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My Dog by John Rice 
We chose Bruno from a litter of mutts when I was fouryears old. He was a pompom of silky black fur with whitefringe at the paws; his face was wolf-like with sharp,inquisitive features and eyes as deep and warm brown asresin. We called him Bruno to fulfill a mob theme: at thesame time, my uncle and next-door neighbor purchased agolden retriever and called him Mugsy.  I don’t know whothought up the themed naming or why it was deemed asensible idea. My father used brown-stained plywood and spare roofingshingles to build a crude doghouse in the backyard. Thiswas Bruno’s full-time playground in the warmer stretches the year; then, in the achingly cold months, he was

Rice / "My Dog" / 2 permitted to sleep on the concrete floor of our basement. My father tried to justify this animal cruelty by claiming that dander makes his allergies act up. I wanted to respond that bullshit makes my allergies act up, so I didn’t hesitate to slip Bruno into my bedroom at night. As time passed, my dog grew to a size formidable enough to justify his brutish name. Our yard and the forest that encroached at its periphery became Bruno’s domain, and I became his companion in countless deep-woods explorations. In this era before I decided that I loathed rashes and bug bites and dirt under my fingernails, I would courageously venture into the tangled green unknown with my shadowy counterpart, ready to stir up mischief and encounter adventure. My father fashioned a sign from a square of plywood with clown-red spray paint that proclaimed “JOHN’S WOODS”; he nailed the sign into a fat tree trunk near the forest’s edge to mark my turf. I remember climbing the thick, twisted branches of trees in John’s Woods while Bruno bounded below as though ready to catch me if I fell from the primitive ladders. I remember searching for artifacts from derelict civilizations, digging for imagined treasure and inadvertently excavating deer skeletons, then pretending I had discovered a provocative crime scene. Often, Bruno

Rice / "My Dog" / 3 would disappear ahead of me as we walked, searching frantically for something he alone could detect, returning moments later with an anxious expression on his face, unable to understand my limited mobility on the uneven terrain and my hesitancy to traverse the undergrowth of poison ivy and nettles. At dusk, my adventures with my dog would end because visibility in the forest becomes nonexistent; the purple-black shadows drape across the tree branches and seal in the darkness like a vast tent. Scraped and bruised, I would arrive home and sit on the toilet, meticulously plucking burrs from my sweat suit and daubing my numerous lesions with Neosporin or calamine lotion. If my mother was home, she would force me to take a bath; otherwise, I would collapse into bed grimy and disheveled, succumbing to a sleep even deeper and more profound than the darkness of the nighttime woods. # These sweltering summers of my youth with my dog persisted until I entered junior high and found most of my idle time taken up by homework and extracurricular activities. I was attempting to discern my place in a new social sphere, and who has time for frivolous adventures in the woods when they have to navigate the prickly underbrush

Rice / "My Dog" / 4 of adolescence? It was around this time that I stopped asking my father to trim the weeds that dammed the entrance to John’s Woods; it was pointless to maintain an area that I seldom ventured to anymore. Rather, I gave up forest exploration for pool parties, and Bruno would accompany my newfound group of friends and me. My dog would sit poolside and lap at the chlorinated water with his floppy pink tongue, occasionally scurrying into the crawl space under the pool deck when we tried to pull him in. As twilight descended and everybody went inside, my dog would curl up by the sliding door to our patio, his thick black body pressed against the screen so that it bulged inward; he wasn’t in the room with us, but he was as close as he could be -- with my father around, at least -- and Bruno was content. Then, on those nights when I couldn't smuggle him up the basement stairs, he would sleep beneath mine or my parents’ bedroom window. We knew he was there because we would hear his arrival: the lazy clack-clack of claws against the hardwood deck, then the ponderous grunt as he flounced down, weary from a day of idle activity. By the time high school rolled around, I was spending even less time at home, and my dog became an old friend that I only saw in passing. We both had outgrown our days

Rice / "My Dog" / 5 of derring-do in John’s Woods; I was preoccupied with school and friends, and my dog was entering his twilight years, no longer able to plunge headlong into the brake. Arthritis bowed his hind legs, flecks of white highlighted the contours of his snout, and blue-gray cataracts veiled his eyes, lending them a diffuse glow. Graciously, my father permitted Bruno to spend more time in the basement, and my mother set up a dog bed for him there. On most nights, however, Bruno chose to sleep on the concrete floor instead. # When I was much younger and better able to convince myself that God is real, I prayed to Him each night a laundry list of requests ranging from the philanthropic to the selfish to the absurd: Dear God, please help the poor and the homeless. Dear God, please allow Bruno to live to be at least 18 years old because then I will be 21 and probably better able to handle his death. Dear God, please allow me to live to the age of 103 and then die quickly and painlessly and unremarkably in my sleep between the months of April and June so there are no holidays to mark the event.

Rice / "My Dog" / 6 While most of these requests are still pending or long-forgotten, the one concerning my dog was fulfilled to a tee the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I was indeed 21; whether or not I was ready to lose my childhood adventure companion is a different story. I had come home from school at the beginning of June to visit my family and friends, and I was planning to stay through the middle of July -- a relatively short summer vacation, but I had a new job and an apartment in the city to attend to. Two weeks before I left, my mother asked me whether or not I thought we should have Bruno put down. My dog was an old man at this point, barely able to stand and shuffle around, with a small abscess on the top of his head and stiff contusions along his bulky frame. His condition had worsened in the month that I’d been home; by the end of June, Bruno’s hind legs were no longer able to support his back half, and he hadn’t moved from a particular spot at the edge of the driveway for two days. My mother and I brought him food and hosed him off when he lay there in his own filth, a pitiful situation that made it easier to make my decision. After we spoke, my mother called the vet, and an appointment was made for the next day. I contacted several friends who had grown up with my dog and loved him almost

Rice / "My Dog" / 7 as much as I did and invited them to come over. That night, we all sat on the deck and used the fire pit to cook hot dogs and s’mores, keeping Bruno company until the still morning hours. # On July 2, I awoke around ten o’clock and ventured outside to see my dog. I could hear the sibilant hiss of leaves in the wind, the creaking of tree trunks. The sun was not strong enough to overcome the morning chill, but I could feel it on the back of my neck like a hand. It was going to be a beautiful day. I stepped onto the driveway and was surprised to find Bruno gone. My mother informed me that my dog had dragged himself under the pool deck in the middle of the night, and I thought about the times that he had fled there to escape being pulled into the water by me and my friends. When it was time to go to the vet, my mother and I used leftover hot dogs from the cookout the night before to coax Bruno from his hideout, maneuvering him onto a blanket and carrying him to the trunk of my mother’s SUV. The whole process was very matter-of-fact; I think we both realized that any betrayal of emotion would lead to a complete breakdown and impair my mother's driving. I don’t remember the trip to the clinic.

Rice / "My Dog" / 8 When we arrived, my mother pulled into the driveway backward and opened the trunk. Bruno looked up at us expectantly, and we sat with him. The vet greeted us outside because we were unable to carry Bruno up the lengthy stairway to his office. He carried a syringe and stated that the substance in the vial would render Bruno unconscious, so the dog wouldn’t convulse after a second, lethal injection was administered. Great, I thought bitterly. I held Bruno’s head in my hands and gazed at his murky eyes, his salt-and-pepper nose, his smile made crooked by nearly two decades of chewing sticks and coal. The first injection made his eyelids flutter and his jaw go slack; within thirty seconds, his eyes were closed and his head rested in my lap, shockingly heavy, massive. My mother kept saying things like, “Bye, Bruno,” and, “There’s a good boy,” and I wanted to yell, “Why do you have to say shit like that? You’re making this so much worse,” but I was too busy crying, and Lord knows I was probably saying the same things, too, not even realizing it. When the vet administered the next injection, I felt Bruno’s pulse shudder in his neck. A minute passed. I didn’t notice him stop breathing, but it happened at some

Rice / "My Dog" / 9 point, and the vet used the stethoscope that hung like a pendulum at his chest to confirm that my dog was dead. My mother and I thanked the doctor for his service, folded the blanket over Bruno like a shroud, and got back in the car. Our attempt to smother our emotions proved unsuccessful the second time around, and we both cried the entire way home. # There was no debate over whether or not we should wait for my father to come home from work to bury the dog. “Hell, no,” I told my mother. She agreed. Using the blanket like a sling, we carried Bruno from the trunk of the car into John’s Woods. The place was overgrown now, reclaimed by nature long ago, but the sign that my father had mounted on the fat tree trunk still hung like an eternal place-holder: JOHN’S WOODS. The clown red had since darkened to burgundy, and the words were flecked with mint-green mold, but they presaged my return nonetheless. My mother retrieved two shovels from the garage, and we dug a grave near the sign, crying the entire time. Layers of sheet rock and copper-colored clay impeded our progress, but we made an impressive hole that ensconced my dog with room to spare. My mother secured the blanket around him and left me to fill in the dirt, complaining

Rice / "My Dog" / 10 that her knee was bothering her… but I know she just wanted me to have a moment alone. I remember standing there with dirt under my fingernails, sweating and crying, swatting away the gnats that hovered half an inch from my eyes, thinking about how much I hated the outdoors and how much I loved my dog. I remember thinking how funny it was that I got to bury him after all, even though I was home for just three months a year. And I remember thinking how fitting it was that he would be buried in John’s Woods, because this place wasn’t mine; it was ours.