I convinced myself that he’d be fine, as he had a covered porch to rest under, with several outdoor ceiling fans that ran constantly, plus a sprinkler to run in. I was certain that he was perfectly safe from everything but himself. He’d be frolicking around as I watched from the living room, and then two minutes later I’d look up again to find him with no leash left, having somehow woven an enormous, terribly designed sort of spiderweb with his leash, all of my porch chairs now caught unnaturally inside of it as he looked at me, his little pug head cocked to the side as if to say, “. . . what the fuck just happened?” I’d painstakingly untangle him and move the porch chairs around to the front of the house, but by the time that I got back he’d be tied to the barbecue grill, giving me the exact same look.
I started to suspect that in a past life he’d been a small and not very good pirate whose specialty was lashing himself to the mast at the most inopportune times. I could imagine the captain giving him the same pitying but frustrated look when he came up from his nap to find that Barnaby Jones Pirate had lashed himself to the wheel of the ship because he thought he saw a cyclone, which turned out to be some birds. I knew exactly how that captain must have felt, as he undoubtedly sighed and spent another half-hour unwinding the knotted ropes as Barnaby Jones licked him uncontrollably on the face. Or at least, that’s what Barnaby Jones Pickles always did to me while I was untangling him. I suspect Barnaby Jones Pirate did it as well. There weren’t a lot of girl pirates around, and I’m not going to judge a bunch of pirates and their licking practices. I’m totally pro–same-sex-licking. And pro-pirate. Except for the raping and pillaging parts. I’m anti–raping-and-pillaging. I’m pro–hooks-and-peg-legs. Which I think makes me pirate agnostic.
I never yelled at Barnaby, though, because it’s hard to be mad at someone who’s so damned happy to see you. “Good old Jones,” I’d say gruffly, as I rubbed his ears while he joyfully attempted to gnaw the shoes I was wearing off of my feet. He’d smile in that semi-mindless way that pugs have perfected, and I’d try very hard not to fixate on the furious rabbit hiding in his forehead wrinkles (constantly glaring at me accusingly), both because it seemed to make the dog self-conscious, and also because Victor said that seeing an imaginary angry rabbit on your dog’s forehead is probably some sort of Rorschach test that proves some mental illness that we couldn’t afford to properly medicate anyway. But it was totally there. See below:
I drew in the rabbit face for people with little imagination, but once you’ve seen it, it can’t be unseen.
And then came the terrible day when I called Barnaby Jones to come inside, only to find him dead in the backyard, his furrowed bunny brow gone forever. His face was swollen, and our vet later said he’d most likely been bitten by a snake. I’d write something darkly comedic here to cut the sadness of the whole experience, but I just can’t, because I loved that damn dog.
In my head I screamed obscenities at myself for ever leaving him outside, but I had to stay quiet so that Hailey wouldn’t notice. I didn’t want her to see him that way. Victor was out of town, and the vet’s office answering machine said they were closed for the weekend, so I picked Barnaby up and carried him down to the meadow behind our house, and then cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. Then, after an hour of backbreaking work digging a hole in ground that was almost entirely rock, I buried him there in the meadow he loved to frolic in. I piled a cairn of rocks on top of the grave to mark it. I did it alone, and it sucked.
When it was done, I told Hailey and hugged her while she cried. We held each other on the couch, and every few hours she’d ask me whether it was just a bad dream. I wished it were. She asked if we could go buy another pug and call him Barnaby Jones and just pretend that he never died. I told her that it wouldn’t be fair to do that to Barnaby, but the truth was that I knew I couldn’t handle this again, and I resolved then and there, “I will never own another dog.”
I called Victor to tell him what had happened, and he cried. I told him that I’d buried Barnaby Jones in our meadow, and then Victor got very quiet, because he was perfectly aware of the fact that there’s almost no dirt in the meadow. I suspected he was just quiet because he realized what a terrible predicament he’d put me in by not being home, but then he said enigmatically, “Keep an eye out to where you buried him.” He said it exactly the same way that the guy in Pet Sematary (still purposely misspelled) would say it if you accidentally buried someone you loved in the part of the cemetery that resurrects bodies. I sighed and started crying again, because the last thing I wanted to do was to have to kill my already dead dog again when his soulless body dug itself out of the grave, and then Victor was all, “What in the hell are you talking about?” and I said, “You know . . . SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK?” Then Victor said he was going to call his parents to come get me, because I was obviously having some sort of nervous breakdown. At the time I thought he was saying that because I was getting all of my Stephen King stories confused in my head, but in retrospect it might have been because I just started ranting about having to murder our already dead dog with no real context. Either way, though, the worst part was over, and I assured Victor that in time I’d be okay.
And I totally would have been. If Barnaby Jones Pickles had not risen from the grave.