might have forgotten.” He was already standing up by then, waiting for the doors to open. “Do you remember Mom-san, Mr. Bones?”

“Of course I remember her. What do you take me for?”

“Well, they tried to kill her, too. They hunted her down like a dog, and she had to run for her life. People get treated like dogs, too, my friend, and sometimes they have to sleep in barns and meadows because there’s nowhere else for them to go. Before you start feeling too sorry for yourself, just remember that you’re not the first dog who’s ever been lost.”

Sixteen hours later, Mr. Bones was ten miles south of the meadow in which he had dreamed the dream, emerging from a small patch of woods at the edge of a newly built subdivision of two-story houses. He no longer felt afraid. He was hungry, perhaps, and more than a little tired, but the terror that had been growing inside him for the past several days was largely gone. He had no idea why this should be so, but the fact was that he had woken up feeling much better than at any time since Willy’s death. He knew that Willy hadn’t really been there with him on the subway, and he knew that he couldn’t really talk, but in the afterglow of this dream about impossible and beautiful things, he sensed that Willy was still with him, and even if he couldn’t be with him, it was as if he were watching him, and even if the eyes that looked down on him were actually inside him, it made no difference in the larger scheme of things, because those eyes were the exact difference between feeling alone in the world and not feeling alone. Mr. Bones was ill-equipped to parse the subtleties of dreams, visions, and other mental phenomena, but he did know for certain that Willy was in Timbuktu, and if he himself had just been with Willy, perhaps that meant the dream had taken him to Timbuktu as well. That would explain, perhaps, why he had suddenly found himself able to speak—after so many years of struggle and failure. And if he had been to Timbuktu once, was it too much to think that he might not be able to go there again—simply by closing his eyes and chancing upon the right dream? It was impossible to say. But there was comfort in that thought, just as there had been comfort in spending that time with his old friend, even if none of it had really happened, even if none of it would ever happen again.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and the air was filled with the sounds of lawn mowers, sprinklers, and birds. Far away, on an invisible highway to the north, a dull bee-swarm of traffic pulsed under the suburban landscape. A radio was turned on, and a woman’s voice began to sing. Closer by, someone burst out laughing. It sounded like the laugh of a small child, and as Mr. Bones finally came to the end of the woods he had been wandering in for the past half hour, he poked his snout through the twigs and saw that this was indeed the case. A towheaded boy of two or three was sitting on the ground about twelve feet in front of him, pulling up clumps of grass and flinging them into the air. Each time another shower of grass landed on his head, he broke out with a fresh round of giggles, clapping his hands and bouncing up and down as if he had discovered the most brilliant trick in the world. Ten or twelve yards beyond the boy, a girl with glasses was walking back and forth with a doll in her arms, singing softly to the imaginary infant as if she were trying to lull it to sleep. It was difficult to guess how old she was. Somewhere between seven and nine, Mr. Bones thought, but she also could have been a large six or a small ten, not to speak of an even larger five or even smaller eleven. To the left of the girl, a woman in white shorts and a white halter top was crouched over a bed of red and yellow flowers, carefully digging up weeds with a trowel. Her back was turned to Mr. Bones, and because she was wearing a straw hat with an exceedingly broad brim, her entire face was hidden from view. He was reduced to observing the curve of her spine, the freckles on her slender arms, a splash of white knee, but even with just those few elements to go on, he could tell that she wasn’t old, no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, which probably meant that she was the mother of the two children. Wary of advancing any farther, Mr. Bones remained where he was, watching the scene from his little hideout at the verge of the woods. He had no way of knowing if this family was pro-dog or anti-dog, no way of knowing if they would treat him with kindness or chase him from their property. One thing was certain, however. He had stumbled upon a very handsome lawn. As he stood there looking at the swath of neatly tended green velvet spread out before him, he realized that it didn’t take much imagination to know how good it would feel to roll around on that grass and smell the smells that came from it.

Before he could make up his mind about what to do next, the decision was taken out of his hands. The boy tossed two more fistfuls of grass into the air, and this time, instead of falling straight down on top of him as they had done before, a small breeze stirred at just that moment and carried them off in the direction of the woods. The boy turned his head to watch the flight of the green particles, and as his eyes scanned the space between them, Mr. Bones could see his expression change from one of cold, scientific detachment to one of absolute surprise. The dog had been discovered. The boy shot to his feet and began charging toward him, squealing with happiness as he waddled forth in his bloated plastic diaper, and right then and there, with his whole future suddenly on the line, Mr. Bones decided that this was the moment he had been waiting for. Not only did he not back off into the woods, and not only did he not run away, but in his calmest, most self-assured manner, he gingerly stepped out onto the grass and let the boy throw his arms around him. “Doggy!” the little man cried, squeezing for all he was worth. “Good doggy. Big old funny doggy.”

The girl came next, running across the lawn with the doll in her arms and calling out to the woman behind her. “Look, Mama,” she said. “Look what Tiger found.” Even as the boy went on hugging him, a wave of alarm passed through Mr. Bones’s body. Where was this tiger she was talking about— and how could a tiger be prowling around out here where people lived? Willy had taken him to a zoo once, and he knew all about those big striped jungle cats. They were even bigger than lions, and if you ever met up with one of those sharp-fanged babies, you could kiss your future good-bye. A tiger would rip you to shreds in about twelve seconds, and whatever bits of you he didn’t feel like eating would be fine stuff for the vultures and worms.

Still, Mr. Bones didn’t run away. He continued to let his new friend cling to him, patiently bearing the brunt of the tyke’s phenomenal strength, and hoped that his ears had been playing tricks on him, that he’d simply misheard what the girl had said. The sagging diaper was loaded with urine, and mingled in with the sharp ammonia scent he could detect traces of carrots, bananas, and milk. Then the girl was crouching down beside them, peering into Mr. Bones’s face with her blue, magnified eyes, and the mystery was suddenly cleared up. “Tiger,” she said to the boy, “let go of him. You’ll choke him to death.”

“My buddy,” Tiger said, tightening his grip even more, and although Mr. Bones was gratified to discover that he wasn’t about to be devoured by a wild beast, the pressure on his throat was becoming severe enough to make him squirm now. The boy might not have been a real tiger, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous. In his own little way, he was more of an animal than Mr. Bones was.

Fortunately, the woman arrived just then and grabbed hold of the boy’s arm, pulling him off Mr. Bones before more damage could be done. “Careful, Tiger,” she said. “We don’t know if he’s a nice dog or not.”

“Oh, he’s nice,” the girl said, gently patting Mr. Bones on his crown. “All you have to do is look into his eyes. He’s real nice, Mama. I’d say he’s about the nicest dog I’ve ever seen.”

Mr. Bones was stunned by the girl’s extraordinary statement, and just to show what a good sport he was, that he was indeed a dog who didn’t bear grudges, he began licking Tiger’s face in a great burst of slobbering affection. The little fellow howled with laughter, and even though the thrust of Mr. Bones’s tongue eventually made him lose his balance, the rough-and-tumble Tiger thought it was the funniest thing that had ever happened to him, and he went on laughing under the barrage of the dog’s kisses even as he thudded to the ground on his wet bottom.

“Well, at least he’s friendly,” the woman said to her daughter, as if conceding an important point. “But what an unholy mess. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dirtier, scruffier, more dilapidated creature than this one.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him that a little soap and water can’t fix,” the girl said. “Just look at him, Mama. He’s not just nice, he’s smart, too.”

The woman laughed. “How can you know that, Alice? He hasn’t done a thing but lick your brother’s face.”

Alice squatted down in front of Mr. Bones and cupped his jowls in her hands. “Show us how smart you are, old boy,” she said. “Do a trick or something, okay? You know, like rolling over or standing up on your hind legs. Show Mama that I’m right.”

These were hardly difficult tasks for a dog of his mettle, and Mr. Bones promptly set about to demonstrate what he could do. First, he rolled over on the grass—not once but three times—and then he arched his back, lifted his front paws up to his face, and slowly rose up on his hind legs. It had been years since he had tried this last stunt, but even though his joints ached and he tottered more than he would have liked, he managed to hold the position for three or four seconds.

“See, Mama? What did I tell you?” Alice said. “He’s the smartest dog that ever was.”

The woman crouched down to Mr. Bones’s level for the first time and looked into his eyes, and even though she was wearing sunglasses and still had the straw hat on her head, he could see that she was ever so pretty, with wisps of blond hair curling down the back of her neck and a full, expressive mouth. Something shuddered inside him when she spoke to him in her slow, drawling southern voice, and when she began patting his head with her right hand, Mr. Bones felt that surely his heart would break into a thousand pieces.

“You understand what we’re saying to you, don’t you, old dog?” she said. “You’re a special one, aren’t you? And you’re tired and beat-up, and you need something to put in your belly. That’s it, old-timer, isn’t it? You’re lost and alone, and every inch of you is tuckered out.”

Had a poor mutt ever been luckier than Mr. Bones was that afternoon? Without any further discussion, and without any further need to charm them or prove what a good soul he was, the weary dog was led from the yard into the sanctum of the family house. There, in a radiant white kitchen, surrounded by freshly painted cabinets and shining metal utensils and an air of opulence he had never even imagined could exist on earth, Mr. Bones ate his fill, gorging himself on leftover slices of roast beef, a bowl of macaroni and cheese, two cans of tuna fish, and three uncooked hot dogs, not to mention lapping up two and a half bowls of water in between courses as well. He had wanted to hold back, to show them that he was a dog of modest appetites, really no trouble to take care of, but once the food was set down in front of him his hunger was simply too overpowering, and he forgot the vow he had made.

None of this seemed to bother his hosts. They were good-hearted people, and they knew a hungry dog when they saw one, and if Mr. Bones was that famished, then they were perfectly happy to provide for him until he wasn’t. He ate in a trance of contentment, oblivious to everything but the food going into his mouth and sliding down his throat. When the meal was finally over and he looked up to check on what the others were doing, he saw that the woman had removed her hat and sunglasses. As she bent down near him to lift the bowls from the floor, he caught a glimpse of her gray-blue eyes and understood that she was in fact a great beauty, one of those women who made men stop breathing the moment they walked into a room.

“Well, old dog,” she said, running her palm over the top of his head, “feeling better?”

Mr. Bones let out a small belch of appreciation, and then he started licking her hand. Tiger, whom he had all but forgotten by then, suddenly came rushing toward him. Drawn by the sound of the belch, which had greatly amused him, the boy leaned forward into Mr. Bones’s face and let out a pretend belch of his own, which amused him even more. It was shaping up into another wild barroom scene, but before the situation could get out of hand, his mother swept him into her arms and stood up. She looked over at Alice, who was leaning against a counter and scrutinizing Mr. Bones with her serious, watchful eyes. “What are we going to do with him, baby?” the woman said.

“I think we should keep him,” Alice answered.

“We can’t do that. He probably belongs to somebody. If we kept him, it would be just like stealing.”

“I don’t think he has a friend in the world. Just look at him. He’s probably walked a thousand miles. If we don’t take him in, he’s going to die. Do you want that on your conscience, Mama?”

This girl certainly had the gift, all right. She knew just what to say and when to say it, and as Mr. Bones stood there listening to her talk to her mother, he wondered if Willy hadn’t underestimated the power of some children. Alice might not have been the boss, and she might not have made the decisions, but her words cut straight to the truth, and that was bound to have an effect, to steer things in one direction rather than another.

“Check his collar, sweetheart,” the woman said. “Maybe there’s a name or an address on it or something.”

Mr. Bones knew full well that there wasn’t, since Willy had never bothered with such things as licenses or registrations or fancy metal name tags. Alice knelt down beside him and began turning the collar around his neck, searching for signs of his identity or ownership, and because he already knew what the answer would be, he took advantage of the moment to enjoy the warmth of her breath as it fluttered against the back of his right ear.

“No, Mama,” she said at last. “It’s just a plain old ratty collar.”

For the first time in the short while he had known her, the dog saw the woman hesitate, and a certain confusion and sadness crept into her eyes. “It’s okay by me, Alice,” she said. “But I can’t give the thumbs-up until we’ve talked to your father. You know how he hates surprises. We’ll wait until he comes home this evening, and then we’ll all decide together. Okay?”

“Okay,” Alice said, somewhat deflated by this inconclusive response. “But it’s three against one, even if he says no. And fair is fair, right? We’ve just got to keep him, Mama. I’ll get down on my knees and pray to Jesus for the rest of the day if it’ll make Daddy say yes.”

“You don’t have to do that,” the woman said. “If you really want to help, you’ll open the door and let the dog outside so he can do his business. And then we’ll see if we can’t clean him up a bit. That’s the only way this thing is ever going to work. He’s got to make a good first impression.”

The door opened for Mr. Bones not a moment too soon. After three days of privation, of eating no more than thimblefuls of scraps and garbage, of rooting around for whatever noxious edibles he could find, the richness of the meal he had just consumed hit his stomach with the force of a trauma, and with his digestive juices in full operation again, working double and even triple overtime to accommodate the recent onslaught, it was all he could do not to foul the kitchen floor and be banished into permanent exile. He trotted off behind a clump of bushes, trying to keep himself out of sight, but Alice followed him over, and to his never-ending shame and embarrassment, she was there to witness the dreadful explosion of brackish liquid that roared out of his bunghole and splattered onto the foliage beneath him. She let out a brief gasp of disgust when it happened, and he felt so mortified at offending her that for a moment or two he wished that he could shrivel up and die. But Alice was no ordinary person, and even though he thoroughly understood that by now, he never would have thought it possible for her to say what she said next. “Poor dog,” she muttered, in a doleful, pitying voice. “You’re awfully sick, aren’t you?” That was the entire statement— just two short sentences—but when Mr. Bones heard Alice say those words, he realized that Willy G. Christmas was not the only two-leg in the world who could be trusted. It turned out that there were others, and some of them were very small.

The rest of the afternoon rolled by in a blur of pleasures. They washed him down with the garden hose, lathering his fur into a mountainous pile of white suds, and as the six hands of his new companions rubbed away at his back and chest and head, he couldn’t help remembering how the day had begun—and what an odd and mysterious thing it was that it should end like this. Then they rinsed him off, and after he shook himself dry and ran around the yard for a few minutes, peeing on various bushes and trees along the perimeter of the property, the woman sat with him for what seemed like the longest time, searching his body for ticks. She explained to Alice that her father had taught her how to do this in North Carolina when she was a girl and that the only foolproof method was to use your fingernails and pinch out the critters by the tops of their heads. Once you had them, you couldn’t just flick them to the side, and you couldn’t just crush them underfoot. You had to burn them, and while she was in no way encouraging Alice to play with matches, would she be so kind as to run into the kitchen and fetch the box of Ohio Blue Tips in the top drawer to the right of the stove? Alice did as she was asked, and for the next little while she and her mother combed through Mr. Bones’s fur together, plucking out a succession of blood-swollen ticks and incinerating the culprits in little blazes of bright, phosphorescent heat. How not to be grateful for that? How not to rejoice at having this scourge of agonizing itches and sores removed from his person? Mr. Bones was so relieved by what they were doing for him that he even let Alice’s next remark pass by without protest. He knew the insult was unintentional, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t hurt by it.

“I don’t want to get your hopes up too high,” the woman said to her, “but it might not be such a bad idea to give this dog a name before your daddy gets home. It’ll make him seem more like part of the family, and that might give us a psychological edge. You understand what I’m saying, honey?”

“I already know his name,” Alice said. “I knew it the moment I saw him.” The girl paused for a moment to collect her thoughts. “Remember that book you used to read to me when I was little? The red one with the pictures in it and all those stories about animals? There was a dog in there that looked just like this one. He rescued a baby from a burning building and could count up to ten. Remember, Mama? I used to love that dog. When I saw Tiger hugging this one by the bushes a little while ago, it was like a dream come true.”

“What was his name?”

“Sparky. His name was Sparky the Dog.”

“All right, then. We’ll call this one Sparky, too.”

When Mr. Bones heard the woman go along with this absurd choice, he felt stung. It had been bad enough trying to get used to Cal, but this was pushing things a little too far. He had suffered too much to be burdened with this cutesy, infantile nickname, this simpering diminutive inspired by a picture book for toddlers, and even if he lived as long again as he had lived so far, he knew that a dog of his melancholic temperament would never adjust to it, that he would cringe every time he heard it for the rest of his days.

Before Mr. Bones could work himself into a real snit, however, trouble broke out in another area of the yard. For the past ten minutes, as Alice and her mother picked away at the vermin embedded in his coat, Mr. Bones had been watching Tiger entertain himself by kicking a beach ball across the lawn. Each time it squirted away from him, he would run after it at top speed, looking like a demented soccer player in pursuit of a ball twice his size. The kid was tireless, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t trip and stub his toe, and when the inevitable accident finally occurred, he let out a shriek of pain that was loud enough to drive the sun from the sky and bring the clouds crashing down to the earth. The woman left off from her delicate ministrations to take care of the boy, and as she picked him up and carried him off into the house, Alice turned to Mr. Bones and said, “That’s Tiger. Nine tenths of the time, he’s either laughing or crying, and when he isn’t, you can be pretty sure that something weird is about to happen. You’ll get used to it, Sparky. He’s only two and a half, and you can’t expect too much from little boys. His real name is Terry, but we all call him Tiger because he’s such a rough-houser. My name is Alice. Alice Elizabeth Jones. I’m eight and three quarters, and I just started the fourth grade. I was born with little holes in my heart, and I almost died a couple of times when I was small, even smaller than Tiger is now. I don’t remember any of that, but Mama said I lived because I have an angel breathing inside me, and that angel is going to keep on protecting me forever. Mama’s name is Polly Jones. She used to be Polly Danforth, but then she married Daddy and changed her name to Jones. My daddy is Richard Jones. Everyone calls him Dick, and most people say I look more like him than I look like Mama. He’s an airline pilot. He flies to California and Texas and New York, all kinds of places. Once, before Tiger was born, Mama and I got to go to Chicago with him. Now we’re living in this big house. We just moved in a few months ago, so it’s a lucky thing you came when you did, Sparky. We’ve got plenty of room, and we’re all settled in now, and if Daddy says we can keep you, then everything will be just about perfect around here.”

She was trying to make him feel welcome, but the net effect of Alice’s rambling introduction to the family was to throw Mr. Bones into panic and turn his stomach inside out. His future was in the hands of a person he had never seen, and after listening to the various comments that had been made about this person so far, it seemed unlikely that the decision would come down in the dog’s favor. The force of these anxieties sent Mr. Bones running into the bushes again, and for the second time in an hour his intestines betrayed him. Trembling uncontrollably as the crap gushed onto the ground, he begged the god of dogdom to take care of his poor, sick body. He had entered the promised land, had fallen into a world of green lawns and gentle women and abundant food, but if it came to pass that he should be expelled from this place, then he asked only that his miseries not be prolonged beyond what he could endure.

By the time Dick’s Volvo pulled into the driveway, Polly had already fed the children their dinner—hamburgers, baked potatoes, and frozen peas, some of which found its way into Mr. Bones’s mouth—and the four of them were out in the yard again, watering the garden as the late afternoon turned into early evening and the sky filled with the first mottled touches of darkness. Mr. Bones had overheard Polly tell Alice that the flight from New Orleans was due in at Dulles at four forty-five, and if the plane wasn’t delayed and the traffic wasn’t too heavy, her father should be home by seven o’clock. Give or take a few minutes, that’s just when Dick Jones arrived. He had been gone for three days, and when the children heard the sound of his approaching car, they both ran screaming from the yard and vanished around the side of the house. Polly made no move to run after them. She calmly went on watering her plants and flowers, and Mr. Bones stuck by her, unwilling to let her out of his sight. He knew that all hope was gone now, but if anybody could save him from the thing that was about to happen, she was the one.

A few moments later, the man of the house walked into the yard with Tiger in one arm and Alice tugging on the other, and because he was wearing his pilot’s uniform (dark blue pants; light blue shirt garnished with epaulets and insignias), Mr. Bones mistook him for a cop. It was an automatic association, and with a lifetime of dread built into that response, he couldn’t help recoiling as Dick approached, even though he could see with his own eyes that the man was laughing and seemed genuinely happy to be with his children again. Before Mr. Bones could sort through this jumble of doubts and conflicting impressions, he was swept up into the drama of the moment, and from then on everything seemed to happen at once. Alice had started talking to her father about the dog the instant he stepped out of the car, and she was still at it when he entered the yard and greeted his wife (a perfunctory kiss on the cheek), and the more she badgered him and raved on about the wonderful creature they had found, the more excited her little brother became. Yelling “Sparky” at the top of his lungs, Tiger slithered out of his father’s grasp, ran over to Mr. Bones, and threw his arms around his neck. Not to be outdone by her pipsqueak brother, Alice came over and got into the act as well, making a great, histrionic show of affection for the dog as she attacked him with repeated hugs and melodramatic kisses, and with the two kids suddenly mauling him like that and covering his ears with their hands and chests and faces, he missed three quarters of what the adults were saying. About the only thing he heard with any clarity was Dick’s initial statement. “So this is the famous dog, huh? Looks like one sorry mutt to me.”

After that, it was anyone’s guess as to what really happened. He saw Polly twist the nozzle of the hose, which cut off the flow of water, and then she said something to Dick. Most of it was inaudible, but from the few words and phrases that Mr. Bones managed to catch, he understood that she was pleading his case: “wandered into the yard this afternoon,” “intelligent,” “the kids think…” and then, after Dick said something back to her, “I don’t have the foggiest idea. Maybe he ran away from the circus.” It sounded fairly encouraging, but just as he succeeded in getting his left ear free of Tiger’s grip to take in a little more, Polly tossed the hose onto the ground and wandered off with Dick in the direction of the house. They stopped a few feet in front of the back door and went on talking there. Mr. Bones was certain that momentous things were being decided now, but even though their lips were moving, he could no longer hear a word they said.

He could see that Dick was watching him, however, gesturing toward him every now and then with a vague sweep of the hand as he continued his discussion with Polly, and Mr. Bones, who was growing a little bored with the raucous love-in that Tiger and Alice had started, wondered if it might not be such a bad idea to take the initiative and do something to help himself. Instead of standing around while his future hung in the balance, why not try to impress Dick with some canine derring-do, some spiffy dog thing that would turn the tide in his favor? It was true that Mr. Bones was exhausted, and it was true that his stomach still hurt and his legs felt diabolically weak, but he didn’t let those things stop him from bounding off and racing to the other end of the yard. Shrieking with surprise, Tiger and Alice went running after him, and just as they were about to catch him, he bounded away from them again, abruptly charging back in the direction he had come from. Again they went after him, and again he waited until they almost had him in their hands before jumping away. He hadn’t sprinted like that in aeons, but even though he knew that he was pushing himself too hard and would eventually have to pay for his exertions, he kept on going, proud to be torturing himself on behalf of such a noble cause. After three or four dashes across the lawn, he stopped in the middle of the yard and played duck-and-feint with them—the dog version of tag—and even though he could barely breathe anymore, he refused to quit before the children gave up and flopped to the ground in front of him.

Meanwhile, the sun was beginning to go down. The sky was streaked with bands of pinkish clouds, and the air had turned cooler. Now that the romp-a-thon had ended, it appeared that Dick and Polly were ready to announce their verdict. As Mr. Bones lay panting on the grass with the two children, he saw the grown-ups turn from the house and begin walking back to the yard, and while it was never clear to him whether his manic burst of high spirits had any effect on the outcome, he took heart from the satisfied little smile that was creasing the edges of Polly’s mouth. “Daddy says that Sparky can stay,” she said, and as Alice jumped up from the ground and hugged her father and Polly bent down and gathered the half-sleeping Tiger into her arms, a new chapter in Mr. Bones’s life began.

Before they could break out the champagne, however,

Dick butted in with a few additional points—the fine print, so to speak. It’s not that he didn’t want everyone to be happy, he said, but for the time being it had to be understood that they were only keeping the dog on a “trial basis,” and unless certain conditions were met—and here he gave Alice a long, hard look—the deal was off. First: under no circumstances was the dog to be allowed in the house. Second: he would have to be taken to the vet for a full checkup. If he wasn’t found to be in reasonably good health, he would have to go. Third: at the earliest possible convenience, an appointment would have to be made with a professional groomer. The dog needed a haircut, a shampoo, and a manicure, as well as a thorough going-over for ticks, lice, and fleas. Fourth: he would have to be fixed. And fifth: Alice would be responsible for feeding him and changing his water bowl—with no increase in her allowance for services rendered.

Mr. Bones had no idea what the word fixed meant, but he understood everything else, and all in all it didn’t sound too bad, except maybe for the first point about not being allowed in the house, since he failed to grasp how a dog could become part of a family’s household if he didn’t have the right to enter that family’s house. Alice must have been wondering the same thing, for as soon as her father came to the last item on his list, she chimed in with a question. “What happens when winter comes?” she asked. “We’re not going to leave him out here in the cold, are we, Daddy?”

“Of course not,” Dick said. “We’ll put him in the garage, and if it’s still too cold in there, we’ll let him stay in the cellar. I just don’t want him getting his hair all over the furniture, that’s all. But we’ll make it real nice for him out here, don’t worry. We’ll give him a first-class doghouse, and I’ll set up a run for him by stringing a wire between those two trees over there. He’ll have plenty of space to frisk about in, and once he gets used to it, he’ll be happy as a clam. Don’t feel sorry for him, Alice. He’s not a person, he’s a dog, and dogs don’t ask questions. They make do with what they get.” With that decisive remark, Dick put his hand on Mr. Bones’s head and gave it a firm, manly squeeze, as if to prove he wasn’t such an ornery customer after all. “Ain’t that right, sport?” he said. “You’re not going to complain, are you? You know what you’ve lucked into here, and the last thing you want is to rock the boat.”

He was a can-do guy, this Dick, and even though the next day was Sunday—which meant that both the groomer and the vet were closed—he got up early, drove off to the lumberyard in Polly’s van, and then spent the entire morning and afternoon putting together a pre-fab doghouse (deluxe model, assembly instructions included) and rigging up a run in the backyard. He clearly belonged to that class of men who felt happier lugging around ladders and hammering nails into boards than making small talk with his wife and children. Dick was a man of action, a soldier in the war against idleness, and as Mr. Bones watched him working away in his khaki shorts and saw the sweat glistening on his forehead, he couldn’t help but read this activity as a good sign. It meant that all that “trial basis” talk from yesterday had been no more than a bluff. Dick had shelled out over two hundred dollars for this new equipment and hardware. He had toiled in the heat for the better part of a day, and he wasn’t about to let his work or money go to waste. His toes were in the water now, and as far as Mr. Bones could tell, it was either sink or swim from this point on.

The next morning, they all flew off in different directions. A bus stopped in front of the house at quarter to eight and took Alice to school. Forty minutes after that, Dick left for the airport in his pilot’s uniform, and then, shortly before nine, Polly strapped Tiger into his child-restraint seat in the van and drove him to his morning play group. Mr. Bones could scarcely believe what was happening. Was this what life was going to be like around here?, he wondered. Were they simply going to abandon him in the morning and expect him to fend for himself all day? It felt like an obscene joke. He was a dog built for companionship, for the give-and-take of life with others, and he needed to be touched and spoken to, to be part of a world that included more than just himself. Had he walked to the ends of the earth and found this blessed haven only to be spat on by the people who had taken him in? They had turned him into a prisoner. They had chained him to this infernal bouncing wire, this metallic torture device with its incessant squeaks and echoing hums, and every time he moved, the noises moved with him—as if to remind him that he was no longer free, that he had sold his birthright for a mess of porridge and an ugly, ready-made house.

Just when it looked as if he might go ahead and do some rash, vindictive thing—like digging up the flowers in the garden, for instance, or gnawing off the bark of the young cherry tree—Polly came back, unexpectedly pulling into the driveway with her van, and the world changed color again. Not only did she come out to the yard and release him from his bondage, and not only did she let him follow her into the house and go upstairs to her bedroom, but as she changed her clothes and brushed her hair and put on her makeup, she informed him that there were going to be two sets of rules for him to remember: Dick’s rules and her rules. When Dick was around, Mr. Bones would be confined to the outdoors, but when Dick was gone, she was in charge, and that meant that dogs were allowed in the house. “It’s not that he doesn’t mean well,” Polly said, “but that man can be a squarehead sometimes, and once he’s got his brain fixed on something, you’re just wasting your breath if you try to talk him out of it. That’s life with the Joneses, Sparky, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. All I ask is that you keep this little arrangement under your hat. It’s our secret, and not even the kids can know what we’re up to. You hear me, old dog? This is strictly between you and me.”

But that wasn’t all. As if this declaration of solidarity and affection hadn’t been enough, later that same morning Mr. Bones got to ride in a car for the first time in nearly two years. Not scrunched up on the floor in back, where he had usually been put in the past, but right up front in the copilot’s seat, riding shotgun with the window open and the sweet Virginia air rushing in on his face. It was a sublime vindication to be tooling down the road like that, with the magnificent Polly at the wheel of the Plymouth Voyager and the motion of the van rumbling inside his muscles and his nose twitching crazily at each passing smell. When it finally hit him that this van was going to be a part of his new routine, he was awed by the prospect that loomed before him. Life with Willy had been good, but maybe this was even better. For the sad truth was that poets didn’t drive, and even when they traveled on foot, they didn’t always know where they were going.

The visit to the groomer’s was something of an ordeal, but he bore up to the multiple assaults of soaps and shears as best he could, not wanting to complain after all the kindness that had been bestowed on him. When they finished with him an hour and a half later, he emerged as an altogether different dog. Gone were the shaggy clumps of fur dangling from his hocks, the messy protrusions jutting from his withers, the hair hanging in his eyes. He was no longer a bum, no longer an embarrassment. He had been dandified, turned into a bourgeois dog-about-town, and if the novelty of the transformation made him want to gloat and preen a little bit, who could blame him for exulting in his good fortune? “Wow,” Polly said when they finally took him out to her. “They sure gave you the once-over, didn’t they? Next thing you know, Spark Plug, you’ll be winning prizes at the dog shows.”

Twenty-four hours later, they went to see the vet. Mr. Bones was glad for the chance to ride in the car again, but he’d crossed paths with those men in the white coats before, and he knew enough about their needles and thermometers and rubber gloves to dread what was coming. Mrs. Gurevitch had always been the one to schedule his appointments in the past, but after she died, Mr. Bones had been spared the agony of further dealings with the medical profession. Willy had been either too broke or too forgetful to bother anymore, and since the dog was still alive after four years of not going to the doctor, he failed to see what good a checkup was going to do him now. If you were sick enough to die, a doctor wasn’t going to save you. And if you weren’t sick, why let them torture you with their pricking and poking only to be told that your health was okay?

It would have been a horror if Polly hadn’t stayed with him during the examination, holding him in her arms and soothing him with her soft, lovely voice. Even with her help, he trembled and shook throughout the entire visit, and three times he jumped off the table and ran for the door. The doctor’s name was Burnside, Walter A. Burnside, and it made no difference that the quack seemed to like him. Mr. Bones had seen him looking at Polly, and he had smelled the arousal on the young doctor’s skin. She was the one he was after, and liking her dog was only a ruse, a way to get on her good side and impress her with his understanding and skill. It didn’t matter that he called Mr. Bones a wise dog and patted him on the head and laughed at his attempts to escape. He did it so he could get closer to Polly, maybe even brush up against her body, and Polly, who was so absorbed in taking care of the dog, didn’t even notice what the scoundrel was up to.

“Not bad,” the doctor said at last. “Considering what he’s been through.”

“He’s a tough old trouper,” Polly said, giving Mr. Bones a kiss between the eyes. “But his stomach is shot. I hate to think about some of the things that must have gone in there.”

“He’ll be all right once you get him on a regular diet. And don’t forget to give him the worm pills. In a week or two, you’ll probably start to see a big improvement.”

Polly thanked the doctor, and when she and Burnside shook hands on her way out, Mr. Bones couldn’t help noticing that Señor Smooth held on longer than he should have. When he answered Polly’s polite good-bye by saying “The pleasure’s been all mine,” the dog had a sudden urge to jump up and bite him on the leg. Polly turned to leave. Just as she was opening the door, the doctor added: “Talk to June at the front desk. She’ll schedule you in for the other matter.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Polly said. “But that’s the way my husband wants it.”

“He’s right,” Burnside said. “It simplifies things, and in the long run it’ll make Sparky a whole lot happier.”

Dick returned home on Thursday night, which meant that Friday morning was much duller than the previous mornings had been. No more stealthy, luxurious hours spent in the house. No more sitting in the bathroom and watching Polly take her bath. No more scrambled eggs. No more sugary milk from the children’s cereal bowls. Ordinarily, losses of that magnitude would have pained him, but on that particular Friday morning they produced no more than a stab of wistful regret. Mr. Bones had hope now, and he knew that once Dick left on Sunday afternoon, the door would open for him again. There was solace in this thought, and even though it was drizzling that day and the air had turned cool with the first traces of autumn, he settled into his doghouse with the rubber bone that Polly had bought for him at the groomer’s and nibbled away at it as the family ate breakfast inside. He heard the bus come and go, he heard the van drive off, and then, in the interval before Polly returned, Dick sauntered out into the yard to say hello. Not even that could ruffle his contentment. The pilot seemed to be in a chipper mood that morning, and when he complimented Mr. Bones on his fine haircut and asked him how he was getting along, the dog’s generosity won out over his suspicions, and he responded with a discreet, gentlemanly lick of the hand. It wasn’t that he was against Dick, he decided. It was just that he pitied him for not knowing how to enjoy life. The world was filled with such wonders, and it was a sad state of affairs when a man spent his time worrying about the wrong things.

Mr. Bones was anticipating a long, slow time of it, and he had prepared himself to while away the hours before the children came home by doing as little as possible: dozing, chewing on the bone, strolling around the yard if the rain let up. Indolence was the only chore on the agenda, but Dick kept mentioning what a big day it was, kept harping on how “the moment of truth had finally come,” and after a while Mr. Bones began to wonder if he hadn’t missed something. He had no idea what Dick was talking about, but after all these mysterious pronouncements, it didn’t surprise him that once Polly returned from dropping off Tiger, he was asked to jump into the van and take another ride. It was different, of course, now that Dick was there, but who was he to object to a slight change of protocol? Dick was in the driver’s seat, Polly sat next to him, and Mr. Bones rode in back, lying on a beach towel that Dick had put down to protect the car from errant dog hairs. The window couldn’t be lowered in back, which reduced the pleasure of the ride considerably, but still, he enjoyed the motion for its own sake, and all in all he much preferred being where he was to where he had been.

He could sense that all was not calm between the Joneses, however. As the ride continued, it became clear that Polly was unusually subdued, gazing out the window to her right instead of looking at Dick, and after a while her silence seemed to dampen Dick’s spirits as well.

“Look, Polly,” he said, “I’m sorry. But it’s really for his own good.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “Your mind’s made up, and that’s the end of it. You know my opinion, so what’s the point of arguing anymore?”

“It’s not like I’m the only one who ever thought of it,” Dick said. “It’s common practice.”

“Oh yeah? And how would you like it if someone did it to you?”

Dick made a sound that fell halfway between a grunt and a laugh. “Come on, honey, cut it out. He’s a dog. He won’t even know what happened to him.”

“Please, Dick. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why not? If you’re so upset—”

“No. Not in front of him. It’s not fair.”

Dick laughed again, but this time it came out as a kind of uproarious stupefaction, a great guffaw of disbelief. “You’ve got to be joking!” he said. “I mean, Jesus Christ, Polly, we’re talking about a dog!”

“Think what you like. But I’m not going to say another word about it in this car.”

And she didn’t. But enough had been said for Mr. Bones to start worrying, and when the car finally came to a stop and he saw that they had pulled up in front of the same building he and Polly had visited on Tuesday morning, the same building that housed the offices of one Walter A. Burnside, doctor of veterinary medicine, he knew that something terrible was about to happen to him.

And it did. And the odd thing about it was that Dick had been right. Mr. Bones never knew what hit him. They put him under with a needle to the rump, and after the excision had been performed and he was led back to the van, he was still too wobbly to know where he was—let alone who he was, or if he was. It was only later, when the anesthetic had worn off, that he began to feel the pain that had been inflicted on him, but even then he remained in the dark as to what had caused it. He knew where it was coming from, but that wasn’t the same thing as knowing why it was there, and although he had every intention of examining the spot, he put it off for the time being, realizing that he lacked the strength to contort his body into the proper position. He was already in his doghouse then, stretched out dreamily on his left side, and Polly was on her knees in front of the open door, stroking his head and feeding him from her hand—chopped-up bits of medium-rare steak. The meat had an extraordinary flavor, but the truth was that he didn’t have much of an appetite at that moment, and if he accepted what he was given, it was only to please her. The rain had stopped by then. Dick was off with Tiger somewhere, and Alice was still away at school, but being with Polly was comfort enough, and as she continued to stroke his head and assure him that everything was going to be all right, he wondered what the hell had happened to him and why he hurt so much.

In due time, he explored the damage and discovered what was missing, but because he was a dog and not a biologist or a professor of anatomy, he still had no idea what had happened to him. Yes, it was true that the sac was empty now and his old familiars were gone, but what exactly did that mean? He had always enjoyed licking that part of himself, had in fact made a regular habit of it for as long as he could remember, but aside from the tender globes themselves, everything else in the area seemed to be intact. How was he to know that those missing parts had been responsible for turning him into a father many times over? Except for his ten-day affair with Greta, the malamute from Iowa City, his romances had always been brief—impetuous couplings, impromptu flings, frantic rolls in the hay—and he had never seen any of the pups he had sired. And even if he had, how would he have been able to make the connection? Dick Jones had turned him into a eunuch, but in his own eyes he was still the prince of love, the lord of the canine Romeos, and he would go on courting the ladies until his last, dying breath. For once, the tragic dimension of his own life eluded him. The only thing that mattered was the physical pain, and once that disappeared, he never gave the operation another thought.

More days passed. He settled into the rhythms of the household, grew accustomed to the various comings and goings around him, came to understand the difference between the weekdays and the weekends, the sound of the school bus as opposed to the sound of the UPS truck, the smells of the animals who lived in the woods that bordered the yard: squirrels, raccoons, chipmunks, rabbits, all manner of birds. He knew by now that birds weren’t worth the trouble, but whenever a wingless creature wandered onto the lawn, he took it upon himself to chase the varmint from the property, rushing toward him in a frenzied outburst of barks and growls. Sooner or later, they would catch on to the fact that he was hooked up to that damned wire, but for now most of them were sufficiently intimidated by his presence to keep the game interesting. Except for the cat, of course, but that was always the case with cats, and the black one from next door had already figured out the exact length of the leash that held him to the wire, which meant that he knew the limits of Mr. Bones’s mobility at every point in the yard. The feline intruder would always position himself in a spot designed to cause the maximum frustration: a few inches out of the dog’s range. There was nothing Mr. Bones could do about it. He could either stand there and bark his head off as the cat hissed at him and shot his claws toward his face, or he could retreat into his doghouse and pretend to ignore the cat, even though the son of a bitch would then hop onto the roof and start digging his claws into the dense cedar shingles just above his head. Those were the alternatives: be scratched or be mocked, and either way it was a losing proposition. On the other hand, there were certain small miracles to be seen from that same doghouse, especially at night. A silver fox, for example, who scampered across the lawn at three A.M. and disappeared before Mr. Bones could stir a muscle, imprinting an afterimage on his mind that was so sharp, so crystalline in its perfection, that it kept coming back to him for days afterward: an apparition of weightlessness and speed, the grace of the wholly wild. And then, on a night in late September, there was the deer who stepped out of the woods, tiptoed around the grass for twenty or thirty seconds, and then, startled by the noise of a distant car, bounded off into the darkness again, leaving great divots in the lawn that were still there the following week.

Mr. Bones grew exceedingly fond of that lawn—the tufted, padded feel of it, the grasshoppers bouncing back and forth among its green stalks, the smell of earth rising up at you everywhere you turned, and as time went on he understood that if he and Dick had anything in common, it was this deep, irrational love of lawn. It was their bond, but it was also the source of their greatest philosophical differences. For Mr. Bones, the lawn’s beauty was a gift from God, and he felt it should be treated as holy ground. Dick believed in that beauty as well, but he knew that it had been born out of human effort, and if that beauty was to last, then unending care and diligence were required. The term was lawn maintenance, and until the middle of November not a week went by when Dick did not devote at least one full day to trimming and mowing his quarter-acre patch of sward. He had his own machine—an orange-and-white vehicle that looked like a cross between a golf cart and a midget tractor—and every time he started up the engine, Mr. Bones felt certain that he would die. He hated the noise of that contraption, hated the ear-splitting fury of its spurts and stutters, hated the gasoline smells it deposited in every corner of the air. He would hide in his doghouse whenever Dick roared out into the yard on that thing, burying his head under his blankets in a futile effort to block up his ears, but there was really no escape, no solution short of being let out of the yard altogether. But Dick had his rules, and since Mr. Bones was supposed to be in the yard, the pilot pretended not to notice the dog’s suffering. The weeks rolled by, and as the assaults on Mr. Bones’s ears continued, he couldn’t help building up a certain resentment against Dick for refusing to take him into account.

There was no question that things were better when Dick was gone. That was a fact of life, and he learned to accept it in the same way he had once learned to accept his harsh treatment from Mrs. Gurevitch. She had been downright hostile to him in the beginning, and his first year in Brooklyn had been filled with stinging nose-slaps and grumpy tongue-lashings from the old sourpuss, a buildup of bad blood on both sides. But all that had changed, hadn’t it? He had won her over in the end, and who knew if the same thing wouldn’t happen with Dick as well? In the meantime, he tried not to think about it too much. He had three people to love now, and after spending his whole life as a one-man dog, that was more than enough. Even Tiger was beginning to show some promise, and once you learned how to stay clear of his pinching little fingers, he could actually be fun to be with—in small doses. With Alice, however, no dose was too large. He wished that she were able to spend more time with him, but she was off at that blasted school all day, and what with the after-school ballet lessons on Tuesday and the piano lessons on Thursday, not to speak of the homework she had to do every evening, their weekday visits were usually confined to a short early-morning conversation—as she straightened his blankets and replenished his food and water bowls—and then, after she returned home, to the period just before dinner, when she would report on what had happened to her since the morning and ask him how his day had gone. That was one of the things he liked best about her: the way she talked to him, calmly moving from point to point without leaving anything out, as if there was never any question that he couldn’t understand what she was saying. Alice spent most of her time living in a world of imaginary beings, and she brought Mr. Bones into that world and made him her partner, her fellow protagonist, her male lead. Saturdays and Sundays were full of these screwball improvisations. There was the tea party they attended at the castle of the Baroness de Dunwitty, a beautiful but dangerous Machiavel plotting to take over the kingdom of Floriania. There was the earthquake in Mexico. There was the hurricane on the Rock of Gibraltar, and there was the shipwreck that left them stranded on the shores of Nemo Island, where the only food consisted of twig nubs and acorn shells, but if you managed to find the magic night crawler who lived just under the surface of the ground and ate him up in a single bite, you would be endowed with the ability to fly. (Mr. Bones swallowed the worm she gave him, and then, with Alice clinging to his back, he took off into the air and they escaped the island.)

Tiger was running and jumping. Alice was words and the meeting of minds. She was the old soul in the young body who had talked her parents into letting him stay, but now that he was there and had spent some time among them, he knew that Polly was the one who needed him most. After several dozen mornings of following her around, of listening to what she told him and watching what she did, Mr. Bones understood that she was a prisoner of circumstances just as much as he was. She had been only eighteen when she met Dick. It was just after she graduated from high school, and to earn some money before starting N.C.-Charlotte in the fall, she had taken a summer waitressing job at a seafood restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia. The first time Dick came in, he wound up asking her for a date. He was nine years older than she was, and she found him so handsome and sure of himself that she let herself go further than she had intended. The romance continued for three or four weeks, and then she went back to North Carolina to start college. She was planning to get a degree in education and become a schoolteacher, but one month into her first term, she discovered that she was pregnant. When she broke the news to her parents, they were outraged. They told her that she was a slut, that she had disgraced them with her promiscuity, and then they refused to offer any help— which caused a rift in the family that was never fully repaired, not even after nine years of apologies and contrition on both sides. It wasn’t that she wanted to marry Dick, but after her own father turned his back on her, where else was she going to go? Dick said he loved her. He kept telling her that she was the prettiest, most remarkable girl on the face of the earth, and after a couple of months of wavering back and forth, of sinking into the most desperate kinds of speculation (an abortion, giving up the baby for adoption, keeping the baby and trying to make it on her own), she buckled under the pressure and quit school to marry Dick. Once the baby was old enough, she figured she would be able to go back to college, but Alice was born with all sorts of medical problems, and for the next four years Polly’s life was taken up with doctors, hospitals, and experimental surgeries, an endless round of cures and consultations to keep her little girl alive. It was her proudest accomplishment as a human being, she told Mr. Bones one morning—the way she’d looked after Alice and pulled her through—but even though she’d been no more than a young girl herself at the time, she wondered if it hadn’t drained her strength forever. Once Alice was well enough to go to school, Polly began to think about going back to school herself, but then she got pregnant with Tiger, and she had to put it off again. Now it was probably too late. Dick was starting to earn good money, and when you combined his salary with some of the investments he’d made, they were pretty well off now. He didn’t want her to work, and whenever she said that maybe it would be nice to work anyway, he always gave her the same answer. She already had a career, he said. Wife and mother was a tough enough job for any woman, and as long as he could take care of her, why change things just for the sake of changing them? And then, to prove how much he loved her, he went out and bought her this big, beautiful house.

Polly loved the house, but she didn’t love Dick. This had become manifestly clear to Mr. Bones, and although Polly herself didn’t know it yet, it wouldn’t be long before the truth finally came crashing down on top of her. That was why she needed Mr. Bones, and because he loved her more than any other living person in the world, he was glad to serve as her confidant and sounding board. There was no one else to fill this role for her, and even though he was a mere dog who could neither counsel her nor answer her questions, his simple presence as an ally was enough to give her the courage to take certain steps she might not have taken otherwise. Establishing her own rules about letting him into the house was hardly a serious matter, but in its own small way it was an act of defiance against Dick, a microscopic instance of betrayal that could, in time, lead to bigger, more significant betrayals. Mr. Bones and Polly both knew that Dick didn’t want him in the house, and this injunction only added to the pleasure of his visits, giving them a dangerous, clandestine quality, as if he and Polly were accomplices in a palace revolt against the king. Mr. Bones had been drafted into a war of nerves and smoldering antagonisms, and the longer he was there, the more crucial his role became. Instead of arguing about themselves, Dick and Polly now argued about him, using the dog as an excuse to advance their separate causes, and while Mr. Bones was rarely privy to the conversations, he learned enough from hearing Polly talk to her sister on the phone to know that some fierce battles had been fought on his account. The hair-on-the-carpet skirmish was just one example. Polly always took care to eliminate Mr. Bones’s traces from the house when Dick was about to return, assiduously vacuuming every spot where the dog had been, even getting down on her hands and knees when necessary and using strips of Scotch tape to remove any vagrant hairs that the machine had missed. Once, however, when she had done a less than thorough job, Dick discovered a few strands of Mr. Bones’s fur lying on the living room carpet. As Polly reported the incident to her sister Peg in Durham, those bits of fluff had led to a prolonged and churlish confrontation. “Dick asks me what those hairs are doing there,” she said, sitting on a kitchen stool and smoking one of her infrequent morning cigarettes, “and I tell him I don’t know, maybe they fell off one of the kids. Then he goes upstairs into the bedroom and finds another one on the floor by the night table. He comes out holding the thing between his fingers and says, I suppose you don’t know about this either, and I say no, why should I? Maybe it came from Sparky’s brush. His brush?, Dick says, what are you doing with his brush in the bedroom? Cleaning it, I say, just as calm as I can be, what difference does it make? But Dick won’t let it end there. He’s got to get to the bottom of the mystery, and so he keeps on pushing. Why didn’t you clean it out in the yard, he says, where you’re supposed to? Because it was raining, I say, telling about my fourteenth fib of the conversation. Then why didn’t you do it in the garage?, he asks. Because I didn’t want to, I say. It’s too dark in there. And so, he says, really starting to get pissed-off now, you drag in the dog’s brush and clean it on the bed. That’s right, I say, I cleaned it on the bed because that’s where I felt like cleaning it, and he says, Don’t you think that’s disgusting, Polly? Don’t you know how much I hate that? I’m telling you, Peg, it went on like that for ten more minutes. All this petty bullshit, it drives me crazy sometimes. I can’t stand lying to him, but what else am I supposed to do when we start in on these stupid disagreements? He’s such a stickler, that man. His heart’s in the right place, but half the time he forgets where it is. Jesus. If I told him I was letting the dog into the house, he’d probably divorce me. He’d just pack up his bags and walk out.”

Such was the marital turmoil that Mr. Bones had stumbled into. Sooner or later, something was bound to give, but until Polly woke up to herself and finally pushed that piker out the door, the atmosphere would continue to be charged with intrigues and buried animosities, the plots and counterplots of dying love. Mr. Bones did his best to adjust to all this. So much was still new to him, however, so many things still had to be studied and made sense of, that the ups and downs of Polly’s marriage occupied no more than a small fraction of his energies. The Joneses had introduced him to a different world from the one he had known with Willy, and not a day went by when he didn’t experience some sudden revelation or feel some pang about what had been missing from his former life. It wasn’t just the daily rides in the van, and it wasn’t just the regular meals or the absence of ticks and fleas from his coat. It was the barbecues on the back patio, the porterhouse steak bones he was given to gnaw on, the weekend outings to Wanacheebee Pond and the swims with Alice in the cool water, the overall feeling of splendor and well-being that had engulfed him. He had landed in the America of two-car garages, home-improvement loans, and neo-Renaissance shopping malls, and the fact was that he had no objections. Willy had always attacked these things, railing against them in that lopsided, comic way of his, but Willy had been on the outside looking in, and he had refused to give any of it a chance. Now that Mr. Bones was on the inside, he wondered where his old master had gone wrong and why he had worked so hard to spurn the trappings of the good life. It might not have been perfect in this place, but it had a lot to recommend it, and once you got used to the mechanics of the system, it no longer seemed so important that you were tethered to a wire all day. By the time you had been there for two and a half months, you even stopped caring that your name was Sparky.