Anywhere But Here
I met Houdini. Right on the corner of DeLaVina and Mission Street on a hot afternoon. There was a haunting loneliness about him, as I’d always imagined. He’d escaped again, only he appeared more bewildered than triumphant.
He resembled a small Doberman Pinscher. Burnt sienna, lean and lithe. I’m driving home when I spot him in the middle of the street, cars whizzing all around. I pull over but there’s a ton of traffic and I have to wait before I can open my door. When I reach out to grab him, he doesn’t resist. The blue metal tag on his collar has an ID number, but no name.
I lead Houdini to the back of my station wagon. He doesn’t want to go in. Odd, I think. He looks so agile. Maybe this is one of those artist’s contradictions, like Hemingway’s macho image and his reputed sexual ambivalence. The dog seems docile, but I hesitate to pick him up—something about that predatory Doberman aura, with the physical power to back it up. I do it anyway.
In the rearview mirror I see him squirming around like a worm on a hook. “Did you catch the new Ralph Fiennes movie? Sexy guy, huh?” I ask, trying to pacify him. In a flash, he scrambles from the cargo area into the back seat then over and into the passenger seat. Gangly, all legs. Bet he could do zero to sixty in five seconds.
The passenger seat is piled with so much stuff from errands I’d been running that Houdini can’t find a place to sit down. He ambles over the emergency brake onto my lap. I take one hand off the wheel and sort of shove him back into the passenger seat, trying to communicate suggestion rather than control. This is a Doberman.
I stroke him. He’s turning in circles on the seat, searching for a place to settle in. What the hey—I dump the mountain of junk that’s on the passenger seat onto the floor. Everything that can possibly spill out of the bags does—fruits and veggies, lightbulbs, a package of fresh cod fillet—but the seat is now a reasonably civilized place to hang.
Instead of settling in, Houdini jumps down on top of the stuff I just dumped onto the floor to make room for him. I’m ticked off but pat the seat beside me, inviting him back up. A grape oozes between his toes. Juice from the cod trickles onto a magazine. He decides it’s too cramped on the floor amidst the parsley and shampoo after all. Maybe even undignified. He clambers back up and sits down on the seat beside me. Seconds later, he springs up. Now he’s down again. And he’s up. I feel like I’m sitting next to some guy who just did a line of cocaine.
Only ten minutes ago my life had at least the illusion of calm, I’m thinking between long, deep breaths. I keep driving, stroking Houdini, trying to reassure both of us now that life really isn’t the lunatic, whirligig ride it seems to be most of the time. It doesn’t help that the drive home is along winding foothill roads so that Houdini, whose slender build verges on the ethereal, keeps losing his balance, tumbles, rights himself, tumbles again. He’s doing all the moving around and I’m exhausted.
When we arrive home, my own two dogs run out to meet us. Not wanting to take a chance of a dogfight, I stick Houdini in the dog run and ask my husband to take our dogs into the house. The run is a spacious grassy area with trees and water, completely ringed with a five-foot chain-link fence. What’s not to like?
I phone the Animal Shelter and they trace Houdini’s tag number. “The dog was adopted a few days ago by a Mr. Ventano,” a woman tells me. “He doesn’t have much money, drives a school bus, lives in a trailer park.” She gives me his work number. I’m about to dial when I glance out the window. Houdini has materialized in the unfenced part of the yard. He’s strolling around the lawn, looking guileless. I dash outside. Again, he doesn’t try to run away. I don’t understand his m.o. He escapes, doesn’t evade capture, escapes, then doesn’t evade capture. Is this a game? A compulsion? Mental pathology?
My husband takes Houdini in the house while I call the school bus company. They radio Mr. Ventano who’s out on his bus run, tell me he’ll be over in half an hour. Dying of curiosity, I check the dog run to see if Houdini jumped over the fence or dug out. There’s an awesome hole by the gate he must have dug in seconds.
I go back in the house. My husband says Houdini started whimpering as soon as I left the room. Weird. He bonds fast, then bails. Fear of intimacy? Shameless manipulation? What, I wonder, makes him so obsessed with freedom one minute, then indifferent to it the next? There’s a bedeviled energy about him, as though he was wired the minute he shot out of the womb. I have the feeling that if he were left alone in a room he couldn’t escape from he’d implode.
Houdini crawls into my lap, looks like he’s going to kick back, then hops off and sucks up to my husband. I like him, but he unnerves me. He relates, but no matter how affectionate or needy he seems, it’s like there’s an invisible bubble around him. His isolation makes me sad.
Half an hour later, Mr. Ventano drives up in an ancient Chevy. He’s about 70, very Old World Italian, has slick black hair, speaks fast with a heavy accent. He’s still wearing his bus driver’s cap. I walk down the path to meet him. He shows me the dog halter that he repaired with candle wax after Houdini chewed through it in four places to escape. “I tied him up because he chewed my chairs, my cassette tapes, my portable radio,” Mr. Ventano says without a trace of anger. He named the dog Rusty, refers to him now, tenderly, as Rascal.
As we walk up to the house, Mr. Ventano hands me a brown paper bag. It’s a bottle of fine Italian wine. I’m so touched I can hardly speak. I know I can’t refuse his gift. Before we’re halfway to the house I’ve learned that Mr. Ventano is a widower—he still wears his wedding band— and that he got Rusty because he was lonely. Eyes moist, in a whoosh he tells me about his late Springer Spaniel who he had to put to sleep after 15 years and even though it was on the advice of others he still feels guilty and he used to take the dog trout fishing with him and his grandson. By the last stair I’m in love with Mr. Ventano.
He sees Houdini, scoops him up in his arms, scratches the dog’s ear, then gently lowers him to the ground. In Italian-crusted English, Mr. Ventano repeats to my husband everything he told me. I assure him that if he thinks he can’t manage the dog, the Shelter will take him back and find another home for him. “Our local Pound is a no-kill Shelter,” I say. “Sometimes a person and a dog just don’t fit. If this one isn’t right for you, I’m sure there’s one out there who is.”
Mr. Ventano hooks the dog up to his leash and we walk back to his car. “I had to put my Springer Spaniel to sleep who I had for 15 years and I was lonely and that’s why I adopted Rusty,” he reminds me. “God bless you,” he says, closing the door. As they drive off, I watch the dog turning his familiar, edgy circles on the seat, still looking for that consummate destination. The one that’s always somewhere else.
God bless you, Mr. Ventano. And, Houdini, wherever you are.
©Lucy Aron, The Santa Barbara Independent 1999
