Chapter Thirty

They were driving along a long stretch of narrow highway, surrounded by barren rocky fields on both sides, when Larry Shoemaker’s voice came over the CB radio.
“Hitchhiker up ahead. Should we stop and pick ‘em up? Over.”
David looked and saw that the hitchhiker wasn’t a man, but a skinny, mangy dog panting along the shoulder of the road.
“Grey Goose here. He looks all alone. Let’s stop and take a look. Over.”
“Roger that.”
The trucks slowed and pulled over. David, Elizabeth, and Natasha hopped down and approached the yellowish-brown dirty mutt, but Derrick stayed up in the gazebo.
“Be careful,” he said. “It might have rabies.”
“It’ll be fine,” Natasha said. She leaned down and stroked the dog’s brown floppy ears.
“He’s foaming at the mouth!” Derrick shouted.
“It’s not foam.” Natasha giggled as the dog licked her face. “It’s slobber.”
“It’s the same thing! You’re gonna have to get a series of painful injections in the stomach!”
Natasha ran her hand along the side of his dirty yellow-brown coat where his ribs pressed out. The mutt looked up at her with sad brown eyes.
“Poor thing,” Natasha said. “He’s starving.”
“Derrick, give him a candy bar,” David said.
“No!”
“Come on.” David jumped back up into the gazebo and went for Derrick’s satchel, but Derrick pulled the bag away protectively.
“He won’t even taste it!” Derrick complained. “He’ll just wolf it down!”
“He doesn’t need to taste it. He needs the nutrition.”
Derrick grudgingly unwrapped a Snickers bar and tossed it to the mutt who swallowed it like a pill.
“He doesn’t have a collar,” Elizabeth said. “Who do you suppose he belongs to?”
“He’s an orphan,” Natasha said. “Let’s adopt him.” She and the dog both looked at Elizabeth with pleading eyes.
David figured the dog was abandoned. His working class owners couldn’t afford to put dog food in his bowl, so they had to get rid of him. They didn’t want to take him to the pound where he’d be put to sleep, so they released him into the wild, where at least he’d have a fighting chance. Maybe some wolves would find him and let him join their pack.
Well, they were right, except this pack of wolves was a flower caravan.
“I hear dogs look like their owners,” David said. “He must belong to us. We’re a mutt. People from all walks of life: poets, hermits, plus-size models, citronella candles, orphans. All mixed together.”
They decided to take him along; he became the newest member of their flower caravan.
“What’s his name?” asked Larry Shoemaker.
“Spot,” David said. “Or Rover. It should be something simple. This is a workingman’s dog, not some fancy pampered pink poodle named Foofie.”
Toby the hermit had a suggestion. “Let’s call him Derrick.”
“No!” Derrick shouted. “That’s my name! It’s the only one I have left!”
“I have a good name for him,” Elizabeth said. “We should name him in honor of my late husband, Howard.”
Elizabeth was the boss, so they named the dog Howard.
***
One day, as they were packing up the flower caravan, they found Howard the dog lying under the tulip truck, curled-up and twitching, wheezing like an asthmatic.
“I told you he had rabies,” Derrick said. “I think I have it too.” He wiped his own mouth with the back of his hand, checking for foam. His hand was dry; he wasn’t foaming at the mouth, yet.
“David, do something for Howard,” Elizabeth said.
“Why me?”
“You have the most medical experience.”
She was right. He had given Howard (the professor) a tracheotomy, unsuccessfully, performed CPR, unsuccessfully, and performed it on Derrick, successfully.
Using his best bedside manner, he knelt down and gazed reassuringly into Howard’s crusty, hopeless brown eyes. He choked when he got in range of Howard’s noxious dog-breath. Hopefully, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation wouldn’t be necessary. Maybe it couldn’t even be done. How could you form an airtight seal over a dog’s snout?
The dog was definitely sick, but David didn’t know with what.
“I’m gonna have to refer him to a specialist,” David said.
“Excellent,” Elizabeth said. “What sort of specialist.”
“A veterinarian.”
They threw Howard onto the gazebo platform and sped towards the vets. When they got there, Toby ran in with Howard in his arms. David ran in after him. The receptionist asked if they had an appointment.
“We’ve got a sick dog here,” David said.
“Do you have an appointment?” the receptionist asked, twirling her hair.
“It’s an emergency!” Toby shrieked.
“Fill these out.” The receptionist dropped a stack of forms on the counter.
Since David was a writer, he filled out the forms. He worked as quickly as he could.
Finally, they were admitted into the office. The vet, Dr. Erwin, had a thick yellow beard, big blinky eyes, and scruffy hair. He looked over the form that David had filled out.
“He’s been vomiting blood?” the vet asked.
“No,” David said.
“You wrote here that he’s been vomiting blood.”
“That’s a metaphor.”
“A what?”
“It’s a literary device. It’s when you…”
“I know what a metaphor is. What’s it doing on the description of symptoms?”
David stared down at his shoes. Finally a chance when his literal workingman style would come in handy and he didn’t use it. He was so used to using metaphors that he did it unconsciously.
“I’m a sellout,” David admitted.
“Now, don’t be so hard on yourself, son,” the vet said. “At least you didn’t drink antifreeze.”
“Antifreeze?”
“But your dog did.”
“What?”
“Yeah. That’s what I said.”
“There was an antifreeze leak in the tulip truck the other day,” Schweitzer said. “He musta licked it up off the pavement.”
“Why would he do that?” Natasha asked.
“’Cause it tastes so sweet,” the veterinarian said. “Antifreeze tastes great. Dogs can’t get enough of it.”
Doctor Erwin pulled down a chart which showed a cross-section of a dog’s internal organs. Only the dog’s face wasn’t cross-sectioned. It was a grinning Golden Retriever with a perfect set of white teeth. The vet pointed at the chart with a stick that looked like it was used to play catch.
“Once antifreeze reaches the liver, the liver separates it into different chemicals. One of those is chloroform, a toxic chemical that causes death.”
“Chloroform,” David said. “That’s the thing on the rag that knocks people out?”
That was also one of Ghetto Traveler’s many uses.
“Once the Chloroform gets to the kidneys, it does more than knock you out,” the vet said. “It destroys the kidneys, leading to the four Ds: dizziness, drunkenness, depression, and death.”
“What can you do?” Natasha asked.
“If noticed immediately, I could have made him throw up and put charcoal in his stomach to soak up the antifreeze. I also could have administered a drug that would make his liver not separate the antifreeze.”
“Stop livin’ in the past, Doc,” Toby said. “What can we do now?”
The vet shook his head. “He’s in the late stages of antifreeze poisoning. There’s nothing I can do. I recommend that you make your peace with him. This is the end.”
Toby knelt beside the gurney, wrapped his arms around the dog, and sobbed violently.
“Aw Howard! I’m sorry I let you drink antifreeze! I wish I had played catch with you more often. I wasted my life.” Toby started to beat fiercely on his own chest. “I never realized until now what was really important! All those years I wasted in my hermitage! I love your dog breath!”
He kissed Howard on the forehead. He sniffed, wiped his nose, then he wiped the dog’s dripping nostrils.
A dying dog was like poetry and flowers. It made people think about what was really important in life.
Dr. Erwin cleared his throat. “Yep,” he said, rubbing his fingers together. “Nothing I can do.”
Natasha glared at him. “Are you asking us for a bribe?”
The vet shrugged. “I gotta earn a living too.”
David gave him a ten dollar bill.
“Well now, let me see.” The vet rubbed his forehead thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose I could give him dialysis. But it’s not gonna be cheap.”
David held out another ten dollar bill.
“That’s not going to cover it.”
“Do you take credit cards?” Natasha asked.
“Of course.”
The vet hooked Howard up to a dialysis machine, a crazy contraption of tubes and needles.
“This is just temporary,” the vet said. “He’ll need a kidney transplant. It’s tough to find an organ donor. It has to be a DNA match. An appropriate blood-type. Preferably someone from the same family. Does he have any family members?”
“He’s a hermit,” Toby said.
“He means he’s an orphan,” Natasha said. “We’re the only family he’s got.”
Dr. Erwin nodded sadly.
Toby sighed deeply. “All right. I’ll do it. I’ll donate a kidney.” He started to unbutton his shirt.
“You can’t give him a kidney.”
“But we’re his family! The only family he’s got!”
“The donor has to be a dog.”
“Why?”
“It greatly decreases the chance that his body will reject the new organ if the donor is of the same species.”
***
David, Derrick, Natasha, Toby, and the rest of the flower caravan waited nervously outside the operating room at Animal Memorial Hospital.
Elizabeth had found the best veterinary canine renal surgeon in the world, and flown him in from Milwaukee. Dr. McGee told them not to worry; he had never lost a dog. This was a joke of course, referring to “lost dog” posters. In reality, the majority of Dr. McGee’s canine patients died when he operated on them.
Toby paced around nervously. Natasha worried that they would send her back to the orphanage if something happened to Howard. Elizabeth was devastated at the prospect of losing another Howard. Marcy looked at her reflection in the window. She shifted around, trying to get the best angle. David tried to write a poem in his notebook, but he couldn’t concentrate. His mind kept jumping around.
He started reading a poem to the plant in the lobby. It was a plastic plant, but it was the only plant around.
Dr. McGee came out the swinging doors into the waiting room. The chest of his blue scrubs and his plastic gloves were covered in blood. He pulled down his paper face mask.
“I have good news and bad news,” he said. “Which do you want first?”
“The good news,” Natasha said.
“No. Take the bad news,” Derrick said. “Get it out of the way.”
“Take the good news,” David said.
Toby said, “I suppose we could all use some good news, what with Howard bein’ sick an all.”
The surgeon nodded and clapped his hands together, splattering blood in all directions. “The good news it is then! But first, I’d just like to say how nice it is to meet you people. And really, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter if the operation was a success or not. What’s important is that we bring kindness and happiness to those around us.”
“Doctor. What’s the good news?” Natasha prodded.
“The good news is that Howard is going to live. His condition is stable and his vital signs are strong.”
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. David hadn’t realized he was holding his breath.
“What’s the bad news?” Derrick asked.
“Follow me.”
Dr. McGee turned and walked through the swinging doors. They followed after him through the door and down a stark hallway.
“The kidney transplant was a success but we have to stop his body from rejecting the new kidney later on, so he’ll have to take immunosuppressive pills. These drugs will suppress his immune system so that the immune system won’t reject the new liver. However, without an immune system…”
“It’s like AIDS,” David said.
“Exactly like AIDS,” the surgeon said. “Only without the stigma.”
They stopped at a medical supply closet. Dr. McGee went in and brought out a large clear plastic ball, about waist-high. There was a part that could flip open on the side. It looked like a giant hamster ball.
“This is the bad news,” Dr. McGee said and started to bounce the ball. “He can’t be exposed to other dogs and their germs. If he catches the common cold, he could die. Whenever he’s around other dogs, you’ll have to put him in this bubble. As long as you keep giving him the immune-suppressive drugs and keep him in the bub...”
Dr. McGee’s voice cracked and tears filled up his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he sniffled, wiping his eyes with his bloody hand. “It’s just that, all these dogs drinking antifreeze. I just can’t take it anymore. It’s driving me crazy. All these sick animals. All I see is sickness and death. I just…”
His voice caught; he couldn’t continue speaking. He collapsed on the bubble and sobbed onto it, slamming his head against the plastic ball, over and over again. He turned his head up, opened his mouth wide, and screamed:
“ANTIFREEZE!!!”
***
ב' בטבת תשס''ח
ירושלים
December 11, 2007
Jerusalem