jumpingfish

1.

“What’s that?” Trudy asked.

It was dark. It was 4:30 in the morning. Someone outside was yelling — yelling at the top of his lungs.

There’d been some shenanigans at the rental house across the street last week, so I figured it was one of the evicted discontents come back to harass. As I walked from the bedroom out into the living room, I could hear better.

“Get out!” he screamed. “Get out! Get out! GET OUT!”

There was a frantic, desperate sound to his voice. After a few steps into the living room, I saw why. The yelling wasn’t from across the street. It was behind us, on the other side of the alley, just beyond the fence. 

“Trudy!” I yelled. “Call the fire department.”

“What!?”

“Call 9-1-1. There’s a fire in the alley.”

2.

On the other side of our backyard, one house over from us, a roaring inferno was climbing into the black night sky. A duplex was on fire, and the flames had already consumed the backside of the building so that there was nothing to see but orange flames. 

The fire roared and popped. It rose up above the two-story duplex. It rose into the canopy of the trees with dry autumn leaves beginning to fall to the ground. One of the trees caught on fire, and a huge ball of flame went hurdling skyward in an instant. Streams of glowing embers raced upwards into the darkness.

I started a sprinkler at full blast in the back of the yard. The fence behind the neighbor’s house was on fire, but Ron was out there with a hose, and he put it out.

Fewer than five minutes after Trudy called 9-1-1, fire engines began to roll in from both directions. As their lights flashed, and as two hook and ladders began to spray water down from the sky, things began to explode — loud pops and bangs and flashes of bright orange light. Gas cans for mowers? Gas tanks of cars? Then some kind of electrical explosions began to snap, loud pops and buzzing sounds and flashes of bright white light. Breaker panels?

3.

That was early this morning.

This evening I wandered into the back of our yard to peer over the fence. It is a complete loss — the carport burned to the ground, the backside of the duplex charred and most of the siding pulled away, leaving only a skeleton of the building that was there yesterday.

There were nine people and one dog in sleeping there last night. All ten escaped. And they escaped because of that man, their neighbor, who had been sleeping with his window open and woke up when the fire started crackling.

That man who woke up and began to frantically yell and scream. Until they got out.

Dude!

Oh, man. It’s you?

Dude, what did you mean that you managed to steal away with Jenny…?

What!?

What did you mean by that?

By what? We went kayaking. We had peanut butter sandwiches. What on earth are you talking about?

That’s not what you wrote. I read what you wrote, and I see no mention of said kayak. You wrote that you managed to steal away with Jenny while Burt was cutting trees in the woods. And I happen to know that when your fair and industrious Trudy reads about this, well… I’m just sayin’ it ain’t gonna be pretty.

What? Wait. Look here… Oh no.

I think you need to start proof reading your stuff a bit closer, man.

Dude. For once you’re right.

1.

When he was a puppy, Guinness went to Puppy School. Let’s just say… that he was not a high achiever.

As Trudy tells the story, he had trouble with the very first lessons in which the dogs were taught to sit. Still, he and she kept at it, day after day. And in the last session, the instructor brought over a towel and set it on the ground so that Guinness might have something cozier than cold ground to sit on. She had Trudy try the command again. 

“Sit,” Trudy said. And sit he did.

You see, he was a good dog. Even if he barked when he wasn’t supposed to bark. Even if he jumped when he wasn’t supposed to jump. Even when the ground was cold and the best approximation of a sit he could muster was lowering his rear end just a smidgen.

At the end of that Puppy School class, he got an award: Best Tail Wag. That was Trudy’s boy. Despite everything, he always had a big tail wag.

2. 

His last week was hard. He must have hurt so much that he stopped drinking from his water dish, opting instead for the pond from which he could drink without bending down.

And he stopped eating. Although, he’d stand in the kitchen wagging his tail slightly and look up at Trudy as if to ask if she could offer him something else, try again, because he loved it so much when she gave him snaaacks.

“I’m hungry,” his dark eyes would say, but he wouldn’t eat, and he was slowly wasting away.

And then last week, he bit my mom. Maybe she woke him from his favorite place on the Papasan cushion. Or maybe she touched his sore ears. Or maybe she came around him from behind and startled him. Whatever it was, he snapped at her and gave her a nasty bite that took us to the emergency room.

He felt bad. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t mean to do it. But he didn’t have a way to say he was sorry. Because he was old. Because he was deaf. Because he had cataracts. Because he hurt so much. Because he was perpetually thirsty. Because he was having a hard week. Because he was a dog. Because he was dying.

3.

Late last night he and Trudy walked in the back yard. It was after midnight.

They went over to the pond where he drank for a while. They wandered around the yard — this yard that has been his Eden for 16 years. They stood in the half-light of the moon, visiting all his favorite places in the coolness of the evening.

He was saying goodbye to all his beloved places. He was walking his mommy around the yard to remind her what a happy life he had, how happy he was that she had rescued him, that she had been his mommy. He was saying goodbye to her last night as he must have been saying goodbye to me this morning on the bed, me with my hand on his head, he with his dark eyes staring gently into mine.

This afternoon, we buried him in the backyard. In a sunny spot in the butterfly garden beside the blooming Mist Flower and Golden Eye. We dug a deep hole and laid him in it, putting lavender-colored blossoms on his still-warm body.

Goodbye Mr. Guinness.

“We just pulled up to the gate,” I texted Burt and Jenny. “I need to get my checked bag, and I have a book to read.”

They had left their home in Kentucky well before the crack of dawn and were approaching Grand Rapids from the southeast. They were planning to pick me up at the Gerald R. Ford airport, and none of us were quite sure of the timing, which is why I had a book.

“Just west of Lake Odessa,” they responded. “Will call when we are close.”

“Lake Odessa!” I thought to myself.

In the days of our youth, my grandfather used to drive us diagonally across the lower peninsula of Michigan from Jackson to Grand Rapids following a rural route that took us thru Lake Odessa. And there on the south side of Michigan Highway 50 a block or two from the north shore of the lake was a Dairy Queen Brazier.

He’d slowly steer the car into the parking lot and announce that it was time for a snack. We’d all pile out of the car and get ice cream cones that tasted so good that… well, good enough to keep my grandfather stopping there for years, although as for that, the smiling faces of his grandchildren probably helped a bit.

And years after that, during the summer of ’78 while we worked summer jobs at the engineering firm where he worked, Burt and I followed followed our grandfather’s example. After work at the end of the week, we’d drive that rural route (which we both can still do with our eyes closed) and we’d stop at the Lake Odessa Dairy Queen. Every Friday evening that summer, we’d stop there with Jimmy Buffet and Randy Newmann and George Benson playing on the radio, and we’d have ourselves a snack. 

These were the things in my head as Burt and Jenny announced that they had just passed thru Lake Odessa.

“What did you tell him?” he asked her. He was driving. She had done the texting.

“That we were just west of Lake Odessa,” she said.

“Well,” he said. “He’s going to tell us to go back.”

Sitting in the airport reading their text, with horror I was imagining the Dairy Queen receding in their rear view mirror. I quickly texted back a response.

“Go back!” I said. “I have a book!”

The two of them laughed very hard, as did the three of us when they later told me the story.

“Where’s that other cinder block?” cousin Burt asked. He and Jenny and I were pulling the raft and dock out of the lake in preparation for the coming Michigan winter.

I looked to my left and saw one sitting on the hill beside the dry milkweeds with their swollen seed pods hanging from dry stalks.

“You mean this one?” I asked. (I am proud to say that I know just what a cinder block looks like — an example of my handiness in winter prep.)

I picked up the block and set it down on the wet sand beach.

There were two Red-backed Salamanders in the rectangle of dead grass where the block had been sitting. And since it was fall and had been cold the night before, they didn’t move even with the block gone and the sun shining down on them.

These salamanders are not endangered. And there is a lot of habitat in that place, so I suspect that the two of them were not alone. But I must say that seeing them there was one of the highlights of my long weekend.