A Big Little Life. Dean Koontz

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      A gentleman named Al almost convinced Elaine to join him at the altar. In the end, however, he met the same fate that is visited upon all her suitors and was let down gently; this is better than having your head bitten off, which is what the female praying mantis does to its male companions, but it still hurts. Even after he had been torpedoed by Elaine, Al continued sending her flowers, candy, and other gifts to express his abiding love. One of the things he gave her was a cowboy doll that, when squeezed, played Billy Ray Cyrus singing “Achy Breaky Heart.” Elaine thought this gift was sweet, though her friends—well, the few with taste—thought that perhaps she had done a wise thing when she had moved on from Al to destroy the last desperate romantic dreams of myriad other men of advanced age.

      Elaine threw a dinner party for a group of us who were all friends and former neighbors of one another. As always, she invited Trixie, whom she saw every day at work and sometimes walked. Everyone who met Trixie loved her, just as everyone loved Elaine, a fact that I have often brooded about without deciding on its meaning.

      Dinner that evening was not served until ten thirty because Elaine had forgotten to turn on the oven after putting the roast in it. She looked through the view window a few times, upset that the meat would not cook, before she noticed the oven was off. None of us in attendance—and starving—found this development surprising. Elaine can spend ten minutes looking for the car keys that she’s holding in her hand. Lest you worry that her occasional confusion indicates the onset of Alzheimer’s, people who knew her when she was a teenager tell us that even then she could spend ten minutes searching for the horses to pull the covered wagon when the poor beasts were already standing in their traces and ready to go.

      When you start drinking red wine at six o’clock, expecting dinner at seven thirty, and when dinner arrives three hours later than promised, you are in a very forgiving mood and find the chef to be as adorable as do the uncountable men whom she has discarded like old shoes. Conversation around the dinner table was lively if not raucous, and surprisingly coherent, considering. About halfway through the meal, someone asked Elaine if she had heard from Al lately, and before she could reply, from under the table came the voice of Billy Ray Cyrus singing “Achy Breaky Heart,” as if Al were under there, concealed by the tablecloth.

      Trixie, when visiting a friend, never before or thereafter appropriated the property of the host for her own use, but with her timely addition of a soundtrack, she got the biggest laugh of the night, and came out from under the table to accept applause.

      Any Spot or Fido might decide that a colorfully outfitted cowboy doll must be a dog toy. Settling with it under the dinner table would also be predictable dog conduct.

      But Trixie had stood on her hind feet to pluck the doll off a shelf that she could barely reach. Instead of munching it at once and activating the recording, she took it quietly under the table, without anyone seeing her. That she bit the song from it precisely when someone asked Elaine if she’d heard from Al lately…

      Well, I won’t go so far as to say that this uncanny canine knew Al had given the doll to Elaine, that she bided her time and waited to hear Al’s name, that she knew why this would strike all present as hilarious. For suggesting such a thing, I would no doubt attract the attention of the Bureau for the Compassionate Care of the Inadvisably Mystic-Minded or some other government agency that would want to lock me up for my own good. But as with so many things about Trixie, this moment at a dinner party was magical and uncanny.

      Trixie was a joker, all right, and when she wasn’t lying in wait under a table for a laugh, other furniture inspired her humor. A console, a dresser, a sideboard, any item on short legs intrigued her. She would stand with head lowered, sniffing the narrow space under the piece. By her urgent attitude, she seemed to say that she had trapped a critter and that we ought to have a look at what she cornered. If we didn’t take her suggestion right away, she would lie down and paw at whatever might be in the hidden space.

      Inevitably, when we got warily on our hands and knees to peer under the furniture for the mouse, nothing was there. The way Short Stuff grinned at us, I swear this was her idea of a practical joke. We fell for it again and again, and when we refused to be conned, we saw her pull the trick on other people.

      In the Harbor Ridge house, we once had a real mouse loose on the lowest of three floors. In the kitchen, I lined up a series of mousetraps in the lid of a box that I could carry to the lower floor, and I baited them with chunks of cheese, one by one.

      Trixie stood at the counter, at my side, interested in my task but drawn also by the aroma of Velveeta. Five times, as I carefully put down a set trap, it sprang, flipping into the air with a hard snap, which caused Trixie to twitch but didn’t frighten her into flight. The sprung traps cast bits of cheese to the floor, which Trix snatched up with plea sure.

      In truth, I shouldn’t be allowed any nearer to a mousetrap than to an armed nuclear device. I’m no more mechanically inclined than I am gifted at bird imitations.

      After I carried the traps downstairs and placed them, I decided I needed four or five more. My strategy when I am out to kill a mouse is not to trust in its taste for cheese. Should it be that rare mouse disgusted by the very idea of cheese, I distribute so many traps in each small area that the little beast will inevitably blunder into a deadly mechanism the first time it ventures from cover.

      In the kitchen again, where Trixie waited, I put five more traps in the box lid. She watched me solemnly, but instead of waiting for more cheese to be flung by sprung traps, she made a low throaty noise of concern and backed away from me, tail between her legs. She backed across the kitchen and through the doorway to the family room, and kept backing away, away, in my line of sight, until she was at the farther end of that adjacent room, fully forty feet from where she had started. Once there, she made several wheezing sounds that were as close to laughter as I can imagine a dog getting. Her tail began to wag, and she grinned at me.

      I know as surely as I know anything that she was having fun at my expense, mocking my mechanical ineptitude with the easily sprung traps. She was saying, I really want the dropped cheese, Dad, but I want to live, too, so I’m getting out of the death zone.

      G. K. Chesterton—who had two dogs, Winkle and Quoodle—wrote more than a little about the importance of laughter in a well-lived life, and of laughter’s role in a marriage, he said: “A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool.” Dogs love to play the fool, and as part of the family, they are quite capable of recognizing the fool in us, and of celebrating it with a joke now and then.

       VI she poops on command, but not just anywhere

      DURING THOSE FIRST days with Trixie, we learned that her personal tao, the code of virtuous conduct by which she lived, included a proscription against pooping on our property. She would pee on our lawn, but she refused to do the nastier act within the borders of our domain. She lived with us for eight years, nine months, and five days, and not once in all that time did she break this self-imposed rule, which had nothing to do with her training.

      As part of CCI’s excellent instruction, their canine graduates obey a toileting command. When you speak this word, they do number one and then number two (if they need to), with nearly СКАЧАТЬ