Straight Man

it in the backseat, and when my father pulled the car in and parked along the side of the house, I saw from the kitchen window its chin resting on the back of the rear seat. I think it saw me too, but if so it did not react. Neither did it seem to notice that the car had stopped, that my father had gotten out and was holding the front seat forward. He had to reach in, take the dog by the collar, and pull
.
    As the animal unfolded its long legs and stepped tentatively, arthritically, out of the car, I saw that I had been both betrayed and outsmarted. In all the time we had been “speaking of dogs,” what I’d been seeing in my mind’s eye was puppies. Collie puppies, beagle puppies, Lab puppies, shepherd puppies, but none of that had been inked anywhere, I now realized. If not a puppy, a young dog. A rascal, full of spirit and possibility, a dog with new tricks to learn
. This
dog was barely ambulatory. It stood, head down, as if ashamed at something done long ago in its puppydom, and I thought I detected a shiver run through its frame when my father closed the car door behind it
.
    The animal was, I suppose, what might have been called a handsome dog. A purebred, rust-colored Irish setter, meticulously groomed, wonderfully mannered, the kind of dog you could safely bring into a house owned by the university, the sort of dog that wouldn’t really violate the no pets clause, the kind of dog, I saw clearly, you’d get if you really didn’t want a dog or to be bothered with a dog. It’d belonged, I later learned, to a professor emeritus of the university who’d been put into a nursing home earlier in the week, leaving the animal an orphan. It was like a painting of a dog, or a dog you’d hire to pose for a portrait, a dog you could be sure wouldn’t move
.
    Both my father and the animal came into the kitchen reluctantly, my father closing the screen door behind them with great care. I like to think that on the way home he’d suffered a misgiving, though I could tell that it was his intention to play the hand out boldly. My mother, who’d taken in my devastation at a glance, studied me for a moment and then my father
.
    “What?” he said
.
    My mother just shook her head
.
    My father looked at me, then back at her. A violent shiver palsied the dog’s limbs. The animal seemed to want to lie down on the cool linoleum, but to have forgotten how. It offered a deep sigh that seemed to speak for all of us
.
    “He’s a good dog,” my father said, rather pointedly, to my mother. “A little high-strung, but that’s the way with purebred setters. They’re all nervous.”
    This was not the sort of thing my father knew. Clearly he was repeating the explanation he’d just been given when he picked up the dog
.
    “What’s his name?” my mother said, apparently for something to say
.
    My father had neglected to ask. He checked the dog’s collar for clues
.
    “Lord,” my mother said. “Lord, lord.”
    “It’s not like we can’t name him ourselves,” my father said, irritated now. “I think it’s something we can manage, don’t you?”
    “You could name him after a passé school of literary criticism,” my mother suggested
.
    “It’s a she,” I said, because it was
.
    It seemed to cheer my father, at least a little, that I’d allowed myself to be drawn into the conversation. “What do you say, Henry?” he wanted to know. “What’ll we name him?”
    This second faulty pronoun reference was too much for me. “I want to go out and play now,” I said, and I bolted for the screen door before an objection could be registered. It slammed behind me, hard, its gunshot report even louder than usual. As I cleared the steps in a single leap, I thought I heard a thud back in the kitchen, a dull, muffled echo of the door, and then I heard my father say, “What the hell?” I went back up the steps, cautiously now, meaning to apologize for the door. Through the screen I could see my mother and father standing together in the middle of the kitchen, looking down at the dog, which seemed to be napping. My father nudged a haunch with the toe of his cordovan loafer
.
    He dug the grave in the backyard with a shovel borrowed from a neighbor. My father had soft hands and they blistered easily. I offered to help, but he just looked at me. When he was standing, midthigh, in the hole he’d dug, he shook his head one last time in disbelief. “Dead,” he said. “Before we could even name him.”
    I knew better