A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Read online

  In southern California, we seldom experience pyrotechnic storms. Whether light or heavy, rain comes with subtropical languor. Thunder and lightning occur on average no more than once a year, though two or three years can pass without such a spectacle.

  When she was younger, Trixie grew mildly irritated by thunder, but as she aged, she developed a fear of violent storms. I think it was less the noise than the combination of noise and night, because when once we had a daytime downpour with a lot of sky drumming, she was unnerved but not fearful, and she even stood at a big window to study the day, as if to determine the source of the sound.

  One evening, however, we were hammered by the worst thunderstorm I’ve ever known. Even in the mountains of Pennsylvania, where rain seldom comes without cannons in the heavens, I never heard such cacophony. The deluge started before ten o’clock in the evening with a detonation that sounded as if the cosmos might be collapsing.

  Gerda and I had gone to bed but were not yet asleep, and we sat up, startled, mistaking the thunder for another kind of explosion, until the sudden roar of rain followed it. Trixie shot off her bed and paced the room, agitated.

  We switched on a lamp. A soft light sometimes soothed our girl.

  Peals of thunder continued, low rolling rumbles suggestive of ominous war machines conquering territory in the distance, punctuated by tremendous cracks and crashes so vehement that the foundations of the world seemed to be under assault and giving way.

  Trixie did not whine or growl. She did not shiver with fear. But she paced restlessly around the bedroom. Every time an exceptionally hard clap of thunder chased blast waves that vibrated in the window glass and trembled the walls, she went still and waited expectantly for some terrible consequence of the sound—then continued to pace.

  We tried to get her to jump on the bed with us, but she wanted to keep moving, alert for some threat of which the thunder warned. When after a while the loud detonations stopped and there were only long low grumbles like some huge beast softly growling in its sleep, she returned to her bed but remained alert and nervous.

  Either a series of storm cells harried the night or the same storm kept circling back to us. Each time it seemed that the rumbling sky would settle into silence, the booming began again, as bad or worse than the previous round of detonations.

  Finally, after midnight, Trixie decided that being closer to her family was better than ceaselessly roaming, and she jumped onto the bed with us. We encouraged her to cuddle, but she sat at the foot of the mattress, facing the windows, which were covered by roll-down wood shutters.

  The storm seemed about to crescendo, but the escalating tumult roared for hours. As the night dragged on, Trixie turned her back to the windows and hour by hour, always panting with anxiety, she inched up the bed, between Gerda and me. Flat on our backs, we reached up to scratch her chest, to touch her face, to stroke her sides, and once in a while she would lower her head to lick one of our hands or to rub her cold nose against our fingers in gratitude for our presence. We could not induce her to lie down, perhaps because she thought that she would be vulnerable if not standing or at least sitting. Just after four o’clock, she traveled as far as she could, her chest against the headboard, her nose against the wall.

  If the thunder had not kept Gerda and me awake, Trixie’s fear and panting would have made sleep impossible. We had work that needed to be done when morning came, appointments to be kept; we were going to be shambling through our meetings as if we were the walking dead.

  At four thirty, the sky quieted at last. Exhausted, Trixie did not lie down so much as collapse on the bed, her head on Gerda’s pillow, her fluffy butt in my face. Instantly, she began to snore.

  We had to get up at six o’clock, and we did not have a dog’s ability to switch off like a lamp. We knew that we would lie awake until the alarm clock rang.

  Throughout the long night, Gerda and I had said little to each other, trying to remain sleep-ready in case the thunder stopped and the panting dog grew quiet. Now, with Trixie snoring between our heads, Gerda said, “I’m going to be a wreck all day…but I wouldn’t trade this experience for the world.”

  I knew exactly what she meant. We had never previously needed to gentle our girl through such a long seizure of anxiety. Being there for her and knowing that she took courage from us, we fulfilled the promise that dog lovers make to their dogs—I will always love you and bring you safely through troubled times—and little in life is as satisfying as keeping promises.

  XII

  things that go bump in the night

  TRIXIE HAD BEEN with us a year when she did something nearly as mystifying as her reaction when I told her that I knew she was an angel posing as a dog.

  Gerda and I were sitting up in bed, reading, about ready to turn off the lights and go to sleep.

  Trixie got up from her bed to get a drink. On her way back to the corner, she performed one of those cute-as-it-gets stretches in which her rump raised high, the rest of her sloped down toward the floor, her legs thrust straight out in front of her, and her toes spread wide as if all the weariness in her muscles were pouring forward through her body and draining out through her forepaws.

  No sooner had she settled down than she leaped up again, ran past our bed, and vanished through the open door into the upstairs hall.

  Because we had looked up from our books to watch Trixie stretch, our attention remained on her when she hurriedly split. She had never raced off like this before, and we both thought, Intruder.

  I had set the perimeter alarm prior to settling down to read, but perhaps someone had already been in the house when I activated the system. Such an unlikely event had happened a couple of years earlier, before we had Trixie.

  One night, we went out for dinner and forgot to arm the security system. When we came home, we entered from the garage, went straight up the main stairs to the master suite, locked the door behind us, and set the alarm to night mode, which engaged all doors and windows but also motion detectors in the hallways. We didn’t know an intruder was in the house, lurking in a second-floor study when we returned.

  The computerized voice of the alarm announced any change in conditions by way of the house music-system speakers. Therefore, the trespasser in the study knew he was trapped in that space by the motion detector in the hallway, which would trigger a siren and call the police with a recorded message if he moved through its field of observation. Apparently, he settled down to wait and think.

  Feeling as safe as Pooh and Tigger in the most benign district of their entirely comfortable forest, Gerda and I got ready for bed, sat up reading for an hour or two, and then went to sleep. At two in the morning, the alarm screamed, and the Hal-9000 voice informed us that someone had opened the study window.

  Because that window was on the second floor, fifteen feet above the walkway along the south side of the house, reachable from outside only with a ladder, we assumed the alarm must be false. After turning off the security system, I went to the study to check for corrosion of the contact points between window and sill—and discovered the window open.

  Yikes. I hurried back to the master bedroom, armed myself, and returned cautiously to the study and peered out of the open window. No ladder. Someone had opened the window to flee the house, not to invade. He had dropped onto a rain-shelter roof over a first-floor side door directly below, cracking a couple of cedar shingles, and from there he had jumped to the walkway.

  After brooding on his situation, the trapped intruder had most likely decided that the second-floor windows might not be tied into the alarm system. Many people save money by not wiring hard-to-reach windows.

  Fortunately, the folks from whom we bought the house were paranoid enough to wire even those openings that could be reached only by the ape from Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. Otherwise, our uninvited guest might have escaped without anyone knowing that he’d been there. When the window was found open, I or Gerda would have assumed that the other had left it t
hat way, for ventilation.

  Now, two years later, when Trixie sprang off her bed and raced into the upstairs hall, we wondered if the intruder had returned or perhaps had recommended our accommodations to a criminal pal. Trixie neither growled nor barked, but then she rarely did either, and it was possible that she hoped the intruder might have a cookie or a tennis ball.

  When I followed her into the hall, I found her standing near the door to Gerda’s office. She was gazing up, as though making eye contact with someone about my height, smiling and wagging her tail.

  I said, “Trixie, what’s happening?”

  Ignoring me, still appearing to be attentive to someone I could not see, she padded out of the hallway and into Gerda’s dark office.

  Even if Trixie might be hesitant to bark at a burglar, her sudden appearance would have startled a yelp out of him if he’d been in Gerda’s sanctum. I followed the dog across the threshold and switched on the light.

  She stood at a far corner of Gerda’s desk, still peering up at something, bright-eyed and engaged. Her tail swished, swished.

  A tail is a communications device, a compensation for not having the capacity for language. Its position and its motion—or lack of motion—can convey a dog’s mood and intentions. With its tail, a dog talks to other dogs, to people, to cats, to all manner of creatures.

  Rarely if ever does a dog wag its tail at an inanimate object. Even the dumbest dog knows the difference between inanimate objects and living beings that might be able to read what it is saying in tail speak.

  Trixie returned around Gerda’s desk, still looking up as if the invisible man had stepped out of a movie and into our home. She remained oblivious of me, responding not at all when I spoke her name and called her to me.

  In the hall again, she paused, grinning up at her make-believe friend. She did a little dance of delight before proceeding next into the office in which Linda worked.

  Here, we went through a repeat of the performance in Gerda’s office, as if Short Stuff were following a visitor on a tour of the premises.

  By the time Trix and I—and whoever—returned to the hallway, Gerda had come out of the master suite to see what was happening. Trixie seemed as unaware of Gerda as she continued to be of me.

  After her paws pranced in place, performing another little dance of delight, our girl proceeded along the hallway to my office. There, we watched as she seemed to accompany someone around the room.

  I am not a guy who sees ghosts or ever expects to see one. If I need a good scare to get my blood circulating, I just switch on the evening news and see what the latest batch of insane politicians is up to.

  I would later publish a series of books about a young man named Odd Thomas, who sees the spirits of the lingering dead. But this peculiar moment with Trixie occurred long before that, when ghost stories were not yet on my agenda.

  After leaving my office, in the hallway once more, Trixie stood gazing up at someone about six feet tall, her tail in motion. Then her wagging slowly diminished, stopped. She lowered her head, shook herself, and surveyed her surroundings, at last noticing us. She chuffed and grinned as if to say, Cool, huh? Then she trotted back to the master suite, curled in her bed, and fell asleep.

  As I went room to room, turning off lights, I wondered about the history of our house, whether anyone had died in it. Even if someone had hung himself from the foyer chandelier, I couldn’t believe that he would be haunting the place. What’s believable and right in a work of allegorical fiction isn’t easily embraced in real life by a person of reason. I decided not to worry about it when I realized that my good dog’s tail had been wagging vigorously throughout her encounter; she had been enchanted by what she saw, and she wouldn’t be enchanted by a spirit with malevolent intentions.

  A couple of friends have suggested that Trixie might have been following a moth in flight or some small winged insect that I didn’t notice. As lame as that explanation is, I considered it. But given how long the episode lasted and how many well-lighted rooms were on the tour, no moth or its equivalent could have escaped my attention.

  Besides, Trixie never before or after that event was lured into the pursuit of any insect other than a few fine butterflies on summer days. And those butterfly chases were frisky, leaping exercises in doggy exuberance, nothing like the leisurely walk-around of the second floor that evening.

  A number of people have told me stories about their dogs seeming to see things that humans can’t see, although none of their accounts were similar to mine. I do believe Trixie saw something that she found enchanting and that remained beyond my ken. I’ll never know what it might have been—unless in some other plane of existence I am reunited with her one day, and in that new world, she can talk.

  During the almost eight additional years that we were fortunate enough to have Trixie, she never repeated that performance, and never exhibited any other kind of fey behavior. Nonetheless, I believe the moment was meaningful, revealing a special quality that cannot be easily defined but that was central to this dog’s uniqueness.

  XIII

  a nose for trouble

  EVEN SERIAL KILLERS have dogs they love and that return their affection, though it’s difficult to imagine John Wayne Gacy knitting a sweater for a Chihuahua or Jeffrey Dahmer taking time away from his collection of severed heads to frolic in the park with a Labradoodle.

  Perhaps Stalin’s dogs had to love him or otherwise be shipped to a Siberian forced-labor camp, but no doubt they would have loved him without the threat of a life sentence to a Gulag. Consequently, we are not on solid ground if we insist that dogs are better judges of character than are human beings.

  Yet I’ve heard people make this claim many times. And we have all seen movies in which only the dog recognizes that the new babysitter is a bug-eating psychopath or that the genial neighbor in the cardigan has been replaced by a shape-changing alien with an appetite for human sweetbreads.

  Nevertheless, over time I learned that Trixie was an uncannily good judge of character with both humans and canines. While it’s true that she was people-oriented and liked nearly everyone she met to one degree or another, she seemed indifferent to about 10 percent of the people she encountered. She was not wary of or hostile to that fraction of humanity; she simply had little or no interest in them.

  With the other 90 percent, her greeting always consisted of at minimum a grin and a wagging tail. The faster the tail moved, the more she approved of the person before her. About half the time, she raised her right forelimb and gently pawed at a new acquaintance as if to say, I’m here, see me, I like you, come down here where we can sniff each other’s face. This was a higher degree of approval than merely a grin and a wag. She expressed total acceptance by collapsing as if her legs had turned to rubber, rolling onto her back, and baring her tummy for her new friend’s admiration and attention.

  The longer Trix was with us, the more I realized that the people to whom she presented her belly were the true friends with whom I, too, could leave myself entirely vulnerable without fear of attack. And those about whom she had mild reservations were also those whom I liked very much but felt I didn’t entirely know—although in my case, I would not be better able to discern the fine points of their character by sniffing their faces.

  People whom I found to be cold or false, or in some other way off-putting, were without exception in the 10 percent toward whom Trixie remained indifferent. When these were individuals whom I had met previously, the argument could be made that from a score of subtle telltales in my demeanor and behavior, Trixie instantly read my opinion of the person and adopted it as her own. Dogs study us their whole lives and learn the meaning of our tiniest changes of expression and voice inflection. But when I met someone for the first time, Trixie’s opinion and mine also matched, though she instantly identified the troubling individuals as worthy only of indifference, while I needed longer to make the same judgment.

  Only once did Trixie react so negatively to someone that s
he refused even to allow that person to touch her. I should have taken our golden girl’s warning seriously.

  To protect the guilty, I will not indicate that person’s gender or occupation, and will use only the name X.

  I knew X for the better part of a decade but only through a business relationship and from a distance. A couple of years earlier, before we were blessed with Trixie, X came to southern California with Y and Z, two people who worked for the company that employed X, and although they were not traveling on business related to us, Gerda and I took them all to dinner. The evening was not filled with the scintillating conversation and hilarity that might have made me want to say, “Let’s take turns flying across country once a week and do this every Friday night for the rest of our lives,” but we had a pleasant time.

  When Trixie came to us, she was welcomed not merely as a pet; she participated in every aspect of our lives, including taking a role in my relationship with my most faithful readers. Those who live in the United States and write to me by snail mail have long received a twelve-page newsletter—Useless News—that informs them of forthcoming books but is largely about having fun, reprinting humorous pieces I’ve written. We began using photos of Trixie in the newsletter, adding funny captions. She wrote reviews of my forthcoming books, solemnly swearing that her praise could not be bought for cookies. Whenever a book failed to include a dog in at least a minor role, she gave it less than a five-star rating. I had so much fun creating Trixie’s singular manner of expression that eventually she would publish successful books “edited by” or “as told to” Dean Koontz.

  As someone with whom I did business and as someone who claimed to read and like my books, X received Useless News and became a fan of Trixie. Eventually, X returned to California on a business trip, and we arranged a visit at the house before we went to lunch.