Straight Man

Lily is looking for is a limp. A listing to port. A stoop. And of course she can’t really see my nose because I’m purposely walking toward her with my head cocked, so as to present her with my good nostril. No easy task, considering the size of the bad one. When we reach the base of the deck, Teddy sees what I’m doing and grabs mychin and rotates it, so that Lily has the full benefit of my mutilation. I wonder if Teddy is as disappointed as I am by her reaction, an arched eyebrow, as if to suggest that even so bizarre an injury was entirely predictable, given my character.
    “The man is out of control,” Teddy says admiringly.
    We go inside because it is still chilly in mid-April and the temperature is dropping with the sun down. I hear Occam whimpering to be let out of the laundry room, to which Lily banishes him when he’s been a bad dog. When I open the door, the dog, beside himself with joy, bolts past me and does a frantic lap around the kitchen island, his nails scratching for traction on the tile floor, before he spies Teddy, whose face blanches. Occam is a big dog, a nearly full-grown white German shepherd who’d appeared in our drive almost a year ago. Lily heard him barking, and we went out onto the deck to study the odd spectacle the dog presented. He stood in the middle of the drive as if he’d been instructed to remain there but doubted the wisdom of the command. He seemed to want a second opinion from us. “I think he wants us to follow him,” Lily said. “Where do you suppose he came from?”
    “If he wants us to follow him, he came from television,” I said, but in truth that’s what he did look like standing there, barking at us without advancing. Actually, he’d start to come toward us, then appear to remember something horrible, yelp in a completely different register from his bark, retreat a few steps, and start the whole process over again.
    We approached cautiously, stopping a few feet from the animal, which was now wagging his tail wildly and grinning at us in a lopsided, rakish manner.
    “I’ve never seen a dog grin like that,” Lily observed. “He looks like Gilbert Roland.”
    I was curious about a glint in the dog’s mouth. He looked for all the world like he had a gold tooth.
    “Lord, Hank,” Lily said. “I think he’s snagged.”
    Which was exactly the animal’s problem. What I had perceived as a gold tooth was a treble hook embedded in the dog’s lip. He was trailing a long tether of monofilament line, invisible except when the dog strained against it, resulting in that Gilbert Roland smile. Lily held him steady while I bit the line in two. He’d been trailing about a hundredyards of it, apparently all the way up from the lake, two miles away. Back in the house, under Lily’s gentle hand and voice, he waited patiently for me to find a pair of wire cutters, nor did he move when I snipped the shaft and removed the hook. “Okay,” he seemed to say when the hook was out. “Now what?”
    We advertised, put signs up around the neighborhood, but no owner ever came forward, so there was nothing to do but feed the animal and watch him double in size. Since his arrival, we’ve had few visitors, a fact Occam clearly cannot understand, given how much he enjoys them. He’s so elated at seeing this one that he’s immune even to the sound of Lily’s raised voice, which usually causes him to quake. Teddy, who hasn’t seen Occam since his face-licking stage, raises both arms to protect himself. Occam, no longer a face licker, executes his favorite move, the one he uses on all strangers, irrespective of gender. When Teddy’s arms go up, Occam burrows his long, pointed snout in Teddy’s crotch and lifts, as if he imagines he’s got Teddy impaled on the end of his wet nose. In fact, Teddy goes up on tiptoes, furthering the illusion.
    “Occam!” Lily bellows, and this time her voice penetrates the animal’s canine joy. He lowers Teddy and looks around just in time to catch a rolled-up newspaper on the snout. Yelping pitifully at this reversal of fortune, he slinks across the floor, dragging his haunches in melodramatic humiliation, yelping every step of the way. My own snout throbs in sympathy.
    “Good dog!” I tell him, just to confuse things, and Occam’s tail comes out from between his legs, darts back and forth, sweeping the floor.
    Lily helps Teddy onto one of the stools that ring the kitchen island while I take Occam out onto the deck, where he clatters