Chapter Excerpts
Chapter 7
Ground Scores
As the months crunched by in the dark of my weird neighborhood and as my mind stewed in the murk, this freaky little dog seemed like the perfect mascot for the absurd, deserted calamity all around us.
While I really did not want to add the rehabilitation of someone else’s pet to my docket of recovery projects, seeing this little abandoned dog every morning got to me. I thought about her sleeping underneath an empty house in an empty neighborhood on my block all winter long by herself. I was sleeping upstairs and had my own dog for company and it was bad enough.
One day I decided to go after her. I used Dr. Watson as bait, tying him to a fence post by the house where we usually found the stray and threading a trail of dog biscuits from the alley to the perimeter of Watson’s leash length, just out of his reach. The stray emerged from beneath the house and followed the biscuit trail. She looked at Watson, looked at me, looked back at Watson and kept eating. I lunged for her and she evaded me easily and scurried under the house. I re-set the biscuit bait and we did the same dance again, but on this second attempt I caught her. I held her down and stroked her at the same time, and I knew in a second she wouldn’t try to bite me. Meanwhile, Dr. Watson was beside himself, doing an agitated tap dance with his front two paws and straining his leash while his tail wagged furiously behind him. Holding the stray down, I managed to take the leash off Watson and put it on her. I took my weight off her and she shot to her feet, but the moment she felt the leash tug at her neck she stopped struggling. It was as though she understood she was back under human care. She stood still and looked up at me as Watson gave her a thorough going-over with his snorting snout.
I thought I would name her Slate in honor of her blue-gray coloring. But as I gave her a first bath with the garden hose, the dirt and grime washed off and the color of her coat changed to burnt caramel flecked with strange, black wicks, almost like quills. So while she was still dripping wet, her new name changed to Ginger.
I took Ginger to the neighborhood vet over by Bayou St. John, who was fully degreed and licensed but nonetheless ran her practice even before the storm as a sort of speakeasy animal clinic. She cared for her neighbor’s pets in the ground floor of a huge old Creole townhouse with no visible business signs and she posted no ads. She got all her clients through referrals and the low profile might have been the reason her clinic wasn’t sacked for pills by drug-addict looters after the storm. She gave Ginger a regimen of shots and medication and advised me that the welts and scars and callous scrub marks all over her body pre-dated the storm and were probably the result of prolonged, habitual abuse.
This explained a lot, especially combined with the mystery of whatever she had been through during the storm and the last three months of its aftermath. Even after we cleaned her up, Ginger was a mess. Her normal posture was one of preemptive cowering, her head bowed and her back to a wall, and for no apparent reason at all she would start trembling like a light aircraft in heavy turbulence. Any loud or hard noise sent her diving for the floor
When I returned home from work in the evenings, she would join Dr. Watson as he ran up to greet me at the door but a moment later she would scurry off, looking for cover. Her preferred hiding spot in my house was under the bed. But she also had a tendency to leap on top of my bed and pee on it. With no viable laundry facility anywhere nearby after the storm, this presented a big problem. The cold nights I had to sleep on the floor after cleaning Ginger’s pee off my own bed marked low points in dog-owner relations in my household. Even Dr. Watson looked guilty and apologetic on those nights, as if embarrassed for the behavior of one of his species.
I closed off my room to her but Ginger quickly found other places to hide. This was impressive considering the downstairs rooms were partially gutted at this point and had no furniture besides folding chairs and a workbench. One night, she hid herself away particularly well and I had to search each room of the dark house several times with a flashlight before finally catching the glint of her eyes looking nervously back at me from the rear of the halfway demolished kitchen cabinet.
I have tried to decode Ginger’s behavior ever since I took her in, but it is incredibly disjointed. When she is nervous, which is most of the time, her face gets tight and her eyes bulge and dart around like a bat. In repose, she often lies on her side with her legs sticking out across the floor and looks a lot like a pot-bellied pig. When she sniffs the breeze with that deep contemplative air of olfactory study, she looks like a horse, and she sounds like a horse whinnying when she gives a heavy nasal exhale. Other times, her jowls puff out and in quickly like a croaking toad. Her strangely spiky coat is like a badger’s, her tail like a rat’s and she is twitchy like a bird. In short, Ginger is a freaky little dog with an identity problem. But somehow, as the months crunched by in the dark of my weird neighborhood and as my mind stewed in the murk, she seemed like the perfect mascot for the absurd, deserted calamity all around us.
