I know it. Bekah knows it. This guy, from the sideways, tortured glances he throws at his sobbing girlfriend and the dog, knows it. The girlfriend must know it, too—everyone’s heard the news about pit bulls, how unadoptable they are. And if Bronx doesn’t know it yet, he will soon.
When it comes to dogs, my mom’s theory of love is wrong—dogs love their people without conditions, even when their people are total assholes.
I can’t stand there anymore, watching this scene. A hard lump fills my throat, tears I won’t cry, and I manage to say, “I’ll go find Ruth,” before I push through the far door into the kennel.
As a teen volunteer, I’m limited as to what I can do, and intake of surrendered pets is beyond the scope of my duties. Which is actually a good thing. If I took Bronx’s leash from the girlfriend’s hand, I don’t know if I could keep myself from telling her what I think of her and her boyfriend and their “move.” What I think of people like her, who do what’s easy and convenient for them, who throw pets away like paper plates or something.
Ruth is over by the isolation ward where we put the sick dogs in an attempt to keep illness from spreading kennel-wide. Once, a few years ago before I started volunteering, I guess there was this terrible outbreak of canine flu, and two-thirds of the dogs had to be put down all at once. There just wasn’t enough funding to medicate that many animals.
Ruth refers to the outbreak as The Auschwitz Incident, even though they didn’t gas the dogs. Lethal injection has been the drug of choice at this shelter since 2010.
“Bekah needs you,” I tell her. “Surrender.”
“Fucking people,” says Ruth, which is her mantra.
At this moment, it seems about right. “Fucking people,” I say back to her, and she nods.
“The north kennels need to be exercised,” she says, before heading up front.
So I head to the north kennels, full of little dogs. A few people wander around, kneeling in front of kennels here and there, where little wet noses press through the chain link, pink tongues curling desperately around outreached fingers. Stanley is sitting where he is always sitting during my shifts—on a bench in the center of the kennels. He’s wearing a green vest just like mine and holds a leash across his lap. Then he gets up and walks over to this girl—maybe she’s twenty-five or something—who’s looking down at a matted white-terrier mix. But he’s not great with personal space, and he hovers over her in a way that’s kind of creepy. “Do you want to take out the doggy and play with him?” he asks the girl. The dog is doing its best to close the deal, wagging its tail and looking as cute as it can, but Stanley startles the girl, and she stands up suddenly when he talks to her and shakes her head. Probably she was on the fence until Stanley started talking. It’s mean to say, because of the way he is, but Stanley’s not exactly salesman of the year, if you know what I mean. If Stanley were on the other side of the kennel door, he would have been put down a long time ago. That’s all I’m saying. It’s not Stanley’s fault, and it’s not nice. But it’s true.
“Hey, Stanley, what’s up,” I say as I head to the far kennel, grabbing a couple of leashes from a hook nearby.
“Hi, Nina,” he says, stretching my name like taffy, like he enjoys the taste of it. Ni . . . n . . . a.
I harness and leash the three Chihuahua mixes from Kennel One and let them pull me up the stairs and to the Play Yard. It’s depressing that they all know how to get there given how little time they get to spend there.
The Play Yard is a total euphemism for this awful square of chained-off dirt. There’s a bench off in a corner where I flop down after unhooking the leashes and watch the dogs do their initial round of the yard, noses down, sniffing the dirt as they trot the perimeter. After they’ve all finished sniffing and peeing, and after I bag a loose pile of poop that one of them hunches down to release, I pick up two half-skinned tennis balls and toss them for a while. They get fifteen minutes to play. That’s all the time they get out of their concrete cells all day long. If they’re lucky, they’ll get out five times this week.
We need more volunteers, and more funding, and, of course, fewer dogs, but as things stand now this is all we can give them while we wait for their “forever home” to find them, as the chirpiest volunteers like to say.
Happily ever after. That would be grand. More likely, though, is that at least one of these three will never see the outside of this shelter again. If I liked to bet, I’d put my money on the one we call Ginger to make it out of here. She’s pretty cute, and docile, and only three years old. The other two, though . . . odds aren’t looking so good for them.
First off, they’re both black. That’s not me being racist, that’s just the truth. Black dogs don’t get adopted as often, or as quickly, as lighter-colored dogs. Even if they’ve passed temperament testing with flying colors, even if they manage to avoid kennel cough, even if they’re not old or lame. I’m just reporting the facts of the matter.
And these two don’t have anything special going for them. They’re not teeny-tiny; they’re not especially cute; they’re kind of yippy and one of them is a leg-humper. People don’t like that.
So I’m the key to their freedom, for these fifteen minutes, and I’m their best friend while I’m throwing the ball, but when time’s up I’m their jailer again, clipping the faded, worn leashes back onto the harnesses and taking them back downstairs to Kennel One. This time, they don’t lead the way.
When I was little, I would beg my father to play with me. I would poke him, I would tickle him, I would cover his eyes with my hands. I would take his cigarettes and hide them. I would turn up the folded-down corners of his books.
I was so hungry, all the time. Always.
I was a mouth, gaping and undone. I was a satchel, pulled apart and waiting to be filled. I was a chasm, a vortex, a winding endless funnel.
I was the emptiness inside of things. I was the negative space.
Fill me, feed me, give me shape.
There is no such thing as unconditional love, as my mother taught me. Or, at least, there is no such thing as a love that lasts forever. Every relationship inevitably ends in one of two ways: a breakup or a death.
It can be between a parent and a child. It can be between lovers, between friends. Even the relationship of a dog and its master ends inevitably in one of these two ways.
Not long ago, I saw a picture of a dog loyally sitting on its owner’s grave. That relationship is over, even if the dog doesn’t know it yet. More often, the relationship ends with the dog’s death, since dogs don’t live as long as people. That is the best ending a dog can hope for—to die first. But sometimes, it happens as it has today at the shelter. The worst way for a dog and human relationship to end. Abandonment. A breakup.