“Stupid, I know, but…”
“Why do you say that?” Buddy objected.
Harry looked at his hands, folded on the kitchen table. “He was still just a dog, at the end of the day,” he said.
“Oh, come on, Harry! Gypsy wasn’t ‘just a dog’ to you, and neither was Mr. Beasley. And neither was Avatar to Andrea. I know you don’t like to use the word when you’re talking about your dogs, but Gypsy was a friend.”
“So why don’t you have a dog?” Harry looked up imploringly, as if Buddy’s answer might make things right. “I mean, you sure looked like a guy who could use some companionship when you arrived on our doorstep.”
Buddy laughed obligingly.
This man, he’s become like a father to you, White Raven pronounced, settling on his shoulder, the grappling of her claws tingling in his imagination.
“Leanne didn’t like animals,” he said, uneasy having to use her name and at his choice of the past tense pronouncing it. He felt guilty, laying the blame on his would-be-ex for an attitude that didn’t deserve blame.
Harry watched, waited.
“And the kids never seemed to mind not having them, either.”
Jesus! he cringed, When was the last time I talked to Gloria and Robbie?
Harry watched, waited.
He’d texted, of course. But, really, it’s like I’ve been communicating in Morse code from Mars.
“You okay?” Harry said at last.
“Yeah. Just remembered some things I’ve got to do, is all.”
“Uh-huh,” Harry nodded, a gesture of benediction. “Been too busy looking after other people’s shit lately to take care of your own, eh?”
“Well, not exactly the way I’d put it,” Buddy reprimanded.
Harry laughed. “Does it matter what colour a man’s underpants are?” he asked. “Or whether he wears them inside-out or outside-in?”
“Huh?”
“You’re a quibbler, Bud,” the old man accused. “If a man said, ‘that-there ball is round’, you’d say, ‘depends how you look at it’.”
They laughed. “I’m not a quibbler,” Buddy objected. “I’m just used to looking for details. I’m a reporter, after all. The back half of a ball might be flat!”
“Well, there you go, then,” Harry allowed. “But I thought you were a journalist.”
“Reporter covers it, I think.”
For a few seconds everything seemed okay, as if their future wasn’t going to tear them apart. As if there was no future, just this here, this now, Buddy would later realize, remembering the simple pleasure they’d taken in each other’s company.
“That’s the thing about dogs, isn’t it?” he said.
“What?”
“Their enthusiasm, their devotion—it’s all summed up in a single bark. Their expectations and gratitude, it’s all displayed with the wag of a tail. Their sorrow, suffering, and yearning, it’s expressed in a howl. They say what they are and what they hope to be so much more immediately than we do. They’re innocent.”
“That’s a bit deep for me,” Harry complained.
“Nothing’s ever pure and simple for us humans. We’re always thinking and plotting. I mean, there might be moments when we achieve ecstasy, others when we’re plunged into the depths of despair. But those instances are like the splash of a stone thrown into a pond; the surface is disturbed for a while, but the cause is submerged. It becomes part of our submerged landscape.
“We humans never take anything as-is; we’re always asking what it means? And why it’s happened? And what we can do about it? Or with it?”
“Holy shit!” Harry stared wide-eyed. “I never knew quibbling could be taken to such extremes.”
You’ve known it since you were a kid, Buddy thought, smiling in what he took to be an inscrutable manner.
Next: Depth Perception