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Dookie’s first wife Denise was loaded, with more money than they would ever need. They could take any trip they wanted, go out to eat at will or on a whim, order bottled water instead of tap—and it would not make a damn bit of difference. They never ran out of money and they never would.
The trouble probably started even before they got married, when Denise told Dookie that he would never need to work.
We’re flush, Denise said.
Dookie did what he could for a few years, dawdling and doodling at the bank, but when Denise said Let’s go to Venice and make a baby—there was nothing to say except Sure. They liked Venice enough to stay for an extra week, long enough for Dookie to send in his resignation by email.
You lucky cocksucker, his boss wrote back—that was exactly how Dookie felt in the gondola that last night in Venice with Denise, like they were sailing away into a sun that could never set. Or something. He felt lucky for that whole extra week and then for the first week back, once they found out that they were going to have a baby.
They made love on the floor of the living room as soon as they saw the color blue from the small kit they got at the drugstore. They made love so many times that day it felt like they had to be in love.
***
Denise lost that first baby almost right away and then the next one and then the next. They went to doctors until they found a woman they both believed in: she said that under the circumstances they should try to make their first baby in vitro, in a test tube. When the doctor said zygote, Denise started weeping right there in the office, but Dookie said: Why not? The doctor said: You’ve got nothing to lose—which turned out to be not exactly true, because they lost three more babies that way after implantation.
That was the beginning but it was not the end.
Denise said they had to get away, to start over somewhere else. Once they decided to move out of the city to Rocky Top—to live in the mansion at Three Creeks her parents never used—Dookie almost never went outside to see the mountains, not even when it was snowing. He was pretty sure he had never seen two of the Three Creeks, either.
Dookie was becoming like a cat, a fat one.
He was bored and bloated and knocking down up to six beers before the sun set in summer—micro-brews from nowhere that no one else had ever heard of—and the closest he ever came to any real activity was trying to buy a bar at Base Village called Rocky Top Tap before that fell of its own weight. The Web and Twitter and Facebook kept him up all hours: Dookie would have been the first to admit he was killing time, drowning in it, because with no job and without children he no longer had a reason to be on the planet. His micro-brew beer blog became his sole source of pride, and it came with the guarantee that he would get loaded every night in the name of research.
At first Denise liked having Dookie around when she came home from shopping, but anyone could see he was becoming a lesser man. She knew losing the babies was her fault—the doctor said so—and there was nothing she could do about it and no amount of money could make it better. Failure as a mother was her fate though Dookie never said word one about it, yea or nay. Maybe that was worse: Denise wished Dookie would just come right out and blame her, say all the horrible things she was thinking about herself to begin with. But he never did—Dookie never did much of anything except sit in the office on his computer in his virtual world of social media and micro-brews.
***
After shopping one day and finding squat, Denise decided to do what most anyone would have done in that situation: to get a dog.
Just by chance the shelter had a half-dozen sled dogs from a local Rocky Top Mountain tourist attraction, huskies normally have been culled from the pack—killed in other words. A local group had saved their lives and that meant Denise and Dookie could have their pick of the litter. When they got to the shelter the sled dogs were caged in a pen away from the others, skipping and skimming around the edges like their paws were on ice skates. They looked more like wild animals than dogs to Dookie, like wolves, their ribs poking out through their coats like cartoon coyotes. When Dookie said Hey they started to bark at him like he was the bad guy.
For Denise it was a different story. She saw they were skinny of course but from the first moment she fell in love with the skittish little runt she called Slider—and Slider seemed to love her back by licking her face.
Slider has soul, Denise said to Dookie, as if Slider knew what they had been through.
Don’t they all? Dookie said.
***
You never know the way things will go but Dookie never thought he and Denise would end up peeing all over each other.
There were reasons. They had lost six babies. Dookie had become nothing more than a big fat loser with nothing to do all day and all year long except organize the micro-brew component of the Annual Red-Hot Rocky Top Chili Fest on the mountain—all the while hoping no one in the valley would ask him what in hell he was doing for a living. Being on permanent vacation might have worked fine in theory but it was eating away at our hero, eating him up inside like a mysterious bacteria lodged in his large intestine.
For all of that Dookie had never been bad to Denise until Slider came along. Having Slider was worse than having a baby because if you left the damn dog alone for two minutes he chewed up Dookie’s favorite loafers or left a pile of steaming crap in the front hall. The dog would not heel for her master: fat as Dookie was, Slider pulled him through the slop in the woods as if this were a one-dog Iditarod. Dookie had given up trying to sleep until Slider stopped her howling at bed time.
Hating that dog was getting to be too easy. Dookie could blame Slider for everything—and he did—but Denise was in love. She fed Slider five times a day and not just with dog food: Denise stopped eating at times to feed Slider off her plate. Denise and Dookie could not go out to dinner or to a movie any more without getting Slider a dog-sitter. After a while Denise and Dookie stopped going out altogether. Once Dookie figured out how to watch movies on the computer he never seemed to leave his chair.
Mommy’s little baby, Denise said to Slider.
To Dookie, it was one thing to have the tragedy of no children whatsoever, but something else again to see your wife turn into a blubbering fool over a sled dog who should have been left for dead. They both knew it was transference—Denise needed someone to love, Dookie someone to hate—but for Dookie his wife’s devotion to Slider was a license to puke.
Pretty soon Dookie was knocking back micro-brews starting at noon sharp, something he had never done before, and he started to conk out on the office couch two or three times a week without even coming up to bed. His micro-brew blog was becoming incoherent, with his stories of hops and barley giving way to drunk-as-a-skunk bla-bla-bla. The Annual Red-Hot Rocky Top Chili Fest was coming up in time for Dookie to let everyone down by not making his annual selections. With three weeks to go the Fest gave him a lifetime admission card and cut him loose for good.
C’mere ugly, Dookie said to Slider. Time to go crap in the living room.
When Slider actually did crap in the living room, Dookie said: You are the dumbest fucking dog west of the Mississippi. Then he left Slider’s steaming pile of dog shit for Denise to clean up.
Denise was obsessed with Slider: a little love and five squares a day were fattening the dog up so fast her sled-dog ribs were disappearing back into her body. Slider was still skittish, with ice-blue eyes that always looked half-cocked, but he was coming to love Denise—licking her face, snugging against her knuckles, wagging her tail whenever Denise gave her a Pup-er-roni.
Denise was not ready to let Dookie drown his sorrows in microbrews forever, so she asked him to walk with her and Slider down by the Roaring Fork River so they could talk things through. She knew they were in a bad way but she also knew that’s what happens as you go through the cycle of life. That was all she wanted to say on their walk by the river but Dookie was locked and loaded. With no job and no children and his wife drifting away, Dookie felt like he was turning into a steaming pile of crap.
I’m not sure this is working, Dookie said.
Maybe you just need to work, Denise said. Some people just do.
Dookie let Slider off the leash.
What the hell! Denise said.
She went to grab his collar but Slider pulled away.
We’ll lose her! Denise said.
Slider, liberated, started nosing along the river, trotting just ahead of them with his tail wagging like this was the first day of the rest of his life. And why not? Slider had been left for dead as a sled dog, and this was like a new way of life, without having to pull somebody else’s weight.
Slider! Denise shouted.
Slider stopped, turned to look at Denise, then took a step into the river and started to lick at the water racing by. He took another step and another lick and then the third step sent him crashing into the river until he was moving with the current with only his bony tail above water like a periscope.
SLIDER! Denise screamed.
Oh SHIT! Dookie said.
Dookie knew in that instant he was nothing more than a drunk who married up—but to that point most of his mistakes had been reversible. He could stop drinking. He and Denise could go to movies together again and share a tub of popcorn with or without butter. He could turn off the computer and come to bed. He could turn back the clock.
But if Slider drowned in the Roaring Fork River there would be no way back to Denise—no way home.
So he ran.
Fat as he was, Dookie had not run a lick for years and he was amazed he had anything left in the tank. He had some sense of Denise screaming and crying behind him but he ran through the branches and bushes along the river trying to keep Slider in view: he would see something on his left every few seconds—a paw pawing at the air, his tail wiggling above the water, the skinny trunk bobbing—and then Slider would disappear behind the trees in the river long enough to never come back up. Dookie knew if he could not get ahead of Slider before the bridge that would be all she wrote—their dead dog would turn up somewhere past Rifle or Parachute or points west he had never even heard of.
Dookie had one chance left and he took it.
Somehow he got to the bridge before Slider and jumped in, his head coming to the surface just as Slider was sliding by like a kid out of control at a water park. Dookie reached out and grabbed the very end of Slider’s bony tail and they kept tumbling down the river until Dookie could work his way hand-over-hand back up the tail to the skinny body of the dog. Slider was scared shitless and snapping until Dookie popped him in the snout.
After he puked, Dookie had Slider by the collar on the bank on the far side of the river. They lay there for a long time, man and man’s best friend, before he heard Denise’s shriek—Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!— from up above.
Denise came sliding down the bank on her bottom and came to a stop in front of Dookie and Slider.
I thought I lost you, Denise said.
She jumped onto Dookie’s lap and held her husband tighter than she had ever held him before.
You dumb son of a bitch, she said—and then Denise started to cry.
What about Slider? Dookie said.
Slider’s just a dog. Denise kissed Dookie all over his face. You’re my baby.
