Fargo squints when it’s raining. She stands stock still, snout angled towards the ground, and when you speak to her she peers up at you, eyes pinched, as if to ask, “Really?”
There was plenty to squint about last night. The rain had been coming down in sheets minutes before, and heavy storms were on their way overnight, forecast to gradually fade to that dreaded wintry mix. Our backyard was already flooded, as it has been all week. The wheel ruts in our driveway were already flooded, as they have been all week. And this blessed dog still needed to use the bathroom before we could all go to bed.
“Go potty?” I asked, and she peered up to me, the “Really?” seemingly punctuated by some canine expletive. She, like the kid on my high school cross country team who’d walk to his house across the street if he had to take a dump (he was all-state, you’ve gotta be weird to be all-state), doesn’t like to relieve herself outside her comfort zone. We’d be going around back.
I, knowing where the puddles lay and knowing she and I both didn’t actually want her submerging any paws in those puddles, guided her through the rocks of the neighbors’ garden until we were past the cars on the driveway. There, by the garage, she quickly went through the motions of the pre-urinary sniff—not really sniffing but, dutiful dog that she is, staying true to her process—and unleashed what felt like a few gallons of piss next to the garbage cans, as fast as her skinny little fluffy body could pump it out. You see, Fargo’s on steroids right now to make her intestines receptive to her latest diet, and one side effect of these steroids is that they make dogs viciously thirsty, and one side effect of being viciously thirsty is the installation of a virtual fire hydrant inside the poor animal’s loins.
We weren’t done, though.
She wanted to be done, of course. “I can hold it, man, I really can, I didn’t ask for this, I didn’t ask for any of this.” But my own probably unwarranted anxiety about her being uncomfortable overnight and my own probably warranted anxiety about her barking us awake during a sleet thunderstorm at three o’clock in the morning had us in a get-this-over-with place. So we opened the gate to the backyard. And we began to walk around.
I was hoping to keep her on the leash. It just seemed simpler, and as long as she was on the leash there was no way she could decide to wade through the fifteen-foot-long sludgy swimming pool the rain creates between the gate and the backdoor, a swimming pool she’s prone to traversing when she wants to get INSIDE, NOW. Like many mammals, biped and quadruped alike, she isn’t always actively cognizant of the consequences of her actions, so while she hates us spending ages pulling the mud from between her toe-pads, she’ll make us do it in a heartbeat.
We steered away from the swimming pool.
It was hard to find a part of the yard that wasn’t actively underwater. The high ground had a crater in it, perhaps from drippings off a tree. The grassy land in the back corner looked suspiciously shiny, indicating a possible presence of standing water there, too, in its midst. God knows what lay back near the opossum’s house, and what a glimpse of the creature could elicit in terms of jumping and digging and other demudding-requiring activities.
We walked instead to the demilitarized slimy leaf zone, an area by the fence below the garage apartment where mulch should be. On spring mornings, it’s loaded with mushrooms which are probably entirely harmless, but as the internet will tell you, could also be lethal, ready to kill your puppy in a painful, excruciating, hopeless, expensive manner should she ingest even a sliver of such a fungus (this evidently happened to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s French bulldog, Brutus, so stop laughing, you jackass). This time of year, there are no mushrooms. God bless the cold for this. Mushrooms stay underground, cockroaches do whatever it is they do to survive the winter (cursed beasts), the swimming pool turns into an ice rink when it finally does dip below freezing, all of this is a fair trade for not being able to drive anywhere when it precipitates.
Fargo’s been pooping in the slimy leaves lately. I don’t know why. Her locations have been all out of whack while she’s been on the steroids. This happens every few months—she picks new spots in the yard to be her usuals—but it’s been exacerbated by the ‘roids. I wonder if Mariano Rivera had a similar experience. Started using different urinals at spring training in ’96. I kid. But do I? Should Mariano Rivera be under stricter scrutiny? I don’t kid. We don’t actually know, you know?
The slimy leaves were not the privy Fargo desired, so I made the call to let her off the leash. I was wearing ankle-boots, meaning I could get through the swimming pool if need be without incurring cobbler costs, and the walk back around the house would at least do some of the demudding for us.
We have a routine, Fargo and I, for moments like this. Well, not exactly moments like this. We have a routine for when I think she might need to take a dump. It’s simple, and stupid, and a lot of people probably do it with their dogs, but it’s our rhythm, and for whatever reason it doesn’t happen exactly the same way when she goes outside with my wife.
“Fargo,” I say, and she looks at me. “Go potty,” and then she trots off and does something else for a minute, considering the proposition. If, after that minute, she goes and poops, she had to go. If she keeps doing whatever else she wants to do—chew a stick, drop her ball under the firepit and make me get it out, chew a stick—for more than a minute, she doesn’t have to go.
The difference, this time, was that I knew she had to go. It was nighttime. She always goes once at night. The girl had to poo, like it or not. So we’d been repeating the routine, and we repeated it once more as I unleashed her. She looked at me, and as is our custom, trotted off to ponder my suggestion.
But Fargo didn’t run to our backdoor. She ran, instead, to Auggie’s. Auggie, the neighbor dog, is a favorite of Fargo’s. Our neighbor works from home, and his desk looks out the window next to the back door, and Auggie (named for the Augustinians, who founded Villanova University, our neighbors’ alma mater) sits with him while he works. Fargo has learned this, and the result is that our neighbor has a video of Fargo, face large in the corner of the window, barking and wagging her tail and barking and wagging her tail and asking, “Please, sir, may Auggie come outside?”
Tonight, though, Fargo was not asking Auggie to come out and party. Fargo was merely looking for a bit of shelter. And the miniscule portico was just cover enough to keep her from being actively rained on. So, tromping after her, shining the flashlight to see what she was up to, I was met with the view of a poor, cold, wet pup, pushed as close to the door as she could be and looking back over her shoulder as if to say, “Good God, man. Let me inside. I’m not going to take the shit!”
We resumed the dance.
“Touch,” I invited, and Fargo, who’s been getting a lot of kibble lately with this command, came dutifully, booping her snout against my fingers.
“Sit.”
She would not sit. She’d look up at me, though. Squinting. “Sir. We were friends once.”
“Fargo.” I had her focus. “Go potty.”
And with this, she trotted off again, though this time not towards the back door. This time, towards the swimming pool. My shoulders sank.
One of many oddities in our yard is the presence of a large, plastic circle set atop concrete. There’s a bit of texture to the circle, to make it less slippery, and we would think it would cover a septic tank, but we pay for wastewater, but then again it’s an old neighborhood and our landlords aren’t exactly clerically minded, so maybe it’s a septic tank and we pay for a sewer system we don’t use. Whatever it is, water is involved, because you can hear it rushing through there if you’re out back and someone’s taking a shower or just flushed the toilet inside. Fargo used to eat the dirt around this circle. Maybe that has something to do with her intestines being all fucked up. Maybe it was a mushroom. Maybe it was the parvo. Maybe it’s genetic, or luck of the draw.
Tonight, thankfully, she had no interest in eating the dirt. There was little dirt to be eaten. The ground around the circle was a thick sludge, narrowly separated from the swimming pool, one levee break from participating in the flood itself. To eat such a thing would have required a spoon, and Fargo had no spoon at the ready.
Instead, I think what was happening was that Fargo wanted somewhere firm to stand, and the circle was the only solid footing she could find. It was a bit slick, but it might do. She began to sniff.
I’m not sure I can emphasize enough how much Fargo hates going to the bathroom somewhere unusual. She only poops on walks if she’s sick. She has a few spots in the backyard and adding one to the list requires a lengthy application process only she understands. The circle is not on the list. It hasn’t, to our knowledge, even applied. She’s been peeing next to it, lately—liter upon liter flushed out, no time to waste, it’s close to the backdoor and invariably she has to go NOW. But she’s never, to my knowledge, pooped anywhere in the circle’s vicinity. No matter, I thought. This was her pre-poop activity. She’d either move on from this and go, or move on from this and not go, and if it was the latter we’d try the thing again a few times, until my compassion finally kicked in and I let her hold it all night and steam up the snow with a big one in the morning.
But it was not her pre-poop activity. This was the real thing. Under duress, she’d found the only stable land she could find, and she was prepared to poop on it. Of course, she always waddles forward a few steps when beginning to do her business in this way. This was a problem for the few days back when we had pee-pads in the living room thanks to her shit being literally lethal, laced with a virus that later required us to empty fourteen gallons of bleach onto this backyard to make it safe for future residents, such as Auggie. Tonight, though, not a problem. She just waddled onto the edge of the swimming pool, and then…
Man. That was quick. I wasn’t sure she fully went.
She trots away after pooping, and I didn’t keep track of where. I just hustled over, rubbing my wet fingers together to open the bag, shining the flashlight down to where I hoped…oh thank God. A full one. Somehow evacuated really, really quickly.
I do think this was intentional. This dog, miserable and furious and above all, confused, not fully tracking that she’d be in a world of discomfort overnight if she didn’t go right now, knew she was supposed to go and decided to do it as quickly as possible. Who knew such a thing could be expedited? But expedited it was, and the deed was done, and the conqueror was off who knows where while I bagged her excrement, proud and grateful and relieved and, now that I could think about it, a little bit damp.
As it turned out, her escape plan post-crap was to scamper over to Auggie’s door again, and that’s from where she came running when, after I’d tiptoed around the edge of the pool and leaned over the fence to slide the bag into a crevice of our overflowing garbage can (really hope those guys still come tomorrow, even with the ice), I walked to the gate and called her name.
When Fargo really wants to come, she comes with a gallop. If she’s hesitant, it’s a trot. If she doesn’t want to, she doesn’t, or she gets where you can see her and she sits, staring at you, telling you that “Something is wrong, sir,” and that you must fix it if you’d like her to follow any command you attempt.
Fargo sprinted to the gate. Faster than a gallop. Had the yard merely been well-watered, instead of the recipient of a deluge, I would’ve liked to go out this morning and measure the space between those pawprints, but alas, they were wiped clean last night I’m sure, and are now beneath a thick sheet of ice. But what an athletic feat it was. Bob Beamon. Mexico City, 1968. Canine edition. She came tearing around Auggie’s corner of the house, passing the picnic table and clearing the space between it and the gate in what I think was just three long bounds. Face to the gate, then up at me, impatiently tapping her toes as I clipped her leash back on, she was ready to drag me up the driveway back to the front door, and if I wanted to make her take the sidewalk around, to get some of the mud off, it was the grandest inconvenience she’d ever tolerated but yes of course she’d tolerate it anything, sir, anything at all to get her back indoors.
Inside, my wife was waiting with a rag, and after we wiped the poor pup’s paws we grabbed bunches of paper towels to dry off her back and head and tail so she wouldn’t go to bed too wet. She loved the paper towel part. Quite the game, being dried with a thing you love to shred. Lots of wriggling was done, then, and a tail was wagged, and all again was right with the world. The poop was pooped. And so were we.
We went outside again, just now, after I’d read through the draft and given it an, “Eh, good enough to post.” The backyard’s all snowy and icy, so that even on the circle there’s a thick layer a dog has to step on just right to break through. Fargo took some coaxing, and even did some squinting in the face of the wind, but she defecated, back by the grassy land, one of her usual pooping locales. It was bright—not sunny, but the well-lit overcast that accompanies the end of a snow. She sniffed, nose jolting back when it accidentally contacted something frozen, and she reacted with surprise at the half-tennis ball filled like a truffle with precipitation and resolidified mud, and with bewilderment at the sticks, imprisoned in this new, shiny, stiff, cold ground. While she may have remembered the battle last night, I’m sure she doesn’t recall it with the same sense of heroism I ascribe to her. I’m not sure heroism is something dogs contemplate. But we contemplate it, we their humans, or at least I do. And returning inside last night, her warming and frolicking while we chased her with paper towels, she was a victorious hero. Right now, her curled up beside me on the couch, bowels empty once more, she still is. Fargo, as we say, over everything.
Oh man …. Life’s little victories! 😊