A Big Little Life Read online

  Our first Christmas tree did not dazzle. There were not piles of gifts stacked beneath it. But we were together, we no longer stood separate and alone in the world, we owned a nice electric hot plate, we didn’t waste time watching TV because we didn’t have one to watch, and if we fell out of bed in the night, we couldn’t drop far enough to hurt ourselves. At twilight on Christmas Eve, snow began to spiral down in silver-dollar flakes, and we went for a walk in an evening as magical as any in Narnia.

  Thirty-two years later, as our first Christmas with Trixie approached, we anticipated the holiday with as much pleasure as we felt in that distant December. With the success of my books, Gerda and I had long been purchasing art and antiques that we both admired; we thought of those things as gifts to ourselves, and years earlier, we stopped exchanging Christmas presents with each other because they seemed superfluous. Now we had a special dog to spoil. Although we might not be able to explain Santa Claus to her, we were eager to play the role.

  We bought plush toys, tug toys, toss toys, more plush toys, plush toys that were also tug toys, balls that squeaked, balls that did not squeak, and a ball with an inner light that flashed when it rolled. We wrapped these gifts in boxes to disguise their size and shape, as though Trixie would be more surprised and delighted by a Frisbee that came out of a big rectangular box than by one that came out of a flat, square, Frisbee-shaped package.

  We intended to open her gifts on Christmas Eve, after dinner, which is the time Gerda and I had exchanged presents in the days when we still shopped for each other. Half an hour before, I took Trixie upstairs for a play session that, with my usual athletic grace, I managed to transform into a medical emergency.

  As you may recall, early in her life with us, in a strangely destructive mood not characteristic of her, Trixie found where we kept the stepstool, dragged it upstairs, positioned it below an oil painting that Gerda particularly liked, climbed the stool, and hit the painting with a Kong toy. Subsequently, we were not allowed to have a stepstool in the long upstairs hallway, and I couldn’t throw a tennis ball for Short Stuff to chase; I could only roll the ball with a velocity-generating snap of the wrist.

  We had always engaged in this game with me on my knees, down at Trixie’s level, largely because goldens are soooooo much cuter seen from their perspective than from above. Over time, the play evolved until it was as much about me trying to fake her out as it was about me rolling the ball and her chasing it. Exceedingly quick, she could sometimes snatch the ball as it zoomed by her, eliminating the need to sprint after it for the length of the hall. But with a young dog, as with children, one purpose of play is to tire the pup enough so you’ll be able to do something you want to do for at least part of the evening. And at three, our girl was still in some ways a pup.

  I developed a repertoire of fake-out moves to keep Trixie unsure of whether I would roll the ball past her port side or her starboard side. I would lean toward her port and tense my rolling arm, so she would lean toward port, all of this very quick, and then I would lean toward her starboard, so she would lean toward starboard, and then I would start to lean toward her port again, but as she shifted her weight to that side, I would snap the ball past her starboard after all. Eventually, I had a million variations of this. Now and then, I was able to roll the ball between her forepaws and between her back legs, which always freaked her out, so that she sprang off the floor and executed an airborne turn.

  In addition, I distracted Trixie from watching my ball hand by making funny noises, by throwing a wadded Kleenex at her just before rolling the ball, by a variety of spastic movements that simulated the effects of electrocution, by revealing a piece of kibble and dropping it on the carpet, and by casting my voice as best I could to meow like a seductive cat. Face wrenched by fear, I pointed overhead at nonexistent pterodactyls, which often worked because, in spite of her intelligence and her CCI education, Trixie did not pay attention in her paleontology classes and did not have a clear understanding of what forms of life existed in previous geologic periods but not in our own.

  Sometimes, she was so wired that as the ball went past her, she pounced on it again and again, as lightning-quick as a starving gecko on a tasty cricket. On those occasions, to be able to fake her out, I needed to come closer to her than three feet, so that when I snapped the ball, my hand was already past her front legs. Perhaps you, dear reader, are perspicacious enough to understand the risk of this move and the inevitable bloody consequences. I am only a writer of novels, however, and do not possess a sufficient knowledge of physics and hand/eye-coordination dynamics to be able to foresee the consequences of every dumb move I make.

  Executing this particular dumb move, I faked to Trixie’s port, to starboard, to port, to port, to port, then actually snapped it past her port side as she mistakenly anticipated a last switch to starboard. As the ball left my right hand, Trixie at once realized her mistake and whipped her head around. My open hand was rising off the floor, her open mouth was coming around in the hope of snatching the ball, which was off and rolling, and one of her long upper canines tore through the meaty part of my palm.

  The radial artery crosses the palm of the human hand. At that point of its transit of the arm, it’s not one of those deliciously large arteries that would interest Dracula, but it keeps a lot of capillaries generously supplied. Trixie might have nicked the artery, but she definitely tore through a bunch of capillaries. Blood flew in a bright spray, and my golden girl raced after the ball, unaware of what had happened.

  Using my left hand to pinch the laceration shut, trying to spill as little blood as possible, both because the carpet was off-white and because I am philosophically opposed to allowing my blood to leave my body, I hurried to the nearest bathroom, which was off Gerda’s office, snatched the hand towel from the rack, and bound up my right hand.

  Trixie returned with the ball, which she dropped at my feet, eager to continue playing. I said, “Not now, sweetie. I think a pterodactyl bit me.”

  As she followed me out of Gerda’s office and into the upstairs hall, she sniffed at the blood on the carpet but made no effort to lick any of it. I would like to think her restraint arose from the fact that this was her beloved dad’s blood, not because it had a tainted odor.

  Downstairs, Gerda prepared for the much-anticipated Trixie’s-first-Christmas-as-a-Koontz, gift-opening lollapalooza. There would be wine and cheese and nuts for us, little cookies for Trixie, and now plenty of blood for everyone.

  Managing not to scream like a little girl, I located Gerda in the kitchen, explained what had happened, and asked her to drive me to the hospital. We left Trixie alone, sternly admonishing her not to open any gifts in our absence and to leave the stepstool in the closet where it belonged.

  Even with minimal respect for speed limits and stop signs, and even though the streets were nearly deserted on Christmas Eve, we needed fifteen minutes to reach the best hospital in the area. I will admit having a prejudice against hospitals that, though nearer, have a high kill rate.

  By the time we walked into the emergency room, the towel in which I had wrapped my right hand was so saturated with blood, you couldn’t discern that it had once been white. Nevertheless, we were directed to the registration desk, where Gerda and I sat opposite a pleasant young woman who would either arrange for my treatment or would transfer me to the boatman who would pole me across the River Styx, depending on how long we needed to fill out all the paperwork.

  She asked me what had happened, and I explained, and she said, “Oh, a dog bite.”

  “No, no,” I corrected. “She didn’t bite me. It was an accident. We were playing, and it was entirely my fault.”

  In a crisis, Gerda is a rock, so even before the receptionist had asked for the insurance card, driver’s license, street address, and proof of membership in the human species, she had all the necessary cards on the desk.

  Glancing at my insurance card, the young woman said, “Oh, you have the same name as the writer.”
r />   When I acknowledged that I shared not only the writer’s name but his brain and his wardrobe, and noted that I was here with his wife, the receptionist was delighted to meet me. Her favorite book, she declared, was Watchers, though she also loved Intensity. As she filled out the forms, she repeatedly paused to ask me why none of the films based on my work resembled the books from which they were adapted (because they’re all blithering idiots in Hollywood), why I write so many more women in lead roles in my books than do most male writers (because I’ve met so many interesting women and married a great one), would I ever write a sequel to Watchers (if you can’t top the original story, it doesn’t need a sequel), and what scares Dean Koontz (the possibility of bleeding to death).

  The towel wrapping my hand became so saturated that it dripped blood on the floor.

  You might think that I became impatient with the receptionist, but I did not, for three good reasons. One, she liked my books, and although I won’t die for people who like my books, I will happily suffer for them. Two, this woman had no way of knowing that I am philosophically opposed to allowing my blood to leave my body. Three, if I’d been the receptionist, and if John D. MacDonald, the writer, had hobbled to me, holding his severed foot in his hands, I would have had a thousand questions for him and might even have asked him to wait while I ran home and got some of his books for him to sign.

  Soon, I settled into a wheelchair, and a nurse rolled me out of the waiting room and into the ER proper. I told Gerda to call Trixie and tell her I was going to be all right, and Gerda agreed that she would.

  The nurse pushing the wheelchair was also a reader of mine. She said she had read everything I’d written and needed another book, and she asked if I would ever stop writing.

  “Not if I live,” I promised.

  The medical system was in gear now, moving right along. A minute later, I was in an ER bed, surrounded by a privacy curtain, listening to someone sobbing at the farther end of the room.

  A young doctor came through the curtain with the flair of a magician. He was handsome enough to join the cast of the television show ER, so I knew he must be a highly competent physician.

  Indicating the soaked towel that bound my hand, he said, “That’s a lot of blood.”

  “Is it really?” I asked. “I thought I might be overreacting to it since it’s, you know, my blood.”

  As he unwound the towel, he asked what had happened, and I told him about the fake-out maneuver in the roll-the-ball game that had gone so very wrong.

  “Oh,” he said, “a dog bite. I’ll have to report a dog bite to Newport Beach Animal Control.”

  I hastened to correct him, to explain that it was an accident, and to describe again how it had occurred.

  “Even so,” he said, “if there was a dog involved, the law requires me to report it as a bite. What’s the dog’s name?”

  Frantically considering whether to lie to him and give a false dog name, I did not immediately reply.

  When he saw the gash in my palm, he said, “This is a rather deep wound. We need to clean it out and look in there. It’ll need eight stitches, maybe ten. What did you say the dog’s name was?”

  If I gave him a fake name—say, Lulu—then I would have to buy another dog and name it Lulu and turn it over to the animal-control officers when they came to our house in riot helmets and bulletproof vests, toting tear gas and Uzis. Lulu would be innocent, she wouldn’t know why she was being booked for assault, and when she was sitting in the dog equivalent of Alcatraz, I would be sleepless with guilt for railroading her.

  “Her name is Trixie,” I said. “Listen, would a dog named Trixie ever bite anyone? She’s a good, good dog. She’s a golden retriever. She probably wouldn’t even bite a burglar if he was beating me with a shovel.”

  As we had been conversing, he had also been requesting from a nurse the tools and materials he would need to clean and close the wound. Now she wheeled in a stainless-steel cart bearing a collection of instruments that would have thrilled Hannibal Lecter.

  Over the years, a few dentists, a periodontist, an endo-dontist, a gastroenterologist, and two internists have told me that I have a very high pain threshold. Because I didn’t want to be anesthetized, I once endured, without Novocain or any painkillers, the three-hour extraction of a tooth with roots fused to the jawbone.

  Now the handsome young doctor, who wanted to send my Trixie to the slammer, told me, “Evidently, you have an unusually high pain threshold.”

  “I guess that’s a good thing,” I said, “though I still try to avoid situations that involve pain.”

  “I’m going to numb your hand anyway, so this won’t hurt at all. Is Trixie current with all her shots?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Rabies, Bordetella, corona, measles, mumps, the black plague, the virus that’s always turning people into flesh-eating zombies in the movies, all that stuff, everything, up-to-date.”

  “Who’s her vet?”

  I told him, and he knew who Dr. Whitaker and Dr. Lyle were. I asked, “What’ll animal control do when they get this report?”

  “I can’t say. I don’t know their procedures. I just know what I’m supposed to do in a dog-bite case.”

  Focused on his work, he remained silent for a long time as he meticulously cleaned the wound, examined it, stopped the bleeding, and finally closed it.

  Although I was worried about Trixie, I was grateful that unlike the receptionist and the nurse, the doctor had made no reference to my books and was unaware that I was a well-known writer. I did not intend to try to bribe him, and I didn’t think a death threat would be taken seriously, so when I wept and begged him to have mercy on my four-legged daughter, I could do so with confidence that the story of my shameless groveling and my plea for special treatment would not end up on a tabloid TV show.

  As he finished repairing my hand, the doctor said, “So, in the future, maybe you should have more cats in your books and fewer dogs.”

  After thanking him for his good work, I made one last pitch for him to join me in a conspiracy against the forces of law and order run amok. “Trixie was a CCI assistance dog, she retired young because of elbow surgery, she’s as sweet as a dog can be, and I hate the idea that she’s going to have a police record. You know, it is Christmas Eve.”

  He smiled, shook his head, gave me a prescription, instructions, and a date for the removal of the stitches.

  Gerda drove us home, and Trixie greeted us with much love, which we repaid with interest.

  Using a terrific spot remover, we quickly cleaned up all the blood on the carpet, and then decided to present Trixie’s gifts to her, as planned, though later than expected. We were determined not to let her know that the terrible hammer of the law might come down on her at any time.

  No child ever received gifts with more excitement and delight than Trixie did. The rustle of tissue paper in particular caused her to wriggle with anticipation. We played a little with each toy, then unwrapped the next one, encouraging her to sniff and paw at every package.

  Before we retired for the night, we disposed of all the torn wrappings and ribbons and boxes, and we lined up the twenty-one unwrapped gifts on the L-shaped family-room sectional.

  Every morning since she had been with us, Trixie followed the same routine. When we came out of the bedroom with her to take her on her first walk of the day, she raced down the back stairs and turned left into the kitchen, padding straight to the pantry, where her kibble was stored in a large airtight can.

  On this first Christmas morning as a Koontz, however, she descended the back stairs with even greater haste than usual and turned right, not toward the kitchen but into the family room. As we watched, she went from one gift to the next, smelling each of the twenty-one, as if astonished to find that the previous evening had not been a dream and that all these toys were in fact hers. When she checked out the twenty-first and then looked at us, her grin was endearing.

  I believe the ER doctor filed the report with animal contro
l, as required, but I suspect he might have added some exculpatory comments. We never received a call from the authorities, and Trixie gamboled through the rest of her years, happily unaware that her spotless reputation had been at risk because of her dad’s lack of athletic prowess.

  XI

  things that go boom

  OUR FIRST JULY Fourth with Trixie, we lived in Harbor Ridge, where we enjoyed a panoramic view of Newport Beach all the way to the sea, northwest to Long Beach, and north to the San Bernardino Mountains. On a clear Independence Day evening, we could see four or five major fireworks displays, some nearby and others at a distance.

  Generally speaking, dogs aren’t cool with fireworks. The pretty patterns of color and light don’t impress them, but the boom-bang-crackle-crash makes them nuts. Most memoirs about dogs have a chapter detailing how Fido, left alone on a July Fourth evening or during a big thunderstorm, did more damage to the house than would have a runaway logging truck.

  In this matter, as in so many others, Trixie behaved differently from our expectations. When the fireworks started, we watched them from an upper-floor balcony, and our golden girl stood with us, intrigued. She even put her head between two of the balusters to have a better view of the spectacle. Her tail wagged when the sky filled with girandoles, palm trees, magnesium peonies, and other types of fireworks that at most hissed or crackled but did not boom. During the louder flash-bangs, her tail stopped wagging and she stiffened slightly, but she didn’t tremble or whimper.

  Over time, she lost enthusiasm for skyrockets and Roman candles, but never became terrified of them. She trembled when the loud ones went off, but cuddling was sufficient to soothe her.

  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.