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I must admit it influenced my own reactions. I was always wary of someone Ahbhu shunned.
Women with whom I had had unsatisfactory affairs would nonetheless return to the
house from time to time--to visit the dog. He had an intimate circle of friends, many of
whom had nothing to do with me, and numbering among their company some of the most
beautiful actresses in Hollywood. One exquisite lady used to send her driver to pick him
up for Sunday afternoon romps at the beach.
I never asked him what happened on those occasions. He didn’t talk.
Last year he started going downhill, though I didn’t realize it because he
maintained the manner of a puppy almost to the end. But he began sleeping too much, and
he couldn’t hold down his food--not even the Hungarian meals prepared for him by the
Magyars who lived up the street. And it became apparent to me something was wrong with
him when he got scared during the big Los Angeles earthquake last year. Ahbhu wasn’t
afraid of anything. He attacked the Pacific Ocean and walked tall around vicious cats.
But the quake terrified him and he jumped up in my bed and threw his forelegs around my
neck. I was very nearly the only victim of the earthquake to die from animal
strangulation.
He was in and out of the veterinarian’s shop all through the early part of this
year, and the idiot always said it was his diet.
Then one Sunday when he was out in the backyard, I found him lying at the foot of
the stairs, covered with mud, vomiting so heavily all he could bring up was bile. He was
matted with his own refuse and he was trying desperately to dig his nose into the earth
for coolness. He was barely breathing. I took him to a different vet.
At first they thought it was just old age...that they could pull him through. But
finally they took X-rays and saw the cancer had taken hold in his stomach and liver.
I put off the day as much as I could. Somehow I just couldn’t conceive of a world
that didn’t have him in it. But yesterday I went to the vet’s office and signed the
euthanasia papers.
“I’d like to spend a little time with him, before,” I said.
They brought him in and put him on the stainless steel examination table. He had
grown so thin. He’d always had a pot-belly and it was gone. The muscles in his hind legs
were weak, flaccid. He came to me and put his head into the hollow of my armpit. He was
trembling violently. I lifted his head and he looked at me with that comic face I’d
always thought made him look like Lawrence Talbot, the Wolf Man. He knew. Sharp as hell
right up to the end, hey old friend? He knew, and he was scared. He trembled all the way
down to his spiderweb legs. This bouncing ball of hair that, when lying on a dark carpet,
could be taken for a sheepskin rug, with no way to tell at which end head and which end
tail. So thin. Shaking, knowing what was going to happen to him. But still a puppy.
I cried and my eyes closed as my nose swelled with the crying, and he buried his
head in my arms because we hadn’t done much crying at one another. I was ashamed of
myself not to be taking it as well as he was.
“I got to, pup, because you’re in pain and you can’t eat. I got to.” But he didn’t
want to know that.
The vet came in, then. He was a nice guy and he asked me if I wanted to go away and
just let it be done.
Then Ahbhu came up out of there and looked at me.
There is a scene in Kazan’s Viva Zapata where a close friend of Zapata’s, Brando’s,
has been condemned for conspiring with the federales. A friend that had been with Zapata
since the mountains, since the revolución had begun. And they come to the hut to take him
to the firing squad, and Brando starts out, and his friend stops him with a hand on his
arm, and he says to him with great friendship, “Emiliano, do it yourself.”
Ahbhu looked at me and I know he was just a dog, but if he could have spoken with
human tongue he could not have said more eloquently than he did with a look, don’t leave
me with strangers.
So I held him as they laid him down and the vet slipped the lanyard up around his
right foreleg and drew it tight to bulge the vein, and I held his head and he turned it
away from me as the needle went in. It was impossible to tell the moment he passed over
from life to death. He simply laid his head on my hand, his eyes fluttered shut and he
was gone.
I wrapped him in a sheet with the help of the vet and I drove home with Ahbhu on
the seat beside me, just the way we had come home eleven years before. I took him out in
the backyard and began digging his grave. I dug for hours, crying and mumbling to myself,
talking to him in the sheet. It was a very neat, rectangular grave with smooth sides and
all the loose dirt scooped out by hand.
I laid him down in the hole and he was so tiny in there for a dog who had seemed to
be so big in life, so furry, so funny. And I covered him over and when the hole was
packed full of dirt I replaced the neat divot of grass I’d scalped off at the start. And
