by Charlie Geer
“In a depression study,” John B began, “Cornelius would be one of those rats who, when you hold them airborne by the tail, just sort of hangs there. Accepts the situation. Doesn’t struggle.”
We were drinking out back of John B’s place and his dog Cornelius, a big middle-aged Springer, had decided to join us. At some point in his wanderings through the house the dog had managed to jam a hind leg through the grip-hole of an empty 12-pack box. He had walked out the door in a gimpy, club-footed fashion, sat down and studied us for a moment before casually lying down, the 12-pack box on his leg looking like some unfortunate growth. If we were better people, we might have relieved the dog of his burden at once, instead of getting first a good chuckle out of his predicament and now, a scientific inquiry, though in our defense the affair seemed less a predicament to the dog than a new fact of life he would simply have to deal with.
“A depression study?” said Blake.
“When researchers do clinical trials,” John B explained, “they hold the lab rats up by the tail. If the rat struggles against the situation, he’s said to be healthy. If he just sort of hangs there, he’s said to be depressed. Though I for one would have to be suspicious of any laboratory rat who isn’t depressed. As I’m suspicious of any human who doesn’t waltz with melancholia now and again, in today’s world.”
“You’re saying Cornelius here is depressed?” Mitch said. “That’s why he’s lying around with a beer box on his foot?”
“A research scientist might call him depressed. I prefer easygoing. Accepting. He doesn’t look to be in a depressed state, does he?”
John B had a point. The dog did not look to be in a depressed state. He looked to be in a deep-rest state: he was now snoring heavily and, by all appearances, dreaming of a hunt—his paws twitching through the gallop cycle, his upper lip occasionally curling. One could not help but wonder if, in his dream, the dog was burdened with a beer box for a leg.
In fact Cornelius never looked depressed with John B around. Those of us who’ve been left to care for the dog during John B’s summers away know the animal to be capable of great gloom in John B’s absence, to the point of irritation—and to the point that no one, not even John B’s own mother, has offered to keep the dog a second time. It can be awfully, well, depressing to live with the heartsick. And so there are more than a few people about town who know a side of the dog John B will never know, John B being a kind of corporeal morphine-drip for the dog, and vice versa. Together, the two are more or less sound. Apart, the facts of existence on earth can get to them.
“Does he look depressed?” said John B.
“He looks ridiculous,” said Mitch.
“Well, he doesn’t think so, is my point. It’s the way his life is for now. He’s got a beer box for a foot, and he accepts that.”
“Only because you’re here,” Blake muttered.
John B ignored the reference to Cornelius’s summers-without-him. It was best to, if he meant to solicit—and surely he did—a dog-sitter for the coming summer. “If only Magnum could see him now,” he said. “If only.”
“Magnum?” said Mitch.
“I never told you all about Magnum? In Gainesville?”
He had not. We fetched another round, settled in.
John B felt sure that without Cornelius, there would have been no Magnum. That is, the pup that came to be known as Magnum would have existed, but somewhere other than 314 NW 12th Avenue, and probably under a different name. Of course, who can say: in Central Florida it may well be common practice to name a dog for a beverage that is itself named for a super-charged firearm. There may be whole herds of Magnums in Central Florida. And putting aside questions of creativity, ignoring for a moment the sadly consumerist choice of the name—like naming a pet “Mr. Pibb,” say, or “Gatorade”—“Magnum” is maybe not a bad name for a dog. (Certainly in the annals of pet names, “Cornelius” ranks among the oddest. John B’s dog was named for a character in a Cormac McCarthy novel none of us were familiar with. Born to a good family but prone to major mischief, he would explain, leaving us to wonder why anybody would christen a pet for a troublemaker, which question itself was possible only if you leap-frogged another, more basic question: Who would name a dog—or anything—Cornelius? Well, John B would, against the advice of puppy manuals and dog trainers the world over, who strongly encourage a monosyllabic tag, for ease of inter-special communication.
Invariably those of us left to care for the dog in John B’s absence had tried to shorten the name, “Corny” being the natural diminutive. The dog himself resisted this, sometimes with a look of total indignation, sometimes with a spell of affected deafness. If ever we slipped in front of John B, he would correct us with a firm, His name is Cornelius. And to be fair, there is nothing Corny about the animal, and much Cornelius about him.)
A description of 314 NW 12th was in order. As John B understood things, it is properly called “slumming” only if a man can afford something better, which, at this point in his life, having spent his most recent years teaching middle school in rural South Carolina, John B could not. Apart from the occasional dry-cleaning bill for clothing claimed from a dead ancestor’s steamer trunk, Cornelius himself was one of the few financial extravagances John B had allowed himself in life. It is not necessary to pay for a dog, certainly not advisable when one is drawing his salary from a middle school in rural South Carolina. Too, a pedigreed, paid-for dog can assign a man to groups he might rather not be assigned to; make possible conversations that ought not be possible; and generally throw off the design of one’s life as a properly dressed but not overly ambitious individual. At the same time, a pedigreed, paid-for dog may by his very presence class a place up, and it’s just possible that in acquiring Cornelius, John B was asking that of him. In whatever low-rent capacity John B felt destined to land, Cornelius would mark John B as a man of taste.
Looking at Cornelius, John B explained, you might think 314 NW 12th beneath him. (Looking at Cornelius, I have felt beneath him. Even squatting to take a crap, he strikes a regal figure. He is a noble shitter, this dog.) But a good dog adapts. He jumps in the car, or the U-Haul as the case may be, and off you go. Whether you are going up the street or across the continent, out to the country or down to the glue factory, he does not know. He jumps in and off you go. In the event, the transition was easier on Cornelius than on John B. It was not the second-floor duplex apartment itself that puzzled John B—a screened-in porch stoop goes a long way for him—but the neighborhood. An evangelical church around one corner, a group home for the mentally disturbed around another, and his own Compound Koo-koo in between, defined what he called a “Bermuda Triangle of Dysfunction.” Naturally John B never got into his own role in the local nutjobbery, not explicitly, but it was a role the rest of us could imagine easily enough.
At any rate, John B felt sure that the fact of Cornelius enabled the fact of Magnum, the puppy his neighbors Little Clyde and Big Lucy acquired shortly after John B moved in. Little Clyde and Big Lucy occupied a small clapboard tumbledown a stone’s throw up the drive from John B. For the first week he had little interaction with them. Their schedule, such as they had a schedule, was different than his, and for the first week he encountered them only in passing or from a distance. By night he would sometimes hear Little Clyde holler from out in the Gainesville night, Turn on the light, woman!, then watch as, shortly, their porch light flicked on and the pillow of cigarette smoke he learned to associate with Big Lucy ballooned out from behind their screen door. By day he would sometimes see Little Clyde pedaling around town on an adult-size tricycle that featured a STAYING-ALIVE-IS-NO-ACCIDENT decal, which decal perhaps explained why Little Clyde did not, or perhaps was not allowed to, operate a motorized vehicle. Afternoons he occasionally came across the two of them drinking Magnums and smoking Camels at a small table in the drive, but usually they were involved in some heated discussion that would drop off abruptly when John B approached, leaving him to exchange short, polite salutations and farewells with them, little more.
But then came a day, or night rather, when footsteps shook his stairs.
“I was rehearsing an Iago soliloquy,” John B told us.
“A what?” said Mitch.
“An Iago soliloquy. From Othello. You know.”
We did not, though we did gather at that moment in the telling of the story that however curious John B had found his neighbors at 314 NW 12th , that was at least as curious as they had surely found him. Like his grandmother Hennie, John B blamed air conditioning for the decline of porch-sitting and hence of civilized society, and would not use it save during the sultriest days of July, so we can be reasonably certain that his windows were open while he stood there projecting Shakespearean English—with flair and drama of course, and nobody there for him to be talking to; nobody responding to him; nobody around at all but a dog. (A distinguished dog, maybe, but a dog.) Really it’s kind of extraordinary that what happened next, happened at all: I don’t know many people, save maybe summoned police officers and psych-ward orderlies, who will knock on the door of a man who is not only talking to himself but talking loudly and dramatically to himself—especially if he is talking in a language that is at once too foreign to be familiar and too familiar to be entirely foreign.
“It was Little Clyde, over to chat about dogs,” John B said. “Well, first to ask me whom I was talking to. Which of course, I was simply rehearsing.”
“The Othello soliloquy,” said Mitch.
“Iago. From Othello.”
“Right.”
“Anyway, Little Clyde told me that Big Lucy was bugging him to get her a dog. Ever since I’d moved in, Big Lucy had seen me with my dog—”
“Hang on,” said Blake. “Did he call her Big Lucy?”
“He did,” said John B. “She was.”
“Did she call him Little Clyde?”
“She did. He was. Anyway, Big Lucy was telling Little Clyde that if he didn’t give her a dog, he would have to give her a baby. This is a fairly common scenario, I think. A dog instead of a baby.”
“Is that why you got Cornelius?” Mitch wondered.
“There are more than enough people in the world, Mitch,” said John B sharply. “Like most sensible people, Little Clyde did not want a baby. He said babies are noisy and messy. I did not point out that the same can be said of dogs. I’d been pulled into something personal between Little Clyde and Big Lucy, something marital, and the less I knew about it, the less we talked about it, the better. I said I’d drive him to the animal shelter the next day, and we’d get Big Lucy a dog.”
At the shelter Little Cyde picked out a ten-week-old rotty/shepherd mix and brought him home to Big Lucy, who, John B said, gave the pup more love in that first hour home than he’d likely received in all his life. She named him Magnum, for her preferred beverage, and for a week or so she and Little Clyde were like proud new parents with Magnum—playing, cuddling, babytalking, the way people will. Then they tied Magnum to a brick.
“Tied him to a brick?” said Blake. “What the hell for?”
“Well, I didn’t know. When I first found Magnum tied to a brick, I couldn’t say what had happened, and neither could Cornelius. Cornelius was so unsettled by the affair, that he relieved himself on the little dog’s head.”
“Pissed on him?”
“Sparingly, but yes.”
Here Cornelius, tuned to the outer world as animals sometimes are in sleep, raised his head.
“Didn’t you, old boy?” said John B.
Cornelius glared at each of us in turn, as if to ask, What would you have done?, then lowered his head and settled back to sleep.
“What did you do?”
“I gave Cornelius a talking to, rinsed the pup off, and directly went to tell Little Clyde that somebody had tied Magnum to a brick.”
“And he?”
“Said he Little Clyde had tied Magnum to a brick.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Give the dog some time outside, for one thing, but mainly to make him strong.”
“He meant to fight this dog?” Blake wondered.
John B squinted hard at Blake. “Fight him?” he said. “What? Like wrestle him?”
“Naw, man. With other dogs. This was a fighting dog?”
“Oh. No. Just a dog.”
“Gotcha.”
“So I rejoined Cornelius and we visited with Magnum for a moment. I explained to Cornelius that what this was, besides being a brilliant way to keep a pup close to the house, out of danger, was strength training. Magnum would be a stout, muscular dog one day, and Cornelius might want to keep that in mind the next time he had a notion to relieve himself on the junior dog’s forehead.”
“What did Cornelius s—” Mitch stopped himself.
“He didn’t say anything, Mitch,” said John B. “He’s a dog, after all. He simply snorted indignantly at me and then led me on towards the park.”
It was only a matter of time, John B explained, before Magnum outgrew his brick. That is, before towing his brick around made him strong enough to really tow his brick around. “I should have seen it coming,” John B said. “Each day Magnum’s range around the driveway increased; each day his skill with the burden improved. Awkward heaves and lunges gradually evolved into smooth slides and drags. Then maybe three weeks after his initial yoking, I was biking home from class, along 2nd Avenue—a good mile from 314 Northwest 12th, mind you—and well, yonder comes Magnum, galloping down 2nd.”
“He broke free?” said Blake.
“Broke free?”
“Of the brick?”
“Hell no he didn’t break free of the brick. The brick was bouncing along behind him.”
“You’re serious?” Blake laughed.
“I am. The brick could as well have been a Kleenex box, as far as Magnum was concerned. He’d gotten strong. Which, if you recall, was the plan.”
“Where was he headed?”
“I’m not sure he knew. Probably just happy to have the strength to head. And fortunately enough, happy to follow me on home to 314. After I explained what had happened, Big Lucy wobbled down the steps faster than I’d ever seen her wobble and swooped Magnum up into her arms. She then—it was really quite sweet— cradled and rocked him. While Little Clyde and Cornelius and I watched, she cooed about her little baby being out there in the big world, alone. I didn’t tell her Magnum had seemed perfectly happy—ecstatic, even—out there in the big world, alone.”
“She wasn’t mad at Little Clyde?” said Mitch. “He was off the hook?”
“Hardly. Once she’d tended to Magnum, Big Lucy proceeded to tend to Little Clyde. Said she would not have her baby wandering off—like him.”
“Like Little Clyde?”
“Precisely. She would not have Magnum wandering off the way Little Clyde sometimes did. I thought it best not to inquire if Big Lucy had ever tried tying Little Clyde to a brick. I was in the middle of something marital again. It’s a place, really, I have no experience with, and have no business being. Little Clyde said all right, we’d take care of it.”
“We?”
“Meaning I was not out of this yet.”
Directly Little Clyde led John B into the scrappy patch of woods that lay adjacent to the rental property—woods where, John B explained, some people dumped things and other people claimed them. Little Clyde told John B that what they needed, what he should be looking for, was a cinder block. That would make Magnum good and strong, and keep him close to home besides.
“Until he outgrew that,” said Blake. “Until he’s running around town with a cinder block behind him. Hey?”
“I pointed this out. Little Clyde said he guessed that at that point, he’d move the dog up another notch—to an old washing machine, or maybe a fridge.”
At this stage of the story, it was hard not to entertain visions of the dog Magnum trailing various home furnishings through the streets of Gainesville. And really, why stop with the furnishings? Why not go ahead and tie the dog to the house, see where that would take him—or rather, where he would take the house?
In any case, they did not find a cinder block. It was not the kind of thing, John B supposed, that the people who dump things in the woods generally dump in the woods, and if ever they do, it is the kind of thing that the people who claim things from the woods, claim quickly. Mostly John B found beer cans, wine bottles, and withered grocery bags. He did come across a crippled beach chair, but Little Clyde said that would not do—too light—and the carcass of an oven, which would not do, either—too heavy, at least at this early stage of Magnum’s development. John B was studying this oven when Little Clyde hollered from behind that he’d found something, just what they needed. When John B walked over, Little Clyde was standing proudly beside an abandoned grocery cart.
“With wheels?” said Mitch. “A wheeled object?”
“That’s what I said. Little Clyde called me a fool, then pointed to a bundle of baling chord tangled up in the grating of the basket. After he’d untangled the chord, loosed it from the cart, he led me back to 314 and informed Big Lucy that we had a plan. In fact I did not have any plan, and at this point I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to claim Little Clyde’s plan, whatever it was.”
“What was it?” said Mitch.
“A back-and-forth line. Little Clyde tied one end of the cord to the rail-post of his and Big Lucy’s stoop, then had me tie the other tight and level to the trunk of the mimosa in the drive. When he presented the arrangement to Big Lucy, Big Lucy wondered what a laundry line was going to do, about anything. Little Clyde called her a fool, then explained that what this was, was a back-and-forth line. The line would go through one of the three holes in the brick, which brick was already attached to the leash, which leash would be attached to the dog, which dog would then have room to run around, back-and-forth like, and continue his strength training.”
“But—”
“But for one small problem, which Big Lucy was quick to point out: How did Little Clyde mean to get the line through one of the three holes in the brick? Naturally, Little Clyde blamed me for the design flaw. Said I tied my end too soon. Called me a fool again, told me to untie my end, and brought over the brick. When we had the brick on the line, Clyde took up the collar and leash and whipped the brick back and forth along the line for a test run, then let the collar go. He called the rig perfect, and Big Lucy agreed that it was perfect—if, that is, Little Clyde meant to hang Magnum: presently Magnum’s little collar dangled a good two feet off the ground. Again, I was at fault. Little Clyde explained that I had tied my end too high. I would have to lower my end, because Little Clyde could not lower his: from the decking of the stoop the railpost plumbed down behind shoddy paneling. So I lowered my end a foot and a half or so, re-tied it, and awaited a verdict.”
“Which was?”
“Well, Little Clyde clearly did not like the new look of the thing. Running at an angle to the ground, the apparatus looked all catawampus, and unless Magnum took to walking around on his hind legs, it would give the pup little more than half as much back-and-forth room as Little Clyde had meant to give him. But for now, in the absence of a cinder block, it would have to do.”
Blake laughed lightly, said, “Should have just let the little guy go, JB. When you found him on the run. Would’ve been better off.”
“I’m not so sure, Blake,” said John B. “Little Clyde and Big Lucy loved that dog.”
“They tied him to a brick, JB!” said Blake.
“Well? In the absence of a fenced-in yard, why not? You should have seen the rig Little Clyde built when Magnum got big. He made this kind of platform trailer that he hooked to the back of the tricycle. Magnum would hop on the platform and yonder they would go, riding about town together. I have to say, there were times when Cornelius would watch them setting off, then kind of squint at me, like why hadn’t I built something like that for him? Little Clyde and Big Lucy loved that dog, Blake, and he loved them. I don’t doubt that he enhanced their relationship, such as it was.”
Here Mitch, who seemed to have been quietly considering things, asked, “Why didn’t y’all just lengthen the leash?”
“Do what?” said John B.
“Buy a longer leash. Or make one. For the back-and-forth line. Seems pretty obvious.”
“Well—maybe to an engineer.”
“Not only an engineer,” Blake said. “I was thinking that, myself. If you just made the leash longer, the back-and-forth line could have stayed where it was. Right?”
“Well, sure,” said John B. It was clear that the thought had only just now occurred to him.
“In any case, Little Clyde did not think of that.”
“You neither, I guess,” said Mitch.
“Well. It wasn’t my dog. Cornelius here is my dog.”
As if to confirm that fact—or anyway, hearing his name again—Cornelius lifted his head and then stood up and shook off his sleep. After glancing briefly back at the beer box on his leg, reconfiguring the facts of his existence after his time away in sleep, he hobbled to John B’s side and sat down. While John B rubbed his ears, the dog studied each of us, the beer box splayed sideways from his body.
“You gon take that damn thing off his leg, JB?” said Mitch. “Jesus.”
“Seriously,” said Blake. “It’s not funny anymore.”
“I never said it was,” said John B. “Did I?” He slipped the beer box from Cornelius’s leg, and though we half expected the dog to then leap up and make a run for it, away from those who would leave him to wander through life as a kind of fool, he did not. No: he sat at John B’s side until John B stood up to fetch another round, when it was that the dog stood up and followed.
