A Big Little Life. Dean Koontz
Читать онлайн книгу.
house are honed limestone with a matte sealer. If she could wake us in time, she waited for us to open the bedroom door, raced down the stairs, and disgorged on limestone, where the mess could be cleaned up more easily and without leaving a stain.
As the reader must now realize, this is not going to be a memoir about a pillow-destroying, cat-chasing, furniture-chewing, miscreant kind of canine. I did not exaggerate earlier when I said that she was something more than a dog, just as each of us is something more than the physical body we inhabit. This dog, this individual, this furry person, this spirit was a wonder and a revelation.
Her veterinarians had difficulty diagnosing the cause of her stomach upset. Even after they decided that we must be dealing with a food allergy, we had to discover by trial and error which food irritated her. By the time we knew it had to be either wheat or beef—and decided to eliminate both from her diet rather than risk one more spell of sickness—we had cleaned up enough vomit to get a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records, supposing they would agree to include an up chuck category.
During this period, Trixie’s worst episode of each day occurred between two and three o’clock in the morning. As her distress grew, she woke us by coming to our bed in the dark and panting loudly, for she rarely barked and never whimpered.
In the pioneer spirit that impelled each of our forefathers to sleep with a Remington rifle beside the bed and a bowie knife between his clenched teeth, I kept nearby a pair of jeans, shoes, a roll of paper towels, a spray bottle of Nature’s Miracle, and a plastic bag. Eventually, counting from the moment Trixie’s urgent panting woke me, I could be in my jeans and shoes, with my clean-up gear in hand, ready to follow her to the nearest limestone floor, in 2.23 seconds.
If we’d had some foresight, we could have installed a fireman’s pole between the bedroom and the lower floors, enabling me to be waiting for Trixie in the limestone hallway when she reached it by the stairs.
The night that her toilet tao was put to the ultimate test, the clock showed 3:30 a.m. when she woke us. At 3:30:02:21, I was jeaned, shoed, equipped, ready to follow her—a personal best for me.
On this occasion, she raced all the way from the third floor to the first, to the hallway that leads to the garage, where she delivered a reedited version of her dinner kibble. I cleaned this up, stowed it in an odor-trapping OneZip bag, and took it to the trash can in the garage, leaving Trixie lying on her side in what appeared to be a state of exhaustion.
Because sometimes the initial regurgitation was followed by a second and more minor event of the same kind, I took a quilted moving blanket from a garage cabinet and used it as a bed on the hallway floor to make our wait comfortable. Lying face-to-face with Trixie, I stroked her side and spoke softly to reassure her.
That night on the hallway floor, as Trixie and I waited to see if she needed to purge her stomach a second time, that yearning look in her eyes, that seeming desire to speak, was stronger than I had ever seen it before. Suddenly she leaped to her feet, turned from me, and ran into the garage, where I had left the door open.
She had been lethargic for some time because of her sickness, so her energetic exit surprised and then alarmed me. I followed her into the garage, where I saw that she had sprinted to the rack on which we hung her collars and leashes.
She looked from the leashes to me, to the leashes, to me. I realized this food allergy, which previously had been expressed solely through vomiting, was about to have an effect at the other end of the dog. Trixie needed to poop. Now.
Quickly, I put on her collar, put my hand through the leash loop, and she took off. As I gasped to keep pace with Trixie, she ran the length of the long garage, to the man door beside the big roll-up.
Just beyond this door was the driveway and, to the left, a large yard graced by a double colonnade of California pepper trees, where we often played fetch with a tennis ball. Although it was nearly four o’clock in the morning, although no one but I would be aware that she violated her toilet tao, Trixie would not trot twenty feet to the pepper-tree lawn and void there. It was, after all, our property, sacred territory. Instead, she raced up the driveway, into the night, pulling me with her.
Halfway between the garage and the driveway gate, she turned right, up another length of driveway that led to the motor court. Her toenails click-click-clicked on the quartzite paving, and my feet raised loud slapping sounds as I staggered wildly after her, hoping not to be pulled off balance. She ran across the motor court, down a set of stairs to the front entrance, through the front gate, and up a 160-foot-long wheelchair ramp paralleling the entry stairs that descended to our front door.
This circuitous route equaled at least one and a half football fields. At the end of the breathless journey, Trixie stepped off our property, squatted on our neighbors’ front lawn, and instantly had explosive diarrhea.
Standing in the cool night, under a fat moon, I said to her, “You are the best dog in the world. But I like our neighbors, so I still have to clean up the mess.”
For the remaining years of her life, wheat and beef were removed from Trixie’s diet. She never had another bout of gastrointestinal distress. But I was motivated to stay fit just in case she ever again had to make a five-hundred-yard diarrhea run.
On the day we had adopted Trixie, Mike Martin had worried that because of our compulsive neatness and our need for order, we would find our lives disrupted by a dog. Instead, Trix was so fastidious, with such a natural sense of propriety, that we had to rise to her standards.
In the new house, Linda and Elaine shared a large office with plenty of roaming room for Trixie, who spent part of each weekday there because Linda walked her at 11:30 and 3:30.
In addition to the toilet tao that prohibited her from pooping on our property, Trixie was discreet about other matters biological. She did not want us to look at her when she was doing either number one or number two, so we had to stare off into the distance or into the sky, as though contemplating weighty philosophical issues.
She allowed us to bag her leavings, but while we gathered them, she often turned her back or stared off into the distance as though contemplating weighty philosophical issues. The times I caught her watching me at this task, she always appeared incredulous, as if my motives were beyond comprehension.
One afternoon, as Trixie dozed on her dog bed, Linda and Elaine were busy at their desks. Suddenly a ripe aroma filled the room. Neither of them remarked on the smell as it dissipated. But when it bloomed again, Elaine declared, “Linda, dear, please remember, I’m a delicate flower with refined sensibilities. I’m withering here. Whatever you had for dinner last night, never eat it again if the next day is a workday.”
“Nice try,” Linda said, “but we know which one of us lives on Metamucil.” When Elaine insisted she was innocent, Linda said, “Well, it isn’t me and it certainly isn’t Trixie.”
At that time, Trix had been with us over seven years, and if she had ever passed gas around any of us, it had been odorless.
Recognizing each other’s sincerity, Linda and Elaine exchanged a glance of disbelief, for a moment speechless, then turned their attention to the dog and simultaneously said, “Trixie?”
They couldn’t have been more shocked if they had seen the Queen of England spit tobacco juice on an antique carpet.
AS FAR AS I know, I’m the only writer who has appeared often on the best-seller list but who has never done a national or even a multi-state book-publicity tour. I also have never stabbed my wife, as Norman Mailer stabbed one of his, nor have I dissed Oprah Winfrey, as Jonathan Franzen did, nor have I faked a bad-boy history and invented a colorful past as James Frey did: I am a publicist’s worst nightmare.
I dislike most publicity, aside from radio interviews, which I enjoy because of the energy and intelligence of the folks who work in that medium. Besides, I can do