The Greyhound (4 page)

The young, brindle pup did not disappoint. Within two weeks she had her eyes open and was pushing her way around the whelping box. And a few weeks later she was tumbling with her littermates on the concrete floor of the kennel. Mahoney carefully chose the dogs that he wanted to run and registered them with the National Greyhound Association. The others were adopted out.

His favourite, the strong, brindle female, he named Mahoney’s Long Shot. She was taller and stronger than the rest, and while he didn’t expect her to be a big winner for Mahoney’s Irish Kennels, he hoped she might do well. At three months, Mahoney neatly put a number inside each dog’s left ear with a tattoo gun. In the right ear he tattooed the pup’s birth information. “Ah, Long Shot, you will do me justice,” he said, and smiled. The surf pounded miles away. The other dogs in the kennel made the
rooing
sound so particular to greyhounds. Long Shot licked Mahoney’s nose.

Long Shot grew fast, leaping in great greyhound bounds ahead of her littermates and demonstrating the urge to run. She grew into a brown-and-grey hound with a smattering of chocolate-brown and coal-black spots sprinkled across her flanks. She was taller by a head than her siblings who had also been chosen to race, Mahoney’s Little Bobby, a square, eager male pup, and Gracie’s Lark, taller, almost the size of Long Shot, but shyer.

One afternoon, she was playing in an enclosure with her siblings, tackling Bobby, who would easily throw her off, and then Gracie, who was quick to
roo
and then scamper away — all of them chasing after a red rubber ball Rufus casually tossed in their direction. Rufus was Mahoney’s sixteen-year-old son. He looked after the day-to-day needs of the dogs. It wasn’t an easy job, either. Unlike his father, the red-haired lad Rufus was tall and built like a chunk of ocean coral, carved by the Gulf winds into a hefty and capable linebacker on the high school football team. After school, Rufus would head home to tend to the dogs, which could number up to thirty at any given time.

Long Shot, Bobby, and Gracie’s Lark, named for Mahoney’s wife, were the last of the litter. By eight months, all three had learned to come, sit, and stay — the basic commands a dog needed to get by with people. And they had been “gentled” a good deal — cuddled and played with by Rufus, his sister Melanie, and their friends. It was important for greyhounds to get along with people, given that at the track any number of different people might handle them. They had to be able to be relaxed so they wouldn’t snap.

At a year, Long Shot and her siblings were taken to the training track, a red, dirt, oblong roundabout that circled a patch of crabgrass, kudzu, and shrubbery, enclosed by a chain-link fence, at the back of Mahoney’s property. A lure was dragged in front of the dogs to get them interested. It didn’t take any urging to get Long Shot to chase the lure, she went after it without hesitation.

“Aye, she’s a fine chaser,” said Mahoney, taking off his cloth cap and running a hand over his head.

“I think she’s going to be an early breaker,” he added, alluding to the fact that some dogs would break out ahead of the pack early, setting a challenging pace. “Not much of a looker, mind you,” he said, looking that the dog’s long skinny nose — long even for a greyhound. “But she’s got the legs, taller, longer even than old Gertie’s Pride. Remember her?” He liked to reminisce about Gertie, one of his early dogs and a big winner.

“That was before my time, Pops.”

Long Shot’s early life was spent running, eating, sleeping, playing with other dogs, and sometimes fighting with them, but only to assert herself as the leader of the pack. She would often strain at her leash, eager to get into the box at the end of the track, ready to race. She was like a slick bolt of supercharged energy. Her muscles would ripple and tense, messages firing like spark plugs,
ping-ping-ping
, her paw pads tapping on the brown sand, leg muscles coiling, waiting to spring out of the gate, waiting for the mechanical rabbit to come whirring around the inside of the track. Then it would come in sight, until it was twenty feet down the track and
ka-chung!!
the gates would open and a flood of pure, raw dog energy would burst forth, pouring down the track after the rabbit.

Long Shot would pound ahead of the others, urging herself by brute force and finesse along the rail, as close as she could get to the rabbit. Sand would fly and her muscles would pump, pushing her forward harder it seemed than she ever ran before. The sound of the crowd at the track would be just rough background noise, a roller coaster of sound that would go higher and higher as the dogs came around the first turn, into the straightaway, around the second turn and into the home stretch. And then the race would be over, the dogs slowed down, dripping saliva from their tongues, panting and huff-huff-huffing as they were led away.

Mahoney pampered his dogs, because he was very attached to them. They always got water, a soft cushion, and a toy teddy bear, as well as delicious food, after a race. But with Long Shot winning and her value going up, there came a time when an offer was just too good to refuse. He reluctantly sold her to a man name Bibbs, who turned out to be a decent owner, and treated her with respect, though not with the same affection that Mahoney brought to each of his pups.

Mahoney once said to Rufus, “I was there for her birth. It is a different thing altogether, lad, when you’ve raised it from a whelp. I can’t expect a man to love her the way I did.”

THE PSYCHIATRIST’S OFFICE

There was a good reason that Danny was going to see a psychiatrist. He reminded himself of it every time he went through Dr. Feinman’s door.

The first time he went to the psychiatrist’s office, the inside of it didn’t match his expectations at all. There was no rosewood panelling or heavy bookcases heaving with the texts by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, with a bronze statue of a long-dead psychiatrist as a paper weight, holding down a stack of research papers. Nor was there a dark wood desk covered in pictures of children with braces lining up at the tennis court, or the psychiatrist himself standing at the helm of a boat, with cottages along the shoreline in the background. There was one photograph, though, of a girl holding a bunch of daisies. She was about Danny’s age, with auburn hair and dark eyes.
She’s hot
, Danny thought to himself.

“That’s my daughter. Her name’s Emma,” Dr. Feinman said with a smile.

Danny quickly put on a cool, disinterested pose. “Oh,” was all he said.

The movie-inspired image of a psychiatrist’s office that Danny had in his mind was no match for this shrink’s office. (“Do you like it when people call you a ‘shrink?’” Danny had asked at their first meeting. Feinman laughed. “Like it? I love it!” he said). It was all chrome and light colours, pastel shades.

There were modern prints on the walls, and the furniture was shiny, like a race car. A rubber tree sat in a corner of the room. And the psychiatrist was not what Danny had expected either; he expected short and surly, with a bushy grey beard, middle-aged and dour, wearing a tweed jacket and smelling like an old sock drawer. Instead he met a tall, athletic man in a plaid shirt, his head shaved so clean that it caught a glint of light from the environmentally friendly bulbs in the ceiling fixture. Dr. Feinman wore wire-rimmed, round-lens glasses that reminded Danny of the poster of John Lennon that Dad had in his study in their old house. He had a gold earring in his left ear, just like Danny’s dad. It made him look a bit like a lost pirate, lost in an air-conditioned office with nice furniture, his pirate ship miles away on the open ocean.

Dr. Feinman was bright and cheery. “Let’s talk about the last week, Danny.” He didn’t use a notepad — that was the other difference between him and the movie shrink Danny had expected — and he was sipping a cup of rosehip tea. Danny could smell it, even from six feet away.

“There’s not much to tell,” he said. “My dad brought home a dog. A greyhound. It used to run at the track. He’s crazy about her.” He had started to anticipate Dr. Feinman’s questions. The next one would be “And what do you think about her?”

“I don’t know if I like her or not.” Danny answered before Dr. Feinman could even ask.

“What’s happening at school?”

“Things are okay. Math is getting better, actually.” For a long time, he had been angry about math — he used to be so good at it, but over the last few months things had been slipping. He was being tutored by a wisecracking senior student who was racking up community service hours, and who was actually getting him to like math again.

They talked about what Danny called “nothing” for a while — Feinman asking mundane questions, Danny given dull, rote answers.

Then, Fienman asked, “Do you still think about what happened with your dad?”

He was referring to the suicide attempt his dad had made a year before. A business deal had gone bad, and Dad had tried to kill himself in the garage of the old house by running a hose from the exhaust pipe into the car. Or that was the story Danny told himself when he wanted to pretend that his dad was troubled, maybe even trying to be noble, in a morbid way. The truth was that he’d driven into the garage, drunk, after spending the evening with some advertising people. He’d closed the garage door, and fallen asleep with the motor running. Their old dog Benny had barked and woken everyone up — everyone except Dad — when the carbon monoxide had started to seep into the house. Nauseated and woozy, Danny and Susan stumbled into the front yard. Mom opened the garage door and pulled Dad out. Danny couldn’t believe her strength, lugging a big man like Dad, pulling him out onto the front lawn.

Dad coughed. “Whaaa! What!” he said as he woke to the cold, clean autumnal air at three o’clock in the morning.

The event had haunted Danny’s nightmares, chasing him down, a cold, lean savage beast that wouldn’t let him go. Reliving the possibility that they all might have died in their sleep, instead of being woken by a barking, scrappy little part-terrier-part-bloodhound with his
whoop-whoop-arooo
howling bark.

That was part of why he’d come to Dr. Feinman.

JUNE

As a rule, retired greyhounds weren’t big runners. They preferred walking quietly, perhaps because they had spent so much time running in their first three or four years of life. Long Shot really liked walks, and Danny was only too happy to oblige. And sometimes Ben accompanied them. Their walks were usually uneventful, but one day something happened when Danny and Ben took Long Shot to the high school grounds for her walk.

Behind the high school there was an old quarter-mile track of soft red cinders. It was overgrown with weeds and dandelions that spread wildly, as if a giant had cast a few handfuls of yellow gumdrops across the green field. Beetles and other small insects winged about; big, shiny, blue dragonflies patrolled the area in the warm late spring sun. Jackrabbits scurried through the grass, and the occasional red fox scampered across the grass, darting through the tall weeds after field mice.

Danny was holding Long Shot’s leash loosely in one hand. He was looking off at the yellow brick high school, on the other side of the long driveway that wound around the school to the back parking lot, wondering what school would be like in the fall. Suddenly he realized he was no longer holding the leash.

Ben yelled, “Hey, man, you let the dog go. Look! There she goes!” They’d been walking along the edge of the track, and now Long Shot was loping down to the track, a rabbit in her sight. Danny knew this was a bad thing: greyhounds are not supposed to go off leash. They’re easily distracted by moving object, and often take off, deaf to their owner’s pleas to come back.

“Crap! We gotta get her! What are my folks gonna say?”

Danny and Ben started running after her, but there was no way they could catch her — or keep her in sight for very long. Within seconds the dog was halfway down the track, and Danny figured she would just keep on running, past the line of maple trees that stretched along the edge of the school grounds, across Mason Street, and far, far away. He’d be looking for her for hours.

But then a strange thing happened. Instead of taking off, away from the track, Long Shot seemed to melted into the moist air, her body a blur of honey gold, a smudge of pastel colour against the red cinders and emerald grasses as she made a perfect turn along the curve of the track.

“Look at that,” said Ben, scratching his head. “She thinks she’s racing again! She’s going all the way around the track!”

They both stopped, watching in amazement as Long Shot, framed by the tall grasses in the centre portion of the track before disappearing behind a stand of tall weeds, ran elegantly, gracefully, and quickly around the track. She completed one lap, and then tired, and with a satisfied look on her face, she trotted up to Danny and sat down, chest heaving. She nudged his hand with her nose, looking for approval and a pat on the head.

He was supposed to be upset, with himself and with the dog for running away, but he was more relieved than anything else.

Besides, how could Danny be mad? “That was quite a run, girl,” he said, massaging her ears. “You still have a lot of energy left in you, don’t you?”

Every day after that, they would go back to the abandoned track behind the high school. Long Shot would run around the track, and Ben would take off after her, following far behind: no one could keep up with her.

“Why all the running?” Danny asked.

“I’m going to try out for track and field next year. I need to work at it.”

Ben didn’t have to work at it too hard, from what Danny could tell. He had a long stride, and his lean frame moved easily along the track, his arms swinging slightly, like he was being carried by the soft spring breeze. He ran as if in slow motion, so effortlessly, but when coming around the far turn, Danny could see that Ben was moving much faster than he’d originally thought. He ran around the track four times, then jogged steadily around half of the track to cool down. By this time Long Shot had finished her run and was lying in the grass, snuffling after a bug.

“Where did you learn to run like that?” Danny asked, as Ben took a long drink from a bottle of Gatorade.

“In Darfur, we used to run everywhere. From one end of the village to the other. From village to village. We were little kids who loved to run. Then…” and his voice dropped.

“Then what?”

“Then…” Ben’s voice trailed off again, his eyes taking on a haunted look. It was clearly not a subject he was comfortable with. “Then the janjaweed came.”

Danny was about to say, “What’s that?” but Ben had obviously sensed the question coming.

“The janjaweed are the riders on horseback with guns and gasoline. They came to our village. I ran into the bushes. I ran for what seemed like all night.”

As Ben told his story, Danny wondered at how he’d survived. The raiding party killed his father and mother, his sisters and brothers, and those who weren’t killed, disappeared. He ran into the scrubby bushes that surrounded the village, running from the burning huts and screaming people and the crackling sound of gunfire. He ran into the night. Exhausted, he fell asleep on the brown earth several miles from the village. The next morning he awoke to find a member of the janjaweed standing over him, speaking in Arabic, a language he did not understand. He was taken to a compound, forced to work for his food, separated from his family. He was only ten years old. A year later he escaped, following a trail to an open road, where he was picked up by United Nations aid workers, then taken to a refugee camp. Two years later, he was lucky enough to be relocated to Canada. He found a home with the Logan family, learned English, and began attending school.

“That’s a wild story,” said Danny. “It must have been very tough. Saying goodbye to your country, to your village …”

“Very tough. But one of my teachers, Mr. Ogbuwe, says we have to realize that our strength is something that is always in us. It never really leaves. We have to listen for it, to know when to find it, when we are faced with danger or trouble.”

Danny’s attention was diverted by the dog. Long Shot yawned, wagged her tail slightly, then lifted herself up off the ground, stretching.

“Time to go home,” said Danny.

“It’s good to
have a home
,” said Ben, and his voice was full of emotion. “Good to have family. It’s good to
be home
.”

THE TEXAN

A big Texan named Dave Langley was mulling over the email he’d just read at his training facility outside of Arlen. The evening sky over Texas was stained a multi-coloured hue, from ocean blue to a rich purple and streaks of orange cloud stretched away to the horizon and the scrub brush around his compound. The small dog track was splashed with spots of dying yellow sunshine.

“Ah, evening,” Dave said to himself. He was sitting on the porch of his home, which his grandfather had built. “Built to last,” Grandpa Langley had said, and it did. Constructed as it was of quarried stone and large logs from a forest far beyond the city limits, and put together by the senior Langley, who had made his money in cattle ranching and oil, and his team of superb carpenters and craftsmen, the house had stood for almost a hundred years. Inside, massive timbers formed struts across the ceiling, and a stone fireplace was the centrepiece of the place. It was big: as big as Dave, as big as the family he grew up in, big enough for his own brood. Three generations of Langleys had lived there, raising cattle, growing grain, investing in oil, and eventually, racehorses and greyhounds.

Dave sipped on sweetened ice tea and stretched, putting his long legs up on the porch railing. A sleek fawn greyhound with little spots of black and brown wandered over to Dave and nudged Dave’s hand for a scratch around the ears. “That’s a good boy, Dynamo,” Dave said, gently kneading the dog’s ears. The dog yawned and looked at Dave through its dark chocolate eyes, all sweetness.

The email, from a close associate who lived a thousand miles away, was intriguing. “Dave: remember that race you wanted to run? You were looking for the best of the last few years? Mahoney’s dog Long Shot, the big female that was handed off and then adopted, was seen just a couple of days ago by a buddy of mine. Racing around a high school track, no less!”

Dave had called and gotten details. Then he called Mahoney. “That old pup of yours, the one that won all that money, she’s still rarin’ to go.”

Mahoney was less excited. “She can’t run anymore, the old gal’s not got the stamina to take to the track again.”

But Langley wouldn’t be put off. “I told you I was going to bring the best together again. This is the race of the decade.”

“Don’t you mean the race of the century?”

“Naw. Things happen too fast now. You never know what’s going to happen next. I’ll just call it the race of the decade.”

While they discussed the details of getting the best of the best together, Mahoney remained skeptical, but Dave was adamant: “It’ll be a great show for the racing industry and especially for the fans.”

“For a cattle man you’ve got quite the flair for dramatization,” Mahoney said with a laugh.

“Heck, my family hasn’t been in cattle for a long time,” said Dave. “But the flair you’ll see will be in us having just a regular rootin’ tootin’ wonderful race,” he added, letting his Texas drawl come out. “I think Long Shot and these other dogs we’ll track down still have a flair for running.”

IN THE BASEMENT

Jack had arranged some office furniture to create a study in the basement, a little alcove set in from the bottom of the stairs. A corkboard was covered with yellow and pink notes, pinned to the earth-coloured cork-like square butterflies. Cryptic writing in his father’s messy script revealed nothing to Danny, except that one was obviously a to-do list:

• Clean eaves

• Danny to judo

• Susan to volleyball and track

• Walk Long

• Plan next steps

He was always planning for a return to advertising, but Danny wondered whether it was ever going to happen. He looked at a plaque on the wall; gold lettering on a blue background, posted to a wood backing, and laminated:

God grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change

The Courage to change the things I can

And the Wisdom to know the difference.

It was the Alcoholics Anonymous credo.

Danny once went with his mother to pick his father up after a meeting at a room in the local community centre. The exposed brick was whitewashed, the chairs were straight-backed and steel and very uncomfortable-looking, they made Danny wonder if the members of AA were made to suffer for the sins by sitting ramrod-straight for several hours, a few times a week. Cigarette smoke hung in the air like a sick, blue fog and burned his eyes. He could smell burnt coffee coming from an enormous stainless-steel coffee urn on a plastic tablecloth-covered side table. The recovering alcoholics all seemed pretty cheery, but some of them just seemed grateful for the companionship of others who were shaking what Dad called, “the monkey off their backs.”

“Alcohol is like this little monkey that sits on your shoulder and whispers in your ear. You keep feeding it, hoping it will go away. But it chatters and screams in your ear and bites at your neck and pokes its dirty little fingers in your eyes. You keep feeding it, but instead of leaving the monkey only gets bigger and bigger and you get weaker. You can’t hear the people around you, the people who care, for all the chattering and screaming the monkey does. It becomes your life, and even though you hate it, you keep feeding it, even when it craps all over you. Eventually it kills you. The monkey.” Danny didn’t like the graphic way his father talked about his alcoholism: it always gave him the chills.

“So what about the monkey now?” Danny asked on the ride home.

“If it doesn’t kill you, you stop feeding it. It sits there on your shoulder and you starve it. Stop giving it what it wants. It gets quiet, stops its chattering. But you have to tell yourself that it never really goes away. It’s going to be perched on my shoulder as long as I live, which is just as well, because it’s a reminder of what I need to do for myself and my family. And that’s to
not drink
.”

Danny felt a chill again, remembering the incident.

Also on the corkboard was a postcard of the Tampa Greyhound Track. “Greetings from Tampa, Florida, home of the country’s top greyhounds.” The photograph was of a mass of dogs, bursting around the curve of the track, a wave of green, red, and yellow jackets. Danny could see the power in their stride, and thought of Long Shot’s grace and speed.

“Tampa was quite a time in my life,” Jack said, startling Danny who hadn’t heard his footsteps on the stairs. He looked at his father’s face. Jack coughed, his skin looked ashy, and the lines on his face were etched more deeply into his skin than Danny remembered. He tapped the postcard on the corkboard. “The track was full of characters. There was this one guy, Renaldo, who was from the Bahamas. He hung around the track, from open until close. Wore a flowered shirt, and Bermuda shorts and sandals. He would win, and buy everyone drinks, and sometimes he would bring a lady with him, and buy her dinner. And when he lost, he would stand by the rail, spindling his program into a hard weapon, and then tap the rail with it,
tap-tap-tap
. Like he was waiting for things to change. I’d watch Renaldo and others, like the security guard, Langston, in his crisp blue uniform. He had a thing for Maggie, the girl who sold tickets and handed out little American flags at the front. Langston was ripped — big, tight muscles that stretched against his blue cotton shirt. Always had a smile on his face, even when he was throwing out an unruly customer. And Jennifer behind the counter, who served up roast beef sandwiches and thick potato wedges. Jennifer had come all the way from Washington State to be in Tampa, ‘to be in a place where the sun shines all the time.’ And my best buddy, Jake, who spent time on the streets of San Diego. An uncle sent him to Florida to work on a cousin’s fishing boat, paid for Jake’s trip on a Greyhound bus. Jake worked part of the time at the track, part of the time on the boat. Eventually he bought his own boat. All of these people were in transition. Even as they stayed in one place, they were still changing, the world was changing around them, and around me.”