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MARLEY
A dog like no other
JOHN GROGAN
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING AUTHOR
To Ruth Howard Grogan,
who taught me the joy of a good story well told.
Contents
Preface The Perfect Dog
Chapter 1 And Puppy Makes Three
Chapter 2 Homeward Bound
Chapter 3 Mr Wiggles
Chapter 4 Master and Beast
Chapter 5 A Battle of Wills
Chapter 6 The Great Escape
Chapter 7 The Things He Ate
Chapter 8 The Dog’s Got to Go
Chapter 9 The Final Round
Chapter 10 The Audition
Chapter 11 Take Two
Chapter 12 Jail Break
Chapter 13 Dinnertime!
Chapter 14 Lightning Strikes
Chapter 15 Dog Beach
Chapter 16 A Northbound Plane
Chapter 17 In the Land of Pencils
Chapter 18 Poultry on Parade
Chapter 19 The Potty Room
Chapter 20 Beating the Odds
Chapter 21 Borrowed Time
Chapter 22 The Big Meadow
Chapter 23 Beneath the Cherry Trees
Chapter 24 Lucky
Preface
The Perfect Dog
When I was ten years old, my father caved in to my pleas and took me to get my own dog. Together we drove in the family station wagon far into the Michigan countryside.
We stopped at a farm run by a woman and her ancient mother. The farm didn’t grow wheat or corn. It didn’t even have cows or horses. It had just one thing – dogs. Dogs of every size and shape and age and temperament. They had only two things in common: each was a mongrel, and each was free to a good home.
“Now, take your time, son,” Dad said. “Your decision today is going to be with you for many years to come.”
I quickly decided the older dogs were not for me and raced to the puppy cage. “You want to pick one that’s not timid,” my father coached. “Try rattling the cage and see which ones aren’t afraid.”
I grabbed the chain-link gate and yanked on it with a loud clang. There were about a dozen puppies. They reeled backwards, collapsing on top of one another in a squiggling heap of fur. Just one remained. He was gold with a white blaze on his chest, and he charged the gate, yapping fearlessly. He jumped up and excitedly licked my fingers through the fencing. It was love at first sight.
I brought him home in a cardboard box and named him Shaun. He was one of those dogs that give dogs a good name. He mastered every command I taught him and was naturally well behaved. I could drop a crust on the floor and he would not touch it until I said it was OK. When I called, he came. When I told him to stay, he stayed. We could let him out by himself at night, knowing he would be back after making his rounds. We could leave him alone in the house for hours, confident that he wouldn’t have an accident or disturb a thing. He raced cars without chasing them and walked beside me without a leash. He could dive to the bottom of our lake and emerge with rocks so big they sometimes got stuck in his jaws. He loved riding in the car. He’d sit quietly in the backseat beside me on family road trips, happy to gaze out the window as the world zoomed by.
Best of all, I trained Shaun to pull me through the neighbourhood dog-sledge style as I sat on my bicycle. My friends jealously watched as he carefully guided me down the street, never leading me into trouble.
Shaun even had the good manners to back himself into the bushes before squatting to poop. With his rear end hidden away, only his head peered out. Our lawn was safe for bare feet.
Relatives would visit for the weekend and return home determined to buy a dog of their own. They were that impressed with Shaun. Actually, I called him “Saint Shaun”. The saint part was a family joke, but we almost believed it.
Shaun had been born with a curse – no one knew who his parents were. Because his breeding was unknown, he was one of the tens of thousands of unwanted dogs in America. Yet by some stroke of good luck, he became wanted. He came into my life and I came into his. And he gave me the childhood every kid deserves.
Saint Shaun of my childhood. He was a perfect dog. At least that is how I will always remember him. It was Shaun who set the standard by which I would judge all other dogs to come.
1
And Puppy Makes Three
“Slow down, dingo, or you’re going to miss it,” Jenny scolded. “It should be coming up any second.” Jenny was my wife. That January evening in 1991, we were driving through inky blackness across what had once been Florida swampland. We had been married for a little over a year and decided it was time for another family member. A dog, to be exact. We were on our way to look at a litter of Labrador retrievers.
Our headlights shined on a mailbox. The numbers on the side reflected back at us. This was the place. I turned up a gravel drive that led into a large wooded property. There was a pond in front of the house and a small barn out back. At the door, a woman named Lori greeted us, with a big, calm yellow Labrador retriever by her side.
“This is Lily, the proud mama,” Lori said. Lily’s stomach was still swollen even though she’d given birth five weeks before.
Jenny and I got on our knees, and Lily happily accepted our affection. She was just what we pictured a Lab would be – sweet natured, affectionate, calm and beautiful.
“Where’s the father?” I asked.
“Oh,” the woman said, hesitating for just a fraction of a second. “Sammy Boy? He’s around here somewhere.” She quickly added, “I imagine you’re dying to see the puppies.”
Lori led us through the kitchen into a utility room. The puppies stumbled all over one another as they rushed to check out the strangers.
Jenny gasped. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so cute in my life,” she said.
The litter consisted of five females and four males. Lori was asking $400 for the females and $375 for the males. One of the males seemed particularly smitten with us. He was the goofiest of the group and charged into us. Somersaulting into our laps, he clawed his way up our shirts to lick our faces. He gnawed on our fingers with surprisingly sharp baby teeth and stomped clumsy circles around us on giant paws that were way too big for the rest of his body.
“That one there you can have for three hundred and fifty dollars,” Lori said.
“Aw, honey,” Jenny cooed. “The little guy’s on sale!”
I had to admit he was pretty darn adorable. Frisky, too. Before I realised what he was up to, the rascal had chewed off half my watchband.
“We have to do the scare test,” I said. I had told Jenny the story many times of picking out Saint Shaun when I was a boy. Sitting in this heap of pups, she rolled her eyes at me. “Seriously,” I said. “It works.”
I stood up and turned away from the puppies. Then I swung quickly back around, taking a sudden step towards them. I stomped my foot and barked out, “Hey!”
I didn’t seem to scare any of them. But only one plunged forward to meet the assault head-on. It was Sale Dog. He plowed full steam into me, throwing a cross-body block across my ankles. Then he pounced at my shoelaces as though he was convinced they were dangerous enemies that needed to be destroyed.
“I think it’s fate,” Jenny said.
“Ya think?” I said. I scooped him up and held him in one hand in front of my face, studying his mug. He looked at me with heart-melting brown eyes and then nibbled my nose. I plopped him into Jenny’s arms, where he did the same to her. “He certainly seems to like us,” I said.
Sale Dog was ours. We wrote Lori a cheque, and she told us we could return to take the dog home with us in three weeks, when he was eight weeks old. We thanked her, gave Lily one last pat, and said goodbye.
Walking to the car, I threw my arm around Jenny’s shoulder and pulled her tight to me. “Can you believe it?” I said. “We actually got our dog!”
Just as we were reaching the car, we heard a commotion coming from the woods. Something was crashing through the brush – and breathing very heavily. It sounded like a creature from a horror film. And it was coming our way. We froze, staring into the darkness. The sound grew louder and closer. Then, in a flash, the thing burst into the clearing and came charging in our direction, a yellow blur. A very big yellow blur. As it galloped past, without stopping or noticing us, we could see it was a large Labrador retriever. But it was nothing like sweet Lily. This one was soaking wet and covered up to its belly in mud and burrs. Its tongue hung out wildly to one side. Froth flew off its jowls as it barrelled past. I detected an odd, slightly crazed, yet somehow joyous gaze in its eyes. It was as though this animal had just seen a ghost – and couldn’t possibly be more thrilled about it.
Then, with the roar of a stampeding herd of buffalo, it was gone, around the back of the house and out of sight. Jenny let out a little gasp.
“I think,” I said, a slight queasiness rising in my gut, “we just met Dad.”
2
Homeward Bound
When it was time to bring the dog home, Jenny was at Disney World with her sister’s family, so I picked him up by myself.
Lori brought out my new dog from the back of the house. I gasped. The tiny, fuzzy puppy we had picked out three weeks earlier had more than doubled in size. He came barrelling at me and ran head first into my ankles. He collapsed in a pile at my feet and rolled on to his back with his paws in the air. I hoped it was his way of telling me I was the boss.
Lori must have sensed my shock. “He’s a growing boy, isn’t he?” she said cheerily. “You should see him pack away the puppy chow!”
I leaned down and rubbed his belly. “Ready to go home, Marley?” I asked. That’s what Jenny and I had decided to name him – after Bob Marley, our favourite reggae musician. It felt right.
I used beach towels to make a cosy nest for him on the passenger seat of the car. I set him down in it. But I was barely out of the driveway when he began squirming and wiggling his way out of the towels. He belly-crawled in my direction across the seat, whimpering.
Between the seats, Marley ran into a problem. There he was, hind legs hanging over the passenger and front legs hanging over the driver’s side. In the middle, his stomach was firmly beached on the hand brake. His little legs were going in all directions, clawing at the air. He wiggled and rocked and swayed, but he was grounded like a freighter on a sandbar.
I reached over and ran my hand down his back. That made him squiggle even more. His hind paws desperately tried to dig into the carpeted hump between the two seats. Slowly he began working his hindquarters into the air, his butt rising up, up, until the law of gravity finally kicked in. He slid head-first down the other side of the console, somersaulting on to the floor at my feet and flipping onto his back. From there he easily scrambled up into my lap.
Man, was he happy – desperately happy! He quaked with joy as he burrowed his head into my stomach and nibbled the buttons of my shirt. His tail slapped a steady beat on the steering wheel.
I found I could change the tempo of his wagging by touching him. When I had both hands on the wheel, his tail beat three thumps per second. Thump. Thump. Thump. If I pressed one finger against the top of his head, the rhythm jumped from a slow waltz to a lively bossa nova. Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump! Two fingers and it jumped up to a mambo. Thump-thumpa-thump- thump-thumpa-thump! And when I cupped my entire hand over his head and massaged my fingers into his scalp, the beat exploded into a machine-gun, rapid-fire samba. Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump!
“Wow! You’ve got rhythm!” I told him. “You really are a reggae dog.”
When we got home, I led him inside and unhooked his leash. He began sniffing and didn’t stop until he had sniffed every square inch of the place. Then he sat back and looked up at me with his head cocked as if he were saying, “Cool house, but where are my brothers and sisters?”
The reality of his new life didn’t really hit him until bedtime. I had set up his sleeping quarters in the one- car garage attached to the side of the house. The room was dry and comfortable, and it had a rear door that led out into the fenced backyard. With its concrete floor and walls, it was virtually indestructible. “Marley,” I said cheerfully, leading him out there, “this is your room.”
I had scattered chew toys around, laid newspapers down in the middle of the floor, filled a bowl with water, and made a bed out of a cardboard box lined with an old bedspread.
“And here is where you’ll be sleeping,” I said, and lowered him into the box. He was used to sleeping in a box, but had always shared it with his siblings. Now he paced the perimeter of the box and sadly looked up at me. As a test, I stepped back into the house and closed the door. I stood and listened. At first nothing. Then a slight, barely audible whimper. And then full-fledged crying. It sounded like someone was in there torturing him.
I opened the door, and as soon as he saw me he stopped. I reached in and petted him for a couple of minutes. Then I left again. Standing on the other side of the door, I began to count. One, two, three… he made it seven seconds before the yips and cries began again. We repeated the exercise several times. Each time it was the same.
I was tired and decided it was time for him to cry himself to sleep. I left the garage light on for him, closed the door, walked to the opposite side of the house, and crawled into bed. The concrete walls didn’t muffle his pitiful cries. I lay there, trying to ignore them. I figured he would give up any minute and go to sleep.
The crying continued. Even after I wrapped my pillow around my head, I could still hear it. Poor Marley. Out there alone for the first time in his life. His mother was missing in action, and so were all his brothers and sisters. There wasn’t even a single dog smell.
I hung on for another half hour before getting up and going to him. As soon as he spotted me, his face brightened and his tail began to beat the side of the box. It was as if he were saying, “Come on. Hop in. There’s plenty of room.”
Instead I lifted the box with him in it and carried it into my bedroom. I placed it on the floor against the side of the bed. I lay down on the very edge of the mattress, my arm dangling into the box. There, my hand resting on his side where I could feel his rib cage rise and fall with his every breath, we both drifted off to sleep.
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