Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog, Page 20

I opened the gate and called Marley, but he was not about to voluntarily walk into this mobile jail cell. I pushed and prodded, coaxed and cajoled; he wasn’t budging. Where were the dog biscuits when I needed them? I searched my pockets for something to bribe him with, finally fishing out a tin of breath mints. This was as good as it was going to get. I took one out and held it in front of his nose. “Want a mint, Marley? Go get the mint!” and I tossed it into the crate. Sure enough, he took the bait and blithely entered the box.

  The lady was right; he didn’t quite fit. He had to scrunch down so his head wouldn’t hit the ceiling; even with his nose touching the back wall, his butt stuck out the open door. I scrunched his tail down and closed the gate, nudging his rear inside. “What did I tell you?” I said, hoping she would consider it a comfortable fit.

  “He’s got to be able to turn around,” she said.

  “Turn around, boy,” I beckoned to him, giving a little whistle. “Come on, turn around.” He shot a glance over his shoulder at me with those doper eyes, his head scraping the ceiling, as if awaiting instructions on just how to accomplish such a feat.

  If he could not turn around, the airline was not letting him aboard the flight. I checked my watch. We had twelve minutes left to get through security, down the concourse, and onto the plane. “Come here, Marley!” I said more desperately. “Come on!” I snapped my fingers, rattled the metal gate, made kissy-kissy sounds. “Come on,” I pleaded. “Turn around.” I was about to drop to my knees and beg when I heard a crash, followed almost immediately by Patrick’s voice.

  “Oops,” he said.

  “The frogs are loose!” Jenny screamed, jumping into action.

  “Froggy! Croaky! Come back!” the boys yelled in unison.

  My wife was on all fours now, racing around the terminal as the frogs cannily stayed one hop ahead of her. Passersby began to stop and stare. From a distance you could not see the frogs at all, just the crazy lady with the diaper bag hanging from her neck, crawling around like she had started the morning off with a little too much moonshine. From their expressions, I could tell they fully expected her to start howling at any moment.

  “Excuse me a second,” I said as calmly as I could to the airline worker, then joined Jenny on my hands and knees.

  After doing our part to entertain the early-morning travel crowd, we finally captured Froggy and Croaky just as they were ready to make their final leap for freedom out the automatic doors. As we turned back, I heard a mighty ruckus coming from the dog crate. The entire box shivered and lurched across the floor, and when I peered in I saw that Marley had somehow gotten himself turned around. “See?” I said to the baggage supervisor. “He can turn around, no problem.”

  “Okay,” she said with a frown. “But you’re really pushing it.”

  Two workers lifted Marley and his crate onto a dolly and wheeled him away. The rest of us raced for our plane, arriving at the gate just as the flight attendants were closing the hatch. It occurred to me that if we missed the flight, Marley would be arriving alone in Pennsylvania, a scene of potential pandemonium I did not even want to contemplate. “Wait! We’re here!” I shouted, pushing Colleen ahead of me, the boys and Jenny trailing by fifty feet.

  As we settled into our seats, I finally allowed myself to exhale. We had gotten Marley squared away. We had captured the frogs. We had made the flight. Next stop, Allentown, Pennsylvania. I could relax now. Through the window I watched as a tram pulled up with the dog crate sitting on it. “Look,” I said to the kids. “There’s Marley.” They waved out the window and called, “Hi, Waddy!”

  As the engines revved and the flight attendant went over the safety precautions, I pulled out a magazine. That’s when I noticed Jenny freeze in the row in front of me. Then I heard it, too. From below our feet, deep in the bowels of the plane, came a sound, muffled but undeniable. It was pitifully mournful sound, a sort of primal call that started low and rose as it went. Oh, dear Jesus, he’s down there howling. For the record, Labrador retrievers do not howl. Beagles howl. Wolves howl. Labs do not howl, at least not well. Marley had attempted to howl twice before, both times in answer to a passing police siren, tossing back his head, forming his mouth into an O shape, and letting loose the most pathetic sound I have ever heard, more like he was gargling than answering the call of the wild. But now, no question about it, he was howling.

  The passengers began to look up from their newspapers and novels. A flight attendant handing out pillows paused and cocked her head quizzically. A woman across the aisle from us looked at her husband and asked: “Listen. Do you hear that? I think it’s a dog.” Jenny stared straight ahead. I stared into my magazine. If anyone asked, we were denying ownership.

  “Waddy’s sad,” Patrick said.

  No, son, I wanted to correct him, some strange dog we have never seen before and have no knowledge of is sad. But I just pulled my magazine higher over my face, following the advice of the immortal Richard Milhous Nixon: plausible deniability. The jet engines whined and the plane taxied down the runway, drowning out Marley’s dirge. I pictured him down below in the dark hold, alone, scared, confused, stoned, not even able to fully stand up. I imagined the roaring engines, which in Marley’s warped mind might be just another thunderous assault by random lightning bolts determined to take him out. The poor guy. I wasn’t willing to admit he was mine, but I knew I would be spending the whole flight worrying about him.

  The airplane was barely off the ground when I heard another little crash, and this time it was Conor who said, “Oops.” I looked down and then, once again, stared straight into my magazine. Plausible deniability. After several seconds, I furtively glanced around. When I was pretty sure no one was staring, I leaned forward and whispered into Jenny’s ear: “Don’t look now, but the crickets are loose.”

  CHAPTER 22

  In the Land of Pencils

  W e settled into a rambling house on two acres perched on the side of a steep hill. Or perhaps it was a small mountain; the locals seemed to disagree on this point. Our property had a meadow where we could pick wild raspberries, a woods where I could chop logs to my heart’s content, and a small, spring-fed creek where the kids and Marley soon found they could get exceptionally muddy. There was a fireplace and endless garden possibilities and a white-steepled church on the next hill, visible from our kitchen window when the leaves dropped in the fall.

  Our new home even came with a neighbor right out of Central Casting, an orange-bearded bear of a man who lived in a 1790s stone farmhouse and on Sundays enjoyed sitting on his back porch and shooting his rifle into the woods just for fun, much to Marley’s unnerved dismay. On our first day in our new house, he walked over with a bottle of homemade wild-cherry wine and a basket of the biggest blackberries I had ever seen. He introduced himself as Digger. As we surmised from the nickname, Digger made his living as an excavator. If we had any holes we needed dug or earth we wanted moved, he instructed, we were to just give a shout and he’d swing by with one of his big machines. “And if you hit a deer with your car, come get me,” he said with a wink. “We’ll butcher it up and split the meat before the game officer knows a thing.” No doubt about it, we weren’t in Boca anymore.

  There was only one thing missing from our new bucolic existence. Minutes after we pulled into the driveway of our new house, Conor looked up at me, big tears rolling out of his eyes, and declared: “I thought there were going to be pencils in Pencilvania.” For our boys, now ages seven and five, this was a near deal breaker. Given the name of the state we were adopting, both of them arrived fully expecting to see bright yellow writing implements hanging like berries from every tree and shrub, there for the plucking. They were crushed to learn otherwise.

  What our property lacked in school supplies, it made up for in skunks, opossums, woodchucks, and poison ivy, which flourished along the edge of our woods and snaked up the trees, giving me hives just to look at it. One morning I glanced out the kitchen window as I fumbled with the coffeemaker and there star
ing back at me was a magnificent eight-point buck. Another morning a family of wild turkeys gobbled its way across the backyard. As Marley and I walked through the woods down the hill from our house one Saturday, we came upon a mink trapper laying snares. A mink trapper! Almost in my backyard! What the Bocahontas set would have given for that connection.

  Living in the country was at once peaceful, charming—and just a little lonely. The Pennsylvania Dutch were polite but cautious of outsiders. And we were definitely outsiders. After South Florida’s legion crowds and lines, I should have been ecstatic about the solitude. Instead, at least in the early months, I found myself darkly ruminating over our decision to move to a place where so few others apparently wanted to live.

  Marley, on the other hand, had no such misgivings. Except for the crack of Digger’s gun going off, the new country lifestyle fit him splendidly. For a dog with more energy than sense, what wasn’t to like? He raced across the lawn, crashed through the brambles, splashed through the creek. His life’s mission was to catch one of the countless rabbits that considered my garden their own personal salad bar. He would spot a rabbit munching the lettuce and barrel off down the hill in hot pursuit, ears flapping behind him, paws pounding the ground, his bark filling the air. He was about as stealthy as a marching band and never got closer than a dozen feet before his intended prey scampered off into the woods to safety. True to his trademark, he remained eternally optimistic that success waited just around the bend. He would loop back, tail wagging, not discouraged in the least, and five minutes later do it all over again. Fortunately, he was no better at sneaking up on the skunks.

  Autumn came and with it a whole new mischievous game: Attack the Leaf Pile. In Florida, trees did not shed their leaves in the fall, and Marley was positively convinced the foliage drifting down from the skies now was a gift meant just for him. As I raked the orange and yellow leaves into giant heaps, Marley would sit and watch patiently, biding his time, waiting until just the right moment to strike. Only after I had gathered a mighty towering pile would he slink forward, crouched low. Every few steps, he would stop, front paw raised, to sniff the air like a lion on the Serengeti stalking an unsuspecting gazelle. Then, just as I leaned on my rake to admire my handiwork, he would lunge, charging across the lawn in a series of bounding leaps, flying for the last several feet and landing in a giant belly flop in the middle of the pile, where he growled and rolled and flailed and scratched and snapped, and, for reasons not clear to me, fiercely chased his tail, not stopping until my neat leaf pile was scattered across the lawn again. Then he would sit up amid his handiwork, the shredded remains of leaves clinging to his fur, and give me a self-satisfied look, as if his contribution were an integral part of the leaf-gathering process.

  Our first Christmas in Pennsylvania was supposed to be white. Jenny and I had had to do a sales job on Patrick and Conor to convince them that leaving their home and friends in Florida was for the best, and one of the big selling points was the promise of snow. Not just any kind of snow, but deep, fluffy, made-for-postcards snow, the kind that fell from the sky in big silent flakes, piled into drifts, and was of just the right consistency for shaping into snowmen. And snow for Christmas Day, well, that was best of all, the Holy Grail of northern winter experiences. We wantonly spun a Currier and Ives image for them of waking up on Christmas morning to a starkly white landscape, unblemished except for the solitary tracks of Santa’s sleigh outside our front door.

  In the week leading up to the big day, the three of them sat in the window together for hours, their eyes glued on the leaden sky as if they could will it to open and discharge its load. “Come on, snow!” the kids chanted. They had never seen it; Jenny and I hadn’t seen it for the last quarter of our lives. We wanted snow, but the clouds would not give it up. A few days before Christmas, the whole family piled into the minivan and drove to a farm a half mile away where we cut a spruce tree and enjoyed a free hayride and hot apple cider around a bonfire. It was the kind of classic northern holiday moment we had missed in Florida, but one thing was absent. Where was the damn snow? Jenny and I were beginning to regret how recklessly we had hyped the inevitable first snowfall. As we hauled our fresh-cut tree home, the sweet scent of its sap filling the van, the kids complained about getting gypped. First no pencils, now no snow; what else had their parents lied to them about?

  Christmas morning found a brand-new toboggan beneath the tree and enough snow gear to outfit an excursion to Antarctica, but the view out our windows remained all bare branches, dormant lawns, and brown cornfields. I built a cheery fire in the fireplace and told the children to be patient. The snow would come when the snow would come.

  New Year’s arrived and still it did not come. Even Marley seemed antsy, pacing and gazing out the windows, whimpering softly, as if he too felt he had been sold a bill of goods. The kids returned to school after the holiday, and still nothing. At the breakfast table they gazed sullenly at me, the father who had betrayed them. I began making lame excuses, saying things like “Maybe little boys and girls in some other place need the snow more than we do.”

  “Yeah, right, Dad,” Patrick said.

  Three weeks into the new year, the snow finally rescued me from my purgatory of guilt. It came during the night after everyone was asleep, and Patrick was the first to sound the alarm, running into our bedroom at dawn and yanking open the blinds. “Look! Look!” he squealed. “It’s here!” Jenny and I sat up in bed to behold our vindication. A white blanket covered the hillsides and cornfields and pine trees and rooftops, stretching to the horizon. “Of course, it’s here,” I answered nonchalantly. “What did I tell you?”

  The snow was nearly a foot deep and still coming down. Soon Conor and Colleen came chugging down the hall, thumbs in mouths, blankies trailing behind them. Marley was up and stretching, banging his tail into everything, sensing the excitement. I turned to Jenny and said, “I guess going back to sleep isn’t an option,” and when she confirmed it was not, I turned to the kids and shouted, “Okay, snow bunnies, let’s suit up!”

  For the next half hour we wrestled with zippers and leggings and buckles and hoods and gloves. By the time we were done, the kids looked like mummies and our kitchen like the staging area for the Winter Olympics. And competing in the Goof on Ice Downhill Competition, Large Canine Division, was…Marley the Dog. I opened the front door and before anyone else could step out, Marley blasted past us, knocking the well-bundled Colleen over in the process. The instant his paws hit the strange white stuff—Ah, wet! Ah, cold!—he had second thoughts and attempted an abrupt about-face. As anyone who has ever driven a car in snow knows, sudden braking coupled with tight U-turns is never a good idea.

  Marley went into a full skid, his rear end spinning out in front of him. He dropped down on one flank briefly before bouncing upright again just in time to somersault down the front porch steps and headfirst into a snowdrift. When he popped back up a second later, he looked like a giant powdered doughnut. Except for a black nose and two brown eyes, he was completely dusted in white. The Abominable Snowdog. Marley did not know what to make of this foreign substance. He jammed his nose deep into it and let loose a violent sneeze. He snapped at it and rubbed his face in it. Then, as if an invisible hand reached down from the heavens and jabbed him with a giant shot of adrenaline, he took off at full throttle, racing around the yard in a series of giant, loping leaps interrupted every several feet by a random somersault or nosedive. Snow was almost as much fun as raiding the neighbors’ trash.

  To follow Marley’s tracks in the snow was to begin to understand his warped mind. His path was filled with abrupt twists and turns and about-faces, with erratic loops and figure-eights, with corkscrews and triple lutzes, as though he were following some bizarre algorithm that only he could understand. Soon the kids were taking his lead, spinning and rolling and frolicking, snow packing into every crease and crevice of their outerwear. Jenny came out with buttered toast, mugs of hot cocoa, and an announcement: school was cancel
ed. I knew there was no way I was getting my little two-wheel-drive Nissan out the driveway anytime soon, let alone up and down the unplowed mountain roads, and I declared an official snow day for me, too.

  I scraped the snow away from the stone circle I had built that fall for backyard campfires and soon had a crackling blaze going. The kids glided screaming down the hill in the toboggan, past the campfire and to the edge of the woods, Marley chasing behind them. I looked at Jenny and asked, “If someone had told you a year ago that your kids would be sledding right out their back door, would you have believed them?”

  “Not a chance,” she said, then wound up and unleashed a snowball that thumped me in the chest. The snow was in her hair, a blush in her cheeks, her breath rising in a cloud above her.

  “Come here and kiss me,” I said.

  Later, as the kids warmed themselves by the fire, I decided to try a run on the toboggan, something I hadn’t done since I was a teenager. “Care to join me?” I asked Jenny.

  “Sorry, Jean Claude, you’re on your own,” she said.

  I positioned the toboggan at the top of the hill and lay back on it, propped up on my elbows, my feet tucked inside its nose. I began rocking to get moving. Not often did Marley have the opportunity to look down at me, and having me prone like that was tantamount to an invitation. He sidled up to me and sniffed my face. “What do you want?” I asked, and that was all the welcome he needed. He clambered aboard, straddling me and dropping onto my chest. “Get off me, you big lug!” I screamed. But it was too late. We were already creeping forward, gathering speed as we began our descent.

  “Bon voyage!” Jenny yelled behind us.

  Off we went, snow flying, Marley plastered on top of me, licking me lustily all over my face as we careered down the slope. With our combined weight, we had considerably more momentum than the kids had, and we barreled past the point where their tracks petered out. “Hold on, Marley!” I screamed. “We’re going into the woods!”