“Meet me down by the river
Down by the river where the water flows.”
-- Tom Sawyer: A River Adventure, by Kelly G. and David Kisor
--
A river scene:
After shows, I never want to do much of anything. I usually watch TV in my apartment or read or eat before slipping gracelessly into sleep. But after this evening’s show, as I walked across the river to where my car was parked, I decided to switch things up. On this lovely Saturday—breeze, sun, blue sky—I would find a bench on the Kentucky side of the river, put on some sunglasses, and read from the Sedaris book until sundown.
(I’m almost finished with it. The final story is also the longest, a day-by-day account of what appears to be his “How I quit smoking” testimony. As someone who bummed a few in college and believed my smoking habit was just “going to be part of my life” until constantly being around impressionable children prompted me to quit, I feel like I can relate to some of what he says. I started this section this morning, when I stopped in at the Pepper Pod, a greasy-spoon diner in Newport where I had corned-beef hash and eggs for the first time (good choice). Reading about a smoking habit while sitting amongst the tired Saturday-morning crowd (roughly half of whom had a burning cig to go with their eggs and coffee), I thought to myself, This is how one ought to read about someone trying to quit smoking.)
Anyways: So I’m down by the river, high up on the bank, reading on a bench, and suddenly I hear this noise, a jingle not unlike a cell-phone tone or a ragtime ice-cream truck recording. I looked in its direction and saw only what looked like a bright collection of trash down at the bottom of the concrete steps leading to the stony riverfront itself. I eliminated the idea of an ice-cream truck, because it would have to have been in the water, so I assumed the bright garbage on the steps was actually someone’s belongings, maybe a family’s, and that there was a cell phone ringing down there. No one was around though, and I considered going down to answer it. No, I thought, that’s what the people in movies do right before they get involved with the mob. Or psychopaths. Or both.
And then this dog came up to me. A beagle. An energetic beagle, white with brown spots. I put away my book and extended a hand. The dog sniffed it, lifted his leg, and marked my bench as his. “Thank you,” I said, and the dog ran away.
Not two minutes later, the owners of the bright garbage returned: a mom and her three kids, two daughters and a son. I gave them a brief glance and went back to my book, reading about Sedaris trying to learn Japanese.
--
I was interrupted again by an old man’s voice. I didn’t even know what he said, but he was talking to the mom from the top of the steps.
She answered, “Yeah, we love it down here. We come here all the time,” in a thick Kentucky accent. The old man hollered something back, and I tried to ignore their conversation.
Then her son, a pudgy kid maybe ten years old in a gray shirt and shades, tapped my shoulder. I had no idea where this child had come from, so I was a little startled. “Sorry, sir,” he said, in his own version of his mother’s drawl. “Can you help me get my dog? He ran ’crost the street, and I cain’t catch him. He’s too fast.”
Though I generally keep to myself, whenever these sorts of things happen I try never to say no, especially to a kid. Saying yes is really saying, “Yes, I’ll join your quest.” It’s saying that you could use an adventure.
“Sure,” I said, dog-earing my page and tucking the book into my armpit. “Let’s get him.”
--
Across the street that runs by the river in Covington there is a small park filled with gallant statues of local heroes I’ve never heard of. I sometimes marvel that Kentuckians identify more strongly with their history than do Ohioans. Maybe that’s inaccurate if you consider different cities around the states, but at least around here, I think it’s true. Case in point, this morning in the diner, I observed a black busboy, maybe fifty years old, with his sleeves rolled up to mid-bicep, hat cocked like they wore them in 1950s war movies. He topped off my coffee a few times, every time calling me “young suh,” addressing the old smarmy waitresses as “ma’am” and “Miss Shirley ma’am.” I got the feeling, looking around at hammy-armed men in suspenders and flannel and webbed baseball caps, that this was basically how the diner crowd must have looked all those decades ago when it first opened. I don’t know how long the park by the river has been there, but I get the sense that locals know the stories of those statues. At the base of one of the bronze figures, there was the beagle, marking it as his own.
“Puppers!” squealed the boy in excitement. His sister had joined him; their mom was nowhere in sight. “He’s peeing.”
--
We jogged across the street and Puppers saw us. It sent him into a tizzy, and he started doing that sideways shuffle that dogs do when they are too excited to do anything else. This particular park is raised from the sidewalk level and surrounded by a three-foot stone wall with small stairways in each side. I knew a beagle this size would never chance jumping down a wall but wouldn’t think twice about traipsing down some steps, so I told the kids, “You take that staircase, I’ll take this one.” And we split up.
Catching Puppers took a while. He kept shuffling and turning suddenly. Halfway through, the dog realized I was a stranger, and interpreted all of my movements as acts of aggression towards his little masters. He began barking, and this in turn started the kids barking:
“Puppers! No! Puppers! No!”
“He thinks I’m trying to hurt you,” I called to them.
“No,” said the boy, who had stuffed his shades in his pocket. “He doesn’t like sunglasses.”
“Oh,” I said, as if this was the most natural thing in the world, as if the dog was autistic and had an irrational fear of anything with its eyes covered, “that makes sense.” I took them off and put them in my pocket as well. I wondered if the boy had been wearing his shades when Puppers took off in the first place.
Finally, the boy’s sister tackled the beagle and got two fingers around the collar. “YES!” the boy screamed, and they began half-dragging, half-carrying the dog back to the riverfront. I started to follow, but Puppers started barking, so the boy told me to stop following them. In that moment, I wondered whether the mother would be upset that her kids had approached a total stranger—someone sitting on a bench wearing sunglasses—without her approval. I wondered whether I looked like a sicko in my gray jacket and old white khakis. Sickos are supposed to look old, right?
--
I got back to my bench just as the mom was gathering her brood, Puppers et al., and leading them to the car. I waved, trying to look unassuming and friendly—just a good-natured young adult who had helped get her dog back. Instead of returning the wave, she hissed at her kids, “Why’d you chase him? He would’ve come right bayuck.”
--
I hadn’t resumed reading for more than a minute when another voice interrupted me. “Didja see thayut feeyish?”
I looked down at the river (What now?) and saw a middle-aged man waving his arms and pointing. Around his feet darted Puppers. (The father?) “What?” I shouted back. The wind was stronger now, the late-day wind that comes from nowhere. You could actually see not just the waves in the river, but the gusts of wind creating the waves.
“Thayut FEEyish,” he repeated. “Theyur. It’s a cayutfish.”
“No,” I said.
So he took a plastic bag from his pocket (Who carries plastic bags in their pocket? Well, I guess for the dog…) and, using it as a glove, bent down and picked up what looked like a white piece of driftwood. But when it was lifted up it bent in that lazy, serpentine look of a dead fish. “This thing weighs thirty payounds!”
“Wow!” I said. The thing was huge and sickly, a four-foot gym sock with gills. Joking, I shouted, “You gonna take that home?” The man looked like just the sort of person who might.
“You kiddin me? I wouldn’t take any feeyish that come from this river. I just hope Cosmo doesn’t see it.” And he pointed to Puppers, who was fixed on what was in his owner-man’s hand.
Around this time, Puppers marked my bench again. I looked at the dog near my leg, then at the one staring at the dead fish, and realized they were two different dogs. Cosmo, who turned out to be a smaller version of Puppers, belonged to the man holding the catfish at arm’s length.
--
Eventually, Cosmo and Puppers discovered each other, as did their families. I remarked a few times how closely they resembled each other, both white with brown spots, and the mother and the catfish guy just nodded in the same way you’d nod if someone told you tires are made of rubber: patronizingly acknowledging a factual statement from a stupid person. Cosmo’s owner-man had scrambled up the bank (ignoring the concrete steps) to chase after his dog, and Puppers’ family congregated on the bench beside mine. Out of nowhere, a photographer-lady appeared among us and said to her companion, “What do you think is making that light on the water?”
She meant a large reflection spot, halfway between us and Cincinnati, that looked about the size of a Winnebago. She snapped pictures of the spot and didn’t bother taking any pictures of the two dogs sniffing each other’s penises ten feet from her. She and her partner, who may also have been a photographer, moved on. Do photographers have apprentices?
Meanwhile, everyone was getting to know each other, including the dogs. Both were males, so they wasted no time figuring out which was the Akela wolf, the alpha dog.
--
When my sisters and I were kids, my parents decided we were mature enough to handle a dog in the house. Impulsively, they ended up buying two: a pair of yellow lab-spitz-chow mutts who were just so darned cute as they slipped and skidded around the tile floor of the pet store. We went from “being ready to get a dog” to “being owners of two brother dogs” in less than three hours. We named them Lucky and Prince, and, with little practical knowledge of how to raise puppies, we started doing just that.
Long story short, we botched the job. Badly. We delayed neutering them, not wanting to pay for such a expensive and sad procedure, so when they hit adolescence they tore into the furniture—and each other. Bloody snouts were common, and soon so were bloody eyes and gums and paws. I remember a few nights when we all became so terrified of our pets that we chained them up in the backyard to stakes set at opposite corners. When they got strong enough to pull out their own stakes, and when the alpha-dog contest had reached an almost deadly climax, and when the task of separating the brothers became as intense as trying to end a gang feud, my parents decided we should give them to a shelter. The one condition was that they be given to separate owners. The day we left them in a white room filled with cages is one I will never forget.
--
The owners of Cosmo and Puppers, I’m sad to say, also know very little about dogs. At one point, Puppers’ owner-lady said she learned from some Animal Planet show that “the magic word for dogs is ‘At.’ You just say that, and it clicks for them.” Then, trying to show the magic word’s effectiveness, she tried to stop the alpha-dog contest by chanting “At! At! At!”
Puppers, the bigger of the two by far, responded by slamming Cosmo’s head into the cobblestone sidewalk.
“Aw, lettum go,” said Cosmo’s owner-man, lighting a cigarette and reclining on the bank.
“They’re havin fun.”
“They’re figuring out who’s the dominant male,” I offered. I was ignored.
--
“I named Cosmo Cosmo because he came from a farm, and now he leeyuves in the city,” said the owner-man. “Short fer Cosmopolitan.”
“We named Puppers Puppers because it’s so close to puppy.”
“I sometimes call Cosmo ‘Ugly Belly,’ because—see?” He grabbed the puppy and held him aloft like Simba, so we could see the speckled belly above the speckled pecker. “He used to be called ‘Chubby’ before that.”
“Chubby?” the boy asked.
“That’s right. I got him from a farm where he was the fattest one of about fifty.” Thinking that Cosmo didn’t look fat at all, and that this guy looked like he had also originated on a farm overrun with dogs, I laughed.
The owner-man and the owner-woman looked at me suspiciously. The boy busied himself by throwing dead leaves into the air, and one of them flew right into my mouth. I coughed.
Finally, the owner-man resumed, “What’s his bloodline?” They talked about bloodlines and pedigrees, sounding a lot like dog show hosts, then suddenly the man asked, “How much you pay for him?”
“A few hundred. You?”
“Twelve-fifty.”
“Wow,” she said. “That’s a lot of money for a beagle.” She started to ask how old Cosmo was, but the man stopped her.
“No,” he said. “Twelve dollars, fifty cents.”
--
A teenage couple walking by the river had come upon the catfish. The girl, in one of those rebellious purple shirts and a female emo haircut, picked up a stick and started poking it. The stomach opened and we heard them both say, “Ew!”
“Didja see that feeyush?” Cosmo’s owner-man ran back down the bank, grabbed the same plastic bag, and lifted the dead catfish again. Gray stuff plopped out of its belly. “It’s thirty payounds!” This scandalized the emo couple, who wrapped their arms around each other and walked away.
--
“He’s a drunk,” said the mother, shaking her head. It took me a moment to figure out she was talking to me.
“Really?” I said, watching the man wiggle the catfish.
“He comes down here all the time, yeah. He’s definitely had a few.” As I contemplated why the town drunk would want to get a dog, even a twelve-fifty dog, the mother stood. “Kids, come on. We gotta go home.”
“It was nice meeting you all,” I said. “And Puppers.”
“Mm-hm,” she said, and they went across the street.
--
I didn’t finish the book; still haven’t. Maybe I’ll do that later. Only fifty pages to go.
No matter how good writers get, people will always be more interesting than books. It’s strikes me now that I spend so much time reading in places where you’re most likely to meet the most fascinating, weird, fun people: coffee shops, diners, libraries, parks, riversides. I think I know why I do it, though.
I think it might be the same reason the town drunk got himself a dog.
