A Dog Story Doggedly Told

A speed mechanic. More sudden than a cinder off a runner’s spike. A trailer slightly behind a 50-grain bullet at 3,900 fps. Oh, my, he was fast. He could run side-by-side with the Harley FXDR for the first 60 yards until Enos slipped the clutch and ripped a wheely down the straightaway at the Delaware County fairground. Motorcycle fans came to watch the dog. Some said he was a greyhound, some a borzoi, some a vizsla. “He’s a damn saluki,” Mort Alston said, as though hosting secret Saturday night cockfights gave him authority to identify any kind of breed.

The dog was mixed. He was an outlaw. He walked close to the earth as though he had the power to turn over the seasons. His name was “He.” No one felt comfortable sticking a label on him, and when he walked or sniffed or simply stood on a street corner or back alley, no one approached with “Here, doggy, come, come.” We knew he lived somewhere, and Enos may have housed him, but Enos was a mirror figure, and all we knew about either one was that on the days of races they were there. Enos would nod, even smile, then bolt like a child through an open screen door.

We lived inside the legend. Some towns have baseball superstars or teams that won the state finals or a college phenomenon who tried out for the Olympics. We had our duo on a dirt track. And it doesn’t get any better—I don’t care what city folk say—than walking down a row of canopies and gazebos and carnival tents with everyone tossing rings at bent-headed ducks or staring at the python in enclosed glass or suddenly dancing in the middle of the crowd when Little Richard comes rocking out of the high-volume speaker. At 8:00 we headed down the midway to the pavilion for sulkies at 8:30 and dog races at 9:00. What a night!

Enos warmed HIM up with a hundred yard dash. His competitors cowered. We chanted. The night was a marble slate ready to drop its star-spangled stars. You remember those kinds of moments—when your real, daily life disappears, no matter whether it’s good or bad, it’s just gone, and you know with everyone around you that this feeling is the life you live for, why, then, you hold on to it and then, all together, let it go with such joy that being human is being with all things on this earth.

Yes, what a night. You have to understand that where some people experience devastation when political or religious figures are suddenly destroyed, others find tragedies in the death of sports heroes. At that moment, the sense of collapse is the same. So, when HIS front paw hit the hole and he spun up and slammed into the iron rail we knew that everything was broken. We all were, and we could not look. We could barely walk away.

It took awhile to sort out why we didn’t want to talk much—to wives, friends, newspaper folks—and we couldn’t do what Enos did and that was pack up and accelerate out of town. We gathered as usual at the Egg ‘n Hash Sitdown, but no one could really start a conversation. Eventually, we got embarrassed with ourselves or maybe it was a Letter-to-the Editor, but someone noted how everything had just slowed to a standstill. That opened up someone saying that’s the way it was when Kennedy was shot and in Philly when the Eagles lost the Superbowl, and another said movement was instinctual or maybe an act of faith. Mort got his voice back and said with authority that anyone who bet on a saluki deserved to lose a payday.

Eventually, we stirred, but momentum to return to daily life didn’t happen until one noon we saw Enos roar down the middle of town with a sure enough greyhound leading the way. Down the street, back again. In spite of ourselves, our blood began to rise with our bodies, and we hurried onto the sidewalks to watch. The greyhound was young, we could tell that, with a burst so graceful it seemed effortless. When Enos stopped in front of us, someone yelled “What’s its name?” and when he simply raised an eyebrow, we knew it was starting again. To get fire back in us and to get our blood racing again, we had come to terms with the fact that you can’t love the thing that makes the speed; you love the thing inside of it.

So the story we tell our kids now, who so desperately want to be recognized as individuals and be loved for who they are, we tell them that as long as they can outrace a motorcycle, fly over the Ball factory building, protect us from incoming zephyr strikes from the planet Zildondia, we’ll celebrate their names at every county fair. Then, wouldn’t you know, they want us to buy them capes and interactive war games software, which we don’t know anything about.

 

 

Author of the article

Philip Raisor has published eight books, most recently That Naked Country (2019). Outside Shooter: A Memoir (2003) and Headhunting and Other Sports Poems (2014) were influenced by the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements of the 1960s (as well as the fact that he played with Wilt Chamberlain at Kansas). His collection, Swimming in the Shallow End (2013), was nominated for the Poet’s Prize, and Hoosiers the Poems (2013) won the Palooka Press Chapbook Prize. His edited volume of essays on W. D. Snodgrass was published in 1999. Raisor’s literary work has appeared in Southern Review, Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Aethlon, Chautauqua, Poet Lore, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. His essays on Shelley, Browning, Joyce, and Faulkner have been published in numerous scholarly journals. He has taught at Louisiana State, Valparaiso, Kent State, and Old Dominion University, and now lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia.