She's in the yard, in the wild side, taming it, tramping down the wildflowers and exotic grasses, nestled at the base of the pecan tree between the large cactus -- its last yellow blooms fallen and pale and rotting in the dirt -- and the old porch swing, put out there on a small table with legs (short table, not small). Her bed is dirt black, rick earth, she spends most of the day in it, scratching up a few more weeds, clearing out a slightly larger place to be, a slightly cooler place to bed.Sometimes she roams the neighborhood, acts like she owns the neighborhood, even though she hasn't been around all that long, six months maybe, since the last cold spell. She just appeared one cool afternoon, making a ruckus, running scared if you got to near her, unless you were a dog; she seems to like dogs, a lot.
She's a dog herself, a stray bitch, though her littering days are long behind her. She has six or eight knobs on her underside, black knobs like dried up berries, she carries them under her yellow tank of a body. There's a sprinkling of black around her neck, ears and snout, and on the tip of her bottle brush tail, but other than that, she's yellow, blond maybe.
But she's no dummy, just a sad case, wandering through the cemetery -- an eight-block square with a busy road down the middle of it. A couple of neighbors spotted her sleeping in the tall grasses around some of the graves when they were there running their dog. They didn't encourage her, but she took it upon herself to follow them home, follow their dog home anyway. And they put out food which she timidly ate but only when they left her alone for a long time.
They built a tee pee (maybe a pup tent is a better choice!) filled and covered with old blankets and cushions. She slept in the vacant lot for a couple of nights then made her way to the bed, to the front porch of their house, near the bowl of food. They started calling her Titz, for obvious reasons.
She was sickly, everybody gossiped about her in the neighborhood, nobody thought she would live long. The girlfriend of the college biker boy across the street put food out for her, too, but she wouldn't call her Titz. She called her Bella; there was no rhyme or reason for that.
She lived through the cold months. She barked ferociously at humans, at the people walking down the street; she would "chase" them from a safe distance down the middle of the street until they were on the next block or around a corner. She decided she did own the neighborhood, decided that it was her neighborhood, planned to protect it from all the humans. Only dogs were allowed.
Of course, we didn't let her chase us away. We all knew she was more afraid of us than we were of her, we knew she wouldn't actually hurt us. Not only was her bark worse than her bite, it seemed to be all there was.
One day a large, crooked old woman showed up in front of the neighbor's house in a car belching gray smoke. Titz didn't run from her, she wagged her tail at her. The old woman opened the hatch on her car and brought out a bowl, a bag of food and a container of raw hamburger. She clicked and clucked the entire time she was there; Titz never stopped wagging her tail. The old lady left the food in the front yard and drove off and Titz ate the food happily, wagging her tail, smiling about the old woman.
At the time Titz was skinny and sickly. The woman came by every day. For many days the neighbors weren't at home when she came so they had no idea where the food was coming from. They asked around and all of us neighbors gave our particular version of the story. Some talked about the way the woman looked, others focused more on the sounds she made, while others talked about the car. Everybody mentioned the raw hamburger. But that was no surprise to the neighbors because they were suddenly inundated with flies, inside and outside of their house.
The man neighbor decided he had to talk to the old woman, had to ask her -- or tell her -- not to bring the raw meat every day; Titz wasn't eating all of it so other strays were coming around and their dog was getting her fill of it as well.
The old woman told him that the dog had belonged to the people she lived next to in the neighborhood on the far side of the cemetery. They were drug dealers and all around no-good neighbors. They kept the dog on a short chain, bred her and mistreated the puppies to make them mean and entered them in dog fights. Then one day they moved away and left Titz behind. She was no longer doing her job. So the old woman fed her until she could get close enough to her to cut her loose. The dog immediately ran off. The old woman had been searching for her for a while, worried about her.
So how can I be upset about a sad old dog sleeping in my yard, tramping the wildflowers and exotic grasses?
