I stood at my office door, and watched as Linda led Casey and Lucy off on their daily walk. As always, Lucy, as the pack leader, strode slightly ahead of Casey, her little white legs a mere blur.
I smiled as Casey surged ahead to be even with Lucy for a moment. Casey leaned over to nuzzle her, and then dropped back to his original position. I’d have sworn that Lucy’s grin, gapingly wide as per usual, widened just a bit more. The always-strong bond between these two seemed to grow even stronger with each passing season.
That evening, we presented Lucy with a surprise. Linda had found and bought a little pink dog bed, perfect for Lucy’s size, and had positioned it in a living room corner opposite the “dog apartment” under the end table. The “apartment” seemed often to be crowded and cramped nowadays, especially when occupied by Casey, Lucy, and a growing variety of dog toys.
Lucy yipped with excitement when she saw it. She pranced over to it, and lay down. She seemed to like the new bed even more than we’d hoped. I grabbed my phone, and took a few photos of her in it. Later that night, I looked at them on my computer monitor. Something in a couple of them, though, snapped me to attention. I called to Linda.
“In most of these, Lucy looks just like Lucy,” I said. “In some of them, as usual, her misaligned teeth show through. But in two of them here at the end, I’m seeing something I’m not sure I’ve noticed before.”
“Hmm, I think I see what you mean,” she said. “Lucy may be starting to show her age just a little.”
“She’s coming up on thirteen years old,” I said. “So I guess she’s coming by it honestly. She certainly doesn’t act her age, and, up until now, she hasn’t really shown it. She’s also done well health-wise. I can’t remember the last time she was sick.”
“What worries me,” said Linda, “is what will happen to Casey one day when he no longer has Lucy. After all, he is six years younger than she is, so it seems pretty much inevitable that that will eventually happen. The two of them seem to get closer all the time. If any dogs were ever soulmates, those two absolutely are.”
“I agree,” I said. “We’ve talked a time or two about getting a third dog. Maybe we ought to seriously revisit it, from the standpoint of Casey not being totally alone whenever Lucy leaves us.”
The next day was a Sunday, and, early in the afternoon, Linda and I visited the animal shelter web site. We reviewed the dogs available for adoption. A young dog, perhaps a year old, and whose “shelter name” was Gizmo, immediately caught our eye.
Although the webpage referred to him as a Shih Tzu, we suspected him to be a mixture of several different breeds. But Gizmo was strangely exotic in appearance, and handsome in his own way.
“What do we have to lose?” said Linda. “Let’s go have a look at the little guy.”
***
“We’re here to see Gizmo, the Shih Tzu,” I told the lady at the shelter desk.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t,” she told us. Linda and I looked at each other. Why, just once, we wondered, could we not have a dog adoption to proceed in a relatively normal and uncomplicated manner?
“We’re keeping him in the back area,” she told us in a lowered voice, after glancing furtively from one side of the lobby area to the other. “A man and woman are trying to claim him as their own, and we have reason to believe they are not the true owners. There are a lot of people interested in this dog, and we’ll probably be having a lottery for him on Tuesday.”
We returned home, more than a little frustrated and confused. Under no circumstances were we going to invest the time and effort to participate in a lottery for a dog we hadn’t even been able to see or meet.
***
By Monday morning, my frustration had grown substantially, and I called the shelter. The worker told me that we might possibly be able to meet Gizmo if we came down and obtained special permission from the manager.
Linda and I decided to take early lunch breaks, so we went to the shelter and asked to see Anna, the manager. We’d never met her, but we knew her well by her reputation as a fast-moving, no-nonsense, totally-dedicated steward of the animals with which she was entrusted.
As she led us toward the back area where Gizmo was lodged, she related her concern about the couple who were trying to falsely claim him as their own. During the course of that brief conversation, I happened to mention the number of homeless dogs we’d adopted into our family over the years. She seemed to almost stop in her tracks, and her face seemed to light up for an instant. She led us to an office, and left to fetch Gizmo.
She returned at once, holding a leash attached to him. As she unhooked the leash, he rushed to us, rubbing against our legs and looking up at us lovingly. We knelt, in order to continue the conversation on a more intimate basis.
“Who is your vet?” Anna asked somewhat curtly. We told her, not taking the time to consider why she might be asking, and then she was quickly out the door. For the next couple of minutes, we played and talked to Gizmo. All was going swimmingly.
Suddenly the door swung open, and Anna entered.
“Gizmo seems to have done well on his job interview,” I said.
“I’ve made an appointment with your vet to get him neutered this Friday,” Anna said. “Come in tomorrow morning at 11:00. Ask for me, and you can pick him up.” She re-attached the leash to Gizmo, and the two zipped out the door, far too quickly for us to have the chance to say a word. Linda and I looked at each other, with our heads spinning.
“Wasn’t a minor detail missing from that conversation?” Linda said. “I don’t recall our having said that we’d decided to adopt him.”
“We didn’t,” I replied. “But I guess that is what we want to do. Isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is,” she said. “But it seems almost like sort of a moot point at this stage.”
***
We’d been taken so aback by the speed with which the adoption process had unfolded that neither Linda nor I had given any thought to what we would name the little guy. “Gizmo” was only a temporary handle given him by the shelter, which had no idea what he might have been called in his previous life.
That night, we decided to attempt to reach a decision. In our past dog adoptions, lengthy and sometimes convoluted discussions had ensued regarding this subject. As we began to talk, I had a sudden burst of inspiration.
“Do you remember John Stewart?” I asked. “He used to be in the Kingston Trio back during the folk music era, and he’s always been one of my favorite singer/songwriters. I’ve been listening to his music again lately, and especially the song that’s my favorite of his. It’s called ‘Cody.'”
“I do remember John,” Linda said, “and I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the song. ‘Cody.’ Hmm… It does go well with ‘Casey’ and ‘Lucy.’ I like it. It seems to fit the little fellow. Why don’t we go with it?”
“We’ll consider it a done deal,” I said. “Let’s hope things go this smoothly tomorrow.”
***
Linda was dealing with the month-end accounting work at her office, so she’d be unable to go with me. But, I told myself as I drove toward the shelter, this process should be quick, simple and painless. What could possibly go wrong?
As I entered the shelter lobby, I had to wait as a scowling man and woman, each quite memorable in appearance, were leaving. The man was heavy, tall, wide, mustached, and notably rough-hewn. He walked with a pronounced limp. His wife wasn’t mustached or as tall, but was otherwise quite similar to the man, in both appearance and demeanor.
Anna saw me as I walked in, and waved me over to meet her at a vacant area of the counter. I thought I detected a look of concern on her face. She kept glancing toward the outside door, and she kept her voice low.
“That couple who was leaving as you came in are the ones I was talking about,” she said. “From time to time, they like to claim that some of the breed dogs we get are escapees from their home. If we let them, then they’d take them, fail to get them spayed or neutered, and then resell them. Little Gizmo doesn’t know them from Adam, despite their claiming to be his owners.”
I felt a breeze just then and glanced to my rear. The front door had opened, and the rough-hewn couple was coming back in. They walked over directly behind me, and stood there menacingly, with their arms folded. Anna and I concluded our paperwork quickly, and with few words.
“There’s an auxiliary door outside in front, just to the right of the main entrance,” she said quietly. “Wait for me out there. I’ll go get Gizmo.”
When I turned around, the man and woman were no longer in the lobby. I’d been so engrossed in wrapping up the transaction that I hadn’t noticed them leave.
As I walked to the auxiliary door, I noticed a battered pickup truck parked just across the driveway. The rough-hewn man was sitting in the passenger seat with his door open, sipping a beer and staring intently at me. The rough-hewn woman was sitting on the passenger-side running board, talking to the man as she joined him in staring at me.
The auxiliary door swung open, and Anna and Gizmo / Cody swept through it. I noticed her eyes dart over toward the pickup truck and then back at me. She placed the leash in my hand, mouthed the words “Good luck,” and was gone, just as quickly as she had come.
My car was parked several positions to the right of the pickup truck. I picked up Cody and walked quickly toward it. He seemed to see the truck and the people, but he didn’t react to them at all.
I noticed the lady scurrying toward the driver’s side of the truck. I unlocked the door of my car and placed Cody on the passenger seat.
“Well, little guy, I didn’t expect your life with us to start with a car chase, but it just might,” I told him. I knew that there might not be all that many vehicles my Honda Civic could outrun, but I expected the battered pickup truck to be one of them.
My engine hummed to life. I zipped out of the parking lot, as the pickup truck backed from its own parking place. I weaved through heavy traffic, zigging from lane to lane, just as swiftly as I could.
The pickup truck never once appeared in my rear-view mirror. I added a couple of side-street detours to my route home, though, just in case. I breathed a sigh of relief as Cody and I and the Honda headed up our driveway.