Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog, Page 4

  On one of those gorgeous days in late March, Jenny invited a friend from work to bring her basset hound, Buddy, over for a dog playdate. Buddy was a rescued pound dog with the saddest face I had ever seen. We let the two dogs loose in the backyard, and off they bounded. Old Buddy wasn’t quite sure what to make of this hyperenergized yellow juvenile who raced and streaked and ran tight circles around him. But he took it in good humor, and the two of them romped and played together for more than an hour before they both collapsed in the shade of the mango tree, exhausted.

  A few days later Marley started scratching and wouldn’t stop. He was clawing so hard at himself, we were afraid he might draw blood. Jenny dropped to her knees and began one of her routine inspections, working her fingers through his coat, parting his fur as she went to see his skin below. After just a few seconds, she called out, “Damn it! Look at this.” I peered over her shoulder at where she had parted Marley’s fur just in time to see a small black dot dart back under cover. We laid him flat on the floor and began going through every inch of his fur. Marley was thrilled with the two-on-one attention and panted happily, his tail thumping the floor. Everywhere we looked we found them. Fleas! Swarms of them. They were between his toes and under his collar and burrowed inside his floppy ears. Even if they were slow enough to catch, which they were not, there were simply too many of them to even begin picking off.

  We had heard about Florida’s legendary flea and tick problems. With no hard freezes, not even any frosts, the bug populations were never knocked back, and they flourished in the warm, moist environment. This was a place where even the millionaires’ mansions along the ocean in Palm Beach had cockroaches. Jenny was freaked out; her puppy was crawling with vermin. Of course, we blamed Buddy without having any solid proof. Jenny had images of not only the dog being infested but our entire home, too. She grabbed her car keys and ran out the door.

  A half hour later she was back with a bag filled with enough chemicals to create our own Superfund site. There were flea baths and flea powders and flea sprays and flea foams and flea dips. There was a pesticide for the lawn, which the guy at the store told her we had to spray if we were to have any hope of bringing the little bastards to their knees. There was a special comb designed to remove insect eggs.

  I reached into the bag and pulled out the receipt. “Jesus Christ, honey,” I said. “We could have rented our own crop duster for this much.”

  My wife didn’t care. She was back in assassin mode—this time to protect her loved ones—and she meant business. She threw herself into the task with a vengeance. She scrubbed Marley in the laundry tub, using special soaps. She then mixed up the dip, which contained the same chemical, I noted, as the lawn insecticide, and poured it over him until every inch of him was saturated. As he was drying in the garage, smelling like a miniature Dow Chemical plant, Jenny vacuumed furiously—floors, walls, carpets, curtains, upholstery. And then she sprayed. And while she doused the inside with flea killer, I doused the outside with it. “You think we nailed the little buggers?” I asked when we were finally finished.

  “I think we did,” she said.

  Our multipronged attack on the flea population of 345 Churchill Road was a roaring success. We checked Marley daily, peering between his toes, under his ears, beneath his tail, along his belly, and everywhere else we could reach. We could find no sign of a flea anywhere. We checked the carpets, the couches, the bottoms of the curtains, the grass—nothing. We had annihilated the enemy.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Test Strip

  A few weeks later we were lying in bed reading when Jenny closed her book and said, “It’s probably nothing.”

  “What’s probably nothing,” I said absently, not looking up from my book.

  “My period’s late.”

  She had my attention. “Your period? It is?” I turned to face her.

  “That happens sometimes. But it’s been over a week. And I’ve been feeling weird, too.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Like I have a low-level stomach flu or something. I had one sip of wine at dinner the other night, and I thought I was going to throw up.”

  “That’s not like you.”

  “Just the thought of alcohol makes me nauseous.”

  I wasn’t going to mention it, but she also had been rather cranky lately.

  “Do you think—” I began to ask.

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  “I almost didn’t say anything,” Jenny said. “Just in case—you know. I don’t want to jinx us.”

  That’s when I realized just how important this was to her—and to me, too. Somehow parenthood had snuck up on us; we were ready for a baby. We lay there side by side for a long while, saying nothing, looking straight ahead.

  “We’re never going to fall asleep,” I finally said.

  “The suspense is killing me,” she admitted.

  “Come on, get dressed,” I said. “Let’s go to the drugstore and get a home test kit.”

  We threw on shorts and T-shirts and opened the front door, Marley bounding out ahead of us, overjoyed at the prospect of a late-night car ride. He pranced on his hind legs by our tiny Toyota Tercel, hopping up and down, shaking, flinging saliva off his jowls, panting, absolutely beside himself with anticipation of the big moment when I would open the back door. “Geez, you’d think he was the father,” I said. When I opened the door, he leaped into the backseat with such gusto that he sailed clear to the other side without touching down, not stopping until he cracked his head loudly, but apparently with no ill effect, against the far window.

  The pharmacy was open till midnight, and I waited in the car with Marley while Jenny ran in. There are some things guys just are not meant to shop for, and home pregnancy tests come pretty close to the top of the list. The dog paced in the backseat, whining, his eyes locked on the front door of the pharmacy. As was his nature whenever he was excited, which was nearly every waking moment, he was panting, salivating heavily.

  “Oh for God’s sake, settle down,” I told him. “What do you think she’s going to do? Sneak out the back door on us?” He responded by shaking himself off in a great flurry, showering me in a spray of dog drool and loose hair. We had become used to Marley’s car etiquette and always kept an emergency bath towel on the front seat, which I used to wipe down myself and the interior of the car. “Hang tight,” I said. “I’m pretty sure she plans to return.”

  Five minutes later Jenny was back, a small bag in her hand. As we pulled out of the parking lot, Marley wedged his shoulders between the bucket seats of our tiny hatchback, balancing his front paws on the center console, his nose touching the rearview mirror. Every turn we made sent him crashing down, chest first, against the emergency brake. And after each spill, unfazed and happier than ever, he would teeter back up on his perch.

  A few minutes later we were back home in the bathroom with the $8.99 kit spread out on the side of the sink. I read the directions aloud. “Okay,” I said. “It says it’s accurate ninety-nine percent of the time. First thing you have to do is pee in this cup.” The next step was to dip a skinny plastic test strip into the urine and then into a small vial of a solution that came with the kit. “Wait five minutes,” I said. “Then we put it in the second solution for fifteen minutes. If it turns blue, you’re officially knocked up, baby!”

  We timed off the first five minutes. Then Jenny dropped the strip into the second vial and said, “I can’t stand here watching it.”

  We went out into the living room and made small talk, pretending we were waiting for something of no more significance than the teakettle to boil. “So how about them Dolphins,” I quipped. But my heart was pounding wildly, and a feeling of nervous dread was rising from my stomach. If the test came back positive, whoa, our lives were about to change forever. If it came back negative, Jenny would be crushed. It was beginning to dawn on me that I might be, too. An eternity later, the timer rang. “Here we go,�
�� I said. “Either way, you know I love you.”

  I went to the bathroom and fished the test strip out of the vial. No doubt about it, it was blue. As blue as the deepest ocean. A dark, rich, navy-blazer blue. A blue that could be confused with no other shade. “Congratulations, honey,” I said.

  “Oh my God” is all she could answer, and she threw herself into my arms.

  As we stood there by the sink, arms around each other, eyes closed, I gradually became aware of a commotion at our feet. I looked down and there was Marley, wiggling, head bobbing, tail banging the linen-closet door so hard I thought he might dent it. When I reached down to pet him, he dodged away. Uh-oh. It was the Marley Mambo, and that could mean just one thing.

  “What do you have this time?” I said, and began chasing him. He loped into the living room, weaving just out of my reach. When I finally cornered him and pried open his jaws, at first I saw nothing. Then far back on his tongue, on the brink of no return, ready to slip down the hatch, I spotted something. It was skinny and long and flat. And as blue as the deepest ocean. I reached in and pulled out our positive test strip. “Sorry to disappoint you, pal,” I said, “but this is going in the scrapbook.”

  Jenny and I started laughing and kept laughing for a long time. We had great fun speculating on what was going through that big blocky head of his. Hmmm, if I destroy the evidence, maybe they’ll forget all about this unfortunate episode, and I won’t have to share my castle with an interloper after all.

  Then Jenny grabbed Marley by the front paws, lifted him up on his hind legs and danced around the room with him. “You’re going to be an uncle!” she sang. Marley responded in his trademark way—by lunging up and planting a big wet tongue squarely on her mouth.

  The next day Jenny called me at work. Her voice was bubbling. She had just returned from the doctor, who had officially confirmed the results of our home test. “He says all systems are go,” she said.

  The night before, we had counted back on the calendar, trying to pinpoint the date of conception. She was worried that she had already been pregnant when we went on our hysterical flea-eradication spree a few weeks earlier. Exposing herself to all those pesticides couldn’t be good, could it? She raised her concerns with the doctor, and he told her it was probably not an issue. Just don’t use them anymore, he advised. He gave her a prescription for prenatal vitamins and told her he’d see her back in his office in three weeks for a sonogram, an electronic-imaging process that would give us our first glimpse of the tiny fetus growing inside Jenny’s belly.

  “He wants us to make sure we bring a videotape,” she said, “so we can save our own copy for posterity.”

  On my desk calendar, I made a note of it.

  CHAPTER 6

  Matters of the Heart

  T he natives will tell you South Florida has four seasons. Subtle ones, they admit, but four distinct seasons nonetheless. Do not believe them. There are only two—the warm, dry season and the hot, wet one. It was about the time of this overnight return to tropical swelter when we awoke one day to realize our puppy was a puppy no more. As rapidly as winter had morphed into summer, it seemed, Marley had morphed into a gangly adolescent. At five months old, his body had filled out the baggy wrinkles in its oversized yellow fur coat. His enormous paws no longer looked so comically out of proportion. His needle-sharp baby teeth had given way to imposing fangs that could destroy a Frisbee—or a brand-new leather shoe—in a few quick chomps. The timbre of his bark had deepened to an intimidating boom. When he stood on his hind legs, which he did often, tottering around like a dancing Russian circus bear, he could rest his front paws on my shoulders and look me straight in the eye.

  The first time the veterinarian saw him, he let out a soft whistle and said, “You’re going to have a big boy on your hands.”

  And that we did. He had grown into a handsome specimen, and I felt obliged to point out to the doubting Miss Jenny that my formal name for him was not so far off the mark. Grogan’s Majestic Marley of Churchill, besides residing on Churchill Road, was the very definition of majestic. When he stopped chasing his tail, anyway. Sometimes, after he ran every last ounce of nervous energy out of himself, he would lie on the Persian rug in the living room, basking in the sun slanting through the blinds. His head up, nose glistening, paws crossed before him, he reminded us of an Egyptian sphinx.

  We were not the only ones to notice the transformation. We could tell from the wide berth strangers gave him and the way they recoiled when he bounded their way that they no longer viewed him as a harmless puppy. To them he had grown into something to be feared.

  Our front door had a small oblong window at eye level, four inches wide by eight inches long. Marley lived for company, and whenever someone rang the bell, he would streak across the house, going into a full skid as he approached the foyer, careening across the wood floors, tossing up throw rugs as he slid and not stopping until he crashed into the door with a loud thud. He then would hop up on his hind legs, yelping wildly, his big head filling the tiny window to stare straight into the face of whoever was on the other side. For Marley, who considered himself the resident Welcome Wagon, it was a joyous overture. For door-to-door salespeople, postal carriers, and anyone else who didn’t know him, though, it was as if Cujo had just jumped out of the Stephen King novel and the only thing that stood between them and a merciless mauling was our wooden door. More than one stranger, after ringing the doorbell and seeing Marley’s barking face peering out at them, beat a quick retreat to the middle of the driveway, where they stood waiting for one of us to answer.

  This, we found, was not necessarily a bad thing.

  Ours was what urban planners call a changing neighborhood. Built in the 1940s and ’50s and initially populated by snowbirds and retirees, it began to take on a gritty edge as the original homeowners died off and were replaced by a motley group of renters and working-class families. By the time we moved in, the neighborhood was again in transition, this time being gentrified by gays, artists, and young professionals drawn to its location near the water and its funky, Deco-style architecture.

  Our block served as a buffer between hard-bitten South Dixie Highway and the posh estate homes along the water. Dixie Highway was the original U.S. 1 that ran along Florida’s eastern coast and served as the main route to Miami before the arrival of the interstate. It was five lanes of sun-baked pavement, two in each direction with a shared left-turn lane, and it was lined with a slightly decayed and unseemly assortment of thrift stores, gas stations, fruit stands, consignment shops, diners, and mom-and-pop motels from a bygone era.

  On the four corners of South Dixie Highway and Churchill Road stood a liquor store, a twenty-four-hour convenience mart, an import shop with heavy bars on the window, and an open-air coin laundry where people hung out all night, often leaving bottles in brown bags behind. Our house was in the middle of the block, eight doors down from the action.

  The neighborhood seemed safe to us, but there were telltales of its rough edge. Tools left out in the yard disappeared, and during a rare cold spell, someone stole every stick of firewood I had stacked along the side of the house. One Sunday we were eating breakfast at our favorite diner, sitting at the table we always sat at, right in the front window, when Jenny pointed to a bullet hole in the plate glass just above our heads and noted dryly, “That definitely wasn’t there last time we were here.”

  One morning as I was pulling out of our block to drive to work, I spotted a man lying in the gutter, his hands and face bloody. I parked and ran up to him, thinking he had been hit by a car. But when I squatted down beside him, a strong stench of alcohol and urine hit me, and when he began to talk, it was clear he was inebriated. I called an ambulance and waited with him, but when the crew arrived he refused treatment. As the paramedics and I stood watching, he staggered away in the direction of the liquor store.

  And there was the night a man with a slightly desperate air about him came to my door and told me he was visiting a house in th
e next block and had run out of gas for his car. Could I lend him five dollars? He’d pay me back first thing in the morning. Sure you will, pal, I thought. When I offered to call the police for him instead, he mumbled a lame excuse and disappeared.

  Most unsettling of all was what we learned about the small house kitty-corner from ours. A murder had taken place there just a few months before we moved in. And not just a run-of-the-mill murder, but a horribly gruesome one involving an invalid widow and a chain saw. The case had been all over the news, and before we moved in we were well familiar with its details—everything, that is, except the location. And now here we were living across the street from the crime scene.

  The victim was a retired schoolteacher named Ruth Ann Nedermier, who had lived in the house alone and was one of the original settlers of the neighborhood. After hip-replacement surgery, she had hired a day nurse to help care for her, which was a fatal decision. The nurse, police later ascertained, had been stealing checks out of Mrs. Nedermier’s checkbook and forging her signature.

  The old woman had been frail but mentally sharp, and she confronted the nurse about the missing checks and the unexplained charges to her bank account. The panicked nurse bludgeoned the poor woman to death, then called her boyfriend, who arrived with a chain saw and helped her dismember the body in the bathtub. Together they packed the body parts in a large trunk, rinsed the woman’s blood down the drain, and drove away.

  For several days, Mrs. Nedermier’s disappearance remained a mystery, our neighbors later told us. The mystery was solved when a man called the police to report a horrible stench coming from his garage. Officers discovered the trunk and its ghastly contents. When they asked the homeowner how it got there, he told them the truth: his daughter had asked if she could store it there for safekeeping.

  Although the grisly murder of Mrs. Nedermier was the most-talked-about event in the history of our block, no one had mentioned a word about it to us as we prepared to buy the house. Not the real estate agent, not the owners, not the inspector, not the surveyor. Our first week in the house, the neighbors came over with cookies and a casserole and broke the news to us. As we lay in our bed at night, it was hard not to think that just a hundred feet from our bedroom window a defenseless widow had been sawn into pieces. It was an inside job, we told ourselves, something that would never happen to us. Yet we couldn’t walk by the place or even look out our front window without thinking about what had happened there.